Is old manga
worth money?

For a long time manga was treated as the thing you moved out of the way to get at the American comics. That has changed. Over roughly the last two years a genuine collectors market has formed around early manga, particularly first Japanese editions of the series that went on to become enormous.

It is worth saying plainly that this is a younger and less settled market than American key issues. Prices move around more, and there is less agreed reference data. That is exactly why sellers get it wrong in both directions.

What drives value in manga

First Japanese editions, above almost everything else. The original Japanese tankobon volumes of the series that became global, Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto and Berserk among them, are where the serious collector attention sits. English translations, however early, are a different and generally much cheaper market.

Early volume numbers. As with any series, volume one of something that ran for a hundred volumes was printed in far smaller numbers than the ones that followed, because nobody knew yet.

The obi. Japanese books ship with a paper band around the cover called an obi. It is the first thing thrown away and it makes a real difference to a collector. If yours still has it, do not remove it.

Condition, judged differently. Manga volumes are squarebound paperbacks, so the spine creasing that comes from actually reading them is very visible and very hard to avoid. An unread copy stands out immediately.

The ones worth checking

• Dragon Ball, originally serialised in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1984. The early collected volumes are the ones drawing attention.
• One Piece, from 1997, now the best selling manga series in history, which makes its earliest printings genuinely scarce relative to demand.
• Naruto, from 1999, another series whose first volumes long predate its global popularity.
• Berserk, whose earlier volumes are harder to find in good condition than their age suggests, partly because of how heavily they were read.
• Akira in its early English editions, which sits in an interesting middle ground between the manga and American comic markets.

Where UK sellers go wrong

Two mistakes, in opposite directions.

The first is treating a box of manga as filler and selling it by weight alongside a comic collection. General dealers and house clearance firms do this constantly, because they price what they recognise.

The second is assuming any old manga is valuable because a headline said the market is hot. The overwhelming majority of English language manga volumes from the last twenty years are extremely common and worth very little, in the same way most 1990s American comics are.

The dividing line is the same as it always is: scarcity and demand, not age.

Getting manga valued

I will value manga alongside comics, and I will tell you honestly when a collection is ordinary. If you have early Japanese editions in particular, it is worth flagging them rather than letting them go through as part of a bulk lot.