I have finnaly caught up to current with Negima, and am working my way through Tsubasa: Resivoir Chronicle and was looking around the giant manga sections at various Borders/Barnes and Noble stores in the area for something to sate my palate for new manga. This brought up my current issues with manga and how published/edited/stocked currently.

First is stocking issues. While I do LOVE having stores in the area that have walls and walls full of manga, It is a pain to try and find something along the lines of what you are in the mood for like you can with regular books. with the sheer volume of titles available these days, it's a pain in the ass to sort through isles of spine out alphabetized titles, doubly so if you are not a super OMG scanlation reading title crawling manga-crazy fangirl/boy. If you are like me, and just read what is published, picking up four or five manga a month, it can be frustrating. I don't like being one of those people that park themselves on the floor in the middle of the manga section (something else that annoys me about the fandom) reading through the first volume or so to see if I like something. I would love to see manga gaining different sections. With more publishers adding easy one or two word content descriptors, this is becoming something that would be easy to do. I mean if I want to look for Yaoi, I really want it to be all right together for easy sorting. The same thing applies to action, romance, comedy, etc...

Another issue I have has to do with certain publishers. Viz is number one on my will not buy ANYTHING from them list. Fushigi Yuugi was a series that I was very into at one point. I was collecting the manga, and at that point, they were $20 a piece. Then, halfway through the series they switched format. That infuriated me. Yes, they released the older ones in the newer, cheaper format, but I had already dropped a large chunk of money investing in a series that would end up looking janky on my bookshelves in two different formats. I sold em all off and vowed never to buy another Viz series. Thing is, they have done that to a number of series since them too, so I stand by not buying a damn thing Viz releases. The other company that is guilty of this is CMX. The reason they are going through reissues though is because of fan backlash. They edited certain series to make it more mass-market friendly and less "mature-themed". I have noticed this trend is starting to tun around though, because of fan backlash, so maybe they have learned and will avoid this in future releases.

My other issue is a personal one. I, like many manga fans, had a bias against OEL or "american manga". Yes, some of the early tripe that TokyoPop publised was not even stylisticly the same and definitely seemed weak. So I built up a bias where there shouldn't have been one. I mean I read and buy Megatokyo manga for crying out loud, a webcomic manga! That should have told me that yes, OEL manga is not ALL crap. So this weekend I broke down my "ewww OEL manga" bias and bought Dramacon. Loving and living the congoing life myself, this manga was good, even great. It hit so many true chords about con life I devoured the first book in one sitting at 2 am last night. I think now I am willing to give OEL writers a chance. If they are half as good as Svetlana Chmakova, they may be a worthwhile read after all.