Call Me Stupid

Well, no don't do that, but this little story does demonstrate my uncanny grasp of the obvious.
I read Bananafish book 1 the other day and at the end of the book it occurred to me that what I read was the first "issue" of the story. These fat little manga books aren't collections of single issues like the American Trade Paperback, this is the first issue. That's a big difference in how the story is paced, plotted, and executed. Somebody tell me, because I'm too lazy to look it up, how many pages are in those things? I can't imagine having that much space to write a single issue of a story. But all this time I've looked at Manga and, while I knew that these were single issues, I didn't get that they were single issues until just the other day. I've gotta admit, I've got a whole new respect for the format.