Manga...Value for Money?

J

Jimi-Jam

Dandy Guy, in Space
I was meaning to put a post on this earlier - the post from a fellow manga-newbie harkins’s reminded me.

I bought my first manga the other week (2 volumes X/1999 and STONe vol.1 for £15 @ FP), and its apparent pretty quickly, even at a discount rate, how much entertainment that money actually gets you. I think even with extended deliberation on the artwork you would struggle to make a volume last longer than 2 hours.

Doesn’t take long to realise anime & manga is an expensive hobby, but at least with anime there is the cheaper option of renting the vast majority of UK DVD releases.

I come to this from buying/reading regular fiction novels where a very similar expenditure buys you a paperback that in terms of both plot/story content and reading/immersion time, I’m estimating, equates to maybe 10 manga volumes?
So it’s hard not to compare the two: with the manga that’s 10 times the cost for a similar level of entertainment/escapism.

I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t buy manga – if there is something you want, you pay the market rate as with anything – after all it’s popularity is the one thing that would potentially bring the price down.

Enough of my ramble, I thought I’d throw this out there and see what bounced back…
 
Don't forget that a lot of libraries are now stocking manga, which means you may well be able to borrow some manga from the library, which is even cheaper than renting a video since it's free...
 
I probably spend more on manga now than on anime - it can get a bit rough allright. Bear in mind that opportunities to cut corners on price don't really exist with manga either.

With DVDs I can go online and save a bit, or import, and eventually older DVDs start being released in budget minded collections, but that kind of tail-end discounting doesn't seem to happen in manga really.

Maybe as the market matures we might see somethign happenign that way.

best way to save money - read manga with mates who also collect some.
 
Gawyn said:
Don't forget that a lot of libraries are now stocking manga, which means you may well be able to borrow some manga from the library, which is even cheaper than renting a video since it's free...
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Wish our local library stocked stuff like anime and manga but we're lucky if they have any recently released books in stock most of the time
 
Its not a perfect world I'm afraid. As long as Anime and Manga is only a niche thing the publication rates are low, and thus more must be charge per volume. You might find some manga in your local library but be warned that yeah, it will still be an expensive hobby, but keep your eyes on online stores like 'Amazon', 'Play' and even ebay to nab a few bargains on books.

I guess this is also where my 'curse' became a 'gift' as i'm an extremly slow reader it it can take me between 1-3 hours to read a Manga. It took me three days to get through GITS :shock:
 
I read that in Japan, commuters read manga on trains and buses and when they’ve finished it they just abandon it on their seat (like people do here with those free newspapers like Metro). This serves as a kind of swap shop I guess.

Sadly that wouldn’t work here as what are the chances of someone else interested in manga finding what you’d left and you ever finding anymore either?

Plus I think most of us like to collect rather than read and expose of our manga.

My tip for making your manga last longer would be only read it when you’re using the bathroom. I know a lot of people who say they read on the toilet.
 
Its not quite the same. In Japan Manga is first released in large anthologies like Shonan Jump. They can be anything from 500-4000 pages of extremely cheap paper and cost all of 2-500 yen [£1-£2.50]. It is these that are abandoned on the trains, not the more expensive books that we get over here, or are later released over there. The magazine loses alot of money on the original release, but if people like it they can later release a Manga, as we know them of the story and make more money.

This is one of the reason we over here will never see 98% of manga released because most of it doesn’t go anywhere near a book, and more over half of it are one off stories. You may have seen some of them in the backs of other books.
 
Better value than colour Graphic novels I would say. Unless you're talking about Akira. I hope they reissue that one day without flipped art, and with a lesser price tag.
 
Jimi-Jam said:
So it’s hard not to compare the two: with the manga that’s 10 times the cost for a similar level of entertainment/escapism.
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Compared to proper books (you know, without pictures, lol) graphic novels are expensive. I don't find that it's a fair comparison though.

It makes more sense to compare prices within the comic market. £2.50/£3 for 32 coloured pages of your average American comic against £4.99-£6.99 for 200 pages of B+W manga. I think manga's the better deal in this respect. Back in the day manga was about £12-4, I'm less likely to complain about it as I've seen things improve so much since those days!
 
If you consider it in number of physical pages then most manga are comparable to most small novels in both price and size. The fact that the content is largely visual means that it is quicker to read than a textual novel but can still tell just as much as said book.
 
So in all it’d be fair to say that manga isn’t bad value for money in the physical sense (paper & ink) it’s just unfortunate that it can be read at such a rate.

