Thursday, May 22, 2008

Manga Mania

So last week, I asked if people would be interested if I did a manga feature... well I only got one response ^_^; The good news is that the response was positive. So according to the majority, LOL, I'll be doing a manga feature.

I'm not sure how this will work and what I'll be doing for the manga feature and the frequency of it. All I know is that lately, I've finished many series and want to share them with people on blogland. Some of you have asked me for suggestions, what series to start with. That's a hard question to answer. Hopefully, this feature will help you and give you suggestion.

However, here's a brief introduction about manga to start with. For more information, click here.

Manga are basically Japanese comics. In Japan, manga are read by a wide range of people of all age and there is an equally wide range of topics and subjects explored. Usually, manga are serialized in magazines, some as thick as phone books... when a series is popular enough, the chapters are collected into a tankobon or what we call here a graphic novel.

Me, I usually gravitate towards shonen (teenage boy) and shojo (teenage girl) manga and sometimes, yaoi (male/male love). I would say that those types of manga are the most popular in North America and Europe... therefore, most series licensed belong to these categories...

By the way, I have to mention scanslations. Scanslation is the cheap way to get manga. Basically, groups on the net scans manga and translated them into English and other languages. Obviously, the major advantages of reading scanslations is that it's cheap. Of course, it's better to buy the graphic novels and support the mangaka; however, scanslation is also a good way to discover new un-licensed series or read the newest chapters appearing in a magazine.

Thus, for those who wants to give it a try, here is a site Onemanga where scanslations are online.

I'll have the first spotlight tomorrow, so stay tuned :D