Relive Anime & Manga Events

279 anime & manga events the community showed up for — relive the night, then catch the next one.

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Bike the Bay 2026 — San Diego

Aug 23, 2026 Embarcadero Marina Park South, 200…

Once a year the Coronado Bridge closes to cars and opens to bicycles, and the view from the top — the whole bay laid out beneath you, downtown glinting across the water — rearranges how you think about a city you already live in. You are not allowed up there any other day of the year. It is not a race. Twenty-five basically flat miles through Coronado, Imperial Beach, Chula Vista, and National City before looping home, with a capped field that fills up with families on cruisers, weekend warriors in lycra, kids on training wheels with a parent jogging alongside, and the occasional tandem that makes everybody smile. Rest stops, mechanics, and sweep vehicles mean nobody gets stranded out there. The County Bicycle Coalition runs it, and the proceeds go back into bike infrastructure. Register early and it costs less. Bring the friend who always says they want to start cycling. This is the ride that converts them.

Castle in the Sky 40th Anniversary — Studio Ghibli Fest 2026

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Castle in the Sky 40th Anniversary — Studio Ghibli Fest 2026

Aug 22, 2026 AMC Burbank 16, 125 E Palm Ave, Bu…

Floating cities, ancient robots, and a girl drifting down out of the sky. Miyazaki opened the studio with this one and never once talked down to the child or to the adult sitting in the same room watching it. Forty years on it works as a quiet faith with millions of adherents, and once a year the fest drags them out of their living rooms and back into a theater. Laputa at the size it was designed for. A full house of strangers gasping at exactly the same frames in exactly the same order, having all seen it a dozen times already. Dubbed and subbed showings both. SoCal's anime community treats these screenings as a seasonal pilgrimage, which is why the room fills with people who could recite it and came anyway. Send this one to the friend who says they do not do anime. This is the specific film that ends that sentence forever.

Sea Country Festival 2026 — Laguna Niguel

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Sea Country Festival 2026 — Laguna Niguel

Aug 21, 2026 Sea Country Park, 23970 Aliso Cree…

You can hear the Ferris wheel before you see it — that slow mechanical hum mixing with whatever Top 40 song is bleeding out of the food court speakers, kids screaming from the Tilt-a-Whirl, and somewhere underneath all of it, the particular sound of a community that decided a long time ago that the last week of August belongs to this park. The Sea Country Festival is Laguna Niguel's end-of-summer ritual. Three days of carnival rides, midway games, food vendors who know that the funnel cake line will be fifteen deep by 7 PM, and enough live entertainment to fill every hour from afternoon into the night. It's the kind of event that doesn't need to explain what it is — if you grew up in South County, you already know. If you didn't, this is what it looked like. The festival runs free entry — just walk in. The rides spin, the games cost what games cost, and the Makers Marketplace brings local crafts and goods into the mix for anyone who wandered in thinking they'd just grab a lemonade and leave. Nobody just grabs a lemonade and leaves. August 21–23. 23970 Aliso Creek Rd, Laguna Niguel. Free admission.

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Dub Club presents Jah9 with Rik Jam

Aug 19, 2026 $25+ Echoplex, 1154 Glendale Blvd, Los …

Down a ramp beneath Echo Park, a sound system has been shaking the walls every week since the year 2000, and Dub Club remains the beating heart of LA's reggae underground, a room where the bass is felt in the sternum and the crowd knows every riddim by heart. This night brings Jah9, the Jamaican singer whose jazz-inflected, deeply spiritual roots music has made her one of the most revered voices of the new reggae generation, with Rik Jam and the Dub Club DJs holding it down. Wednesday, August 19, 2026, 9 PM, the Echoplex in Echo Park, 21+. Come for the sound-system culture done exactly right, the outdoor bleachers, the deep vibes, and a crowd that treats this as church. Bring the friend who lives for bass. This is the good, hidden LA that tourists never find.

