Comic Book Resources

Send Us Your Shelf Porn!

Here I was at Shelf Porn Central, thinking “you know, we haven’t had a big manga-themed post in a long while,” when who should appear in my in box but one Emily Snodgrass, with a manga collection to beat the band.

Remember though, you don’t have to be an uber-collector to submit your pics to Self Porn. Large or small we’ll gladly accept and and all submissions. Just send photos and commentary to cmautnerATcomcastDOTnet and we’ll take care of the rest.

And now heeeere’s Emily ….

Right now my collection is almost 3800 books, mostly in Japanese. I don’t have much room in my apartment, so my organization system is somewhat sketchy. Almost all of it is Shoujo (for girls) manga.

As it stands, I have everything roughly organized by publisher or imprint.

In this photo are my two bookcases that contain most of my series that are published by Shogakukan under their Flower Comics label. Flower Comics is by far the imprint I buy the most series from. And, er, not because they publish a lot of smutty shoujo manga. Really! Ahem.

Within each publisher, I made a half-hearted attempt to group things by author but this never lasts long. When I get new books, I tend to just pile them up in the general shelf and do a more thorough organization maybe twice a year. On top of most of my bookcases are stacks of weekly or monthly manga magazines that most series are serialized in before they are published as a collected volume. I buy these magazines individually, for the most part, but I have had subscriptions at one time as well. I really should get rid of these things, as they take up tons of room, but I had a hard time letting go because they have a lot of pretty color pages,

This bookcase contains a combination of things. Most of it is my small yaoi/boys love manga collection. I like Boys Love manga, but I don’t buy as much of it as it is more expensive, and, well, I’m cheap I also have an even smaller collection of English translated manga here as well. Finally, on the top shelf, are some comics published under the Asuka Comics imprint from Kadokawa. These are a lot of fantasy/action series. Down on the floor is a framed animation cel of Tsukushi from the Hana Yori Dango anime. Part of my plushie collection lurks up on top of the bookcase.

This bookcase is filled mostly with books published by Shueisha under their Margaret Comics imprint. I don’t buy as many Shueisha titles, but when I do, it usually ends up being a very long series. Included here are two of my favorites: Hana Yori Dango (37 volumes) and Itazura na Kiss (23 volumes). There are more anime plushies up on top. On the very bottom shelf, I have set up a space devoted to books by a single author, Miwa Sakai. She publishes works through a bunch of publishers, and I didn’t want to spread her books out across the other bookcases.

Here is more Shueisha stuff, this time their Ribon Mascot Comics imprint, which is for younger readers. Also included here are books from Hakusensha’s Hana to Yume imprint. Hana to Yume published a lot of series that are being released in English here, including Otomen, Maid Sama, and KareKano.

This bookcase is reserved for my over-sized manga and my shounen and seinen stuff. Finally, some more manly manga. These shelves contain series like GTO, Rurouni Kenshin, and other series originally published through Shounen Jump or Shounen Sunday comics. I don’t collect as much shounen manga, because it always ends up so popular and gets animated and licensed anyway, I don’t feel as great a need to follow the Japanese versions.

This is an overflow area, for stuff that doesn’t fit with the other publishers, or into the other bookcases. These are mostly older series, awesome 70′s shoujo manga where everyone has ringlets and huge eyes filled with stars.Lots of wide-eyes orphans searching for their parents or sparkly-eyed teens enduring brutal training in various sports (ballet, figure skating, volleyball, tennis, etc.) I love 70′s shoujo manga.

Here are some more “phonebook” manga magazines, along with some smaller reprinted versions of older series. In particular, I have some reprints of the Hana Yori Dango manga that came out when the TV drama first started airing.

A closeup of my small anime/manga plushie collection. DangerMouse is hanging out with them!

And that’s it! I hope I won’t have to start selling the collection!