I should just start a category dedicated to piggybacking on Danielle Leigh’s posts over at Comics Should Be Good. In her latest, she delivers a wish list to manga publishers. Here are some of my additions:
I wish for more translation and cultural notes! Some publishers are consistently generous with these (Dark Horse, Del Rey, Go! Comi, etc.), and some are flat-out stingy. I’ve noticed that Viz has been adding these to some of their recent Shojo Beat releases, which is terrific, but I would love for this to become standard practice so I can start complaining that they aren’t extensive enough instead of nonexistent.
I wish for more money to be thrown away on commercially iffy projects! I know this is impractical, but, hey, it’s a wish list. And while I don’t want to see more series abandoned before they’re completed, I would love it if publishers delivered more commercially counter-intuitive offerings every now and then. Okay, so I might be the only person who buys a manga about, say, retirees who decide to spend their golden years traveling, or stories about Japan’s agricultural bureaucracy or new mothers navigating playground culture, but I might not be, and you’d make me very happy.
I wish books I really like would come out either faster or slower! There seems to be no happy medium here. Either I feel like I’m waiting forever for a new volume of Mushishi or Hikaru No Go or that I can’t possibly keep up with some series or another. Please be more sensitive to my utterly unpredictable whims.