Yo I heard you like reading comix backward, homie...

Gingerbread Man on 5/9/2011 at 01:51

Holla, manga faggots! I need some guidance. From you.

Here are some titles I read / have read:

Berserk - Goddamn I love this series. I just... I... Even the fairy bullshit. Berserk is absolutely my favorite non-American comic ever, and I subscribed to Heavy Metal when it was good.

Uzumaki - Love Junji Ito so much. The horror is so surreal and yet somehow impossibly believable.

Gyo - Probably my second favorite manga. The love story is so perfectly interwoven with the flatulence-powered elephants etc. Heard there was a movie, no way can they do it properly... just like Uzumaki.

I started reading one about a school that just mysteriously vanished and was whisked off to another dimension or something. I forget what it was called, but I was quite enjoying it.

Started Approach of the Titans or some shit about walls and a fifty meter flaming giant kicking holes in them so littler giants fuck I don't know. It's so sloooow and unless this guy's gonna go Shyamalan on me I already know how this whole story is gonna go. I do play some jrpgs.

Ichi the Killer - OMFG what a great series. So glad I read it before I saw saw the movie, because the movie was nowhere NEAR as complex and rich and thrilling as the comics.

Short collection of spookies, I forget who and what it was called but it all had the theme of inappropriate intrusion by faceless, almost formless creeps. Loved that one.

And that's about it. I keep hearing about Death Note and other currently popular series, but they didn't really grab me. I even read what was apparently the pinnacle of bio-horror and I got kinda bored and stopped.

Help me find something new along these lines. Or we can just talk about the ones I've read. If you guys start talking about ones I haven't read, try not to be too spoilery. And don't use spoiler tags because I have no willpower.

Okay? Okay!

Scots Taffer on 5/9/2011 at 01:53

Holy shit, the Berserk anime... that was a mindfuck.

That is all.

Gingerbread Man on 5/9/2011 at 01:55

Man, believe me when I tell you the anime is less than the first tenth of it, and it NEVER LETS UP.

But yeah, the Eclipse... Brrr... :D

june gloom on 5/9/2011 at 02:07

I hear Monster is really good. I've seen the anime, and it's very atmospheric, though I always seem to get hung up around episode 20 because the story kind of drags for a while. Not read the manga, but I probably will, once I have time.

Sg3 on 5/9/2011 at 02:53

I'm surprised that it took five posts for tentacles to be mentioned.

demagogue on 5/9/2011 at 03:26

If you like Berserk, you might like Blade of the Immortal, another on the mindfuck end, or just really bloody with a touch of supernatural. But the artwork is incredible. He does pencil work, and sometimes has these full page panels that are just fantastic. Only thing I don't like so much is how they translate colloquialisms into English, but it's a minor thing.

My favorite manga is Lupin III, about a band of modern thieves. Very funny, and just clever, action-packed stories, not childish. I basically learned Japanese off this manga.

Cowboy Bebop has a decent manga version.

I sometimes like just random series I pick up. I picked up one recently called 'Me and the Devil Blues', sort of a mythical supernatural take on Robert Johnson's life, where he has some mysterious "encounter" at the crossroads and wakes up 6 months later (for everybody else; for him it was like a weekend), not entirely sure what happened, we're not sure what's dream and what's real, but suddenly he's a master blues guitarist, but bad mojo follows him around... Artwork is great and esoteric. I love it it's a Japanese artist bringing us into the world of the 1920s delta blues and black sharecroppers, but also this dark surreal dreamy evil undercurrent. You can tell he loves the music and knows how to tap into its spirit.

Mr.Duck on 5/9/2011 at 10:59

Lone Wolf & Cub, baby.

And for something sci-fi GUNNM (Battle Angel Alita - the original, then Last Order if you're up to it scraping the last volumes including the original ending and taking the story into a whole new direction and expanding on that).

Yeah, long enough to keep you interested for a while.

:cool:

dexterward on 5/9/2011 at 12:17

Three cheers for Lupin! :)

It might count as "the obvious one" but fuck it, Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex is one of the mindbogglingly cleverest things I`ve ever seen, across all mediums. Can`t at the moment think of a Western equivalent, probably because there isn`t one.

Ok, it`s an anime, but I bet manga isn`t far off in quality.

Sulphur on 5/9/2011 at 13:18

I've been 'reading' Akira since 2007. Gosh it's a slog. Miyazaki's Nausicaa has a boring and convoluted eco-friendly story that takes too long to get going but fantastic, fantastic art.

My absinthe-swilling friend keeps raving about the One Piece manga, anyone know how worthwhile that is?

Thirith on 5/9/2011 at 13:30

I quite liked Osamu Tezuka's Buddha, a multi-volume retelling of the life of, well, Buddha. It's not told straight, with Tezuka breaking the fourth wall and using anachronisms every now and then, but it works pretty well IMO, with some beautiful art work.