I Need Gumshoes

Honestly, never thought I’d see a day where several trips to the local comic book shop and two bookstores would fail to uncover a manga that’s supposedly been available since the second to last week of December. The title in question: Dark Horse’s re-release of Masamune Shirow’s Dominion.

Actually, this has been something of a trend for me lately. Volumes of less than mainstream titles are now asking for notably more foot pounding to find, with certain books ultimately having to be purchased online. To be blunt, I unequivocally hate buying manga online.

I’m a real stickler for condition. Not that I’m planning to resell my collection, but I can’t stand paying for manga only to have it delivered looking like someone’s been using it for the last month to prop-up a table at Chuck E. Cheese. If anyone’s going to damage my book beyond recognition, I want it to be me, not the overpaid USPS dude or the underpaid workers in a shipping warehouse. And as helpful as many sites are in regards to replacing disfigured merchandise, the whole return process is still a giant ass fuck, even when dealing with the best Internet stores.

Cheaper prices just can’t beat grabbing a title off a shelf and knowing exactly what I’m getting. This all boils down to, I guess, being pretty amazed at how the US manga industry has grown to the point where a niche hobby actually has a substantial body of hard-to-find, marginalized titles.

I could probably go on a tear cursing VIZ for bloating shelves with their ever expanding line of censored shounen soldiers, but that’s really a matter for another day. One thing I would ask, at least to the bookstores that traffic so heavily in manga: I realize the manga glut has you cramming as many titles onto a shelf as possible, but could you please take care not to hide a series’ most recent release behind a phalanx of earlier volumes. Unlike your actual workers, I’m not being paid to re-stock your shelves every time I want a copy of Victorian Romance Emma #6.