Bookshelf #39

This week's bookshelf is a manga shelf, and it's dominated by two creators, one of whom is among the most influential Japanese artists to ever put pen to paper. 

That is, of course, the late Akira Toriyama. On the far left we have four volumes of his Dragon Ball, volumes 13-16. Why does my collection start with the 13th volume...? Good question! If I had to guess without a more thorough investigation, I would guess that I had read the earlier parts of the series via single issues, when Viz was still publishing some manga series in floppy, stapled comic book format on a monthly basis (Note how much lighter volumes 15 and 16 are compared to volumes 13 and 14; I fear that the sun must shine through the blinds in that room in just such a way to land directly on those two volumes). 

After that, we have ten tankobon volumes of Dragon Ball imported from Japan, which I bought at my first Mid-Ohio Comic Con in 2000. I of course could not read them at all, but I thought they looked neat...and I especially liked the connecting images on the spines. I believe the comics within had yet to be published in English at that point, and while it was a long time ago, I want to say that part of the series had yet to arrive in the U.S. in anime form yet either. So, they were fascinating to look at, and I still appreciate them as objects. I assume they were relatively cheap since I bought so many of them. 

Then we have a few collections of Toriyama's Dr. Slump, his breakout work that preceded Dragon Ball, and Cowa!, a super-fun one-volume comic about some monster kids. 

Moving along the shelf, we then get to the work of Kiyohiko Azuma. First, there's his Azumanga Daioh, a slice-of-life comedy series about a half-dozen or so schoolgirls, the stories presented in the four-panel comic strip format. And then we have his later and better-known work, Yotsuba&!, a book I can't speak highly enough of. Here I've shelved the first nine volumes, while the later volumes are on another shelf we've already looked at in a different room on a different floor of my house. Here you can see how the design of the spines changed when the book changed hands from ADV to Yen Press. 

Finally, there's a trio of books from neither Toriyama nor Azuma. First is the CLAMP collective's Shirahime Syo, short stories set in the snow and featuring the legendary Snow Princess, and two volumes of Jae Sung Park and Sung Jae Park's romantic comedy Couple...which is actually Korean rather than Japanese, so is technically manhwa rather than manga. It looks like it only ran four volumes, so I guess I read the first half of the series before losing track of it.