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Currently I am reading Moyashimon. I had caught wind of the anime some time back when my college anime club was showing episodes of it, and it dawned on me when I was in the book store to pick it up to see how the manga is. While I know it's got some scientific background to it, I'm finding that I'm enjoying it more for the comedic elements that are being presented in this Japanese college setting.

Last edited by Jose Cruz on Tue Feb 23, 2016 12:44 am; edited 2 times in total

Reading some academic works on Manga and anime:

Adult Manga - Sharon Kinsella

Imagine Japanese culture being the subject of Marxist class warfare. Manga represents the working class and it's rebellion against the capitalistic system, Manga is the medium for the oppressed elements of Japanese society. While an interesting perspective on Manga this Marxism looks rather pseudo scientific and inconsistent with the facts.

Anyway, reading further into the book this Marxism becomes sidelined and the author focuses more on the actual reality of the Japanese Manga world ca. 1997, at a time when Manga was becoming associated with Japan itself: before the late 1980's Manga wasn't regarded as art but after Tezuka's death in 1989, several Manga museums spread through Japan, by the mid 1990s there were Manga museums in all major cities and university courses teaching Manga everywhere.

The World of Japanese Comics - Frederick Schodt

Now, for a more sober analysis of manga. This work focuses on the Manga world as it was in 1983, when this book was written. It changed quite a lot since and Manga is a much more mature medium now. At the time Manga was beginning to get extremely popular and the stylization wasn't as aggressive as today. Apparently since the early 1980s the aesthetic standards of shoujo Manga spread through the whole Manga medium.

Anime: A History - Clements

A very dry and academic history of Japanese animation, beginning in 1917-1918 when the first professional animated short films were made. So far it's more a history of the industry and not a history of the aesthetic principles guiding the medium.

So I have been reading Gantz. After finishing the anime, I thought that I should finally try this manga thing. I did try it some years ago with Kekkaishi, but I lost interest for some reason even though I kind of got into it. But I've really liked Gantz. It's awesome, it's better than the anime for sure. Anyone can die and that suspense makes it so great. Or more like how long is each character going to last. I'm at volume 16 right now and... (massive spoilers ahead) spoiler[Tae!!! NO!!! ADSAFGDSJ *incomprehensible*... Goddammit. She was the sweetest girl in the world. I prayed every chapter that no harm would come to that sweet girl. But I kind of knew it was going to happen.] Ahh... gotta go read what happens next.

I am also reading Shomin Sample, which was at the beginning a very interesting story now, after all the major plot elements have come together, become a very stale thing, involving repetition of tropes from harem shows. The art style, however, is pretty good standard contemporary shounen manga style.

I really delved into Manga these days:

Reading Gunnm: Mars Chronicles. From the master storyteller Yukito Kishiro, it's a brilliant exposition of the nature of conflict and a course in science fiction worldbuilding. Of course, the characters are always great like in his previous titles. However, I noticed that his Manga became less and less serious and started to incorporate a lot of otaku pop culture terms like "tsundere", it has the risk of becoming more of a self parody even though Last Order has been great like the original.

I also have been reading some Chinese stuff, I the Female Robot is kinda like a mahua version of Gunnm, including a female main character with a robotic body, however, in this case she is a robot housing a human consciousness and it's not explained how that human consciousness went inside the robot's mind. Lots of cool fights and even though the art is not quite up to the standards of the best manga I found it quite enjoyable to apreciate in its simplicity and the entertainment factor of this is huge, has a lot of good comedy (the Chinese might be really good at comedy or at least I like their sense of humor).

Also I have been reading Saturn Apartments, an award winning seinen Manga about the people who clean the windows of a massive orbital ring that has been constructed to house Earth's population after an ecological revolution that turned the earth into a human free zone. However, the Manga is tremendously boring and has some really ugly character designs. Like most artistic manga, it's supposed to look ugly and anti-commercial in order to attract the people with refined tastes I guess.

