omg!

I've been reading more manga this week.

Both of my renaissances of anime and scanning seem to have fallen by the wayside for some reason. It's not a conscious decision, I've just found myself constantly in the situation where I just haven't had the time.

Next week is my last week before I take a weeks holiday and I'm hoping I'll get a bit of anime watching and scanning done then. However, I was compiling one of my 'to do' list and it's got a hell of a lot of stuff on it. See, the problem is I really want to get rid of a load of crap.

I've discovered there's a council recycling place just down the road and I believe they'll take loads of the big stuff I've been reticent to throw away because it would just end up in landfill. The council collections are shot where I am - they take virtually nothing and you get nasty notes and threats of fines if you get it wrong.

So yeah, I'm hoping to clear that stuff, plus I want to finally get a load of stuff from my childhood on e-bay. I'm pretty certain it won't sell, but at least I'll have put it on there and then I'll know for definite it can go in the bin.

Trouble is of course both of those things will just eat my time and on top of that I'm going to visit my Dad and there's all the regular crap I do.

Anyway, the point today is I have been reading some new manga. Specifically I've started back reading Oh My Goddess.

OMG was one of the first manga I ever read. Indeed, I think it was one of the first manga ever released in America. Back in those days it was 'flopped' - printed back to front, which probably seems a bizarre thing to do in the modern era.

Anyway, the point is because it's such a long series (it's still ongoing in Japan!) there came a point with OMG where the fashion had very much shifted to printing manga in the original right-to-left way and Dark Horse where still playing catch up. That meant they decided with volume 21 to revert to the original format.

But also, it turned out Dark Horse had played silly buggers with the earlier volumes, skipping out and reordering some chapters. So they therefore released several of the earlier volumes in with the correct chapter order. But then they also announced that they would re-issue all of the already released volumes in unflopped format.

And that's why I think I stopped reading - I got very, very confused.

But now, many years later, I thought it was about time I caught up, so I bought loads of volumes and have started ploughing my way through.

I've gotta say I still like OMG. I was a little worried my tastes might have changed, but it still pretty much works. I will say I'm still a little frustrated with it - Keichi and Bell's relationship still remains weirdly non-intimate and stagnant, but the stories are sufficiently full of other goings on that it kinda gets around that issue.

Still, it would be nice for it to at least start to explore the implications of a man and goddess pairing, and who knows maybe it does in the volumes I need to catch up, but I kinda doubt it.