Here's a radical fiscal concept for you: a government service that's actually worth every penny.

SF's public libraries have been quietly expanding their manga and graphic novel collections, and the people are noticing. Shelves that once gathered dust are now cycling through readers faster than BART escalators cycle through breakdowns.

One Bay Area parent summed it up perfectly: "Manga is like all my kids read. They read through the Harry Potter novels when they were younger but now it's all One Piece and MHA and SPY×FAMILY."

And honestly? Good. Great, even.

We spend a lot of time in this publication calling out government waste — because there's a lot of it. But public libraries remain one of the few institutions that deliver genuine, measurable value to taxpayers. A single manga volume runs $10-15 at the bookstore. A library card costs exactly zero dollars. For families watching every line item in their budget (which, in San Francisco, should be all of them), that math is unbeatable.

There's a deeper point here too. In a city that spends billions on programs with questionable outcomes, libraries operate on comparatively modest budgets and consistently deliver. They don't need a task force. They don't need a community advisory board to study the feasibility of maybe possibly considering a pilot program. They see what people want to read, they stock it, people show up. It's almost like responsive, demand-driven service delivery actually works.

The fact that kids are voluntarily walking into a public building to consume hundreds of pages of sequential storytelling — not doomscrolling, not glued to TikTok — is a win by any metric. Whether it's Frieren or Fullmetal Alchemist, reading is reading, and literacy compounds.

So next time City Hall asks for another nine-figure budget allocation for some nebulous initiative, maybe point them toward the institution that's already doing its job. Quietly. Affordably. One volume at a time.