Due to my recent observations and also due to the recent recruitment of new authors I take this opportunity to introduce some formal rules that should be applied for later manga posts.
First, the authors should see this manga blog as a project to introduce unique and interesting manga series that are not popular or well known enough as they shouldbe. Some series are too old to be known, have an unique art style that does not fit everybody’s taste or are simply overlooked because of their unusual content and topic. When I started this project I still read the Naruto manga and the Bleach anime has just begun to appear on Japanese television. As I have read more manga and my experience with manga has grown, the feeling and urge to read more unique manga has grown as well. I soon found out that there are so many unknown, but mega cool series out there, that are just waiting to receive greater recognition. Such series like Shin Angyo Onshi, which was scanlated by ETC and initially released in a two month period. This was certainly before SleepyForest has taken up the series and the series has finally has grown in popularity. But there are many other series that receive recognition due to their outstanding storytelling but are often overlooked by many readers simply because there was nobody to pick them up. This blog is such a project. If you enjoyed reading a series so much that you simply have to share it with everybody else, series like Ares scanlated by Korean Manga Translations, or Eden scanlated by ProjectManga, then THIS is the blog for you. We want the readers to come here not in the hope to find the latest release of Bleach, GantZ or Berserk, simply because there are so many other sites they can easily look for and download it. Our wish is it to serve either complete series that are available as volume uploads, or a batch of volume uploads if the series is still ongoing. The cover image need to be selected carefully to attract attention, to convince the reader that this manga has a unique story and provides much more than fiddle sketches. It’s not the random cover page that counts and stays in memory, but often just one single line of words that can introduce a person to a whole world of reading. It’s not the quantity, not the need to provide images for every single chapter, but the idea that if a series is good enough to appear here, it should be presented with an image that actually tells the reader what this manga is actually all about. If this is fully understood to both readers and writers, you may read the following guidelines for the future manga posts:
- A series should be picked by the author’s taste, not by ratings, popularity or other factual reasons as long as the author is convinced that the reader will get a unique story and that it is absolutely worth mentioning.
- An author can only post what he has actual read. This is to ensure that every series reaches a certain level of quality. A series that is not read by the author shall not be posted even if it is hugely popular.
- Every new series that is going to be introduced should be posted with a batch of volume download links to ALL previous releases. One can’t simply post the latest chapter of a series and expect the reader to jump in the middle of the story while disrespecting all previous releases by the author.
- After a whole volume is completed, it is up to the author to either add the latest chapter link, or to recompress and upload the full volume with previous individually released chapters. If the latter is not done, the authors should at least point to a site where the reader can download the volume.
- Remember: Every single post ought be a collection of unique manga series with beautiful images. Something that you would like to reread again and again just to be able to look at the pictures. To emphasize this I added a wallpaper containing all posts from the time when this site was still run by a single author.
silverado
December 19th, 2009 at 3:34 AM
All of what you said is THE reason I come to this site as often as I can. I cannot count the amount of series I now read because I found them on this site. Thanks so much and keep up the amazing work!
December 19th, 2009 at 10:09 AM
Likewise, I have also found new manga to read an expand my horizon over different styles. This site introduced me to sanctuary, eden, xs, zombie hunter(which how I hate how it ended) an more. Overall this this a wonderful site. Keep up the good work!
December 19th, 2009 at 11:58 AM
Ahhh..i remember the time when i found this blog,the nostalgia! i used to visit it almost every day and when i finally had more free time i decided to become an author :)
I think thanks to this blog i found out about Ares,enjoyed it a lot back then,now…i see it as just another generic shounen,still the art is pretty good and it’s still a fun read.Of course there are a lot other great manga that i found out about thanks to MU.
btw we can always check out the v3 version to see how this blog looked years ago.
December 19th, 2009 at 2:26 PM
This will be a very nice development for this blog; one that will further solidify it’s niche. I like it when you can get to know an author by his tastes, and not so much by his volume of uploads. This makes it easier to get introduced to manga that you may have never found out by yourself.
When I offer manga collections on BakaBT, I mostly only offer those manga that made some sort of impression on me. I also try to make sure to design my offers in a visually pleasing way, so as to entice prospective readers. I would really like to see this site develop more along those lines.
One manga-site that really does it for me, given their selection of series and the reviews they write up in their blog posts, is the site run by the good people of Kotonoha. The personal touch, again, is what I really like there.
December 19th, 2009 at 2:43 PM
so you’re saying we should stop doing the update posts and only do complete series reccomendations?
i thought the point of the blog was so people dont have to trawl mangaupdates, and countless group’s sites to get the cream of the releases aswell as new series and our reccomendations.
December 19th, 2009 at 3:31 PM
Actually no. It’s not a manga update blog but rather a special-manga-that-I’m-reading-twitter.
December 19th, 2009 at 4:00 PM
I think we are doing the “right” thing.
Updates with the good seinen mangas, sometimes a huge release of some mangaka and our own releases.
The thing I miss the most must be that we don’t have a good mirror for everything. Mediafire ain’t that good :/
December 19th, 2009 at 6:20 PM
i agree with crazy
but we should use more multi-hosters
multiupload is good atm
December 19th, 2009 at 6:24 PM
I think it wouldn’t hurt if your update frequency was lower. It would be great if you would blog for every complete volume for series *you* like. And if you add a little text about why you like the series, that would be even better.
Like silverado says, there’s a lot of other places that tell me when a new chapter is released. I come here because you select a fine share of good mostly interesting seinen manga. This relieves me of searching for the better series a bit. Which I like. I don’t like trawling through a lot of chapter updates that don’t really add anything special for me. It’s not what makes this site tick for me.
But to each his own.
December 20th, 2009 at 12:24 AM
I think to combine recent chapter releases and volume uploads would be the best solution. If more time is spend on providing volume uploads or whole series it gets easier to pick up a new series. Now we have like 9 chapter releases and 1 volume release. Maybe we should try to get it fifty fifty.
December 20th, 2009 at 12:36 AM
The chapter release is nice since, I’m not having to scour different sites for updates such as wolf guy. For a new series being updated with a new chapter is different than having an old series with a update of every chapter.
December 20th, 2009 at 3:26 PM
First of all: I can only agree. I was introduced to so many new and good manga through this site, its just great that this kind of blog exists! Thanks very much for this.
But how frequent and how long can MU pull through a recommendations for super elite manga only, if you don’t even count the most popular seinen like e.g. Berserk or Vagabond (because like you said, the links for those are everywhere).
I mean I like to read good books as well but its not like I discover another good one every other week or even month. I’d rather say I discover a really good (=awesome great) one once in a year or so. At most.
Should we vote some of the so-so series out or should we just discard them? Take Veritas or Wolf Guy for instance or even more the Gantzcrap: they started kinda ok but somehow lost their pace. What to do? Some readers might only visit us for those releases but by visiting this site they’ll be introduced to much greater series (that’s the theory anyway).
But anyway, with only few volume-gems posted every month or so, we’d have to cut short our regulars considerably if we were to achive a fifty fifty of volumes and chapter-updates. And with so little update, I fear people will eventually forget to check this site :((
Because on the one hand we don’t have 2002 anymore where the scanlation busines was still young and people could still DISCOVER mangas like e.g. Blame! or Shamo.
On the other hand, I have absolutely no insight in the RAW-scene, so I don’t know how many and what great manga slumbers yet unseen and raw-only in the depths of the internet. And thus, how much potential there still is here. Rather young series like Vinland Saga are proof that there still IS potential, however how much else there is, like I said, I don’t know.
Sorry for this long answer!
December 24th, 2009 at 2:42 PM
Silv,
Well done !!!
Phil