Verp said:
This continuity issue is pretty much why I don't read superhero comics, although it's also because they aren't a big thing in my country anyways.
With manga, you don't have to ask yourself "Where do I start?" because it's piss easy: you pick up the first issue and go from there. Also, with scanlators comes the ease of sampling a series before picking it up, not to mention that publishers act as quality filters that ensure that not all samey shoonen comics from Japan are there to throw you off. If you really desperately need a series that hasn't been published here or if publishers give up on one that you're reading, you can usually buy imports from USA or someplace else.
Manga can have as confusing storylines and conflicts in continuity as anything put out by the US. Try and make sense of the Sailor Moon manga continuity sometime--it makes the Hawkman mess look understandable by comparison and is worse than its anime counterpart.
Tenchi (which started out as an anime) has no less than 13 (!) more or less "official" continuities making it on par with any US comic book you care to name.
I should mention that most manga series are LONG. Sazan (3x3) Eyes is a 40 volume 15 year spanning series. Hellsing is a somewhat confusing 10 volume 11 year spanning series. Worse, some manga series never really end (Ranma 1/2 case in point. After 9 years it left things at status quo not resolving anything.)
Unless you have shorter sub arcs (which Hellsing really doesn't) there are not many series you can just pick up an issue and have a reasonable idea of WHAT is going on.
Finally while anime tend to follow manga closer than US cartoons follow their source material they still go off the rails much of the time producing story arcs that never existed or in the case of the Hellsing TV series making up their own continuty.
In those respects you can have MORE problems with a manga series than with a US comic series.