Really Quick Analysis of Manga Appeal

I was reading Sean Kleefeld's recent pondering on comics appeal and he started to get into his dad's confusion about the (arguable) sameness of manga, which the younger Kleefeld refuted. And it made me think about how one of the barriers to me, a 38-year-old reader of all kinds of books and comics, becoming more of a manga fan, is the multiple volume aspect to so many of the titles we see on U.S. bookshelves. Aside from the Koike/Kojima samurai stuff and a lot of Tezuka, there aren't a lot of multi-volume manga series I've read...at least not to their conclusion. Sometimes books I've really enjoyed for several volumes just wear me out when I realize they're going to go for another dozen or more volumes. It's the same thing with TV series I enjoy--much as I like The Office, I'll be just fine when they cancel it, and probably they'll cancel it a little after I've lost some degree of interest in it.

Anyway, it seems like this hindrance to me might be one of the appeals to the predominantly younger audience for manga, the involvement and dedication to these fictional worlds that is a natural fit for adolescents and twentysomethings, that singlemindedness and fannishness and zeal. I'm not saying these aren't also good series, many of them, but that this is an extra element of the appeal--a long saga by one or two creators. It reminds me a bit of some of the stuff I was really into when I was younger, and not just comics. When I was a teenager, it wasn't enough just to buy Depeche Mode albums when they came out, but I had to buy every 12" single I could find, most of them imports, occasionally pressed on colored vinyl. It wasn't enough that I had two or three remixes of this song on one single; if another one came out with another remix, I needed to have it. B-sides? Had to have them. Who knows what great songs I'd be missing if I didn't buy it all?

So that's what I see as one of the reasons for manga's appeal, at least the multivolume manga which forms the majority of the successful series. It's a kind of state of mind--a need to both collect and connect--that I feel only fleetingly now. Nowadays I feel a kind of guilt, like, what other great stuff am I missing by devoting myself to this one thing? It almost makes me angry, like that thing/that artist is asking for more than their fair share of my time.