A friend of mine attended this week’s Vertical Vednesday and enjoyed it a good deal. He’d been wanting to to one for a while, but his schedule simply did not permit it. Later, we spoke online, and having seen the sheer scope of just the pet manga genre he said to me, “I absolutely cannot imagine keeping up with the manga scene any more.”
I responded, “What you realize eventually is that the “scene” was always that big. We just saw the pond for the ocean.” And every day, I feel like that more and more, whether it’s about the fandom or the works themselves.
When I was younger, I found the Anime Web Turnpike. Seeing all of those websites, I came up with a goal: even if I couldn’t see every anime and manga out there, I could at least know about every single one.
I’ll start with these.
And so I read as many fansites as I could, and in the end I “knew” I couldn’t have possibly covered everything, but that I must have at least learned about “most of them.”
Hahahahahahahaha.
Memorizing the statistics of every Pokemon gets more difficult every few years, but at least that’s an obtainable goal. Total knowledge of anime and manga is another realm entirely. Even Japan Thompson, one of the men in America closest to achieving that goal, restricted himself to manga released in English when he was researching for Manga: The Complete Guide.
I think about half of the sheer hubris of thinking that one can know even “most” manga or anime comes from believing in the back of your mind that manga is a fairly “small” thing. Few would be brave enough to say that they know about every kind of tea there is, or every book written about World War II, but so many of us think that knowing every anime or manga is a realistic goal.
The other half comes from determination, so in a way I look forward to a lot more people making this mistake. It’s almost like otaku growing pains.
OGIUE MANIAX 
It’s an interesting thought.
I would imagine in that sense, the manga space compares to the world of Western-style comics. I remember when I was younger, thinking of the space of all comics as something my mind could encompass. If you restrict yourself to the realms of “mainstream” DC and Marvel, it seems pretty feasible.
Then my dad took me to the comic shop for the first time. A person could literally suffocate under the weight of all the content in the comic shop where I grew up, and it wasn’t even a very big comic shop. The long tail on comics is very long, and as publication and distribution prices continue to plummet, I only expect it to get longer. In that sense, we live in a pretty lucky time; the barriers to entry are so low, it really does seem like artists with good ideas can breathe life into them.
I had a history teacher who used to speak of the Renaissance as the last time in history when a Westerner could honestly believe they knew everything there is to know. A long time ago, we shot well past the point where a person could read every book published in one year. I fully believe that we are well into the space where a single person can’t be expected to even have awareness of the titles of every book published in a popular genre—comics notwithstanding.
Good time to be alive.
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good old anipike, that brings back memories
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Yes, Manga is Japan’s Hollywood/books, and nobody would ever dream of reading all books and watching all movies.
I remember how my brother wrote essays on Japan and how Manga came to be after WW2. Drawing is cheap.
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Just as in any academic field, it’s nearly impossible to claim an expertise across every dimension of a subject, so it’s easier to to say focus. Pokemon stats are surprisingly easy to remember. At least for me anyway. It’ll get harder once it passes the 500 mark soon.
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When I was growing up I had a very similar experience. I was head-over-heels in love with anime starting in 7th grade and I devoured any and all information I could find about any series at all. I started getting TRSI’s catalogues in the mail and that was a fine pre-internet resource. Then I came across The Anime Movie Guide at a local comic shop and that pretty much cinched it.
I just wanted to know everything I could about any title people on which people had info. I never thought that I could learn everything, but to come across information about short-lived series and series that had not yet made it out of Japan was absolutely flooring. And once I hit the internet it got even worse. It was hard to find anything as comprehensive as The Anime Movie Guide at the time, but if the series was large enough and had a devoted fan base I found that there was sometimes more information and discussion in a handful of fan sites than in entire books.
That’s when I knew I couldn’t learn it all. I didn’t particularly care that I couldn’t and I kept eating information like there was no tomorrow, but the dream was dead. Then again, all of that knowledge helped me seek out series I never would have seen, not to mention helped shape my tastes. If I could do it all over again I wouldn’t really change a thing!
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Your post remembered me the times (ages ago!) when (どきどき！) I bought my very first anime/manga-related magazines and found that not only there existed an overwhelming number of series but authors of those magazines just reviewed some random or trendy ones (I trusted them on a few titles and found myself with boring stuff). It took me a split second to realize that no one could read everything even if having 24 hours free per day and unlimited wasteable money.
This said, the problem became “getting good stuff”. Good anime/manga series are the ones that from time to time you happen to want to enjoy again, even years after (GitS:SAC and Genshiken, for example). Until the internet boom about 15-16 years ago (blogs and fansites one click away), it was hard to find reliable pointers. Italian anime/manga-related magazines just featured “trendy” series (that is, the late ’80 ones already aired here in Italy and… the ones including some sex in the first or second episode); today it’s not that much different.
Today I often happen to follow no more than 3-4 episodes before giving up. I mean, it appears that the first episode is a presentation, the second is the climax, the third should conclude but instead is inflated up to 10-20-50 chapters. I can name countless series (Kenshiro and Blood+, for example) that have such an awful schema. It’s not that easy to choose how to invest my scarce time/money resources when reading news about new series.
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Good points. It may be niche in the US, but the sheer volume and near ubiquitous nature of manga in Japan can’t be overstated. I remember 10 years ago reading a 15 volume series about a guy and his pet rabbit (and, later, a cat). They cover such a wide variety of topics and genres, especially compared to the more limited scope of US comics. We just see the tip of the iceberg here.
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