One Piece Rave Los Angeles — August 2026 at The Compound

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One Piece Rave Los Angeles — August 2026 at The Compound

Aug 16 – Aug 17, 2026 The Compound by Dirt Dog, 6540 E W…

Luffy finds a new island and the entire crew loses their minds. Somewhere around midnight that is precisely what this room is doing, except everyone is in costume and the bass is doing the screaming. COSRAVES runs it: DJs pulling One Piece themes apart and rebuilding them over house and bass, with anime cut into the projections and synced to the drops. Half the floor can name every Straw Hat in order. The other half came because a friend said trust me, and an hour in there is no way left to tell which is which. Anime fandom and rave culture should not fit together this well. They do, and the cosplay commitment here is unhinged in the best possible way. A warehouse in Commerce, doors very late, grown folks only, two nights in August. You will leave at closing with your ears ringing and the certainty that you belong to something. Bring the friend who has been reading it since middle school.

Sturgis Motorcycle Rally 2026 — Sturgis, SD

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Sturgis Motorcycle Rally 2026 — Sturgis, SD

Aug 7 – Aug 16, 2026 Main Street, Sturgis, SD 57785

Ten days in August, and the small town of Sturgis, South Dakota — population 7,000 — becomes a city of half a million. The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally has been doing this since 1938. Arrive in Sturgis on the first Friday of the rally and the sound alone tells you something is different. Main Street closes to cars and opens to motorcycles, and the flow of custom Harleys, touring bikes, and custom builds becomes a continuous parade. The surrounding Black Hills are the real draw for serious riders: Needles Highway is 14 miles of narrow tunnels and granite spire switchbacks that belong on every motorcyclist's bucket list. Iron Mountain Road corkscrews through South Dakota's most dramatic terrain. The rally itself spawns music stages, vendor villages, stunt shows, bike shows, and pop-up bars across a 50-mile radius — the Buffalo Chip alone hosts major touring acts nightly. The diversity of the crowd surprises first-timers: veterans and newcomers, engineers and mechanics, people who rode three states to get here and people who flew in and rented a bike. The common denominator is the machine. Sturgis is for anyone who rides or wants to understand what riding means to the people who live it. This is not for people looking for a sanitized festival experience with VIP sections and scheduled activities. It is for those who find meaning in the open road, want to ride some of the most dramatic terrain in the country, and are comfortable with ten days of organized chaos. If you are a motorcyclist who has never been, Sturgis before you die is not a cliche — it is a genuine recommendation. Book accommodations now. Not soon. Now. Hotels and campgrounds within 50 miles of Sturgis sell out months in advance, and the closer to Main Street, the earlier they go. The Buffalo Chip is the largest campground and hosts the best concerts — book a camping package directly with them. Bring rain gear: August in South Dakota includes afternoon thunderstorms that clear fast. Gas up before you reach Main Street — the lines at pumps on rally days are long. Parking on Main Street is motorcycle only, which means you park your bike among 50,000 others and walk the strip. That is the point. There is no corporate polish here, no influencer activations, no sponsored experiences. There is Needles Highway at sunrise, a custom build that took three years, and 450,000 people who made the same choice to show up. That kind of authenticity is increasingly rare. Sturgis 2026 runs August 7-16 in Sturgis, South Dakota. Event information at sturgis.com.

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YOASOBI — US Tour Stop: Los Angeles

Aug 16, 2026 From $75 Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Av…

You either found them before 'Idol' became the song everyone knew, or you found them because of it, and at this point the distinction has stopped mattering to anyone but you. The premise was always strange: take a novel, one book, and turn it into a single pop song. It should not work as a career. Instead it produced a catalog that goes far deeper than the one breakthrough — 'Yoru ni Kakeru,' 'Gunjo,' 'Biri-Biri,' the tracks that quietly built an international audience years before the anime crowd arrived — and hearing them performed live, with a full production behind them, is a different animal from the headphones you learned them on. They do not come through Los Angeles often. Details at yoasobi-music.jp/en. Send this to the person who sent you the song. That is how this band has always travelled.

