Finally getting into manga (discussion/reviews)

Let's talk Aguachile Alley

Postby tonybricker » Fri Nov 23, 2018 3:17 pm

sevenarts wrote:Nice, I found Bakune Young while searching for Castle of the Dragon and thought it looked amazing as well, cool to have confirmation.

I still haven't gotten around to 20th Century Boys despite loving Monster and Pluto. It's hard with manga to decide today's the day I start the next 4,000+ page epic but I should try to get over that more.


Pluto is awesome, so underrated/not rated at all
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Postby sevenarts » Fri Nov 23, 2018 5:06 pm

Awesome Blade of the Immortal post. I recently downloaded the whole thing and put it on my ipad, I think it's going to be the next big series I read because it always sounds and looks amazing. Now my anticipation is even higher.
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Postby sevenarts » Fri Nov 23, 2018 5:07 pm

And yea, Pluto rules although I feel like it's pretty well-loved in general. It being considerably shorter than Urasawa's other 2 big works, and having a connection to Tezuka, means it seems to be his most acclaimed and widely read series, though maybe I'm wrong about that.
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Postby tonybricker » Fri Nov 23, 2018 5:23 pm

sevenarts wrote:Awesome Blade of the Immortal post. I recently downloaded the whole thing and put it on my ipad, I think it's going to be the next big series I read because it always sounds and looks amazing. Now my anticipation is even higher.


hell yeah, as far as I can tell I am the only boarder who has read it, I would love to see what you think of it

re:Pluto - I know it's not under the radar or anything like that, people know about it because of the creators - I just never see it on any best-of lists and it's more than worthy
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Postby shizaam » Fri Nov 23, 2018 5:40 pm

whew Yokohama Shopping Trip sounds amazing
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Postby sevenarts » Mon Nov 26, 2018 12:50 am

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River's Edge by Kyoko Okazaki
Another, slightly earlier manga from the author of Helter Skelter. Once again, Okazaki is dealing, in uncomfortably raw ways, with the alienation and cruelty of modern society. Her story, set in a high school, follows a loose group of sort-of friends as they torment, humiliate, and coolly toy with one another. Okazaki seems to have a real fascination with characters who are tormented and victimized but are also kind of monstrous themselves - or who at least have come to see themselves as monsters through the eyes of others, and act accordingly. Her art is often sketchy and rough here, even rawer than the minimalist style of Helter Skelter, but her crudely defined characters with their lopsided forms and gangly bodies are perfectly suited to this story about outcasts and loners. Okazaki seems to be using somewhat stock high school melodrama scenarios (cheating boyfriends, eating disorders, closet homosexuality) deliberately, warping them to their limits and making these familiar stories discomfiting and startling again, the way they should be.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:42 am

Fantastic Blade of the Immortal writeup, Tony. I got to check that series out.

20th Century Boys goes on much longer than Pluto and perhaps inevitably goes off the rails a little more often but it’s definitely up there on a similar level. It’s more elegiac, more complex and even heartfelt in some ways, and the mystery is killer.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Nov 26, 2018 8:26 am

sevenarts wrote:Nice, I found Bakune Young while searching for Castle of the Dragon and thought it looked amazing as well, cool to have confirmation.


Matsunaga is some kind of visionary. It didn't quite make my list, but his book Paperakyu is also very interesting - a story about a boy with a contagious disease that causes small limbs to sprout from his head. It's another weird evolution of his style, deliberately drawn in a much simpler, more childlike way to fit the content – this exploration of the injustice and exclusion that we all feel so keenly as children.

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Postby jca » Mon Nov 26, 2018 9:21 am

Suehiro Maruo - The Laughing Vampire

I've seen parts of this reproduced in other works and read about Midori, but this is my first Suehiro Maruo straight through and it is just so good. I love the silent film influence of shadows and darks and the 1920-30s style. And the direction and composition of the panels. I guess this is a pretty popular one after seeing how many 'famous' panels pop up in this. Gonna read Panorama Island next since that seems pretty art deco.

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Postby HotFingersClub » Mon Nov 26, 2018 10:16 am

Yes, awesome, Laughing Vampire is one of my fave Maruo books (although in many ways they’re all kind of the same). Excited to hear about Panorama Island
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Postby HotFingersClub » Wed Nov 28, 2018 7:43 am

Favourite manga part 5/6…

10.
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Junji Ito – Gyo
This is the most recent of Ito’s three major sustained works, and also the one that most resembles a single contiguous story rather than a constellation of related shorts. In practice, though, Ito is still performing variations on a singular and terrifying theme. In Gyo, fish are coming to claim the land, their rotting corpses scuttling into people’s homes on pointed mechanical spider legs. Given the space to stretch out, Ito takes this image from its initial Evil Dead setup of a couple being menaced in their holiday home to a more apocalyptic, World War Z type of vision, as humanity is quickly overrun. At the same time, the strange gases that perpetuate the fish are starting to affect humans as well. Although its central image never loses its capacity to shock and disturb, this series is more a game of logistics than most, and more of an adventure. His characters are constantly on the move, struggling for survival – there’s a lot less of the soft resets that for some people can spoil the momentum of Ito’s work. While I’m not convinced there’s a huge amount operating beneath the surface here, Ito’s visual imagination makes it a genuinely horrifying melding of zombie and Godzilla tropes.

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Inio Asano – Nijigahara Holograph
Again, this has been talked about a lot on the board, and I haven’t read it for years, so I’ll keep it brief. This is my favourite Asano work, certainly the one which makes the most sense to me – a very deep dive into a dark and bottomless well of alternating timelines, each promising a legacy of abuse and cruelty. Asano’s detached, ethereal style is something I often find a little grating, but here it provides a high enough vantage point to let us deal with his vision of a world that decays inexorably towards evil and sorrow. His art, as always, is extraordinary – his images are as rich with detail and dreamlike terror as those of David Lynch, who is the obvious comparison for this story.

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Naoki Urasawa – Pluto
Urasawa’s greatest work in an extraordinary career, this is manga’s Planetary: a thrilling metafictional investigation into Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, a foundational text for all of comics. Urasawa reframes Tezuka’s story “The Greatest Robot on Earth” as a gripping murder mystery, as a detective trails a serial killer who has been picking off the world’s most famous robots. The robots, once mighty weapons of war, are long past their days of heroism and living in a state of elegiac perpetual retirement. Honestly it brings Tezuka alive in a whole new way, adapting the source material in the most satisfying way by finding a patient and mature equivalent to Tezuka’s story, delivering that same sense of adventure, invention and high stakes that Tezuka did so well but removing the sunny disposition and manic busywork that mark Astro Boy out as a text for children. It’s something I love in Western comics as well, the continual dialogue with what is essentially a rolling past, testing the universality of an idea by continually refining it. Urasawa is always gripping, but hitched to Tezuka’s force of imagination he really takes flight, achieving a unique synthesis of fantasy and humanism, past and present.

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Yuichi Yokoyama – New Engineering
This oversized collection of short pieces is in some ways a defining statement of experimentation for Yokoyama, dispensing with his usual thin veneer of narrative to give us moments in time, or perhaps more accurately, instances in systems. His art examines objects, sounds and situations from the perspective of a god, using a cone to carve a concavity into a mountain, or rolling out giant bales of turf across a flat plain. His characters, with their blank faces sprayed on extraordinary heads, are like little recording devices, prompting and commenting on inexplicable phenomena. The tactility he lends to unreal forms is incredible, as is the way he can communicate his massive sound effects with what to me are essentially abstract symbols. A highlight, and one of my favourite things Yokoyama has ever done, is the extraordinary fight scene in which the characters use blades to slice apart a roomful of objects in midair, creating a staccato dance of shape and motion. This is genuinely like nothing else in comics.

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Minoru Furuya – Boku to Issho / Together With Me
This is probably my last pick that isn’t super well-known, so bear with me. Together With Me is the second major work from Minoru Furuya, who started off with the more gag-heavy Ping Pong Club (not to be confused with Taiyo Matsumoto’s Ping Pong) and then went on to more “serious” stuff that never quite connected with me in the same way. This series follows two brothers who are kicked out of their dead mother’s house and go to Tokyo hoping to turn rags into riches. In Tokyo, they meet a third boy and, as a trio, start sponging off a kindly barber. Their efforts to make something of themselves are hampered by being the worst, most pathetic and detestable losers of all time. The two older boys especially are surreal and grotesque parodies of a typical underdog teenage protagonist: not just clumsy and bad with the ladies, but hateful and awful clowns, changing forms between panels like The Mask, gurning and screaming at their own inadequacy. Which is the main thing, I suppose; the emotions in this series are cartoonishly extreme, turned up to an intolerable volume for a laugh, but inside that extremity there’s somehow still nuance in the way you respond to these characters, a cyclonic mix of pity, hatred, hilarity and perhaps recognition. This is Beavis & Butthead but in a HOWL of sorrow that they can’t just be normal people. Foregrounding the profound depression in his protagonists, Furuya satirises the way we perceive idiocy itself, exposing the frustration, fear and shame of being an oaf. All that said, it’s the drawings that will catch your eye at first. The precision that he puts into his huge heads and bizarre facial expressions has a real evil energy about it, like Johnny Ryan with perfectly controlled draughtsmanship.
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Postby Wombatz » Tue Dec 04, 2018 12:58 pm

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so i've finally finished homunculus. it's an amazing ride for 5 and a half volumes, but then, quite suddenly (while our hero dreamily gazes at the sky after a pretty harrowing volume-long rape scene which seems to hint at deeper, sickly altruistic motives), yamamoto totally loses the plot. there is so much to work with, but he doesn't seem to know where to go, feels the water in different directions, skips the homunculi altogether for a stretch, adds a very crude freudian layer, then everybody worries about their closet homosexuality and it gets a bit soapish ... it's not all bad, the art is still great (though it gets considerably cleaner, more polish less soul), so i kept on reading ... it really picks up again for the last 2 and a half volumes, when the author has finally decided where to take this, even if it's in a more conventional psychological thriller mode. throughout there are pretty disturbing passages, but unfortunately the whole thing doesn't live up to its own initial amazingness.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Wed Dec 05, 2018 5:11 am

Haha, no memory of any of that. Glad it wasn't a complete dud!
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Postby sevenarts » Mon Dec 10, 2018 11:20 pm

Whoa, missed some posts here. Nice writeups - I need to read some Maruo, I've seen tons of images because his stuff is so iconic but never actually read any.

Hell yea on New Engineering. I remember how much that blew me away when it first came out - so often with comics, or any artform probably, even the really inventive stuff has an obvious lineage but Yokoyama really seemed like he came out of nowhere with a totally different approach to the medium than anybody else. A totally alien and unique way of thinking about what comics can do.
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Postby sevenarts » Tue Dec 11, 2018 12:05 am

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Blade of the Immortal by Hiroaki Samura
So... over the past few weeks I read this monster epic and whew, I'm almost overwhelmed with things to say, and at the same time have no idea where to begin. The more I think about it, it may be one of my new favorite comics, period, and it's definitely one of the most impressive manga I've ever read. Tonybricker does a great job of summing up a lot of what makes it special on the last page - its slow, character-centric emotional arcs; its subtly developed but very pointed themes; the intricacy and ambiguity of its approach to morality; the PHENOMENAL art. Seriously, Samura can just draw the crap out of anything, his figures and characters are so beautiful to look at even when they're just standing around talking, and when they're in motion - as they often are for the frequent fifty-page-long fight sequences - it's jaw-dropping. His action scenes are all kinetics, all motion lines and speed blur, and yet, though it's often intentionally confusing or unclear for a few beats exactly what's happened, when he wants to be precise he can be absolutely precise even when dealing with 5 characters all hurling themselves at each other with rapidly twirling weapons. At times he steps back for meticulously crafted pages with figures in tiny panels facing off against each other, capturing their movements in animation-like progressions, while more often he gets a similar degree of precision out of much simpler layouts.

There's such beauty to the combat here that the horror of it - the limbs getting lopped off every other page, the half-moons of blood spray, the gory consequences - hits on a delay. That may even be part of the point, because one of the major themes of the work is the abstraction and aestheticization of violence into concepts like principle, honor, revenge, style, and so on. The book is populated with characters who see violence not as a horrible act but as a symbol, or a means to an end, or a political statement, and Samura is continually wrestling with these ideas even in the midst of his flashiest battle sequences.

The other immediately impressive thing about this epic is just how good a job it does of fleshing out nearly every character. Early on there are a few villains who are pretty obviously just evil and monstrous, but as the book goes on it begins to seem more and more like that was merely a feint, a way of lulling the reader into unambiguously siding with the protagonist's revenge quest. It pretty soon becomes apparent that each faction, each character, has their own motivations, their own justifications, their own complex ideologies that drive what they do - and as tony says, many of the book's "villains" have far loftier goals and ambitions than the vengeful heroine. Even characters who commit the most monstrous acts will often take on subtler shadings the more Samura delves into their stories - not in order to forgive or redeem, but as a way of suggesting that stories are seldom as simple as "good" and "evil," and that there are mixtures of both in most people.

There are so many great character beats and arcs along the way that it'd be impossible to call them all out here, but I will say that the moment I really fell in love completely with the book was in the earlyish volumes dealing with the main antagonist's marriage to the daughter of a rival sword school's master, to seal an alliance. Samura devotes a great deal of care to these seemingly minor characters, investing great emotion and resonance and complexity to this whole sequence, which ultimately occupies such a minor place in the epic as a whole, easily forgotten, but it's such powerful, intense storytelling that it stands out. Samura repeats the feat again and again.

It's also worth noting that this is at times a deeply weird book. It is quite obviously steeped in research and historical context, meticulously utilizing the rigid class structures and hierarchies of Edo Japan as a story engine, but it is also willfully anachronistic and tonally all over the map. Samura apparently despises the self-seriousness of most historical fiction, so his own take on the genre features samurai who talk like modern street thugs, weird bursts of punky style that deliberately clash against all the kimonos, half-jokey "battle manga" info sheets on the various combatants. Samura is unafraid to mash-up different genres as well. For a few volumes in the middle, a relatively long stretch, the book unexpectedly becomes a claustrophobic body horror set piece with a mad doctor experimenting on the immortal hero, trying to transfer his immortality to convicts by grafting limbs back and forth between bodies. And it totally works - it's gruesome, darkly funny, and absolutely horrific, with Samura deliberately pushing the concept to such extremes that it's almost uncomfortable, and I didn't know whether to laugh or hurl. It's so good, and though it furthers many of the book's central themes, it's so tonally distinct from the surrounding story that it's a wonder it works so well. Not everything Samura tries does - there's some comedy filler in the second half, usually sexual, that kind of grates - but it's to the book's credit that it tries so many different things, so many different kinds of story, and makes it all hang together as a single grand narrative. Basically, this is an amazing work and one I'll be thinking about for a long time to come, I'm sure.
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Postby tonybricker » Tue Dec 11, 2018 2:05 am

I’m so glad you read it and liked it! Your writeup is fantastic. The wedding sequence was also one of my favorites, and I agree 100% with your thoughts on the body horrror/absurdity of the immortality experiments.

I’m really just enjoying rereading your post a few times o/
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Postby sevenarts » Tue Dec 11, 2018 8:06 am

\o Really glad you nudged this to the top of my list.
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Postby Hal Jordan » Tue Dec 11, 2018 8:33 am

Read the first compilation of Blame! and it was alright, but dont plan to continue on.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Tue Dec 18, 2018 11:23 am

Sorry for the delay…
Favourite manga Pt. 6/6!

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Kentaro Miura – Berserk
One of the great all-time fantasy epics of any genre and probably also a visual highpoint for manga, this is the story of the world’s strongest man standing his ground as all the demons of hell and beyond pour out onto the earth. The incredible visual design of the series is the first thing that will hit you – blended together from every corner of regional myth and fantasy, Miura’s gods and monsters are instantly intriguing and intimidating, like the most bonkers Final Fantasy juggernauts gifted with profound emotional depth, their deeds so mythic as to defy comprehension, and always promising the most insane explosions of kineticism as soon as a sword is drawn. There’s nothing else in comics that gives the same visceral thrill as Guts bifurcating ten people with one swing while knowing that he’s still hopelessly overwhelmed by the Lovecraftian entities hovering in the margins. Guts and his antagonist Griffith are part of a classic dynamic. Former friends, once closer than brothers, now locked together as nemeses. At this stage in the long, long tale, when you see Griffith ruling over his utopia, it’s surprisingly easy to forget that he’s meant to be the devil in disguise, while Guts, a monstrous serial killer streaked in blood, is still the notional hero. The series for sure digresses a whole lot and goes to all sorts of dumb and annoying places in its recent years, but the appeal is essentially undiminished and resistant to criticism: it’s pretty much the living definition of epic. Sevenarts is doing the lord’s work keeping everyone up to date in this thread.
https://forums.hipinion.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=91874

