The Increasing Difficulty of Buying Physical Manga

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed, but it has been ridiculously difficult to get complete collections of any multi-volume manga titles that are relatively popular and more than just two or three books long to collect. Sure, a bunch of stand-alone stories like stuff from Junji Ito or something like Levius, or short series like Planetes (which is only two combined volumes) are easy enough to find and readily available. But other stuff has been a nightmare to collect all of.

I don't normally buy physical manga, which is why it hasn't been a problem before, as digital is more convenient for me since I don't have a lot of room in my apartment to store books. That said, I've been wanting to collect comics and manga for series that I really love and cherish (for instance, I recently bought Grant Morrison's Animal Man 30th Anniversary Edition volumes despite already owning the series digitally on Comixology) to keep in my relatively small personal collection. I am actually in the process of trying to sell off some other titles that I own but don't have any plans to re-read just to make room for those. I'm not a stranger to comic books being out of print, but if the title is popular enough it will get a reprint every few years if you keep an eye out for it and doesn't typically go out of stock that fast.

Manga has been a different story, though. I'd say even before COVID hit, the increased sales were showing and popular titles could be hard to fully collect both in stores and online. But especially with COVID slowing down the publication and shipment of physical media, it has been nearly impossible to find some titles. I was trying to buy all 9 volumes of the Perfect Edition of Monster as a gift for my brother who's birthday is coming up. I found the first 4 easily enough (which is what I will end up giving him), and I could find volumes 6, 7, and 8 as well, but volumes 5 and 9 were nearly impossible to find, even used. On the occasion that I did see them listed, they were either ridiculously over-priced by themselves or as part of a full collection. Likewise, in most cases the condition was marked as used with no real way to discern the actual quality and shape that the book was in unless I bought it and had it shipped to me. I'm not about to over-pay for manga that can easily be read online, so I settled on the first four volumes and figure my brother can read the rest digitally if he's interested. That said, it's never been this hard to find out of print stuff for me.

I do get that part of it is the increased sales and interest in manga, and the problem is exacerbated by the larger gaps in publication reprint windows since last year, but it's still odd to me how even then some popular and well-known titles still seem to be hard to find at a reasonable price. Like with Animal Man, I wanted to go ahead and add One Piece to my collection ever since my re-read of the pre-time-skip material, but the box sets and many individual volumes have been out of print since last year, and that kind of baffles me. I can understand that for a more niche title like Monster, or even something like Claymore (which I also tried to get), but One Piece is a relatively popular series even here in the states. And I've seen Akira go in and out of stock at least a couple of times even since last year, so I don't see why something like One Piece that sells well has been so hard to get back in stock.

At any rate, I guess I'll keep my eyes out for a restock, but honestly it kind of just encourages me to stick to digital only when it comes to manga. That said, reading on my phone is usually a no-go because of how small the screen-size is, and a laptop has it's own set of issues given how shitty the presentation is from most online websites in the desktop format. I'll probably need to invest in a new tablet one of these days to continue my online reading when it comes to manga.

[LumRanmaYasha]

ICV2 has a good article on the problem, but yeah, manga sales were the highest they've ever been in the U.S. in 2020 and the growth has only continued into 2021, but the pandemic exacerbated the difficulties of publishers to keep up supply with the increased demand. Printers and warehouses are operating at max capacity and with COVID restrictions, so the amount of books that can be printed and reprinted is limited. There's also a ton of other supply chain and labor issues that are preventing books from getting printed and shipped faster. By the sounds of things, I wouldn't expect the manga supply chain to get back on track until next year at the earliest.

[Markness]

It wasn't easy collecting all volumes of Excel Saga but I had some lucky turns. A store two hours from me at a retail copy of Volume 7, I saw Vol. 8 on eBay for about $28, Half-Price Books often carried used copies of the series, and I got Vol. 26 at Barnes & Noble when it came out. A few pages have printing errors in the dialogue but I can't afford a replacement copy since aftermarket prices for that volume are insane so I have to hang on to it.

Amazon and eBay sellers would try to sell Flame of Recca Vol. 29 for triple to quadruple digit prices but I managed to order a $7 copy of one from Half-Price Books. I highly suggest Half-Price Books if you can't find what you want on the aforementioned sites.

Some volumes of Black Cat are out of print and I had to dig deep to find prices that weren't too painful for them. Every volume of B. Ichi I paid for was in the $20-40 range and shipping prices added to that. Sumomomo Momomo I managed to get all of by constantly checking Half-Price Books, conventions, and special ordering.

I actually bought the first One Piece manga box set from RightStuf earlier this year. The third box set is in stock there last I checked but the second keeps going out of stock. I missed an email that they had a re-stocking for it and it was sold out again when I logged in to my account there.

I've noticed there are some sellers on eBay dedicated to selling out of print manga and I've seen some sets, including Excel Saga, as either Buy It Now or for bidding. I once tried to get Eden It's An Endless World! Vol. 8 through bidding but whenever I put a bid on it, someone else would almost immediately outbid me. I managed to finally just get a set that had all the volumes of Eden Dark Horse had published at the time. After 14, they dropped that manga and it was such a downer since they were only four books away from publishing the whole series.