Sunday, December 14, 2008

Doujinshi purchases Part 1

Yesterday I went to Osaka all day in hunt for doujinshi.

For my comments, it's like I'm a regular doujinshi buyer, but is not true. My collection of -physical- doujinshi is only of around 130 or so, very focused on a few circles (about half of them are from only 3 circles).

Buying doujinshi outside Japan is almost impossible. The only doujinshi that you can find at Yahoo! Actions are from very popular circles (and using a bid proxy is really expensive, so I use this method only to keep updated my CRAZY CLOVER CLUB collection); at eBay you can find a bit of doujinshi, but with awkward prices and random availability; and finally, the doujinshi stores have usually only mainstream stuff, so is hard to find old doujinshi or from not-so-popular circles. Also, the huge amount of doujinshi available makes impossible to keep all them in a database, so they usually put on-line a small amount of them.

So at the end, the only way to buy doujinshi is to stay in Japan and search for them in person.

Back to topic, I went basically to 3 shops: Mandarake Grand Chaos, K-Books Nanba and Toranoana Nanba.

Mandarake Grand Chaos is in America-mura, kinda far from Nipponbashi, where the rest of the otaku interests shops are placed. Is one of the 2 Mandarake in Osaka (the other one is near Umeda station).

There I bought:
INAZUMA Warrior 1 and 2 and UNDER 300M by INAZUMA (Sato Shouji) from circle Digital Accel Works. Warrior 1 and 2 are compilations of his works until 2005. Under 300M was released last year.
He is also the author of the commercial manga HIGHSCHOOL OF THE DEAD, that I don't read but lately is getting a few figures...

MuchiMuchi Angel Vol.7+ from circle MuchiMuchi7.
This circle consist of several authors, some of them quite good but some of them rather mediocre. I liked the works of the main author, Terada Tsugeo, but I don't like his recent style. This doujinshi is the revision of a 2003 release, with a few new pages. Sadly, the old pictures are retouched with his new style, and I still prefer the original one...

And finally, Koyoi Konban Serio-san and Herion, from circle King Revolver. In a previous entry I spoke about this circle and my intention to get all his works. Now I'm missing only 2...

That's all for today. I will put my lot from K-Books and Toranoana later.

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