Anime/Manga/Etc...

[bikingjahuty]

It blows me away how popular Manga has become. My wife and I have been huge manga collectors and readers since the 2000s, but after taking a bit of a break from it or a few years we got really into it again this past summer. Literally everytime we'd check out the manga section at our local Barnes and Noble stores or any place that had a manga section there would always be a ton of people around it checking out the selection. Compare this to 4 or 5 years ago when the manga section at any given store had been gradually shrinking since the early 2010s and you'd be lucky to see anyone else head on over to it while you were browsing. I've specifically noticed a lot of younger zoomer girls being into manga, including quite a few that I'd never took for manga/anime fans if I'd seen them anywhere else. Makes me wonder why it became so popular amongst that demographic.


Another thing that blows me away is how valuable certain out of print manga has become. Up until recently I've never known manga to be super collectable; more or less any manga series I'd ever wanted to read, whether in print or now was always pretty affordable and never more than cover price per volume. In fact, most of the manga that my wife and I own was bought at various used book stores for a quarter of cover price or less. However, we were looking at what some of the series we own go for now and it's insane! Probably the craziest being Gantz which might be my favorite manga series; full sets are going for as much as $2000 right now. Fortunately I own the entire series, but jesus I'd never guessed this would happen! Similarly, Battle Royale, Nura, Flowers of Evil, and other series I've been into for a while that are no longer in print have mooned like crazy. Sadly, there are a few series I really regret not scooping up back in the day like the aforementioned Battle Royale. I've read most of it either through a few volumes that I do own as well as manga reading sites, but about 10 years ago I a small book store my wife and I used to visit had the whole series used and if I'm remembering right I could have had the whole series for no more than $60. I stupidly passed and now it's going for $400+ for the whole series.


But yeah, just thought I'd comment on how crazy the manga scene has become and how it really seems to be popular with younger people today (god, saying that makes me feel old lol).

[kamikazekeeg]

Manga was never something I got into for whatever reason.  I think because back in the day, it was really hard for me to find them, no one locally had them and buying online wasn't the cheapest.  I think because of that, I just haven't felt the need to get into manga.  Plus generally I'm into anime more, because I want these stories in all their visual glory, so give me the colors, the voice acting, the crazy action or intense drama.  Not that manga can't be good, some of the art I've seen is amazing (I think Berserk would be one I'd get into purely on art alone) and I know that there are anime's that kinda botched things (Promised Neverland being one I know of), but anime just has the best draw and ease of access.

And like you said, there's a lot of manga that has gone up in price, making some series harder to get into, but manga is pricey in general as some series can have so many volumes.  Like I brought up Berserk before, but getting into that, it would cost me nearly 50 bucks per every deluxe volume, and there's 9 of them currently, and that's not even all of the currently available regular volumes.

[bikingjahuty]

Manga was never something I got into for whatever reason.  I think because back in the day, it was really hard for me to find them, no one locally had them and buying online wasn't the cheapest.  I think because of that, I just haven't felt the need to get into manga.  Plus generally I'm into anime more, because I want these stories in all their visual glory, so give me the colors, the voice acting, the crazy action or intense drama.  Not that manga can't be good, some of the art I've seen is amazing (I think Berserk would be one I'd get into purely on art alone) and I know that there are anime's that kinda botched things (Promised Neverland being one I know of), but anime just has the best draw and ease of access.

And like you said, there's a lot of manga that has gone up in price, making some series harder to get into, but manga is pricey in general as some series can have so many volumes.  Like I brought up Berserk before, but getting into that, it would cost me nearly 50 bucks per every deluxe volume, and there's 9 of them currently, and that's not even all of the currently available regular volumes.

Kind of like with movies or TV shows based on book where the book is almost always better, the manga is almost always better than the anime. In fact, some of the better anime out there isn't based on a manga at all. That's not to say the anime based on manga are all bad, but just that the manga is typically better. It's way easier for me to get motivated to read a manga series and continue to read it more than it is for me to get through some anime series I've watched in recent years. But as you said, the value of some of these manga is ridiculous, especially if its a more well known series that's out of print. But, I'd definitely pick up a manga series based on an anime you like and see if your preference swings one way or another. It certainly does for me in favor of the manga 95% of the time.

[emporerdragon]

Kind of like with movies or TV shows based on book where the book is almost always better, the manga is almost always better than the anime. In fact, some of the better anime out there isn't based on a manga at all.

Pacing's definitely the biggest reason as you can tell when the anime's too caught up with the manga, like with Namek's "5-minute" destruction, how the last third of Naruto is 90% filler, or how One Piece can turn into 50% recap per episode (Dressrossa). Or if they don't have enough episodes and have to cut things out, like how Promised Neverland removed the Goldy Pond arc and most of the characters involved. Sometimes the manga itself can seem a bit poor-paced too, but in most cases, that's caused by being fully caught up and reading only 1 chapter a week/month rather than the volume as a whole (or if the series is getting the axe, so the author needs to wrap up as much as possible to get some semblance of an ending).

I will say, manga's my current collecting focus right now since my desire to collect some of my other things, like video games has diminished (mainly a combo of having most everything I want from the past couple generations, a small trickle of new releases I'm interested in, & having the digital-only Series S). So, I've been picking up a handful of books each paycheck. Right now, I'm getting a lot of 1st volumes of newly-published series that I discovered online from fan scanlations, like Happy Kanako's Killer Life or The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs, as I know I already like them and it lets me support the authors. Besides that, I am keeping pace with a few series's releases (Beastars, Dr. Stone, the Fullmetal editions of Fullmetal Alchemist), and getting caught up/completing other series I've let stay fallow for a while (Promised Neverland, Rise of the Shield Hero, Rurouni Kenshin).

All of that has accumulated to this wonderful wall of weeb: