Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Free manga.

Every couple of weeks, I find these lists on my desk for graphic novels that someone expects me to order for our library.

So I go through the list of over one hundred titles and check off everything that says "Batman." Then I check off all the Spider-man, X-Men, Avengers, Superman, Justice League and Little Lulu. After that, I'm completely lost.

Eventually, I'm left with nothing but manga. Or MAHN-ga, as the fanboys (or otaku) say. And I read titles like, Beautiful Love Supermarket or Girl Love Assassin or something else with love in the title.

So I have to rely on reviews from Amazon or IGN or maybe some blog. And the previews and descriptions usually tell about a shy girl with hidden powers to fight evil or a cursed samurai or a crazy super vampire high school or a monster baby horror demon or a half-something-half-something else (but whatever it is, her skirt is really short), which never help me to decide what to order.

So I was really glad to find a couple of sites where I can read many of these titles for free. One is Manga Fox (which has a lot more ads) and the other is One Manga (which has not so many ads).

The pages aren't convenient to read in that you need to scroll up and down to see the whole page. Luckily, my monitor and graphics will rotate 90° so I read the pages more easily.

But still, I didn't know about these sites before, so now that I've found them, they're making the selection process a lot easier. Or harder. Because now I spend half the day reading all this crap.

(Did I say, crap? I meant cool stuff. Reading comics - yeah, I love my job.)