manga, manga everywhere

I'm a big fan of manga.

Manga are Japanese comic books, if you're not in the know. Manga is accepted in Japan in a way that comics aren't in the west, so it's basically okay to read manga over there, and it's very popular.

In fact, it's so popular that vast quantities of it are churned out every week. The format is different to American comics, where individual books have fairly small page counts and are published on their own. Manga comes out in huge collected volumes, with up to a dozen independent stories running at the same time in each of these books.

The books are themed, of course. So they may be aimed at young men (shounen) or young girls (shoujo). But, to some extent, the content within that varies. I mean, there are constraints, obviously, but it doesn't mean the mag that carries naruto is all about ninjas, although most its series are action oriented.

The schedules of manga can be quite punishing as I understand it--they're monthly or weekly. The weekly ones have fewer pages, but both schedules mean greater output is required from the artist than in the west, which is why they have assistants. The assistants take on similar roles to inkers and colourists (manga is black and white, so they use screen tone--probably digitally nowadays) in the west.

They also put out what are called tankobon, which are collected volumes of the particular series. These are what get translated and put out by the western companies, like Viz, Tokyopop or Dark Horse.

Anyway, the problem with these for me is that the companies are often playing catch-up when they first start putting out a series. So in Japan, the Tankobon basically might come out every six-months, or nine-months, or yearly or whatever. But for the western versions they almost never pick them up at the beginning.

Partly, or course, that's because manga in the west is still relatively knew, and with all that output in Japan you might license a series that's already git 17 tankobon out. That means you've a huge "backlog" of stuff to put out.

So they pump it out--one every other month isn't uncommon for the hit series. That can make it a pretty expensive undertaking for me.

It also means that at some point they will catch up with the Japanese manga. So, unless the series has already finished there comes a point where they suddenly change to a six/nine/twelve-month release schedule, which is then really frustrating.

What this means is that you end up with the weird situation where on my manga list I have around 20 series 'on the go'; but on my anime list I never have more than 3 or 4.