A few people might know that I run a rather busy book store in the Los Angeles area. I'm a fairly hands on kind of manager and I have a tendency to adopt book sections for a while and see how much I can work my magic inventory secrets and push sales as far as I can. For the last couple of years I've been busily running the manga/graphic novel section as it's an area of interest of mine anyways and it's fun watching the new issues pour in and to see the section get more and more popular. I've been wildly successful and in the company I work for my manga section in sales is in the top ten out of +600 stores.

Because of this, I get rather a lot of books when a top selling series comes out with a new issue. Naruto is pretty much on the top of the food chain. The only thing that competes with it is Fruits Basket which sells faster initially than Naruto but the older volumes don't sell as consistantly so it kind of balances out.

Where am I going with all this useless information? Well for some reason the good folks at Shonen Jump decided it would be an awesome idea to release three issues of Naruto AT THE SAME TIME! The problem? Well besides the usual space issues, as I said before Naruto is at the top of the food chain and I typically get 120 to 250 copies of a new issue depending upon how the last issue sold. So by getting three at the same time I was suddenly buried under 400 copies of Naruto! Thanks Shonen Jump! Did I mention that issue #18 comes with free stickers? Gosh oh gee I would've loved to have been in the same room with the brain trust that approved that marketing idea. I wonder what's going to happen to a bunch of loose stickers at a manga aimed at young teen boys. I wonder...

On a giant plus side, they finally brought over one of my favorite manga entitled Mahou Tsukai Kurohime although they shortened the title on the international market to just Kurohime. Now if you'll forgive me, I have a veritable mountain of manga to sort through.

*grumble*

...oh by the way, girls are the backbone of the manga industry and overall Shoujo titles far outsell all other types of manga.