I did some manga shopping over the weekend at the newish Big Chain Bookstore in town, and picked up Yotsuba&! (cute, in spite of the typesetting mishap that seems to have taken place with the title… kidding!) and Eyeshield 21 (haven’t had a chance to read it yet). There seems to be something weird in the air at Big Chain Bookstores where I buy manga.
Up at one store in Pittsburgh, I waited in line and watched the cashier cheerfully chat about the purchases of the people in line in front of me, congratulating them about their good taste and making recommendations of other books they might like. When I put my stack of manga down, he looked at it, thought for a minute, and said (cheerfully), “People sure do buy a lot of that stuff!” (I felt kind of bad for him, but I was strangely proud that I’d been the one to make him hit the wall in terms of the suggestive sell.)
Then on Saturday, another cashier looked at my purchases and kind of muttered, “Manga, manga, manga,” like nothing in the world was more dispiriting than Japanese comics in translation. Still riding the large coffee I’d had in the cafe, I informed her that I loved the stuff. She quickly changed gears and said she’d read some, just to get an idea of what it was like. Then she listed off some titles that would leave me disspirited, too, if they were my only exposure to manga. I felt her pain when she couldn’t remember the name of “one of those battle things.”
The odd thing was that there was a stack of Shojo Beat on the magazine rack right in front of her register. Speaking of which, I thrash that subject one last time (I promise) in this week’s Flipped.