Well, one place that often gets overlooked is your local comic book store.

Not every city has a selection of fancy fetishwear and gear shops the way San Francisco does, but most cities have several comic stores, and often a very good one.

In your high-quality comic store you will often find an adult section, where specialty items like hentai comics are kept away from the prying eyes of under-eighteens.

You might find, as my gentleman friend and I did at a recent trip to Comic Relief in Berkeley, anthologies and collections of old-school artists like Guido Crepax and Eric Stanton, graphic novels by more contemporary artists like Michael Manning, and thoroughly modern hentai omnibuses that feature tentacles and lolita fashions. For hentai manga I like “Please Miss Yuri” by Syowmaru, an artist who possesses true draughtsmanship and figure drawing skills. A great way to sample various hentai artists is Comic AG, the manga magazine of “art, sex and CG culture” that features the best erotic manga from Japan. 

You will also find something I personally detest- the work of R. Crumb, which I consider to be authentically, not ironically or satirically, misogynist. To me, R. Crumb is anti-sex and anti-woman, but you will find his work right next to jolly sex-positive Cherry Poptart in the “Adult” section, so be prepared.

My gentleman friend loves “Bondage Fairies”, and this is certainly the most widely available of the “Lolita-Tentacle-Bondage-Xenophilia-Fetish” school; there are collections in most comic stores and you can order them from j-pop and manga sites like jlist : http://www.jlist.com/

NBM publishing puts out some excellent erotic titles under their Eurotica imprint, and your comic store staff can usually special order titles they don’t have on hand. “Sizzle” is their erotica quarterly, with stories by a variety of different artists- again an anthology is a great way to feel out which artists you like.

Happy browsing, and let me know if you find something you think is really great!