It’s been an exciting week for the 2011 Great Manga Gift Guide with lots of excellent entries from esteemed anime and manga bloggers out there.
First up there’s Erica Friedman with a Retro Gift Guide full of older shoujo anime and manga that have come back into print in the past year. Of course, in traditional Okazu style, all the suggestions are yuri-friendly.
Anna has a number of great suggestions up on Manga Report this year, including my personal favorite: A Bride’s Story!
Rob of Panel Patter brings us a wide spread of different genres in his gift guide this year, all of critically acclaimed manga well worth the time of any reader.
While Tom Spurgeon’s holiday gift guide at The Comics Reporter is mostly comic book-related, he does take the time to include a number of great manga suggestions that take into consideration the tastes of people who are primarily graphic novel fans.
Josh Tolentino has gift ideas for anime and manga lovers from all the contributors at Japanator, just in case your friends care more about Puella Magi Madoka Magica than Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon.
Tony Yao’s gift guide reads like a love affair with the best shounen and seinen manga of the year, but still makes sure to include some ideas for shoujo and josei fans.
Kate Dacey bucks convention at her blog, The Manga Critic, and goes for manga and anime-related gifts that you can’t find in a plain old chain bookstore!
Deb Aoki gives us a one two punch with her gift guide for manga readers and her gift guide for supporting comics and good causes at the same time.
Finally, although plenty of bloggers love doing the Great Manga Gift Guides, this year there are some bloggers fighting back against what they see as cold, impersonal gift giving…
On Rocket Bomber, Matt Blind suggests giving cash instead of manga because you probably won’t get the person what they actually like. And hey, who doesn’t like cash?
Milo Turnbull of Blog of the North Star just finds gift guides to be a superficial way to find a gift for someone.
Both bloggers make excellent points, but to take a page from my life, I was overjoyed as a teen whenever someone got me a manga-related gift. If any of those people used a manga gift guide, I didn’t care and I couldn’t say that I’d blame them for getting assistance; most of them didn’t know much about manga at all.
Oh well, we can agree to disagree. Still, it poses a few interesting questions, such as: are gift guides really useful? And: does the gift feel like it’s more shallow if you use a gift guide for suggestions? Feel free to comment!
As for the 2011 Great Manga Gift Guide, it doesn’t seem to be stopping any time soon! If you want to find out more about the 2011 Great Manga Gift Guides, please check out this post.
If you would like to have your holiday manga gift guide added to the 2011 Great Manga Gift Guides, please feel free to leave a comment on this or any other Great Manga Gift Guide-related post, or use the twitter hashtag #gmgg. (And don’t forget to include a link to your gift guide!)
Happy holiday manga shopping! See you next week!
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Hahaha, unfortunately, I read mostly shonen and seinen. I do like josei manga. Agh, I should’ve included Bunny Drop, since it’s created so my headlines this year because of the anime & movie.
Haha, don’t worry about it! In a year where there’s been so many great shoujo and josei manga out, a lot of the same things are popping up on everyone’s wish lists. So actually, a mainly shounen gift guide mixes things up a bit. ^_^
Ahhh, I see. Good point.