I want to buy Manga on Boxing Day! I don’t know if you guys have heard of Boxing Day. I think it may be a Common Wealth tradition. Maybe it’s something like Black Friday but I’m not sure. I don’t really know what Black Friday is all about and it sounds scary so I don’t want to look it up. Anyways, Boxing Day is the day after Christmas where everyone that doesn’t work in retail gets a day off and there are crazy sales all over the place. Kinda…
Lately, I’ve been really renewing my love of Manga. I blame Scott for constantly posting amazing looking manga panels on Twitter and black magic. I looked into the average workload of mangaka and I’m pretty sure it’s not humanly possible. So thank you lord of darkness!
I’m writing this ahead of time so I’m not entirely certain I will manage to snag all these titles at a good discount however, this is my plan. Also, I will be giving links to Amazon but if you don’t find something on there, and you’re Canadian, there’s a website called NotAmazon.ca. It’s really just a collection of links to Canadian retailers but I had been looking for vol. 9 of Devils and Realist for over a year. It has been out of print for a while. And I could only find used copies for 60 to 140$. I actually manage to find a copy at The Beguiling for list price and I was ecstatic. So remember to look through your local bookstores for hard to find titles.
OK, now onto my list. Volumes I will put on reserve: Bungo Stray Dogs 17 (comes out Jan 5), Natsume 25 (April 6), Spy x Family 4 (March 2) and The way of the Househusband 5 (May 18). I don,t know if there will be any rebates on preorders but I’m going to try my luck.
I will also try to continue my Noragami collection (volumes 7 and beyond), get all the Nozaki-Kun and Haikyuu I can justify buying and volume 4 of the xxxHOLiC omnibus. I just started watching xxxHOLiC and it has revived my love of CLAMP big time! I sort of bought the 3 first omnibus volumes on a whim. This is what anime drinking games do to you!
Additionally, I want to look into (or look more into if I have volume 1) Chainsaw man, Jujutsu Kaisen, Hell’s Paradise and Hanako-Kun. I also read this thread on Twitter where tons of people were saying which manga they thought should get adapted and from that, I got really interested in Tokyo Ravagers (which is going to get an anime in 2021) and Blue Period. I’m actually quite excited about the latter. It looks different and I’ll probably get it even if it’s undiscounted.
Depending on the deals, I might just snag the entire Soul Eater collection. I do have volume 1 already. I really liked the Soul Eater anime but I thought the ending left to be desired. I have heard that the manga has a completely different ending so I would be buying it just for that. Unfortunately, my OCD won’t let me start a series at vol 13 or something so there you go…
Aside from the manga I am also really interested in a couple of book about anime. I have been seeing this Anime: A History book everywhere. By that I mean Amazon tells me to buy it all the time and I am intrigued. I am also interested in The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. It was published in 2009 so it’s probably rather out of date as streaming has had a huge impact since then but it could still be interesting.
However, the book that I am most excited about and I will get even if it’s not discounted is Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and Anime. Man, this looks amazing! I’m sorry but you can probably expect a bunch of posts on Japanese mythology in 2021 because of this.
I actually have recently abused my power to get a bunch of scholarly articles on anime and anime culture. Let me know if you guys would like to hear about those. I can summarize the papers and give you the gist so that you’ll know if you want to read them for yourselves.
I am also interested in a few non-reading things. For instance these adorable Haikyuu patches. They really rock but no way are they worth that price. Barring that, this Haikyuu hoodie could be a nice backup.
Finally, I’m hoping to pick up the Trails of Cold Steel games 1 and 2. I bought 3 on a whim but a reader told me to really play them in order. So I put the game aside and I’m hoping I can get a decent rebate since the earlier games are still full price.
That’s pretty much it for me. If you’re wondering what my weekend is like, I’m probably making my way through countless online retailers right now hoping to snag some sort of deal that can justify me buying 100 volumes of manga. Not that I need to justify it to anyone…but myself.
What can I say, funny things happen to you when you suddenly realize you’re an adult.
Happy early boxing day everyone! I hope you find some things that will make you happy!
I used that exact Anime: A History book in one of my studio posts (I think it was the Toei one).
As for me, I was spending in chunks over the year, so while Boxing Day is typically the day for huge discounts, this year I’m just hoping to save money. COVID both made me unable to work on my physical collection and start on my digital collection (Humble Bundles and Bookwalker), alongside that time where I found the En Nendoroid – which I thought wasn’t being sold anymore – earlier this year. (I still have some physical manga backlog I didn’t work on through COVID, because the volume I’ve been stuck on for two years is in Japanese and I’ve been painstakingly checking up vocab.)
