Icv2: the great manga shortage of 2021

[CountFrylock]

https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/48767/the-great-manga-shortage-2021

 

"Manga sales just spiked during the pandemic, and it's almost impossible to get replacements right now,” Bob Schaffer of Dragon’s Lair Comics and Fantasy in San Antonio, Texas, told ICv2.

Ryan Higgins of Comics Conspiracy in Sunnyvale, California, only stocks first volumes of most manga because the store is so small, but lately when he goes to special-order later volumes for customers, he often finds they are out of stock. “ChainsawMan [volumes] two and three and four, they're just gone,” he said. “I don't think we'll ever be able to get those back in for customers.” Higgins gets restocks from Diamond and Penguin Random House, but he’s still having trouble finding titles. “If it's not a current series, forget it,” he said. “Anything that’s finished, there's nothing available. There were select titles that obviously they do keep around, but if you're just looking for a random volume of, like, AttackonTitan, it is not available.”

The Boston comic shop Comicopia has a wide and deep manga collection (see “Successful Manga Retailing in a ‘Comic Bookstore’”), but owner Matt Lehman has the same problem. “If we're sold out of those popular titles, we have many other titles that customers can explore,” he said “These are also more likely to be able to restock, since they're less likely to be sold out from the publisher. However, we're still selling manga faster than we can restock it, as is evidenced by our increasingly large gaps [on shelves].”

Big retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble can’t keep some titles in stock either; as of this writing, neither had volumes 2, 3, or 4 of Chainsaw Man or the first volumes of My Hero Academia or Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaibaavailable for online purchase, and neither had a full run of Jujutsu Kaisen."

[Jman]

Digital sales are going to go through the roof.

[CountFrylock]

On 7/15/2021 at 7:40 AM, Jman said:

Digital sales are going to go through the roof.

Eh I Prefer Physical myself....I Always stare at screens plenty during the day

I'd rather not do that just to read manga

[Jman]

1 hour ago, CountFrylock said:

Eh I Prefer Physical myself....I Always stare at screens plenty during the day

I'd rather not do that just to read manga

Fair enough, but the market might force it.

I just prefer digital for space saving purposes.  You only have so much room in the house, and keeping all those volumes of manga in a digital form for tablet reading makes it easier to use the space for other stuff.