I suppose the other problem (and this applies to anime too) is the voracious appetite we have for it. After all I’ve bought more ‘books’ in these six weeks I’ve been getting into anime/manga than I’ve bought in the several years previously. Mind you that's still only 6!

Has anyone ever decided to sell all or part of their collections and if so how well does it retain it’s new value?
 
Well, I'd rather pay a lil' more for a comic that can last, small and clear to read, rather than these american comics (like Marvel). They can be flimsy pieces of paper, large scale and have an art style that requires so many lines for shade, effects etc, that to me it looks messy.

That's just comparing Manga to Traditional comics though.
As for the prices, I've seen books that are more than 4 week's worth of wages. Something that's just £7 is still cheap to me. As long as you don't read the whole thing in a day, you'll savour it and save money.

So I think it's worth it.
 
Actually thinking about it, even if my local library did stock manga I'd still probably buy it, there's something about owning it that feels right, plus it means if your ever bored you can just go back and re-read your old mangas.

Beside £5-£7 isn't too bad, it only really hurts your pocket when you collect mangas like Initial D which is waiting for the 29th issue to be released.
 
Manga can be an expensive hobby, but it really is worth checking out your public library, in the whole of the borough where I live, one library has really good books. I've found D N Angel, Furuba, and even really new titles, so give it a go. Otherwise, try the websites and look out for special deals.
 
Ushio said:
Compared to proper books (you know, without pictures, lol) graphic novels are expensive. I don't find that it's a fair comparison though.
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Gawyn said:
If you consider it in number of physical pages then most manga are comparable to most small novels in both price and size. The fact that the content is largely visual means that it is quicker to read than a textual novel but can still tell just as much as said book.
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I’m not sure I can agree that 1 volume of manga can say quite as much as a novel, maybe one of the more detailed mangas (GITS?) comes close to a shorter/thinner novel, but £6-7 can get you 300-400 pages. I have an extreme example on my shelf – Stephen king’s The Stand ‘Uncut’, £8.99 - 1400+ pages – not read actually read it – the thickness has psyched me out from getting anywhere near it as yet!

Maybe it’s not a fair comparison, they are two different mediums after all, just like the difference between a book and a film. In terms of paper and ink – yes novels and manga are not to far apart – I could be persuaded that the same number of pages filled with good art work is worth more for. I think I agree with McIcy that there is something about owning the manga themselves - the combination of artwork and story, more than a bunch of pages with ‘just’ words on them.

My original question was trying to get at the value purely in terms of the quantity of entertainment you get for your money – bang for your buck - perhaps its the case that English novels are actually an entertainment bargain for what you can get out of them – they require some effort on the readers part admittedly, but that is all part of the reward. One thing I can say about manga though is they are much easy to pick up and enjoy –novels almost require a little too much commitment and seclusion – specially if you’ve got a bunch of Anime waiting to be watched!

I think there is possibly another element to it also – that of the satisfaction factor or gratification. This is less about quantity as much as feeling you have completed some journey, the arc of the story – a film is the best example – it may only be 2 hours, but you finish (hopefully!) with some satisfaction either having completed a journey of some sort or simply being left with something to think about. This brings me back to the manga (the problem is just the same with episodes of anime) in that to get that same feeling of completion/satisfaction it requires a hefty outlay.

I certainly need to read some more manga before I get a good handle on what it has to offer, I think what I hope to find is some quality manga has or gives that words of a novel fall just a bit short.
It’s a bit of an evil question but can anyone put into words what it is they get from manga that you don’t think you can get from reading a book?
 
Jimi-Jam said:
It’s a bit of an evil question but can anyone put into words what it is they get from manga that you don’t think you can get from reading a book?
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Well, one thing you get is absolute visual context with each individual panel. A well written book can give you a good generalisation of the surrounds and looks of their settings and characters but a lot of that is left to the imagination of the reader. This can vary wildly from reader to reader, since simply saying that a scene is in the middle of a forest could be imagined quite differently from someone in the North Pole compared to someone in the Amazon Rain Forests compared to someone in the UK. Admittedly that is a very vague statement but it serves as an extreme example of how any particular description can be interpreted completely differently by the reader. This of course is before any particular translation between languages has taken place, which can add its own variety of interpretation. The drawing dosen't suffer thar particular conundrum since the artist draws the image exactly as they see it themselves and shares this with the reader providing an absolute visual context, which is independant of the location and language of the reader. Both have their merits and I love to read books as well as read comics and I appreciate the strengths of both.
 
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