weebdeluxe

Each year, I set up a couple of new years resolutions. It’s kind of rare for me to follow through on them. But somehow, I stuck with one of them this year, at least so far: I wanted to read more manga.

The initial trigger for this was the fact that I own all volumes of Golden Kamuy but never had managed to read the full series. So I set out to read all 31 volumes in as many weeks. One volume per week was surely easy enough to do.

To my surprise, I started enjoying the manga way more over time. I initially had stopped reading it around volume 13, since I was only getting new volumes occasionally and the series features a huge cast with changing alliances. It’s hard to keep track of everything if you only read a volume every three months and keep forgetting things.

Reading one volume per week initially took me three to four day. After the first few weeks it took me two day and soon enough I manage to read my weekly volume on monday. The best thing? Since February I have been reading at least one manga volume from my collection per day.

This has done wonders for my passion for the medium. I’ve read through series sitting on my shelves for years in a very short time. My best example for this is probably Blood on the Tracks by Shuzo Oshimi, which I read in only two weeks. Yes, I had read many volumes before, but I feel reading this through in a shorter time really intensifies the experience.

Besides my backlog, I’m also reading a couple of ongoing series. Eden by Hiroki Endo is being republished in a huge new edition and I remember reading a couple of volumes back in the early 2000s during the first German manga boom. Reading it now has been a very impressive experience I might write more about soon. I’m re-reading the Chainsaw Man volumes I own to get the follow up volumes and I’m making my way through Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 4, which I enjoy a lot. Besides that I am also making slow progress through Blade of the Immortal, a very impressive series that asks a lot from me as a ready. But I think this time, I’m up for the challenge.

I very much feel like a teenager again. When I was younger, I lived through the first German manga boom. Germany had just discovered manga and the scene was exploding. So many different things got published, so many series got canceled and the only limiting factor to me was the fact I couldn’t buy all the manga with my limited allowance. Over time, videogames took over my free time and I read less and less. My first job led to me having even less time for manga and I retreated completely from it. Until the pandemic hit and I got myself the entire Naruto series and read through it during that time.

The passion retreated a bit after that surge, but it was always there. But focusing on it a bit more, organizing myself, has improved my enjoyment of this hobby way more. I feel like writing more about it is a good way to be creative with that hobby as well. Maybe I’ll even finish writing some of my fanfictions I started back in the day. Let’s see where this leads, but I don’t want to put pressure on myself here.