Ever wonder what it's like to sell comics at a Japanese bookstore? Honda provides a hilarious firsthand account from the front lines! Whether it's handling the store, out-of-print books, or enthusiastic manga fans, Honda takes on every challenge. And now, all the observations and shenanigans have been collected into one complete volume!

Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san: The Complete Omnibus has a story and art by Honda. English translation is by Amanda Haley, with lettering by Bianca Pistillo and published by Yen Press (June 23, 2026).

Erica Friedman
Rating:

I'm a sucker for a good comic essay—a non-fiction manga story. And I'm a sucker for meta-fiction about life in publishing and books. I really enjoyed the Skull-faced Bookseller Honda-san anime, but had never found time to read the manga. It is exactly as amusing and informative as I expected. For folks familiar with the anime, the first part of this omnibus covers some of the same scenarios, with our hapless skeleton bookseller dealing with foreign manga fans, obsessive BL and gay manga fans, and a lot of details about how Japanese bookstores handle release days, Book Fairs, and the like.

I worked in a bookstore decades ago, before the manga boom, but I remember what it was like to have people ask me for a suggestion for their 11-year-old granddaughter. When Honda-san has to traverse that same gauntlet, I just bust out with a laugh. (My suggestion was Goosebumps, for what it's worth.) And, of course, I have been that weirdo foreigner in the Japanese bookstore, practically giddy when I find a book I'm looking for, so this omnibus really hit me coming and going.

As fun and insightful as the main story is, some of the best bits come later in the collection: the anime announcement, the serialization that continues because of it, and Honda-san's efforts to get more insider info to draw skits from. And when that starts to dry up, her recounting of an overseas trip and her own personal experiences as a manga artist. These last chapters take her work from fictionalized non-fiction to a pure comic essay about her current life as a manga artist. If you're sharp, you'll see some hints about her work after Skull-faced Bookseller Honda-san.

Overall, this omnibus succeeds on several levels. For folks in bookstore and publishing life, it's a reminder of what we lived through… and possibly still bear the scars from.

For new readers, it's an amusing glimpse into bookstore and publishing life with lots of otaku references. As a collection for older fans of the manga, it's filled with many of the extras drawn for bookstore sales, fairs, and other promotional work. Overall, it's a fun time for manga fans.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

This ought, by most measures, to be a book I loved. As you're probably guessing from that first sentence, I did not love it. In fact, it bored me, which feels unfathomable. But here we are, with me, a certified bibliomaniac, not liking a book about working in a bookstore. The mind boggles.

But I think it didn't work for me because I was already familiar with much of what Honda had to say about her job. This is a fairly exhaustive account of her time working in the manga section of a large bookshop, covering not just the customers who come in but also the nitty-gritty details of stocking shelves, dealing with publisher representatives, interacting with coworkers, and tracking market trends. If you've never worked in a bookstore or a library, I suspect you'll find it a lot more interesting and entertaining. If, like me, you spent many summers working in the local library and museum, it may run the gamut between cutting too close to the bone and feeling like reading about your life with different characters standing in for you and your coworkers.

That said, I don't want to rank this lower, because while I didn't personally enjoy it, it does have a lot of potentially engaging material. Honda doesn't skimp on details, and the sheer number of manga references thrown in is genuinely impressive, setting notwithstanding. From weird patrons to messy shelves after a group has blown through like a gale-force wind, all of the hits of working in the book service industry are here, including the desperate wish to get your hands on a new book but not being able to despite working with it. Among my favorite sections were those about trying to help someone find a book they want, because Honda perfectly captures the frustration of them claiming to know what they want and then not actually knowing.

It is nice to get all four volumes in one large book, but that doesn't come without one very specific issue that I feel Yen Press could have avoided: the cultural notes in the back are in very small print. I fully admit that my eyesight isn't great, but I couldn't read this stuff without a magnifying glass, and I'm really not exaggerating. Page constraints may have dictated this font size, but if you like the notes or rely on them, the print size almost makes it more worthwhile to hunt down the individual volumes.

So at the end of the day, my feelings are thus: if you're already intimately familiar with the subject matter, this may not be an interesting book for you. But if you want to know more about working in the book service industry, this is likely to be a good read. Just have that magnifier handy for the notes.

Bolts
Rating:

Anyone who's ever worked in customer service can tell you it will make you incredibly angry, incredibly anxious, or both. Honda-san is a series that has been around for a while, and this omnibus allows you to own a large portion of the series in one tight package, but what does that package actually entail? Well, it's about a skeleton who works at a bookstore…No, I swear it's funny! It's actually interesting that the series occasionally features very off-the-wall, exaggerated characters like the main character, Honda, who just happens to be a living skeleton. But the series treats it more like it's a normal thing than not. If anything, the occasional foreigner or crazed fan girl entering this bookstore comes off as more otherworldly than he or his coworkers do, and that's the joke. This feels like a story that was written from the perspective of someone who has worked at a bookstore, and these are just exaggerated examples of what he might've literally gone through.

Sometimes reality can be stranger than fiction because there's not really any crazy tension or a huge, bombastic thing literally happening in these chapters; a lot of it comes down to the reactions or the comedic back-and-forth. Honda wants to do a good job and fulfill its customers' requests, but its customers don't always make that easy. He's very soft-spoken, but clearly has a lot of anxiety. He wants to make sure that everybody is having a good time. I appreciate that, and the artwork does a fantastic job of conveying a lot of emotion from what should be a very stoic character model.

You would think that the series would rely on very deadpan humor since a skeleton can't exactly emote. While there are moments of quieter reactions, this manga takes full advantage of the medium to artistically present things with the most effective punchline it can, given the relatively simple setting. The humor isn't gonna be for everybody, and I think the people who will probably relate to the story the most are the ones who have had similar experiences. But this is also a series that I think perfectly communicates that you don't need a complicated premise to be entertaining; all you need is a relatable idea with just the right amount of antics.