My manga collection had gone from "everything neatly shelved" to "quarter-empty shelves and giant piles all over the place". Boxed up a few of the old failed experiments from fifteen years ago to make room for the new ones. Notable shelf denizens these days:

-pretty much any of Shirow's manga. Damn shame that he discovered that illustrating porn got him twice the income with a quarter of the effort. Sure, he's weird at times, but his good stuff scratches the same itch as a Stephenson novel.

-Hayate the Combat Butler, up to vol 17. Rapidly transitioning from a poor-Hayate comedy to a harem comedy, and it'll be interesting to see what it does with it from there...

-Naruto, up to volume 50 (!) Better than its reputation, honestly. Yes yes orange jumpsuit ninja saves the day, granted. But it's got a wealth of good secondary characters and is often just plain fun. Not sure I'm going to keep it up through the new plot arc, but it's worth a time or two more.

-Berserk, up to vol. 34. This is how to tell a dark story, Japan!

-Plenty of slice of life stuff. 4 volumes of Hidamari, 3 of GA, 5 of Lucky Star (stay away from vol 1 and 2, they're the same translations I had to deal with for the TV... but 3 and on have a new translator who does a good job.) 5 of Strawberry Marshmallow. There's even some Cromartie in there. I tend to re-read these on a more regular basis than the other stuff, mostly because I can just grab a random volume and it's good.

-Six volumes of Oishinbo. Picked up one and then the rest of 'em, and don't honestly expect any more to come out in the US. It's more of a "best of" / "theme ingredient" compilation, which is just as well, because the art at the beginning wasn't that great (it's never that great, to be honest, but you can see it improve). Very different, in a kind of "let's watch Iron Chef!" way.

-Lone Wolf and Cub, all. Picked this up when the "ten bucks a volume" format was still pretty new. Great period drama. Small format, but eh, for this series I'll run with it.

-Gunsmith Cats, all of it. Liked this series from long ago, enjoyed working on it when the time came, and the manga's great too. Definitely a bit of a gun-nut series, but what the hell.

Other stuff I've got a lot of: Aria, Sgt Frog, GTO, FMP, Yakitate Japan, Negima (pretty much done with this), Trigun, School Rumble (probably this too).

I'm kind of glad I did this. Not just in the "ugh, do I really need a volume of Hyper Dolls on the shelf" sense, but going through it reminded me of a lot of stuff that I haven't been paying any attention to. I don't buy as much as I did, what with the market in bad shape. Frankly the budget has room for a few more series if I could get into them...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 01:28 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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