Anime Boston, My Birthday, and Live Chats — Oh My!

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The last couple weeks have been incredibly hectic, but for all good reasons!  As many of you know, Anime Boston was last weekend.  The store I work for, Comicopia, has a large booth at the show, and part of my responsibilities is helping with ordering and organizing what we bring, who our volunteers are, and how things get displayed.  The month leading up to AB is honestly a lot more work than being at the show and selling the books!  That’s the fun part — getting to interact with customers, helping people find what they’re looking for, figuring out new ways to showcase books on the fly.  And we have a really great host of volunteers who help make the experience extra fun.


As is often the case, my birthday was immediately after Anime Boston — this past Wednesday, in fact.  I spent the day…well, going to work and unpacking manga, honestly, haha.  It wasn’t so bad, and my husband and I went out for Japanese barbecue afterwards which was great.
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And now, all the manga is unpacked and counted, I’ve figured out what needs reordering, and we can get back to business as usual at work for a little while!  I’ve been pleased to note that some more obscure titles have been selling lately in the store, and I hope that we can continue to fill that niche for customers!
Bit of an announcement before I pop off: at 4pm today I’m taking part in the third installment of The Black Manga Critic’s “Women Talk About Anime & Manga” series!  We’re going to be discussing Nagata Kabi’s My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness, published in English by Seven Seas Entertainment.  Joining us on the panel tonight will be the manga’s translator, Jocelyne Allen, whose insights I’m really looking forward to hearing!  I hope some of you will have a chance to watch that, whether it be live as it airs or after the fact.
I promise that since life has settled down a bit more, I’ll actually get to posting some manga-specific content, not just “day in the life of a Manga Maven” stuff, haha.  I’m especially excited about the new GeGeGe no  Kitaro anime that’s airing right now, so I’m sure I won’t be able to resist sounding off on that!
Keep it real, kids!
 

An Introduction: Who I Am and Why I'm Here

/ morganarhalina / 2 Comments

This website has been a long time coming, honestly.  I’ve been reading manga since childhood, I’ve written reviews for other sites, and now I am the manga buyer and manager at a comic book store in Boston.  As part of my duties, I often advise a couple groups of comics retailers on their manga buying, and I keep feeling like I want to be able to dispense that advice on a somewhat  larger scale.
I can’t claim that I know all there is to know about manga, but I am confident in the knowledge that I have, and I know it is specialized enough to be of use to others.  So at least in part, I hope that my reviews and ramblings are helpful for retailers, but also to publishers and consumers.
Beyond that, I just really love manga.  I am deeply interested in its history and its production, both within and outside of Japan.  I was lucky enough to be a young teenager in the early aughts, so my pop cultural experience was very much embroiled in the Cool Japan zeitgeist.  Basically, I never had a chance!
So what will you see here?  My reviews will mostly skew toward less-popular titles, partially because I like and read a broad and strange array of manga, and partially because a series like One Piece will never need my help getting sales.  I will also focus a lot on work by women, because again, the men don’t need my help.  In terms of genre, you can expect a little bit of everything, save perhaps hardcore hentai (though I will review adult works).  The manga will be a mix of old and new works, because there will always be a soft spot in my heart for anything that came out while I was a teen — and besides, there’s some good vintage work out there!
Outside of the reviews, I will try to pop by with interesting little manga-related tidbits from my life, or my opinions on current goings-on in the manga and anime world.  I may also occasionally bring up non-manga graphic novels and maybe even some prose fiction or non-fiction that I think is relevant to manga in some way. My intention is for this site, like all projects, to grow and change as I do, and as I gain more readers who want certain content.
So thank you all for being here, and for starting on me with this adventure!