As for manga I’d buy…there’s a whole bunch. I maintain a list of 10 manga I should buy if I have extra money to drop for both physical and digital on my AniList, so there’s no point listing them in this comment. Part of said digital collection includes Spy x Family’s 1st volume (going for free on Japanese Bookwalker at one point), so probably not that though.
Spy x Family is a wonderful manga. I hope you get a chance to check it out soon
I did mention it at one stage while writing up the comment, but then got rid of it due to extreme verbosity which is why you misunderstood…but I’ve already checked Spy x Family out in English and am close to current, if not current, on the Viz release as well as following the Manga Plus release while that was the only way to read the series. I love the series to bits, to the point where I list it as a favourite on AniList. However, I haven’t read it in Japanese (to memory) and those are the 2 reasons why I got the free volume when I saw it.
“Commonwealth” is one word… 😉
where you are!
Planet Earth! 😛
It’s a play on words handsome. Like the old joke… What is the Common wealth? Depends where you live! In these parts it’s 1.50$.
Don’t get me wrong though, I typo like my life depends on it. I’m sure there are like 700 other mistakes in this post alone you can pick on!
Sorry, never heard that joke before… :-/
Really? It is pretty lame. You lost nothing.
Happy early Boxing Day and good luck!
Thank you!!! It’s my mission!
Happy early Boxing Day to you too! I think I’ll be waiting for teh Janaury sales to grab some bargains.
Those are the better deals, honestly. But I’m not patient….
I guess I have a new title. Scott: Ruiner of Haikyuu.
That actually sounds a little like a Haiku
Oh, then it works well! 😁
Haikyuu Haiku!
I would buy everything and use it to improve my skills in making AMV 🤩
Interesting!
That is a lot of stuff to buy! Here mail is going crazy due to lockdown so I am not ordering anything yet! We agreed to not do chirstmas gifts this years after stores closed down so instead everyone gets to treat themselves after the lockdown is over. So I will be getting something nice in like Februari or something 🙂 Until then no picking up stuff for me, I am to afraid it will get lost in the mail and I will lose the money to treat myself!
That’s actually really wonderful. I love that idea!
I’ve always treated Boxing Day as the day I pay for everything I overate the day before, as well as the day I start reading/watching whatever I got for Christmas.
Manga-wise I’ve got my eyes on the latest volumes of One Piece and Witch Hat Atelier but the shop I normally buy them from doesn’t typically do sales. Not that I mind paying full price, both series are more than worth it. I do need to complete my Soul Eater collection though, I have most of the series including the final volume, but there’s 4 volumes that I’m missing ’cause I’m a mad fool who skipped to the end.
Merry Christmas and Happy Boxing Day!
OMG, you skipped to the end! You crazy daredevil you! Merry Christmas to you too! I hope it’s just bursting with happiness.
Best of luck on finding great deals on everything you want! Black Friday IS scary. Don’t look.
I’m gonna have trouble sleeping…
I haven’t played Trails of Cold Steel 3, but still, I agree, it’s pretty much mandatory to play the first two games before that. Even the first title relies to some extent on other games in the fanchise (for example, a major event seemed really sudden and out of nowhere for me, until I learned that people who played another series in the franchise had actually played through that). The wordbuilding and mythology is very involved. I was never lost playing the Cold Steel (having played none of the other trails-series before), but I still often got the idea that I’ve been missing out. However that’s mostly on a worldbuilding level (also with some characters). Cold Steel is a single story, though, and the plot is complex. Really complex. Not to mention that there are so many NPCs I grew fond of, so that it was just fun to see how they were doing after the rather game-changing finale of the first game. If you play 3 first, there’s a good chance you’ll constantly have to look up who is who, and what faction wants what. I want to play 3, too.
Also, I really hope you enjoy doing the rounds and talking to all the NPCs you can find. They all have their own stories and that’s a huge draw of the game for me. I wish I could have had a lot of them in my party.
***
Also, you remind me that I really need to get around to XXXholic, one of these days. I still haven’t seen it.
OK – 3 games it is. I’m getting a bit excited about it – I love talking to random people… in the tv…
Come to think of it, the games also have a great sense of place, too. Every location has its own personality. I have my own clear favourite.