From the (Library e-)Comics Rack: Weeaboo

As I waited and waited for new issues of Otaku USA to show up in my mailbox in the months after renewing my subscription by phone, I did start to wonder if something had got lost in the system. Having had the chance to begin at the beginning with the magazine’s very first issue and then kept buying it as the other North American English-language periodicals vanished amid the anime industry crisis at the close of this century’s first decade, I’d established something of a habit; with the habit apparently broken by accident, though, I did find myself asking if I missed it all that much. Thoughts of a stack of back issues being a “hard-copy chronicle” only went so far. Confronting that, I also got around to contemplating unsubscribing from the magazine’s email newsletter I might not have quite specifically asked for in the shift from bookstore magazine racks to the postal service. Before I could quite break a habit through my own resolve, however, I did notice the regular inbox arrival promote a North American work of comics about anime fans, with a title recognizable to me but a word I do try not to use. For all of that I did wonder about actually reading the comic, and then I happened to ask myself if it might show up in the multimedia e-lending service offered through my city library. It has almost no “manga,” but does offer a considerable amount of North American comics, which just might provide an alternative to another habit drifted into. I went looking, and Alissa Sallah’s “Weeaboo” was there.
( Another time and place )