Syzygy
Man, I love Hunter x Hunter to a completely unreasonable degree which I think it not quite in proportion to the quality of the actual work, but who knows. There is just something about it that grabs the essential appeal of a battle shounen for me in a way that nothing else quite does. Some tout it as a “deconstruction” of the genre or whatever, but I kind of feel like it is just a really, really good example of what the genre can be when it’s best (apologies to the One Piece fans, but HxH is by far my favourite). A lot of my emotional attachment to the characters is admittedly likely because I’ve been following it for 17 years or so. I watched the 1999 anime for the first time around 2004 I think and since then I have read through the manga and watched that first anime as well as the 2011 anime multiple times.
The hiatuses can be painful, but at this point I’ve just sort of accepted it to the point that it doesn’t even bother me anymore. If the manga is never finished I am very happy with what we already have, if Togashi ever finishes another arc I will read it. In fact in general, I have become very chill with unfinished artwork over the last decade, I enjoy what is there and if it ever finishes great, but if not it doesn’t really diminish my enjoyment of what is there.
In general I sort of have the same problem that many mentioned in the thread, namely that i always enjoyed anime and I always enjoyed books, but somehow comics/manga were never quite as appealing to me as either. However, I did enjoy some manga, I remember reading through about half of the Danish translation of Dragonball in a single day when I got my hands on it as a child.
In general I agree that it is a lot more enjoyable to read physically than digitally. Since I moved to Japan I have been reading more as used manga is very cheap here. For example I finally read through a bunch of Urasawa Naoki’s manga which I had always wanted to do because of how much I loved the Monster anime. His other stuff is also great! I also read Berserk for the first time here, despite having really liked the 1997 anime for a long time. Good stuff.