Now this is cool. I’ve been reading Manage for at least 8-9 years now, but only on a casual basis. This is partly because it’s somewhat inaccesible – you can only reliably get the translated editions as trade paperbacks which are released years after the original editions are published in Japan, and I’ve had trouble identifying series that I enjoy. For every Adolf: A Tale of the Twentieth Century I pick up, it seems like I buy 5 Battle Angel Alitas, which has for the most part kept me from buying a lot of it. I’ve also found that I don’t enjoy the manga “canon” as much as the critics would expect me to: Things like Akira really didn’t do all that much for me.

Anyway I’m rambling. My point today is that a new magazine is out, Shonen Jump, which collects manga and runs them as series. It’s sort of like an asian flavored Vertigo Presents, or a PG-rated ‘Heavy Metal.” The comics seem to be skewed towards the younger reader, but still I am loving it, finally I can get my hands on large volumes of manga inexpensively and scope it out, rather than dropping $20 on a trade paperback that may or may not completely suck. It’s well worth checking out, a 300+ page issue sells for about $5 and will keep you in bathroom reading for at least a week. I plan to subscribe, plus I am trying to track down the initial issues on ebay (there have only been 4 issues so far).