Pomona Swap Meet & Classic Car Show — July 2026

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Pomona Swap Meet & Classic Car Show — July 2026

Aug 16, 2026 1801 W. McKinley Ave., Gate 17, Po…

You have been hunting one piece for months. Not a category of piece, the exact one: the right trim, the correct-year manual, the thing that does not exist on any website because it was never important enough for anyone to photograph. And then it is lying on a folding table next to a man who knows precisely what it is worth. Hundreds of vendors spread across the Fairplex lots with parts, tools, memorabilia, and boxes nobody has sorted since the eighties, plus a full classic car show running alongside. What separates this from a flea market is the crowd. Everybody walking those rows can identify what they are looking at from ten feet away, and half of them will tell you the story behind it whether you asked or not. Gate 17 on West McKinley Avenue in Pomona, free to get in, and bring cash. Set an alarm that feels unreasonable, because the good stuff is gone before reasonable people arrive.

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IchigoCon 2026 — Gaming + Anime Oxnard

Aug 15, 2026 Oxnard Performing Arts Center, 800…

Ventura County has spent years being the place you leave to find your people — an hour to San Diego, an hour to LA, a drive and a crowd on the other end. IchigoCon is the answer the community built for itself: proof that you don't need to be in a major metro to have a real fandom gathering, just people who care enough to make one. It's run by the nonprofit behind the Oxnard Performing Arts Center, which gives it a genuine arts-and-culture weight most hotel-hall cons never get — a single, packed day of gaming tournaments, anime screenings, voice-actor guests, a vendor hall, and a cosplay competition, all tightly run. For fans from Ventura, Santa Barbara, and the western Valley, this is the home con, the place local fandom actually forms instead of just briefly gathering in someone else's crowd. Oxnard Performing Arts Center, August 15 — a single-day pass, details and cosplay-contest registration at IchigoCon's page as the date nears. The show that deserves more attention than it gets, which is exactly the kind that grows.

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MTG The Hobbit — Tabletop Release Day

Aug 14, 2026 Local Game Shops — SoCal

Every card in this set reads at two levels at once - the mechanical function, and the character or moment from the books it was pulled from - so opening a favorite is not just a good draw, it is Middle-earth arriving in your hand. Magic: The Gathering's The Hobbit set brings Tolkien's foundational fantasy into Magic's card frame, and the lore is built straight into the design: Gandalf, Bilbo, the dragon, the dwarves. Release Day is the Friday the shelves open and the sealed product is finally there to crack, and the first weekend of a new set is when the community gathers to figure out what everything actually does at the table - the theory meeting the card for the first time. Bring your deck-building instincts and expect the set to surprise you. Find your local SoCal game store and its Release Day events at magic.wizards.com. Local game shops across SoCal, August 14th - the Unexpected Journey begins for real.

California Extreme Pinball & Arcade Show 2026

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California Extreme Pinball & Arcade Show 2026

Aug 8 – Aug 10, 2026 Santa Clara Convention Center, 500…

You've been in rooms full of pinball machines before. Not like this. Every July, collectors and operators bring their machines to Santa Clara — not for display, not behind velvet rope — but set up on free play for the entire weekend. Five hundred of them. The 1970s electromechanical tables that require a different kind of patience. The golden-age arcade cabinets. The obscure things from the late eighties that haven't been in a room together since the mall they lived in closed down. You pay once to get in, and then you just play. This is California Extreme, July 17-19, 2026 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The people who go every year describe it the same way: they expected to spend an hour and stayed the whole weekend. The machines are part of it. The other people who showed up knowing exactly where they were going — those people are the rest of it. All-weekend pass recommended. You cannot see five hundred machines in a day. Advance tickets at caextreme.org. Santa Clara Convention Center, 5001 Great America Pkwy, Santa Clara, CA.

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Midsummer Scream 2026: Horror Musicals

Aug 7 – Aug 9, 2026 35.0 Long Beach Convention Center, 300 …

Some people do not celebrate Halloween so much as survive the other eleven months. If you know who you are, this is the weekend that carries you across the summer. The Hall of Shadows is the reason. A blacked-out stretch of the convention center holding more than a dozen fully built haunts — not teasers, not previews, the real thing — running all three days and included with every badge, no upcharge, no separate line. It is the biggest indoor haunt zone in California outside of October itself. Past that: 350-plus vendors selling costumes, props, seasonal decor, original art, and the vintage pieces that make a stranger grab your arm. Panels on haunt design, practical effects, and cosplay construction, taught by the people who actually build the season. Long Beach Convention Center in August, with weekend and single-day passes online ahead of time. Send it to whoever puts their skeletons up in July. They already knew.

