The Distortion of Time

Ever notice how sometimes things seem to wait for you to blink before they move? To look away for a second and they're suddenly somewhere else? Things like the fly on the wall, or the bird in the tree. But I had the same thing happen to me with a couple of series of manga I read, called "World God Only Knows" and "Beelzebub", tho it was on a larger scale. As an avid manga reader, I had picked them up when the first one-shot chapters came out on mangafox, and have faithfully checked for updates ever since. They was cool, funny, and different from a lot of the stuff that was out at that point, and it felt something like an underground favourite since not many people had read it. Then, for about a month, my laptop was broken and my time online reading was spotty at best. When I got it back, I rushed to check all of my manga, and lo and behold, several of the ones I read, including "The World God Only Knows" and "Beelzebub", had gone from being something of  unknown manga to chart-toppers, with "Beelzebub" taking the #2 spot and "World God Only Knows" taking fourth place. its quite an achievement considering the top manga series of the time had held their spots for almost as long as I have been reading manga! I was compleyely shocked! my favourite manga had gone from something I could tell people about in forums and people wouldnt have a clue what I was talking about to being series with forums of their own! TT^TT how time doth move on the moment we look away! Perhaps this is a sign? A sign that the tastes of those who read manga are shifting from the older series to newer ones? If that is truely so, then I hope to see many new series start getting scanned or even licenced in North America as the online popularity reaches the ears of those who would decide wether the series lives or dies, and expands or remains solely in Japan.

For my personal hope, I pray that many of these great series make it over here, but with the Loss of one of the main manga publishers, Tokyopop, I fear that soon online will be the only place I'll be able to get my manga, short of learning Japanese and flying to Japan to buy it right from the shelves there!