A Thankful MMF Daily Diary: Voyage of Discovery
In a way, my current hobby is very closely tied to my current employment, as a bookseller.
I’ve always liked anime, even before I knew where it came from or could put into words why I liked anime better than other cartoons on television. I watched Star Blazers, Voltron, G-Force, and Robotech as a kid; I remember Speed Racer’s run on late-night MTV, as a college student I watched anime on the Scifi Channel – because I watched a lot of Scifi Channel back then.
I was primed; not a fan in a sense we would recognize today (i.e. otaku) and certainly not rabid, but familiar enough. I had seen what dribs and drabs were getting localized for the American market, if not during its first run then in re-runs.
Two things changed in 2001. First, I got a regular job. I had worked more-or-less full time while in school (especially if you count my job as an RA with campus housing) and had managed to piece together work as a freelancer and ‘consultant’ after leaving college, but in 2001 I took a part-time job at the bookstore just to have some steady income I could count on. Within three months the bookstore offered me a full-time job with benefits, and even though it was retail I jumped on it. (I was tired of irregular checks and having to pay my own social security taxes out of my own meagre pocket, among other things)
The second thing that happened in 2001 was Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. Specifically Cowboy Bebop on Adult Swim on Cartoon Network. With that as a new catalyst, my inner fanboy started to grow again, and grow up. Suddenly I knew there was this thing called anime and I wanted more of it.
I discovered websites like Anime on DVD. I remember scouring every local Blockbuster just to find the few anime DVDs available to rent. Then I discovered Netflix. (Actually, Netflix started years before, and it would be 2002 before I signed up, but a friend of mine who noticed I rented anime from Blockbuster mentioned there was a website that rented movies that had foreign films and “your Japanamation cartoon stuff, too”.)
Before I bought my first manga, I was renting dozens of discs a month and watching everything — yes, I’m sure we all remember what kind of crap was coming out — but also remember that I was working at a bookstore. Bookstores in the early aughts were just beginning to ramp up their manga offerings. The first manga I remember seeing actually was Dragon Ball, since even before we added Manga as a shelving category, some of the books were coming in piecemeal — and having seen Dragon Ball Z I recognized the name.
I know the exact date when I bought my First Manga, though: It was Friday, October 3rd in 2003. It was the first volume of Planetes. At the time I was quite content to watch anime and would have described myself as an ‘anime fan’ — This book was compelling, though. The cover said: buy me.
I know the exact date because I was working in our back room at the time and I literally took this out of the box and decided to buy it before it even hit the shelf. I know it was a Friday because I got paid on Fridays and nearly always bought books; I know it was October 3rd because (as I would later discover) we always got manga early at my bookstore, before the ‘official’ release date on Tuesdays.
The discovery of manga also led me back to a discovery of comics as a visual medium. I eventually made my way to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and started thinking a bit more deeply about art and storytelling, and not just boobs and action scenes. Eventually this led to a semi-regular writing gig at a friend’s site [the now-defunct ComicSnob] and that led to my current part-time career as a blogger and data-analyst.
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Wednesday is the Appetizers course for this Manga Moveable Feast, and the seed-topic I offered was “The Manga My Best Friend Lent Me That Got Me Into Manga” –
For me, it was more of a process than a single event: a lot of ground work and familiarity with stuff like old-school anime, Pokemon, Super Mario, and Toonami, juiced by the sudden appearance of anime that followed on DVD, and set to incubate in a big-box bookstore where we were just beginning to stock up for the Manga Boom of the aughts. A perfect storm setup for turning a scifi-geek, math-dork, and general-purpose-nerd into an full blown manga otaku.
My ‘friend’ that got me into manga was my bookstore. I would like to offer my most sincere thanks, especially as that ‘friend’ still provides me with an income, a privileged spot atop our massive distribution chain, access to an amazing book database maintained for me by a corporate office in New York, and a very decent employee discount aside.
If I weren’t a bookseller, I would still be a fan – but I would be watching anime on DVD. I don’t know if I would have made the jump sideways into manga, or if I would be quite so obsessive about owning each-and-every-version of a property I love (like the Crest of the Stars novels, or Mori’s Emma, or as much Aqua/Aria as has been made available in English, or the 27-volume box set of Fullmetal Alchemist manga)
If I weren’t a bookseller, I might still be posting bar reviews and bad fiction to my own small blog on an out-of-the-way corner of the internet, rather than the grand experiments I keep attempting now. I wouldn’t be compiling my own manga bestseller lists and scheming how to make a living at book-sales-data analysis. I wouldn’t know all of the TRULY AMAZING PEOPLE I have met who are also manga fans and bloggers. I wouldn’t be a participant in the Manga Moveable Feast.
There are a lot of people in the industry I need to thank, not just the sci-fi and graphic novel buyer who decided to place manga in our stores — in fact, that long-list of “thank yous” is going to be my next post.
But today, as we get this Thankful Manga Feast started I’d like to thank all of you: my friends, if I can claim you all. I am particularly grateful to the community for sticking with me even as my own participation ebbed and waned (mostly waned) and my focus and engagement with manga, shifted, and started taking me to weird places.
I wish I could remember everyone and thank you all. David, thank you for hosting the first MMF. Melinda, thanks for giving some of my projects a new home. Erica, Brigid, Johanna: thank you for being my role models – I wish I could blog (and write, and think and analyze) more like you do. Ed, thanks for having me on the podcast. ALL YOU FABULOUS TWITTER FOLKS, thank you for putting up with me talking about everything and anything but manga (it’s almost comical how little I mention my favorite hobby).
If I didn’t namecheck you, please please don’t feel slighted – I have limited time and space :)
But I value all the interactions I have with every fellow fan on the internet, as it can be kind of lonely being the only fan at work, or in your peer group. I love that we have the MMF, and that you are now my peer group, and [hopefully] my friends.
