It’s not really a follow-up to the last post, but I ended up doing some comparison shopping this evening. We were up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh at a spot where there’s a Borders basically across the street from a Barnes & Noble. The Borders has had a larger manga section for a while now, and a better selection in general, but I ended up doing all of my shopping across the street. Either B&N had gotten recent releases earlier or had shelved them faster. It was probably the latter.
(The whole area was unusually quiet, which makes me want to always go up on a Friday afternoon instead of the usual Saturday trips. Of course, the weather was awful, so that might have kept people away. There were next to no squatters in evidence, except for one twenty-something in the café at Borders reading a big stack of Shonen Jump titles.)
I also noticed that whoever is picking the licenses for Viz’s Shojo Beat line is doing a really good job. Given my tastes, there are usually a fair number of titles I like, but their current roster of books include a lot of titles I think are just plain good by any comics standard. So… um… good work.
Oh, and lots of people are weighing in on where they shop over at Comics Should Be Good, so go take a look.