Hokuto Manga 1

In 2006, Finnish book publisher Otava held a manga competition, where amateur artists could submit their comics. The best comics were compiled into two volume anthology.

Finland, like many other parts of the world, had an animanga BOOM in the mid-noughties, and what else illustrates this better than western comics inspired by manga! While mostly nothing special, the stories are pretty good and impressive for (mostly) amateur works. At least manga-hungry child me enjoyed reading them in the library. (Few years ago these very same books I read were on clearance sale in the same exact library. No one else seemed to want them, so I decided to adopt them to my collection. Thank you for your service!)

Hokuto Manga wasn't the first of it's manga anthology kind though, that title goes to the Finnmanga-zines. The first self-published Finnmanga-zine was sold in 2004 at Animecon III, where they sold out. (The first volume was later reprinted as as a "remix", including one bonus story.) The zines continued printing, under a publisher, and over the years came out 12 zines. The last Finnmanga was volume 12, published in 2011. I plan to some day complete my collection: I have volume 1 (remix), volume 2 (these two were saved alongside Hokuto Manga from the horrible faith of getting thrown in the trash) and volume 12! I see the other volumes float around from time to time, so it's not like they're very rare. The original 2004 Animecon zine might be though! As to why I decided to highlight Hokuto Manga here, idk it was thicker!