I’ve been trying to find some great anime and manga to try and I was wondering what your favorites/recs would be?
Usual disclosures: I worked for a bookstore during the height of the American publishing manga boom. I worked as the backroom manager/stock supervisor. I have read EVERYTHING that was published up until around 2008/2009. My interest waned a bit after that. If it existed and was carried by a national retailer, I have read it. So this is going to be a list of things that I really, really enjoyed.
As always, your milage may vary, and many of these may not be readily available any longer due to, well, everyone going OUT OF BUSINESS. It’s a problem.
This got way longer than I imagined, so…. CUT! 8)
-Yotsuba&! From the creator of Azumanga Daioh, if you ever wanted to watch a bunch of grown men deal with a strange and off beat child in a way that seems startlingly realistic, this is your manga. A small girl, and her adoptive father, move into a new house, and she does what small children do best: learn, create chaos, and grow. There’s little by way of plot. Some chapters are structred around as small a thing as learning to flip a pancake, but Yotsuba, her father, her neighbors and her father’s friends make it a book that is worth reading.
- Penguin Revolution Look for it used or at comic conventions, because it is worth it. I am not kidding, I love this series with a rather desperate mania. It takes all the stupid tropes that I hate in shojo manga (forced cross dressing, dead parents, wanting to break into show business, love triangles) and somehow makes it all awesome. AWESOME. A girl with a deadbeat father learns that the beautiful girl at school is actually a beautiful boy, forced by his father, the head of a talent agency, to dress as a girl at school if he wants to make an attempt at being an actor. Now that that our main character knows, she must dress as a boy and be his manager. They will both live with his adoptive brother, an award winning teen actor. The two boys eventually make a blockbuster movie where they are the romantic leads with one of them dressing as a girl. And the series legitimately seems to end on a threeway.
Also, another star actor being in love with our heroine’s male persona. The fact that our male lead breaks into the big time by playing his own mother in a biopic! Kidnappings! People in comas! I don’t even know who is in love with who! I don’t think it matters! And our heroine has the ability to sense ‘star power’ by her ability to see literal wings on the backs of those who have the ability to become superstars. I am not kidding about any of this. It shouldn’t work. It does. More than once I finished a volume, put it aside thinking, “Wow, that was fun, that was great, OH MY GOD WAIT A SECOND THAT IS COMPLETELY MESSED UP WHAT- HOW DID I THINK THIS IS OKAY?”
The mangaka also wrote another very good series, Land of the Blindfolded, about a trio of kids, one who can see the past, one who can see the future, and one who can’t control her ability to see beyond the present. In the land of the ‘blind,’ those who can only see the real world, they are merely blindfolded. And occasionally, that blindfold will slip, or they can take it off, only to find that it will not go back on. And things are not what they should be. It deals with grief, guilt, suffering and the rage that comes from seeing secrets in a very visceral way.
-Fever This is Mahwa, Korean comics, but it’s very similar to manga. First of all, let’s get this out of the way. The boys in this are BEAUTIFUL. So are the girls, but hey, I appreciate a hot boy that still looks like, well, you know, a boy. I’m shallow, what can I say.
Fever deals with a girl on the verge of collapse. She had a best friend, a sweet and shy girl who was her constant companion outside of school. In school, however, her friend was the constant target of bullies and harrassment and the two had an unspoken agreement that they would pretend not to know each other once the school day started. When the bullying takes its toll, her friend kills herself, but not before sending one last text to the person who had been her daily lifeline. Left with the guilt, our heroine is spiralling out of control, her life falling to ruin, when she discovers a cabal of misfits and outcasts who hold court at a school beyond the edges of town.
The interplay of characters and the slow build of relationships are fascinating, and the glimpse into the structured, precise life this girl casts off, where her dead friend is remembered only by her seat number, is measured and nuanced. Also, very pretty boys. Did I mention that?
-Ghost Hunt A girl gets caught up in a web of supernatural events and goes right down the rabbit hole. Grotesque and creepy, the series focuses on a group of exorcists and ghost hunters run by a brilliant and egotistical teenage boy. Yeah, it’s that kind of a thing, except she promptly nicknames him basically, well, “Narcissistic,” and the supporting cast is joyful. An Austrailian priest, a buddhist monk with a rock star attitude and a wardrobe to match, a miko with hidden depths, a famous television psychic and the cool and expressionless assistant make for a scooby-doo style odd group, but the cases are bloody and violent, horrifying and creepy, with discussions of superstition, legend, and the damage human beings do to one another. Not something I can read at night, but in the clear light of day it is a shiver inducing joy.