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Junji Ito – Uzumaki
Ito’s masterpiece and – for me – the clear apex of horror in manga. I think Uzumaki for most of its runtime represents an important evolution in how horror is put together. Specifically, this is horror based on a category rather than a root cause. “Spirals taking over a town” is not something that the characters can defend themselves against or predict even moment-to-moment. Instead, they’re left at the mercy of these strange elemental forces that murder and mutate them for seemingly no reason. The enforced episodic rhythms whereby threats seem to explode before dissipating into memory on the next page are something that a lot of people find frustrating, but it works for me. There’s a dreamlike, cyclical quality about it that mirrors the threat of the spiral itself. Above everything else though, it’s those images: relentless dreadful evocations of the spiral into madness. There’s something about it which gets straight to the heart of a vertiginous fear we all have inside ourselves – the plummeting irrational quality of terror.

3.
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ONE & Yusuke Murata – One Punch Man
OMFG I love OPM so much. I’m not sure a more entertaining comic has ever existed, and yet it’s also a PERFECT deconstruction of the mechanics of the superhero genre on a level with something like Miracleman, seen here through the eyes of creators with enough distance to pick it apart with tweezers, highlighting its absurdities and contradictions. One Punch Man is Saitama, a hero with (hilarious) origins shrouded in mystery. Getting his start in the superhero world by fighting an endless army of monsters, Saitama is disappointed to notice that he’s thousands of times more powerful than any of his fellow heroes and can destroy literally anything with a single punch. The mileage that ONE gets out of this setup is incredible, expertly crafting intense, high-stakes superhero drama, building up titanic, world-devouring threats to ridiculous extents until, like the coyote, you finally believe that maybe this time… Followed by the hilarious deflation as, once again, an alien god who’s been hyped for five volumes gets his head exploded in a single punch.

Backing up Saitama is a huge cast of brilliantly-designed heroes and villains, each perfectly walking the line between absurdist comedy and actually being fucking sick as hell. Over and over again, comedy characters like Mumen Rider (the hero whose gimmick is that he rides a bike with a basket) are given moments of genuine pathos and drama. Murata was the ideal choice for adapting ONE’s original webcomic: his action scenes and character designs are absolutely insanely good, but he also has a great knack of suddenly emphasising Saitama’s inherent goofiness for the comedy moments. Really difficult to imagine anyone not enjoying this. It’s simultaneously one of the best comedies, fight mangas and superhero comics of all time.

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Yuichi Yokoyama – Travel
We’ve talked about Yokoyama a lot already – apparently a fully-formed manga alien manifested in our dimension to show us the potential of the medium. In Travel, a train journey through a landscape is used to interrogate and explode the visual conventions of comic books, silently and rhythmically shifting patterns of light, shadow, movement, sound and everything else that might possibly make up a comics panel. To read Yokoyama, and Travel in particular, is to see impossible tricks played with an ancient toolset, but somehow despite the exhilaration and constant shock of the new that Yokoyama displays in his manipulation of the form, the mood you take away is totally blissful calm: the organic flow state of sitting in a train carriage, watching the countryside roll by, completely inhabiting the moment. His characters with their big blank abstract faces act completely in unison with one another and without hesitation or stress. It’s clear from the moment you open the book that you’re in the safe hands of a benevolent spirit, even while you’re shown a strange and unfamiliar angle on the medium, human behaviour and sight itself.

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Kiyohoko Azuma – Yotsuba&!
Yotsuba feels entirely necessary for my soul. I think my list and my taste in general is attracted to the dark and the unsettling but none of those titles feel as integral to my personality and my ability to navigate life as getting to see the world through the eyes of Azuma’s rambunctious five year-old. The setup is simple: Yotsuba lives with her father in the Japanese suburbs and every episode she comes into contact with a new thing – whether that’s elephants, swimming, a new type of ramen or the concept of death. I think she’s an all-time great character: a living embodiment of that intense, exuberant person we each have inside us, open to the world, furiously enthusiastic and participatory. The rest of the cast are mostly neighbours and friends of her Dad – a very pleasant collection of loyal, mild-mannered goofballs for Yotsuba to bounce off, giving us the correct perspective to see her properly, and appreciate the way in which she kind of creates the world anew. Azuma is a beautiful and hilarious cartoonist, but fills in Yotsuba’s backgrounds with a placid photorealism, doing nothing to overemphasise (for example) the scale and majesty of an elephant but using Yotsuba’s reaction as a lens through which we see just how insanely huge it is, and have our minds blown all over again. I find it very moving sometimes – weeping for lost innocence maybe; it’s feel-good in a way that feels genuinely profound, like it connects to a deep inherent sunniness. Simple pleasures maybe, but it’s one of my favourite pieces of art in any medium.
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Postby sevenarts » Tue Dec 18, 2018 7:41 pm

