Collection
November 12, 2006
See my collection at librarything.com.
So I’ve been collecting manga since 1998. I’ve got a huge collection of graphic novels, magazines, and floppy issues. The collection has increased exponentially, as has the number of titles available to the English audience, in the past 4-5 years. I’m just as serious about collecting them as I am reading them, and I’ve got a number of rather rare and out of print items, some because I bought them and they went out of print, and others because I sought them out. I’ve also got a number of artbooks, both domestic and import, though I only pick up one of those about once a month on average.
I used to keep a text-based list, as long as I’ve been collecting, of all my graphic novels as well as the series I’d collected in magazine and floppy comic book format. That list has bit the dust in favor of another format, which is more fun.
So this page is not a total waste, here’s some photos of my collection!
Y-town Shelf - this is the actual shelf I have at my parent’s house. Contains my two longest series (though OMG is missing the newer, small format volumes), a third fairly long series, a handful of random volumes, all my 32-page comics (including the entirety of Dengeki Pikachu), the entire print run of Animerica Extra save for about ten or so issues, some other catalog and magazine miscellaney, and the only phonebook I have, an issue of Shounen Jump with Luffy on the cover.
Y-town Pile - since I don’t have enough shelf space at my parent’s house, here’s 500 volumes of manga sitting on the floor. I couldn’t get a clear shot since my bed is in the way, but if I’d have been able to get everything in, this would make for an awesome contest photo where the person who names the most series wins. This is mostly completed series and non-current volumes of longer series. Two of the stacks are dedicated CLAMP, and the stacks have all their series (plus duplicates in Japanese) save for the ones I’m still collecting, which is RG Veda, XxXholic, and both the English and deluxe Japanese editions of Tsubasa. The tallest stack is about 4.5 feet tall. 500 is no exaggeration, I counted them before I came back to my apartment, there are 486 volumes total, so give or take 14.
Chi-town Shelf - Here’s the rest of my manga. This is two cases packed full of more manga. I can’t really think of anything else to say… you can see some of my CLAMP anime up on the top, and some of my figures, including my CLAMP no Kiseki chess set and my first generation of CLAMP in 3D Land figures. Tsubasa deluxe hardcovers are down on the bottom shelf, and the artbooks are on the bottom shelf of the other case. Sgt Frog graphic novels are stored on the floor, for whatever reason. I really need a 3rd case as I’m running out of room to stack things on top of things now.
Artbooks - Because I love these, here’s a detail of my artbooks. You’ll notice Jojo a Go-Go is huge. I would do a webpage on Jojo a Go-Go, because it is the coolest artbook in the world, but it would just dance away. It cannot be contained. Other highlights include Plus Ultra, X Zero, Tenmagouka, Hideshi Hino, and that Happy Mania artbook.
February 11, 2007 at 5:01 am
can you give me the lonk for manga godchild ?
February 11, 2007 at 7:42 pm
If you mean a download link, the license was announced about a year ago so the scanslations have likely stopped. It’s being released by Viz, the link on their site is http://www.viz.com/products/products.php?series_id=343 The series is 5 volumes long, the third just came out and they’ll probably have the other two released before the end of the year.
June 23, 2007 at 8:36 am
wow! sooooo many!
I’ve only been collecting about 4 month so I dont have many. Only 60 :(.
Anyway how many manga do you have altogether?
June 23, 2007 at 4:13 pm
60’s pretty good. When I started, there wasn’t too much available (and I was still in high school), so I probably only had 60 volumes after 3 years.
I just broke the 1,200 mark. If you click the librarything link at the top, it’s a really cool site where I list everything and you can see who else on the site has the same volume, how popular they all are, etc. I love that site so much ^_^
September 4, 2007 at 7:51 am
I love you will you marry me *Dies when sees manga colection* I have only 98 mangas so far only been doing this for a year.
September 6, 2007 at 1:29 am
Wow. That’s a whole lot of manga. *quite stunned*
I’ve only been a die-hard fan since this January (started off with Fullmetal Alchemist).
Mind if I recommend a few other series? We seem to have similiar tastes.
Not that you need any more series to spend money on. :P
- D.Gray-Man: Six volumes are out, and it’s one of my favourites. Kinda reminds me of Fullmetal.
-Mushi-shi: A slower, folk-tale style manga with two volumes out. It focuses on making you think and being more epic. Watch the anime too!
Any other series I own (Bleach, Immortal Rain, Deathnote, +Anima, etc.) you have already read.
September 6, 2007 at 8:45 pm
D.Gray-Man is something I’ve been considering. It sounds really, really good (and some of my favorite characters in Jump Ultimate Stars are from that series), but the only thing holding me back at this point is that I already read too many shounen jump series, and they’re so long. I’ll probably pick it up once I finish Dragonball and get caught up with Knights of the Zodiac, which are my two SJ backburner series.
Though I’ll probably just randomly get it during the next sale or something :p I’m so bad when it comes to randomly buying manga. A whole bunch of random stuff came in while I was away the past two weeks, and now I’ve got TOO MUCH to read. It makes me feel guilty.
