Much of my collection is media-driven, which I'm sure would make true manga fans scoff. If I like watching it on Adult Swim, I'm usually interested in seeing the original manga the cartoon was based on. I'm avidly collecting Case Closed and Fullmetal Alchemist at the moment. Case Closed is cool because it looks like a kids show but constantly deals with adult level murder mysteries. And as for Fullmetal, I never seem to be around to catch the show running in order, so I'm reading the comics to get the proper story. I also have a couple Lupin III books, which are wildly different from modern manga because they date from the 1960s and have kind of a classic Playboy comic strip feel. I have the five Cowboy Bebop books, and Baron the Cat Returns (which I picked up because I liked the animated movie.) Started picking up Inital D, which I first encountered as a medicore TCG a couple of Origins ago. I also have the first three books in The Ring series, but I refuse to buy the fourth because they want $12 for it and it's half the length of any other $10 manga on the shelf. The hell.

As far as non-media empire properties go, the ones I've glommed onto seem to me to be just shy of hitting the US bigtime. Love Hina is a great series (14 books) that drags out a Will They / Won't They young romance. There's a certain amount of titillation in Love Hina, but it's always played for laughs or as pure innocent love. For example, the main male character is always accidentally falling through doors and seeing the various female characters nude. It strikes me as distinctly Japanese, because there's a great deal of embarrassment associated with the nudity, whereas the American equivalent would probably be something like Porky's. As the series goes on, it does flail about a bit into ridiculousness, but it always comes back to the poignant center story eventually. Love Hina is a pretty popular title, so I'm surprised we haven't seen much of the anime series it spawned. Either the cartoon version totally sucks or it takes M-rated liberties with all the girls-covering-themselves-with-towels bits, because I don't know of any US channel running it. You can buy it for $100 at Suncoast, and even though I'd love to see it, I'm not dropping that on a show I haven't tested out first on cable.

Here's one that I would love to see take off, Sgt. Frog. The premise is that a race of frog-like aliens have invaded Earth. Their plan is to take it over, or, failing that, blow it up... but the small team of frogs get distracted by general Earth life and never really get around to pulling off their master plan. There's a subtle Pokemon vibe in that each frog primarily hangs out with a human kid they've become attached to... and that just screams of the monster/trainer relationship seen a dozen times over. (Where's my Sgt. Frog card game!?) But overall, the series is much more sitcommy and never dives down as far as the never-resolved, always battling structure of Digimon, Zatch Bell, Pokemon, etc. It's funny stuff. Sgt. Frog also bails out into the same type of crazy-stupid action that burns Love Hina, but here it fits better since we're talking about aliens... when Su from Love Hina starts building giant turtle mecha, I start reading faster.

Once I started buying manga semi-regularly - which corresponds exactly with manga showing up in droves at major booksellers - I made a beeline for Battle Royale. This one had somehow penetrated the clueless fog of my pre-manga mind, no doubt due to a fairly longstanding legacy of being one of the most twisted and gruesome comics ever made. This is serious Over 18 stuff, far removed from the cutesy sex allusions of Love Hina. It takes place in an alternate-reality police state Japan where every year one school class is chosen at random to get dumped on an island with the instructions to kill everyone else before they kill you. Last kid standing "wins." This book pulls no punches. It's probably the only manga at your local Border's that is shrinkwrapped and there is a wealth of good reasons why that's so. I love it, but it is a tough book to read at times. A lot of the time. But it definitely makes you think about your old school classes and your circles of friends and wonder what you would have done.

So those are my recommendations. Manga books feel like a good value... you usually get 180 pages for $10. But you have to remember that the Japanese value silence as much as we value noise, so you can easily flip through page after page of establishing shots and wordless panels. Initial D is a major dealer in that. After years of reading American books, I did need some time to train myself to read in the other direction... and I still screw it up from time to time purely out of gaijin habit. But one cool thing is, even though some series are absurdly long, most of them do actually end. Imagine if Superman just ended after 20 issues.