The Toronto Comic Arts Festival is coming up this week and though I’ve been saving pennies to lavish on the artists there, I had to leave some room in my pre-trip budget for new manga books!

From Viz Media this week I bought Kingyo Used Books (Vol. 03) which has a chapter about someone reading Sailor Moon in it – both nostalgic and well-timed. I also bought March Story (Vol. 02) and I enjoyed it even more than the first volume as it focuses more on the characters. Great atmosphere in this series. It only takes a quick flip through to stare at the artwork to see what I mean.

A little behind on this series but I finally came across a copy of Genkaku Picasso (Vol. 02). I’m expecting lots more of the same weirdness the first volume had and looking forward to it! I rounded out my purchases with a great discount-bin find of Buddha (Vol. 01) to add my Osamu Tezuka collection.

From Seven Seas I bought Blood Alone (Vol. 01) which is omnibus of the first three volumes. I’ve wanted to read this series for a while because of the pretty covers (doesn’t take much for me to give a series at least a fair try!) and having it re-released as a 3-in-1 is the perfect opportunity. It’s also a nice omnibus physically-speaking, very light in hand despite the huge page count and still feels tightly bound.

And lastly I was able to finish at least one of my on-going Tokyopop series by purchasing Mad Love Chase (Vol. 05). The series hasn’t made the most sense in the past couple volumes but I’m a fan of the artist’s work so my fingers are crossed for a somewhat coherent finish.

Next week I plan to write about my non-manga purchases for a change with hopefully a long list of self-published comics I’ll get to buy at TCAF. Until then, what was in your swag bag this week?