The best way to support the actual artists is to buy Japanese raws. The compensation for English releases varies but since so many of them sell in such small numbers many of the authors don’t get any payment at all for the book sold and only get the initial licensing fee for the series.
Depends on the series, obviously. A huge series that moves tons of books, like one piece? Different story. But the latest niche release that will sell maybe 4k copies at most? Nahhh
Piracy is justified, viz/kodansha/etc are pieces of shit. unless you specifically want to support the localization teams I guess, but they also aren’t getting royalties. It’s a company of suits who “buy” creative works and earn money off them in perpetuity.
As for recommendations: you and I are polar opposites, the summer hikaru died, after the rain
The one thing that sales do benefit is the potential for future localization and to be fair that does matter if you can’t read the raws
This is why niche titles are shifting. People complain about companies like viz doing less with niche shonen and yuri and stuff, instead translating tons of BL. But you know who buys tons of physicals? BL peeps. And when the expected sales are 3-5k units, if that, might as well go for the ones that drop cash
That said it’s still crap that viz doesn’t localize smaller titles. They can do digital only releases. They have a one time fixed cost of the licensing and localization then just bandwidth, which is not much for digital books, and still make a bit of profit. But their mission isn’t to bring media to people, it’s to make fat stacks
Full disclosure: I don’t have a dog in this fight really bc i can read Japanese and just get raws in Japanese. I typically pirate everything and I do for big titles like oshi no ko (which had a weak ass ending) and shit but for small titles I do buy them to support the creators. Buying from Japanese sites gives the artist (typically) an 8-10% cut and with the weak yen digital titles are real affordable