Even more so if people who have been keeping up with it are having problems getting current volumes at places where they could easily get it before. I live in a triangle of 3 comic book stores and a flurry of book retailers who reward my business with discounts that make online convinces irrelevant. It’s a shame that I can’t simply go out when I want and pick it up like I have since vol. 1 came out.

There’s your solution: the itch that’s scratched by seinen manga in Japan is scratched by superhero comics in the US. There is no gap in the market for seinen because the consumers most likely to find it appealing already have their needs catered to.

You know, most manga being published looks the same. It’s formatted the same, it’s sized the same, it’s all shelved and smushed together at the bookstore without distinction for genres or markets, and almost every character – seinen, shojo, shonen- they all have that anime ‘moeh’ look.
As a casual reader I couldn’t tell which ones are seinen or whatever. Maybe it would help if the main manga publishers could convince bookstores to use a genre/market-specific shelving system, then promote accordingly.

and Dark Horse: two years between volumes of Hellsing? For shame.

If you’re looking for an entry, that is an entirely different question.

If you’re burning to try some manga, you can always go to the library and see flip through what’s there. You’re local librarian may even be able to point you in the right direction. Or you could go to manga sites and blogs to see what publishers and fans are talking about. Heidi links to manga occasionally, but you’ll probably find more links on Journalista.

The genre vocabulary takes time. I wouldn’t worry about it until you find a couple of titles you like. Instead, concentrate on the art and kind of stories you’d like to see– Slice-of-life, martial arts action, graphic horror, etc.

This is probably not terribly helpful, but I don’t want to completely derail the thread.

Simon–I’ve been lettering manga for a long time and I’ve also noticed that what sells has an anime tie-in. I was hoping that when manga boomed some of the things I work on would pick up in sales. But that hasn’t happened yet. It’s definitely an awareness issue.

But that advice doesn’t work for me. I’m not very knowledgable about manga in general; when I look at those rows and rows of manga at Barnes & Noble I have absolutely no idea what I should try. I can’t keep track of what the terms yaoi or senin and josei etc mean.

I’d like to try out some manga, but I have a hard time finding the entry point to find material I might like. It’s funny, because it’s actually the same problem that non-fanboys complain about with the mainstream comic book industry!

Get used to ordering books that you really want. Come September with the Naruto Tsunami (3 volumes a month for 4 months), who knows what will be orderd by retailers and what won’t? The only way to be sure you can find the manga you want is if you order it.

Also, it’s worth noting the stuff that’s doing especially well tends to have an anime backing it up. Which most Senin or Josei titles simply don’t. So, while there is a prevailing female audience, I question the ‘femaleness’ being the entire driving force as much as the relative youth of the fandom.