September 12, 2007 at 3:14 am
Wow! i look like a complete noob. i mean i have a huge book shelf too. but it doesn’t not compare to your collection.
i have all the sailor moon manga’s too! rock on sister! i love your sailor moon poster. i wanted to reach through the screen and grab it!
i went to a small comic book store and they had a sailor moon wallscroll and the second i saw it , i freaked! they thought i had seen a spider of something. i just pointed at it and said “i’m buying that! take it off the wall it’s mine!!!”
heh..i should be ashamed of that shouldn’t i?
September 14, 2007 at 4:10 am
It’s cool that you found something like that Sailor Moon poster, I haven’t seen any Sailor Moon stuff around in years (probably since all the licensing for that series vanished a few years ago). My Dad bought me that poster, I actually don’t usually decorate my walls. There’s a wanted poster for Vash the Stampede hanging next to it that my Dad also bought, but those are almost the only wall decoration in my room.
September 30, 2007 at 6:03 am
You’re Chi-town Shelves are crying out in pain. Your collection is amazing.
October 2, 2007 at 3:02 am
Thanks! I appreciate the comment ^_^ They’re buckling because they’re cheap, unfortunately. $20 at Target, but they’re big, though slightly not suited to my purpose. I need better shelves. And a nicer apartment to put them in.
October 10, 2007 at 11:40 pm
XD I have only…somewhere between 140-160. Haven’t counted in a while. ^^ Been collecting for about 3-4 years, but a non-steady flow of income tends to slow one down. >< I would recommend Basara and Love Roma if you haven’t already read them. Basara is just classic, while Love Roma is cute and…slightly odd. XD
October 15, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Yeah, Basara is one of the series I put off when it started coming out because I couldn’t afford it, then didn’t pick up later because of the huge number of long series I read anyway. I did read the two other series of hers in English though, Chicago and Wild Com. Both of those are pretty good.
December 10, 2007 at 8:45 pm
whoa you have so many the second biggest collection i have ever seen! I only have 77, and so i am gonna try hard to get as many as you! but i am eleven and manga is expensive so it might take a while
December 12, 2007 at 2:35 am
I didn’t have any manga when I was 11, so you’ve already got a head start on me. It took me a few years before I had 77.
December 14, 2007 at 10:15 pm
Hi there! I just came across your site and wanted to say that you have an awesome collection! I wish I could have started collecting manga a lot sooner, but unfortunately being a kid didn’t give me much options, plus my parents would have thought that it was a waste of money anyway. Now that I’m older and have my own money to spend, it’s not only much easier but pretty addictive to collect too! If I didn’t spend so much money on clothes and electronics (plus X-mas shopping), I’d probably have a lot more manga, but right now I’ve managed to collect 32+ in 2 months (just started collecting).
January 7, 2008 at 9:33 pm
I’d post a photo of my collection, but looking at a bunch of plastic rolly bins under the bed (and stacked upon a disused treadmill) would not be very exciting. :)
January 8, 2008 at 2:02 am
Those photos are over a year old. I want to take new ones, but there are seriously stacks upon stacks everywhere, and I’d have to do some serious cleaning and organizing to get them in any sort of order for photos again. I’ll probably do it next time I go see my parents, though. I do like seeing photos of other people’s collections though, just because I like to get ideas for storage and stuff. Plus I really like playing I Spy with them and seeing how many series I can pick out ^_^;
January 9, 2008 at 5:15 pm
wow I can’t wait till my brother gets a job ( we both collect) but now because of B-days and christmas and christmas offers in the shops, we have as much as yaoi_hugs (98)
January 11, 2008 at 3:48 am
It’s cool that you share your collection with your brother. I didn’t really have anyone to read them with for a long time, but my current roommate really gets into certain series now. I’m still the only one who buys them, but my roommate is sometimes really good at spotting ones that I would have otherwise passed over. He’s the one that got me started on Hideshi Hino.
February 26, 2008 at 11:39 am
Wow… imagine how many words are in there o_0
Did you buy the bookshelves or make them? My collection is about 150 graphic novels and I’m running out of cardboard boxes xD
February 27, 2008 at 3:23 am
The shelves are just the cheapest ones I could find at Target. I can’t bear to put them in boxes (or even double them up on the shelves), for some reason I have a serious compulsion about making sure all the spines are visible.
I’ll get back to you on how many words it is ^_^; You’ve made me almost want to figure it out mathematically.
Actually, yes, I’ll do that. The volume laying next to me is Bastard 3. I flipped to a random page that wasn’t a full-page action panel, and there were 47 words on the page (kind of a text-lite page, but it wasn’t heavy dialogue or wordless action, so it works). An average volume of manga will have around 200 pages… we’ll go to 220 because there are a fair number of long volumes/omnibuses/whatever and not many that are less than 190 pages. That’s 10340 words per volume. Multiply that by the number of volumes in my collection… (at the moment 1571), you get 16,244,140 words. That’s a lot of reading.
