Jane Parker's Guide To Discovering And Buying Comics

1/08/2026

Over the last few years, I have became quite the buyer and collector of comics, manga, books and other assorted print goodies. I thought I would share some of what I do to...

• Keep aware of new releases.
• Get things at decent prices.

Unfortunately, this is going to apply almost exclusively to North America. You probably have other online stores and local retailers available. I'm also going to try to cover as wide of a variety of books and comics that I can. You may only be interested in one kind, but you might get some good knowledge out of my strategies and information. I want to stress beforehand that knowing everything that's coming out across an entire medium of art is basically impossible. But still, I'm going to try and equip you the best I can.

I am not affiliated or sponsored by anybody. This is just what I do.

Let's start with our first point.

Knowing What's Coming Out

My personal favorite place to see what's coming out is the pre-order catalog for mycomicshop.com This is typically for books 3 months out. Yes, the layout of this part of the site looks like it hasn't changed since 1998. I assume that's because it must be very functional on the backend, and something would explode if it were updated in any way. It's also absolutely not mobile friendly. But I'll have a solution for that in a bit.

Anyway, this is the closest to an all in one source for new comic releases that I've ever seen. Other web stores, like similar and respectable Discount Comic Book Service tend to be a little spottier when it comes to things like manga. Mycomicshop is where you can see RuriDragon right next to the upcoming Batwoman series.

Taking some screenshots for this month's catalog, this is how I found out that there's a Baby Garfield Comic coming out from Boom Studios. Aren't you glad you know that? For me, there's a ritual to sitting down with a beverage and perusing all the previews for a month. It's a lot to look at once, though. On my comicshop, you can filter by publisher. If you're not totally familiar with comic publishers, that's okay! You'll learn as you go. There's also a very handy filter for upcoming #1s. This was probably more intended to help get comic buyers into new series. But it includes things like Volume 1s for manga and paperbacks, so you can apply the logic of you want to get something new as it comes out, which can be fun!

For a quick publisher cheat sheet, your manga and light novel go-tos are going to be Viz, Seven Seas, Yen Press, Kodansha, and Square Enix.

For "American" comics, I'm sure you know Marvel, DC, and Image as big players. Look also to IDW, Boom, Dynamite, Dark Horse, Oni Press. Look at UDON too for a variety of video game (especially Capcom) licensed books. You will see there are other publishers too though (Mad Cave, Titan), so don't be shy and take a look around.

We'll talk about pre-orders and actually buying stuff in the next section.

If you want something a little more modern looking, I use and can recommendLeague of Comic Geeks. There's a mobile app available for them as well! I believe you need to make an account to use it that way. On desktop, you are also free to see the upcoming comics, under the Discover section, then scroll down for Soliciations. My only qualm here is that not every publisher gets a dedicated section here. It's not as easy to find something coming out if you don't already know what it's called.

League has great features for tracking your spending on a per week and monthly basis. You can make sure you stay on budget, if you make sure to add all your purchases to your Pull or Subscribe lists. Pull just means you put that one item on your "I am going to buy this" list. Subscribe here means that you're putting all future issues, volumes, or books in a series on your "I am going to buy this" list.

Just to be clear, League is not a site where you actually buy comics. It is only a site for collection and purchase tracking. mycomicshop, that we looked at earlier, is an actual retailer that has no built-in collection tracking. Besides your order history, I guess.

Those two resources relatively informed. If it seems like a lot of work, I suppose it is. Comics are everywhere, all the time. Of course, this is a wonderful blessing, but it means finding out about stuff is hard. If you can turn checking on some of these things into a little monthly habit, I think it helps.

For news websites...well, I don't check too many too often, but I do have some to highlight. Bleeding Cool and ICV2 have the most paper comics reporting that I know about. Bleeding Cool is how I found out there's a sick new Batman villain coming out, and she's kinda bad. ICV2 is great for industry news and pieces! I've also started following Comic Book Club Live after finding them on Bluesky. No idea if the podcasts are any good, but you may be into that!

Buying Stuff

Congratulations on becoming a comic super-expert! So, what's a good way to get some paper with funny pictures on it? That 35% discount for pre-orders on mycomicshop is pretty juicy. But we'll go over strategizing this so that it works for you.

Your local comic shops and bookstores can be a really big asset for you, for all kinds of comics. But watch out, no two stores are exactly the same! I know it can be a little scary to go outside, but your local places have existing infrastructure for ordering things from all the various comic and book distributors out there. It's often fairly trivial for them to add a particular book at your request. Small comic shops in particular, in my experience, will be quite happy to order something knowing that it's a guaranteed sale! Some may even offer discounts to you for a pre-order or a subscription, all while you don't pay shipping! But that discount aspect varies dramatically from shop to shop. Still, I really want you to think about this because it might be the secret cheapest way for you to get stuff!