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Padres vs. SF Giants

Jul 30 – Aug 3, 2026 From $20 Petco Park, 100 Park Blvd, San Die…

There is a Bay Area transplant living three doors down from you in San Diego, and when the Giants come to town he wears the colors to Petco without apology - the right-field bleachers take on a whole different character during this series. This is the oldest rivalry in the NL West, thirty-plus years of two California clubs fighting over the same playoff real estate, playing each other more than any out-of-division opponent. Late July at Petco is the stadium in full summer mode: weeknight sold-outs, the NL West standings close enough that three games directly move the pennant picture. The Giants travel with one of the most geographically concentrated and loyal away fan bases in baseball, which gives the whole series an edge a divisional midweek set usually lacks. This one matters. Show up for it. The San Francisco Giants visit Petco Park on July 30.

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Otakon 2026

Jul 31 – Aug 2, 2026 Walter E. Washington Convention Ct…

Some of the people in this hall have not missed a summer since 1994 — since before the shows they came for were streaming, before anyone called it content, when a fan-run convention in a hotel was the only place the community existed in the flesh. Three decades later, the first-timer and the person who's been coming since the Clinton administration walk the same corridors, and that unbroken thread is the whole thing. It's one of the oldest fan-run cons in the country, and it still runs on devotion: cosplay built to museum detail, English-language premieres you can't see anywhere else, and evening concerts by Japanese musicians who play Otakon and nowhere else on the American tour. Twenty-five, thirty thousand people make the trip from every state — big enough to feel monumental, still small enough that the community recognizes its own face in the crowd. Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington DC — July 31 through August 2, 2026. Come for the premieres and the concerts; stay for the strange comfort of a room that has quietly kept itself together for thirty years.

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Collect-A-Con Los Angeles 2026

Aug 1 – Aug 2, 2026 Los Angeles Convention Center, 120…

Somewhere in that hall is a holographic Charizard, and the only way to know if today is the day you find it is to walk the walls of long boxes yourself. With over 900 dealer tables across West Hall A, this is the trading card, anime, and pop culture floor experience that turns casual fans into lifelong collectors: Pokemon, Magic: The Gathering, One Piece, and sports cards alongside anime merchandise, Funko POPs, vintage toys, comics, and rare video games. Whether you're hunting that Charizard, completing a One Piece set, or just browsing walls of nostalgia, the day is built for the hunt - live box break events, trading sessions, celebrity guest appearances, and convention-only merchandise drops. The Los Angeles Convention Center West Hall A offers easy parking and sits centrally for collectors from across Southern California - LA, Orange County, the Inland Empire, and San Diego all have strong collector communities that converge here. Collect-A-Con Los Angeles 2026, August 1-2, doors at 10am both days. Two-day passes and general admission via Ticketmaster, with VIP early entry options. Come ready to trade, hunt, and discover.

Metrocon 2026 — Florida Anime Convention, Tampa

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Metrocon 2026 — Florida Anime Convention, Tampa

