My name is Jason Thompson, and I have read a lot of manga. It just sort of happened. As the author of Manga: The Complete Guide, the first and so far only English-language manga encyclopedia, I made a vow to read every manga available in English. That was back in 2006, when there was less manga available than there is now; but it was still a process requiring 10+ months of reading manga for 12+ hours a day.
I could say it was a terrible ordeal (I did lose a lot of skin pigmentation by staying indoors for 10 months), but why lie? I am a manga fan. I am also a comics fan, a science fiction fan, a fantasy and horror fan, dating back to my elementary school years when I read Starlog film guides and The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (whose structure, with its essays on various sci-fi genres, was a big influence on MtCG). I am a RPG fan, an obsession which started with Dungeons & Dragons at age six and is currently expressing itself through King of RPGs, my graphic novel series coming out in January from Del Rey. (Osamu Tezuka, “God of Manga,” once said “Manga is my wife. Animation is my mistress.” In my case, RPGs are my mistress.) I may not get to run D&D; games for a living, but I read (and write) manga for a living, and it was a great feeling to pour my observations on years of manga into “Manga: The Complete Guide.”
The one flaw of “Manga: The Complete Guide,” however, is that it is a book, and after it was published, the manga market kept going, producing more and more manga. Despite my pleas to publishers to stop all manga production so my book would forever be an icy memorial to a frozen world of manga, time marched on, and with every month incredible new manga — Honey and Clover! Black Jack! Moyashimon! — were being released. (And plenty of awful manga too, but that’s another story.) How would MtCG keep up? Would we release new editions, perhaps annually, like an old Leonard Maltin/Roger Ebert film guide? Or would the book continue in some other format? A cryptic note in the back of the first edition of “Manga: The Complete Guide” promised, as some of you may recall, that Del Rey would soon release information about online updates.
