Definitely not my shelf btw
In my room I have two bookshelves – one small shelf that manages to fit all of the manga I have finished, whether it is something like Yumi Hotta/Takeshi Obata’s Hikaru No Go, Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako, or even an out of print manga like Takanori Yamazaki’s Diamond Girl, and one large bookshelf that not only has a few movies and anime DVD/BDs, but ongoing manga series like Hajime Isayama’s Attack on Titan and Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba. Once upon a time what I mostly owned was video games, but from 2009 I started to try and build a new collection, and that involved manga. Let me share with you how easy I had it building my collection, then let me tell you how that managed to change really quickly!
I live in New York City. It is pretty much one of the few places in America that has a good variety of what people need – or at least it’s a place everyone seems to care about! Anyways, I’ve been here forever. It was good fortune that I managed to be around a place that sold manga — it was called Borders. With its location being Penn Station, I could go there easily after school and get my manga. I call it convenience! And with it being so convenient, this was the part where I picked up a lot of manga. When Borders closed however, my spending on that started to get few and far between. It’s not just because the Borders I frequented was close by: it was one of the places to go to whether it was at Penn Station or on the East Side of NY. It was a brand name store. Nowadays, you have to know what stores are comic retailers, or just order online. Amazingly enough it’s rare for me to order manga – the last order I placed was for Nausicaa, and that was back in January. So for me I’m either killing my back by buying manga from Kinokuniya or buying manga at conventions. Either way, my back suffers!
In short, there are ways to get manga where I’m at, but it requires basic knowledge of where to get it: the problem I notice is that I don’t think people know where they can actually get manga legitimately, in English, and instead resort to reading it online. (Among other reasons I won’t get into) You probably just so happen to be friends with someone on Facebook who ends up sharing the latest Naruto chapter or other content from an illegal site, and in a way, it’s unfortunate. Not even educating them can work out since spending money on manga is not what one wants to do with their money. But that just seems to be how it is for me at least, though we have manga that we can read in New York, just waiting to be brought or read…
Ok, enough of how things are manga wise from my perspective. I’m curious about how manga is from you guys. I can complain all I want and everything, but manga is still fairly solid around here. How about yours? Can you buy your manga efficiently? Are you forced to read it online because of where you live? What’s your situation? However it is, I would like to know, so feel free to share!