Moonlight Fromage, this is a very weird shounen title. It features the main character, a 15 year old boy fan of visual novels featuring bishoujos who wakes up as the gothic lolita main character of an erode he was playing and inside the world of the game. I actually liked the manga's atmosphere, it's a very moe Manga without plot and involving only cute situations and all the characters shown are gothic lolita girls, although there are references in the dialogue to the existence of other types of people in that world.

Haven't been reading as much manga lately. I've been trying to catch up on my anime and regular comics a bit more. But I felt the tides changing so I'm picking up some more manga for now.

I just read the most recent volume of Citrus. I'm enjoying it thus far. It's just enough different from Girlfriends and Whispered Words to not feel like a simple clone of either of them. I also just got the complete collection of Kisses, Sighs, and Cherry Blossom Pink as well. I need to get the vol 3 omnibus of Whispered Words with my next purchase. Been on a bit of a Yuri kick lately as you can tell.

I just ordered the first 4 volumes each of Freezing & Monster Musume from rightstuf. So I'll start them when they arrive. Actually with Freezing it was the first 2 dual collected works, but it equates to volumes 1-4. So mix in some T&A with the sweet Yuri lol. I've seen the first season of the Freezing anime but not Monster Musume.

Somewhere in all this I need to work in The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service and Battle Angel Alita Last Order. Never enough time to get everything in. Stupid work and stupid bills lol.

Been reading:

Oh My Goddess! The classic of classics in harem manga. So far I am finding it very entertaining romantic comedy although I am finding the characters slightly cliche, well, they are extremely influential characters type anyway. Great series so far, the pinnacle of harem entertainment. Though I disliked the art style in these first 20 chapters, it looks kinda crude but it is improving, and now at least the girls are looking less "weird" than in the first chapters.

Assassination Classroom Now, this is entertainment. In fact, yesterday I cried while reading it, I found the concept of a teacher dedicated to his students even though the students want to kill him very inspiring. Thing is that now that I am finishing my PHD I am teaching college kids as well so I kinda identified with the "monster" character. Also, doesn't the main male character look exactly like a girl? It's usual in Manga for the main male to look cuter than other male characters (such as in Oh My Goddess!) but here its pretty extreme, he looks just like Yotsuba!

Tokyo Ghoul Now this is something more gory. Being precise. I still don't quite understand how the ghoul demographics work though: aren't the ghouls supposed to like, you know, exterminate humanity at this rate? How can society function normally if there are hundreds of thousands of ghouls killing people all the time? Well, ghouls are certainly very few in number, you need 10,000 persons for every ghoul or so to feed the ghouls using minimal amount of human meat and with a mortality rate not much higher than Brazilian homicide rates.

Erased a great Mexican time travel soap opera, in minimum number of words. I a, finding it slightly boring though because the characters look so serious and the plot is rarher cliche and heavy handed. Still I and finding the Manga as a whole a nice and valuable experience.[/list]

So, I will occasionally add a thing or two to Wikipidia. I'm no expert, I don't know all the rules and making tables completely confuses me. But I have a log in and when I visit the site I will invariably check what updates have been made to pages I've added to. A few months ago when I was reading all of the Mitsuru Adaichi I could find I made improvements to a few of the related pages. Expanding the cliff notes type synopsis of H2, fixing character descriptions in Touch. But it's kinda bugged me that the page for Mix. was such a stub. I added the most basic plot description months ago, but it still bugged me that there were no character descriptions.

So, that's what I did today, I reread what there is of Mix, and paused periodically to write character descriptions.

In the end, it looks a little impressive, but as always I feel an odd combination of pride and embarrassment for doing it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_%28manga%29

Jose Cruz,

I do agree that Saturn Apartments dragged in some parts, but I really enjoyed how it all came together in the end.

As for what I've been reading:
Alice in the Country of Joker: Circus and Liar's Game-I have to admit that it was kind of jarring reading some of Blood's lines since they're really different from what the original Blood would say. I actually haven't played the games first hand, but from what I've seen, the English version of Blood is a vulgar a-hole(though not all the time) while the Japanese one is a classy a-hole. Aside from that, I enjoyed the story and the art.