That is a helluva top 5. I love 4 out of 5 of those so I feel like I really need to read One Punch Man now.

Travel, Berserk, and (newly) Blade of the Immortal would probably be my 1-2-3 if I did this. We've talked a bunch about Travel before in various threads but it's really worth reiterating just how extraordinary it is - totally unique in the ways it takes advantage of comics' potential. Again and again in that book Yokoyama does things that seem like they should be obvious or basic - the way he plays with light, shadow, and movement especially - and yet the way he does it creates this entirely unique sensation.

And Berserk is of course my total obsession. Yeah I've been frustrated with some later chapters - and that's reading it in a condensed period, so I really feel for those who lived through the mostly dull Sea God saga in realtime - but it's just so fun and wild and unpredictable at its best, and it's covered such expansive ground over the years. It's amazing now to think back on the Golden Age saga and realize that that was the same book, and how much has happened to those characters since then.

Anyway, great list and writeups, that was really fun to follow and I got some more great recs out of it along the way.
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Postby barrier » Tue Dec 18, 2018 8:44 pm

Don't have anything to add, but I combed the entire thread and binge downloaded about 25-30 different things thanks to you guys and have read manga literally all day today. Blame! is blowing my mind.

Prior to this thread I've read like 5 manga: Akira, Death Note, Bakuman, Uzumaki and Oyasumi Punpun. Thanks to everyone who's posted for helping me broaden my horizons.
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Postby Annie May » Tue Dec 18, 2018 10:29 pm

Reading blade of the immortal now, buying a couple of the big omnibus volumes each week. I know that it's a huge waste of money but i just wanted to have physical copies. At least it'll look good on my bookshelf after I'm done and i have a couple friends who'd probably want to borrow them.
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Postby barrier » Wed Dec 19, 2018 1:48 am

blazed through Homunculus. mostly just wanted to see how you'd end a story like this lol.
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Postby HotFingersClub » Wed Dec 19, 2018 5:35 am

Everyone has to read One Punch Man
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Postby shizaam » Wed Dec 19, 2018 1:56 pm

this thread rules.

any recs for kids (12 and under)?
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Postby internetfriend » Wed Dec 19, 2018 2:27 pm

i finished berserk a week or two ago

it’s funny that after like 10 volumes that i didn’t really care about at all, it ended on one that was actually a pretty substantial cliffhanger

like if the most recent one had been 34 i wouldntve reallt cared that 35 wasn’t available, but hoo boy do i want 40
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Postby HotFingersClub » Thu Dec 20, 2018 7:44 am

shizaam wrote:this thread rules.

any recs for kids (12 and under)?


Yotsuba&! always gets put on lists like this although I don't know to what extent it's just kid-related and very good rather than actually kid-friendly. I think a kid would have a blast with One Punch Man too if they don't mind seeing monsters explode quite graphically.

Also Chi's Sweet Home, Dragon Ball, One Piece, Sgt. Frog... Some of the old Tezuka stuff would fit the bill
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Postby jca » Thu Dec 20, 2018 1:02 pm

Did anyone feel like some dread/anxiety while reading Travel? I feel like the close-ups of hands and faces and seeing two characters lock eyes ramped up the tension
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Postby jca » Thu Dec 20, 2018 1:12 pm

azumi and vagabond are two other neat samurai/assassin mangas with strong characterization. i like how understated azumi is outside of fight scenes. the first volume stuck with me for a bit.

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Postby Meeps » Thu Dec 20, 2018 1:19 pm

Shonen Jump just launched a $2/month subscription service to read a bunch of the classic manga they've published, like Dragon Ball, One Piece, Death Note, Naruto, Yu-Gi-Oh, Rurouni Kenshin etc

https://www.viz.com/shonenjump
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Meeps
 
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