Manga releases in Bulgaria:N1

As the title says, in this post I will be talking about manga releases in my home country - Bulgaria.This is number 1, because I will be focusing only on book editions here and in number 2  I will focusing on the manga magazine we had here.

The very first manga-like thing that we got here in Bulgaria was volume 1 of the Warcraft: Sunwell Trilogy, story by Richard A. Knaak and artwork by Kim Jae-Hwan. This was actually my first volume of manga. Fortunately, the series was finished and the whole three books were published here and I have them in my collection.

Next we were presented with the work of Judith Park and four of her stories - Dystopia, Y Square, Y Square PLUS and Luxus. I have only Dystopia, since this is the only story of hers that I liked. I read the other three books, but they weren't quite my style.

 Next we have volume one of Shin by Lilian nad Jan. This one had an interesting story, but the artwork wasn't good. I actually had it, but sold it later, because I didn't really like it.

 We continue with volume one of Breath Effect by Asan. I read only one chapter of this .... thing, because it was in the magazine, that I was buying at the time and I have to say that it is awful... Crappy artwork, stupid and uninteresting story, really irritating main character... I think that you get my point.(This is a personal opinion. I know people, who liked the book and I'm not judging them)

 And last but not least - the first volume of Amilova. I find this an interesting story with average artwork. I have it in my collection and I'm waiting for volume two now.

As you can all clearly see by now, none of these "mangas" is actually a Japanese manga. They look like manga, but they are not. We have French, German and Korean things, but no Japanese and I think that this is a major problem of our publishers. They never even tried to get anything Japanese on our comics market and thus never got the attention of the audience. I find this to be a big mistake. This fact discourages potential buyers from buying these books. Some people buy them, yes, bit not as many as the publisher would like. Fans here want the real thing, not just some knock off. People here want mangas like Naruto, One Piece, Hellsing, Death Note or Tsubasa Chronicles, they don't want European black and white comics. 

And this makes me wonder - what is the real problem of our publishers? Maybe they don't know what people seek, or maybe they can't contact Japanese publishers, or maybe the licensing is too expensive. I don't really know. All I can do for now is watch and see what happens next.

I would really like to make a discussion on this topic so feel free to comment and ask questions.