Phia_one, I will try to read Saturn apartments to the end then.

Been reading now:

One Piece - After reading an article which claims 88% of its readers are adult and after reading a few chapters of it when I was 13, I decided to begin reading One Piece again from the beginning (its not like I remember anything about it). So far it's pretty entertaining character driven story, the art style is pretty simple but effective. Overall, I did not find its first 35 chapters to be anything exceptional though.

Pandora Crimson Shell Ghost Urn - Masamune Shirow is the best. And here is a manga that's very different from his usual work. It looks like a mix between GitS and K-On, very cool modern otaku stuff. I am noticing more and more that my tastes are converging closer and closer to Japanese otaku tastes.

Birdy the Mighty - Remake of the 1980's manga, so far so good. Pretty conventional but still very entertaining (the gender bender stuff is not really gender bender but more like two persons sharing the same point of view and shifting bodies).

Right now I am reading You have a lot of Freckles

The story reminds me of my high school days like the field trips and mostly having fun with friends and teasing each other. However this story is from a point of view of a woman. Confused with the actions of a man towards her, she came to like him. There is past involved so it becomes a love triangle. Very Happy

typical puppy love haha Laughing

I've just read my new copy of vol. 8 of No Matter How I Look at It... and liked it very much. I thought it was a return to what I like about the story of Tomoko: the exaggerated but emotionally true depiction of loneliness, which is funny and wrenching. Whereas recent volumes seemd to me to be slipping into an easy rut of internet and pop-culture references, with Tomoko being offered as an otaku mascot, which is to my mind unfunny and pointless.
So I liked vol. 8 very much. Especially the image of Tomoko's mother helping her pack for the class trip and chatting to her. (I like those glimpses of Tomoko from a point of view other than her own, where you see that she is loved, and everything is okay!)

Finally finished Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin. A masterpiece, IMO. A extremely well told sci-fi coming of age story/war drama. Even if you've already seen the origin MSG tv series, it's still worth reading. Yasuhiko basically smooths out all of Tomino's weird quirks and add a ton of extra characterization to the main cast, making the characters more fleshed-out than in the show. In addition, the manga seems a lot grittier and more of a war story. Also, Yas' artwork is fantastic. His character designs have this classic 70s/80s look that's refreshing compared to a lot of the designs we get nowadays. And last but not least, there are some epic action scenes. Anyway, highly recommended. I have the Veritcal release, and though it's expensive, it's really worth it.

Gantz Vols. 1-2- Very entertaining so far but also a little trashy. At this point, it's pretty much a series of long battles with lots of gore and some sex thrown in. That said, I actually think Gantz does a pretty good job of showing how characters react when thrown in life or death situations. And Oku does a good job of showing the main characters mindset. The entire premise of the Gantz game story seems like a very twisted social experiment since the "players" are people from different backgrounds being forced to work together. The art is pretty good, but can look a bit stiff. I know Oku is well known for using CG backgrounds in Gantz and you can definitely tell as the buildings and objects have this plastic look to them. His character art is great though body proportions can look funny (especially boobs, lol). otherwise his art has a very clean look, despite all the gore. Not much story or character development so far but the interesting premise, action, and bits of dark humor and social commentary are keeping me interested.

See, see, I am making progress on my backlog! So stfu! Yeah, slowly but surely, I'm trying to make lots of backlog progress, I have read a lot over the past couple of days especially.