-Aqua and Aria two parts of the same story, about a girl who becomes a gondolier in the canals of Neo-Venezia, a replica of Venice on Mars. It is the comic equivilent of a dream on a spring afternoon, hazy and warm and soft on the edges, passing without any sense of urgency, with the fantastical taken as common place. Our heroine makes friends and rises in her chosen profession, learning the ropes and learning about her new home at the same time. There’s no real storyline here, nothing but the lazy float of delicately rendered boats in sweeping old canals, with festivals and visitors and alien cats sweeping along with her. It is calming and gentle and warm, and I love it.
-Ooku: The Inner Chamber The manga-ka, Fumi Yoshinaga, is actually also my favorite writer of yaoi, because man, is her stuff weird, but this series is strange and fantastic. In a feudal Japan where the vast majority of men have died of the mysterious ‘red pox,’ roles that were traditionally male have, by necessity, passed to women, including that of the shogun. As gender roles become fluid, and the male ability to procreate becomes highly prized, the sense of self that had previously held the country in balance is jeopardized. Lies become fiction become myth become legend, and life continues in that vien. This is not for the faint of heart, violence, including sexual violence visited upon both male and female characters, is endemic, but none of it is treated lightly, and none of it is left unexamined. The damage is real, and the characters bear the scars of the things they do and the things that are done to them, as time passes.
Also worth a try is Yoshinaga’s Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy! a weird little volume of her own life as a comic creator and foodie in modern Japan. She is perhaps most famous here for the outlandish series Antique Bakery a yaoi series so embedded in food porn that there were scratch and sniff covers. Not Love follows a series of restaurant visits and interactions with friends and collegues, told with warmth and humor.
-Genshiken is a weird little series. I’m not gonna lie. The sheer amount of “boys like to play/watch/read porn” bits are a little offputting, but there’s also a raw honesty to it. And the female characters are just as messed up as the guys. The nominal main character, a boy entering college with the determination to let his geek freak flag fly, is drawn into the biggest group of misfits on campus.
If you were ever part of a ‘geek’ club, you know these people. Oh, GOD, do you know these people. And they are treated with affection and kindness, even as they are stripped bare. They are socially awkward and occasionally creepy and strange and still the people you want to spend time with. There’s a reoccurring theme of what you give up to pass as normal, and whether that effort is healthy, or even worth it. There are model builders and cosplayers and dojin makers and fragmented, broken people.
-Kingyo Used Books Part ‘history of manga,’ part slice of life, this series follows a seemingly unconnected group of readers as they pass through the doors of Kingyo’s front doors, and down into the manga dungeon. As each book finds its reader and each reader finds their book, the staff keeps the stock fresh and the history coming. For anyone who loves books, there is a lot to love here, and for everyone who is interested in the history and culture of manga, there’s even more.
From Sailor Moon to Galaxy Express 999, from an archer struggling with performance anxiety to a student who thinks smiles are lies, from the lovelorn book hunter to the street brawler looking for a shojo fix, the characters are engaging, and so are the stories they find. For everyone who’s ever found their keystone book, you’ll root for these people to find theirs.
-Swan It’s a ballet manga. Published in 1978. When shojo was SHOJO. When the girls had eyes like pools if liquid and the boys had extremely bad hair. The rise of ballet in Japan is shown with careful attention to real dancers and historical cross overs with Russia, Britain and the US. Language barriers are never brought up, no one cares, but there’s deep discussion of classical ballets, modern dance, and the fashion is 1970’s horrible.
I love it with an unreasonable passion.
-Apothecarius Argentum A poison tester that has injested so much poison that he is literally toxic to the touch becomes a healer, and nurses a love for the princess who once saved his life. An overarcing theme of court intrigue, betrayal, and fear marks the volumes, with a tough, headstrong and fierce princess, and the gentle, deadly outcast who protects her at all cost. As a Remy/Rogue shipper, I much enjoy this, even if it never got a published ending. 8)
-Princess Princess First of all, SCREW YOU. THIS SERIES IS AWESOME.
Second of all, yeah, I’m kind of ashamed of the deep affection I have for this stupidity.
A new student enters an all-male school that deals with its hormone crazed boy population by giving them Princesses to worship. These Princesses are male students who spend their days dressed, well, as girls. Everyone knows they are boys. This is not a secret. This is not a lie that is told.
Everyone knows.
No one cares.
Don’t think too hard about this. Don’t… Try to make this make sense. Just enjoy the truly bizarre, even for Japan, levels of cross-dressing.