April 8, 2008 at 10:26 pm
You’ve got one heck of a collection there. I thought it was bad enough for me having only a 100 volumes of manga. XD
You should really look into getting D. Gray Man. I read earlier that you didn’t want to because it’d be another SJ series, but this one is absolutely amazing.
April 9, 2008 at 1:41 am
I keep coming back to D. Gray Man and Claymore, which are two series I get confused despite the fact they have very little to do with one another. After I finish up a few of my current series, I may go for one or the other, and at the moment it’s kind of a tossup between the two since I really like dark fantasy, and I get it either way.
May 3, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Oh my gosh!You have so much manga,its amazing!
I (like many people) just started collecting in like the past month and dont have that much,but you have inspired me!I love how you comment on mangas and show pictures of what you have.Actually today i just picked up a pile of Death Note >_<,….i love manga but my parents tell me i always burn holes in my pockets -_-,but im 14 and know what im doing! :)
I also found it funny that we have the same name.:)
May 4, 2008 at 4:38 am
True, Connie is a very uncommon name ^_^ I started collecting when I was 14 too. Well, 13 or 14, I can’t remember. There weren’t that many manga series coming out at the time and no bookstores carried the graphic novels, plus I lived in kind of a rural remote area, so I would have to have my dad order one or two books a month over the phone for me. He definitely kept my buying habits in check until I moved out ^_^;
May 22, 2008 at 12:28 am
very impressive! i’ve been collecting on and off since last spring, and i have about 35 volumes total. i do mean to collect more, but because the series that i want to read (sgt frog, excel saga) are > 10 volumes long and still running i’m trying to not buy into as many series like that (i’m focusing on shorter series like sugar sugar rune and emma, stuff like that).
i am curious about one thing, though.. those tsubasa volumes - can you read japanese? i’m beginning to learn because my native japanese friend tells me i should ‘have pride for my country,’ (i was born in japan) and i remember that a manga i want to read (lucky star) is only in japanese atm. if you do read japanese, how long did it take you before you could say you were fairly proficient?
tl;dr: awesome collection, i only have 35 volumes. also, if you read japanese, how long did it take before you could say you were fairly proficient?
May 22, 2008 at 4:04 am
Mmm… I’m not very good at Japanese. I can’t read kanji at all, and the Japanese volumes I do have take me a long time to puzzle through, and it’s got to be fairly easy to read. Tsubasa is the one I spend the most time with, but even then I often have to refer to a translation elsewhere. I’m not really the one to ask about that ^_^;;; I should start making more of a concerted effort not to be so lame about it, though.
July 16, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Just a small question: how do you keep the dust away from it? Cause when you have to clean them all the time - they don’t seem to like that…
And.. how often do u read/reread your mangas?
Honestly I only read them online nowadays because my space and money are limited.
Greetings
July 18, 2008 at 3:17 am
Eh, I just dust them with a feather duster and wipe the spines and shelves around them with a damp cloth occasionally. I had to move a bunch off a shelf I had by the window because the sun was bleaching the pages and soot blew in from the window over them.
I read them all the time, I try for 2 a day (mostly on my commute to work, one hour each way, and before bed). I very rarely re-read them any more, but after they pass a certain age, I tend to go back to them anyway. I usually read a few old volumes whenever I go back to my parents house. I don’t really like reading things on my computer, I sort of get impatient about scrolling around and clicking to view the pages, plus I just like having the book in my hands ^_^;
July 18, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Certainly true that its nicer to hold a real book. But I find the prices here pretty exaggerated and since I can get them for free to try them out before I have to rent a room…^^ Since Angel Sanctuary there’s not much that interests me that much anymore, apart from Naruto and some fast food stuff. Can you recommend anything, that goes into that direction? Only if u don’t mind =)
Btw, what do Mangas cost in England? Im from Germany, and they cost around 5-6,50 here.
July 20, 2008 at 4:17 am
True, they can be expensive if you have to import them. I live in America, and I can usually get most of what I have for around $5 if I wait for a sale. I’m not sure what they cost in England, but I heard it can be pricey if they’re imported from the US.
Hmm… Angel Sanctuary? I’ve only read the first volume of it, but you may like the Demon Ororon, if you haven’t read that one yet. It’s got the otherworld power struggle (mostly devil-centric), some action, and a pair of star-crossed lovers with a LOT of angst. It’s four volumes long and probably not nearly as well-developed as Angel Sanctuary, but I flew through all four volumes and really, really liked it. It’s got sort of a disappointing ending, though. Moon Child is also good for a pair of star-crossed lovers and some weird magic stuff (in that case, mermaids), but it’s very different from Angel Sanctuary and Demon Ororon, not very action-y. Immortal Rain is very good and very romantic in its way, there’s a lot of very well done romance and some action too, but it’s more about a pair of immortals that are fated to do battle to decide whether humans deserve to live or die, one of whom is the immortal Methuselah. It’s pretty good, but a bit further removed from Angel Sanctuary than the other two.
In short, Demon Ororon, Immortal Rain, and Moon Child are all very good and are varying degrees of similar to Angel Sanctuary ^_^;