Orange omnibus 1
So this series was pretty highly anticipated by me, and for once, it actually lived up to the hype! The fact that I have to wait until late May for vol 2 is pretty painful, but I'm used to that on a yearly basis with things like Real, so I'm glad this one will be mercifully short (because Seven Seas was awesome enough to just do the whole things in two volumes). They picked a damn good cliffhanger, let me tell you that.
I'm looking forward to it getting more popular with an anime though, assuming they just follow the manga, a good 12ish ep series should cover it all perfectly and be engaging and awesome. It's been a while since I've read a 2.5 vol omnibus so quickly, I simply cannot wait to lend this one to my friend to get her addicted to it as well! And then have her frighten me by demanding vol 2, so I might just wait until May and lend her both (it will be safer for me that way, lol)

Demon From Afar 1-6
Kaori Yuki seems to be best read either one volume at a time, or all of the volumes all at once. This was an "all of the volumes, all at once" sort of thing. But I think it's kind of a shame, it started off so promising, the first 2 volumes were quite good, but it failed on the world building aspect really hard, and it made it difficult to follow at times as a result. That, and all the sudden plot twists weren't helpful either. IMO, this definitely did not deserve Yen's hardcover treatment (though something like Bride's Story does, if only on art alone, but it's also just a better manga anyway). I'd rate this one pretty low on my Kaori Yuki scale, I need a break from her it would seem.

Saturn Apartments
I read some of the first few volumes ages ago, but it was really ages ago. This one was also better all at once (I had picked out vols for three series, but just ended up doing the first two all at once anyway, lol). I'm clearly doing some of the shorter complete series first. But I did really enjoy this one. It starts off a bit more episodic, but there is an overall plot that slowly emerges without being too sudden. There are a lot of side characters in the guild though that you do need to know as well or the series is harder to follow, which is probably why it is better read in a larger chunk.
I can safely say that it's not for everyone, but it most seemed to remind me of things like the Freedom OVA and the more mundane parts of Planetes (the not hard science parts, but the junk cleaning parts) and whatnot. I feel like it's the sort of thing that you know if you like it or not. But if you do like it, it's a good one. I'm not too big on IKKI in general, but this is probably my favorite of the IKKI series that I've read.

Princess Jellyfish omnibus 1
I knew there was more to the anime! At least it concluded its arc, but I really did want more, and I'm enjoying the manga a lot too. I think omnibus 1 got through most of the manga, odds are in omnibus 2, I'll actually get some new material, and I'm very much looking forward to it. If not omni 2, then definitely omni 3.

And now, just the things that I actually keep up on in my ongoing lists:
My Love Story 8
Yeah, this series is still awesome, did you expect anything less? Gawd, it's so friggin adorable, how is this so? And they finally started year 2 of school! Therefore, time has progressed, neat!

So Cute, It Hurts! 5-6
I probably should've read these before My Love Story 8, but it's still cute, and it seems to be going into a new arc, so that's pretty cool. I can definitely respect that it resolves some romantic things quickly, y'know, the sort of things that other series will drag out forever needlessly sort of things.

Love Stage 5
Dammit, I almost forgot this is yaoi, it is under SuBLime. Though this volume is low on that quota, but the next volume is totally going to start with a sex scene. But it's still adorable to me, I'm kinda all for that.

Real 14
Dammit, the volume is over already?! But, I was getting into it and all! And now, I've gotta wait a whole year (at least) for another one? Dammit! At least this isn't Viz's fault, it really does come out slowly in Japan. But each volume, I'm right back where I was and super excited again.

Void's Enigmatic Mansion 3
I had totally forgotten this one had come out, even with my detailed list, but I did get it during the Rightstuf clearance sale, so that's good. It's one of the few full color series to come out in the US, and I do like how it tells individual stories that all interlink. It completed one and started another, which I am sure to forget by the time v4 comes out, lol.

Next up on my list: LoGH novel 1 and Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer (which I have read like, 1.5 omnis of, out of 5, lol, I'll just start at the beginning again, I know me...)

classicalzawa wrote:

Saturn Apartments

It definitely reminded me of the good parts of Planetes, too. When it was episodic it was great, and while the 'plot' drags a little at first, it finishes very gracefully and pulls itself together really really well. I wish I liked the art more though, because the character designs are really not up my alley. Everyone looks too round and short, like they're in constant chibi mode.

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