Jul 31 – Aug 2, 2026 Tampa Convention Center, 333 S Fra…

Florida's anime community has been meeting at Metrocon every summer since 2002. Three days at the Tampa Convention Center — the event that built anime fandom in this state. What it feels like: Metrocon runs hot on cosplay. Florida's anime community has produced some of the country's most technically impressive costume builds, and the convention center floor is a working gallery of that craft. The programming is community-forward — panels run by fans who actually know the material, not PR-approved talking points. The Artist Alley features Southeast creators who rarely appear at national conventions, making Metrocon a genuine discovery venue for independent anime art and merchandise. Worth it? Who it is for: Metrocon is for the Florida anime fan who has been told that the real conventions are all in California. They are not. Metrocon draws 20,000 attendees to Tampa every summer and has been doing so for over 20 years. It is also worth the flight for East Coast fans looking for a convention that combines quality programming with the natural draw of Tampa in late July — the city has invested heavily in its Riverwalk and Ybor City nightlife, making the convention weekend an actual trip. What to know before you go: Badge pickup moves quickly for pre-registered attendees. The Artist Alley opens a half-hour before the main floor — use this window if you want first access to independent vendors. The cosplay contest runs Saturday evening and draws the highest-production builds; arrive early for seating. Tampa in late July is genuinely hot — plan accordingly if you are wearing anything elaborate. The cultural moment: Metrocon has been running for over two decades, which means it has watched the anime fandom transform from a niche community to the mainstream cultural force it is today. It carries that history without being precious about it — the convention feels alive in a way that older events sometimes lose. Florida has an anime community that rivals California's at the neighborhood level. Metrocon is the annual proof.

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Otakon 2026 — Washington, DC

Jul 31 – Aug 2, 2026 Walter E. Washington Convention Ce…

It started as 300 fans in a Baltimore hotel in 1994, and it has been running the whole time since, without interruption - which is why the 30th anniversary in 2024, drawing 46,000 to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, felt less like a convention and more like a reunion. Otakon has a character that separates it from every other major anime convention. The DC location pulls a concentrated East Coast fan base - people who follow seasonal anime, collect physical media, and can place any character in their franchise context - and the programming reflects that, getting into the craft of animation, voice acting, and manga creation at a level that assumes real expertise from the room. The Friday night concert is the kind of thing attendees plan their whole weekend around, and the cosplay photography in the convention center's glass architecture, with DC landmarks nearby, produces an aesthetic that exists nowhere else on the circuit. This is a convention for anime fans who want more than a dealers hall and autograph lines - who want to understand how the work they love gets made, in a room with tens of thousands of people who love it as specifically as they do. The programming depth rewards multiple days; single-day is worthwhile for a specific guest or the concert, but the experience compounds over the full weekend. A few things worth knowing: Washington DC hotels near the convention center fill quickly after the con is announced, so book early or look at Metro-accessible neighborhoods like Shaw or Mount Vernon Triangle. The Walter E. Washington Convention Center is enormous - the map is essential - and it photographs extremely well, which matters when many attendees arrive in cosplay. Badge pickup lines move fastest early Friday morning. This year's theme is Swords and Sorcery, so programming skews toward fantasy-genre anime and epic storytelling, timed well with current momentum around Dungeon Meshi, Frieren, and Witch Hat Atelier. Otakon is operated by Otakorp Inc., a registered non-profit - 'By Fans, For Fans' is legally true, not marketing copy - and weekend badges run about 110 dollars with concerts included, where a convention like Anime Expo upcharges those separately. What Otakon really measures is longevity: a community that self-organized, refused to be dismissed as niche, and built institutions that outlasted the people who started them. That's what cultural endurance looks like from the inside. Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC. 2026.

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Anime SD: Summer Cosplay Social

Aug 1, 2026 Free Balboa Park, San Diego, CA 92101

No ticket, no badge, no schedule - just a character and the willingness to show up in the park where the architecture hands every costume the backdrop it deserves. Balboa Park in August turns outdoor cosplay photography into production work with no production behind it. The Spanish Colonial Revival buildings, the fountain plazas, the museum facades all read as fantasy environments no matter what you are cosplaying. An armor build catches the afternoon light against the Botanical Building in a way photographers plan shoots around; a soft character design photographs against the garden with no post-processing needed. The social runs as an open community gathering - no formal schedule, no judging, no hierarchy between the group who spent six months on a build and the group in store-bought costumes who came because it looked fun. Both are welcome. Photographers with real cameras show up alongside phone cameras. The park provides the setting; the people provide the energy. Follow Anime SD on Meetup for the exact gather location: meetup.com/anime-watch-san-diego. Balboa Park, August 1st, 2026. Free. Show up in costume and find your people.

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