One thing about me is that I’m an Anime Enjoyer. I’m especially a slice-of-life, sports anime, “the power of friendship!!” Anime Enjoyer, and this has lead me to go so far as to start reading manga to keep up with some of my favorite franchises. I’m (digitally) caught up on Black Clover and Jujutsu Kaisen and not-so-caught-up on Chainsaw Man, One Piece, and Haikyuu!, and recently, I’ve been adding some other less shonen-y titles to a small, physical manga collection of my own.

My collection actually started during the pandemic when a friend gifted me two manga titles: Our Dining Table, a standalone BL manga about Yutaka, a lonely office worker who meets brothers Minoru and Tane and teaches them how to cook his favorite meals, and Ten Count, Vol. 1, the first in a *spicy* BL series about Shirotani, a secretary who suffers from OCD, and his relationship with his therapist, Kurose. At the time, I had also just watched “Blue Period” on Netflix, so I got a copy of Blue Period, Vol. 1 because I wanted to read it (I never did lol).

Since then, I’ve only added a few more items to my collection. I wanted to finish reading Ten Count after being gifted the first volume, so I got hold of Vol. 2-6 over the summer. While it is honestly a little darker for what I’m looking for it terms of content and in what I’d want to actually add to a collection, I did enjoy it a lot and am glad I got the chance to finish the series.

I also watched “Skip and Loafer” over the summer, so I now have Skip and Loafer Vol. 5 and 6 since these are the volumes that continue Mitsumi and Shima’s adventures where the anime ended. And finally, I got the Wotokoi: Love is Hard for Otaku complete box set as a gift to myself for the holidays. It’s another where I really love the anime and wanted to continue the story, so I finished reading the series this week.

Now that I have these titles, I do kind of have things I want to add/look for as I continue to grow my collection. I am mostly interested in slice of life and romance genres, but of course there are other anime-manga things I want to add! For example, I do want to actually read Blue Period at some point since I really loved how the anime was about creating things and the different reasons the characters had for their own expression of art.

I’ve also been contemplating collecting volumes of Haikyuu!! and possibly Initial D, since they’re anime series that I really love and are complete manga series too. Haikyuu!! should be easy enough to find since it’s very popular, but Initial D is pretty old, old enough to not even be published in single, English volumes currently (they’re all over Ebay). Luckily, it looks like an omnibus edition of Vol. 1 and 2 is coming out with Kodansha Comics soon, which hopefully means they’ll re-publish the rest of the series too!

I don’t know if I’d ever collect anything longer than a Haikyuu!! or Initial D (they’re both just less than 50 volumes piece), but never say never. The only limiting factor with any collection is space ☠️