Originally posted at myanimelist.net.
Asano’s stories would drip with cliché and hackneyed nonsense in another author’s hands; they are so ripe for rolling your eyes at. But Solanin is fresh, adult, funny, compelling and emotional. It manages to roll up those moments of our early twenties into two volumes of heart-felt drama presented in what is now a typically Asano fashion.
Originally posted at myanimelist.net.
A precursor to Yoshitoshi Abe’s much praised Haibane Renmei, we have a similar setup here with White Rain: people waking up on the other side of reality with no memories.
Originally posted at myanimelist.net.
With this manga we have a master storyteller breezing through an intriguing backdrop, occasionally threatening to descend into cliche, but avoiding it enough to become an entertaining romp through the world of women’s baseball in post-war Japan. The stakes are high, the hopes and dreams of a nation rest on the left arm of a woman, can tetsuwan girl carry the burden?
Originally posted at myanimelist.net.
Takehiko Inoue’s Real is his most mature and accomplished work. You won’t find constant court action here with secret techniques powering up people. This is a tale about three young men, the issue of disability in Japan, and of course basketball.
Originally posted at myanimelist.net.
Fuyumi Soryo is an intelligent writer. Her use of all the tropes of high school based manga feels refreshing, and her focus on mental, emotional instability and psychological scars is fascinating and compelling. It’s assisted through the use of contemplative dialogue and characters interacting to move the plot forward, rather than the plot conspiring in convoluted or clichéd ways to move the characters.
Originally posted at myanimelist.net.
Without going too much into the plot, what we ultimately get in this manga is a pretty break-neck paced thriller about corporations seeking power, offspring demanding answers for their reason for existing, unlikely brotherhoods forming while others disintegrate, spontaneous violence from psychopaths, history and economics lessons, and lots of excellent quotes as usual from Buronson aka Sho Fumimura aka Yoshiyuki Okamura. (Stop confusing us man, just pick one!)
Originally posted at myanimelist.net.
Smuggler is a 4 chapter crime caper that rolls along with Tarantino-esque underworld hijinks and Korean gangster flick humour.
Originally posted at myanimelist.net.
Set in the same universe as all Tsutomu Nihei’s manga are: the nondescript urban landscape of our nightmares. The architecture is as suffocatingly bleak as usual; the story is faster paced than Nihei’s most well known work, Blame, due to this manga’s short length. Maybe it would be a good litmus test for newcomers to his world.
Originally posted at myanimelist.net.
Gantz is about a room somewhere with a black ball and a very infantile presence who gives out childish nicknames to unfortunately-recently-dead and usually unwilling participants in a ‘game’ that requires them to kill aliens in a kind of real-life recreation of a First Person Shooter. The brilliance is in the mystery and its ridiculousness.
Originally posted at myanimelist.net.
Tsutomu Takahashi’s crime thriller Jiraishin is a decisive step away from most manga tropes and conventions. It feels more like a manga adaptation of a gritty US TV series in the vein of NYPD Blue, or to go even further back, like a Japanese take on TV series The Equalizer.
Cihan Narin 