Back into the tankoban life after 18 years
At the expense of space and 6 stuffed bookshelves (though mostly novels with one shelf for comics and manga) so planning what to do with these as I complete them will be interesting.
Backstory: I’m old. Read manga through the 2000’s from printed books (and the shonen jump mags when they started though I’ve long since gave them away) because anime dvd’s were still in the era of 2-3 episodes on $40 discs while a tankoban cost $10 (and shonen jump releases were $8 so reading bleach and yugioh was balling on a budget) and came across a few series in my collection. In the 2010’s I read a few series in Jump but aside from One Piece I’ve kind of fallen in and out of manga reading between 2009-2024 when I decided to subscribe to the jump app and read back catalogue. I also started reading a lot more light novels now that a lot more mainstream ones are getting presence in book stores and they’re always mixed in with the manga or they’re right next to it so had to double dip eventually.
Now I’m coming full circle and slowly going to build both missing volumes from the series I still had, as well as pick up more including special printings of classics from even back in my days (seriously I loved seeing dragon ball, dr slump, fist of the North Star, tomorrow’s Joe, urusei yatsura, slam dunk, yu yu hakusho, and plenty other old manga still gets shelf space). In the last couple years it’s been an occasional purchase of single volumes or very short stuff, but now seeing some of the options at the store I’ve fallen back into the old habits. So here’s the haul from this past weekend. The Hokuto no Ken hardcovers are so nice and going to blow out my budget and I had the dangerous discovery that FMA has a similar printing. More expensive, but getting the colour pages reprinted looks so much better than the old trades we grew up with. Not to mention I keep seeing other classics like Lone Wolf and Cub, Berserk, Vagabond, Vinland Saga, Jojo in similar formats.
May share some collections if I get the chance. There’s a box of gems likely in my parent’s basement (hopefully not destroyed) and again lack of space can’t really share pics at my full power, but there’s a lot of stuff to pick up that either got missed on my student budget or the new series that have become modern classics! For now though feel free to check out some of my nostalgia and one of my modern favorites I figured wouldn’t be bad to collect while there’s only 3 (4 next month) volumes so far.