Shipping is going to be the big thing to work around when you shop online. This is why I don't blindly recommend mycomicshop to everyone, even though that pre-order discount is immense! You are charged a flat rate and then some additional cents per item, which can eat into most or all of the pre-order discount. The site often has good deals for trade paperbacks and hardcovers in-stock, but they are very spotty about manga.

One of the most well regarded online stores for comic paperbacks, manga volumes, and everything else of the sort is InStockTrades. They are pretty darn good about manga and can sometimes feature discounts as high as 50%! You can also get free shipping on orders over $50 USD. I'm actually unsure how that's possible in this economy, but hey, that's great!

My personal favorite online store for manga and light novels is Books-A-Million.

There are a few reasons for this. First of all, I have a local BAM that I love going to. Secondly, I share a Millionaire's Club membership with a friend. Big value there! For $25 USD a year, you'll get free shipping. I know these VIP-type programs are designed to get you to spend more money, but it really doesn't take a lot of manga buying in a year to see the savings. I find this much more palatable than the famous Barnes & Noble, which currently costs $40 USD a year and comes with a bunch of tacky in-store deals that I don't care for.

BAM also frequently has online deals in addition to the free shipping you can get with their membership. When those deals are good, I find it hard to beat! They also offer simple (and unlimited!) in-store coupons with this membership, which works really well for me, as I do like to visit our physical store.

I will say, however, that Books-A-Million is not spotless when it comes to books arriving in perfect condition. To be honest, almost nobody is. Mail stuff is hard. I have had dings on spines and corners in a fair amount of manga I buy. I've never anything I'd call outright damaged, but it's not like I don't notice either. For some people, stuff like that is a deal breaker.

Miss Parker, what about Amazon?

I'm not a fan of the company, but they offer nothing suuuuper exceptional for discounts or shipping. Remember, Books-A-Million's free shipping membership is twenty-five dollars a year, where Prime starts at fifteen dollars a month. I acquiesce that a decent number of you reading this probably already have Prime. If it works for you, by all means, get your books that way! But as someone who isn't plugged into the Amazon ecosystem already, it's not quite worth it for me as a big comic buyer.

What about digital?

Buying digital is tough, these days. Amazon's buying and melding of comiXology into Kindle really sucked. Without recapping all that history though, you can get digital comics of all kinds through Kindle. For some monthly comic series and magazines (but not all, all the time, I don't know why) you can even subscribe to the series. Here's the upcoming Iron Man series where they offer a digital pre-order and a subscribe button. Amazon has kind of a death grip on purchasing digital comics, so if your main goal is to have everything all-in-one, they are your answer.

My favorite place for digital manga and light novels is BOOK WALKER, which is actually getting a big makeover and update in 2026. They offer a fun "coin" program, basically rewards points, when you buy stuff, that can go towards more purchases. They also frequently slash first volumes of things down to 99 cents, which is pretty sweet. I was reading Dinosaur Sanctuary and Land of the Lustrous this way, and I liked it. I'm looking forward to that 2026 re-design!

You may have heard about GlobalComix, but all I'll say is that they've been caught using AI sloppinator tools for promotions without asking creators. This was almost the solution the digital comics world needed, but there's a big ugly mark on how they operate. Still, you can look and be informed.

I am much more favorable to "library" style reading when it comes to digital comics. Options here are somewhat more limited, but in my opinion, more worth it if you're a big reader. Amazon does offer comiXology unlimited, which has a pretty healthy number of comics and manga to read under its umbrella. This is how I read the classic Mirage Studios and Eastman/Laird Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was awesome.

Marvel and DC both have library style programs for their catalogs. Marvel Unlimited has damn near everything they have ever published. That's excluding the most recent releases, though, which come out on Unlimited on a three-month delay. DC Infinite, at the highest price tier, offers their back catalog and new comics on only a one-month delay. This is a pretty cool feature that's worth a mention!

If you made it down this far, you already know about the incredible deal that Shonen Jump offers. It's crawled up to $4 USD over time, but it's still one of the most ridiculous deals in all of entertainment. I wish this was the model that everyone followed, but if you're ready for a reread of Dragon Ball or Yu-Gi-Oh, it's hard to beat this.

PHEW!

If you read this far, well, I hope you're in the mood to shop now! I also hope you feel a little more equipped in the world of navigating comic releases. I've done my best to accommodate different kinds of buyers and interests, but I'm sure I've missed something. There are almost certainly countless small comic publishers for digital and paper that even I don't know about.

If you have a question or something like that, you can hit me up on Bluesky.

I also sometimes make YouTube videos and Shorts where I show off comics, magazines, or other things. If that's your style, I'd appreciate if you checked the channel out.

Happy new year, and happy reading!

- Jane