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Since marie-antoinette hasn't started this thread, as she did last year, I'll start one up!

Here's a link to last year's thread

So, for those who have not been around for these threads before, we've done one every year since 2006. The idea is to share the manga you read this year that you enjoyed best. This does not have to be a manga that only came out this year, just one that you read during that time.

Also, we've had mentions of graphic novels that are not, strictly speaking, manga so feel free to bring those titles up as well.

2013 was a hell of a good year for manga for me. Going all the way back to January of last year, I finally accomplished getting Basara! But it's not automatically the best shojo I read in 2013 because I also got From Far Away in the spring and Baby & Me during the summer. Hell, I even started Kaze Hikaru. Seriously, I'm not even going to pick a Best Shojo I read in 2013 winner, I can't narrow down a field like that!

Best one shot volume is probably going to go to Utsubora for me. Moto Hagio didn't have anything new come out this year. I seriously need to read Utsubora again, honestly, it's a really weird manga. Helter Skelter was great too, but it often reminded me why I enjoy The Maury Show a bit too much, because I am a horrible person who enjoys watching people self destruct in public (and find out that the 8th guy tested isn't the father either)

Best re-release is probably gotta be the Uzumaki omnibus. The 2nd ed manga were already fine, but this has all the color pages those were missing and this is a series where having oversized pages really really matters.

Even with Utsubora above, it's still possible that Afterschool Charisma is the actual weirdest one I read. And it's really sticking with me, but that could be in part because I've read it more recently. I guess that could get a "please rescue this" award?

I think Most Disappointing should go to The Mysterious Underground Men. The physical release itself is fine, if anything, it's too because the story is freakin' awful. I had almost forgotten how terrible early Tezuka series are, honestly. I did a Best Osamu Tezuka last year, I should this year too I suppose. It's tough, because Unico is physically gorgeous what with being all color and stuff, though it is a small book. Atomcat is freakin' adorable, you can't deny that. But I'm going for Triton of the Sea as the best Tezuka released this year, as I'm enjoying it the most and still have half of it to go. But if Atomcat can't win Best Tezuka, it can still win Best Cat Manga. Because I'm not big on Chi's Sweet Home and Atomcat is just awesome. Oh and the winner for the Where in the hell is this? award is also a Tezuka manga, The Crater. I pledged for the Kickstarter (which ended in June) and heard it was coming out "in October", then "in November" and haven't heard jack since.

I do nee a slight nod to Rose of Versailles as Best Anime Release of 2013. Not only was this a long time in the making, but TRSI did a great job with the physical release.

Best non-manga comic for me is probably the Adventure Time comics, they're really fun, they fit in so well with the show, I really like them.

Nerdiest thing I Did this year was probably seeing Equestria Girls. In the theater. With another Brony. Kind of an awesome experience, actually.

I'm really behind on new releases, so I don't think I have a best new series (I've only read one vol of Magi and was like "meh" and haven't finished my Vinland Saga 1 yet either)

My favorite manga that i started reading this year was most definitely one punch man. The artwork is just godly and the way you can piece some of the parts together its almost like animation frames. Add to that the story is great for the action fan and the occasional bits of comedy are very well done.

This so needs to come out in print form, it'd be a mega-hit.

One-Punch Man in WSJ is easily my favorite Manga of 2013. Probably my favorite comic of 2013 for that matter.

And 2013 has been a great year for comics! Saga, Savage Dragon, Transformers: Regeneration-One, 2000AD, & Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man... I could go on really. Really good year to be a comic fan.

Gosh, this is going to be tough.

Definitely my best acquistion of the year was 4 Shojo Stories (thanks, Tamaria). So glad I finally own a copy. I was also fortunate enough to get all of Flower of Life for very reasonable amounts of money. I've wanted to read it for a long time and it's just as good as I expected.

Guilty Pleasure of the Year is a tie between the Alice in the Country of... franchise, and the josei smut Viz has released (Happy Marriage and Midnight Secretary) It's nice to read romances which aren't set in high school.

Like classicalzawa, I also discovered the delights of Baby and Me this year. Definitely an underrated gem.

Things I need to start getting. I've decided to try and get all the Fumi Yoshinaga series because she's just that awesome. Antique Bakery next, I think. Then Ooku.

I was very satisfied by the manga that I read this year. The only complaint I have is that I couldn't read Twin Spica for the first time again this year. Until we have Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind technology, that remains a singular experience. Goddamn was it a good one.

The Most Awesome Thing That I Read This Year was easily Dorohedoro. It's got all sort of qualities that make me pump my fist. It has weird, dark, sometimes gruesome art with a setting appropriate to style. The story has enough moving parts and bends in the path to be interesting, but the characters are in the driver's seat. That's kind of like having a drunk mental patient on uppers in the driver's seat... well, that or a giant cockroach who says, "shocking," but that's why it's awesome. The characters are pretty great, from the dude with a crocodile for a head to the one with mushroom themed magic who is f**king terrifying. It also has cool, interesting and badass women in Nikaido and Noi. There are a lot of shades of really dark grey here, but it's hard not to like almost everybody in some way... there's also a toilet connected directly to Hell. *FIST PUMP*

Sorry, I get a little excited about Dorohedoro. Dear God I wanted it animated so bad. I would eat my vegetables for a week, watch every imōto show ever made and support Rick Santorum for president to see Dorohedoro: The Animation.

The Best Thing That I Read This Year (best is different from awesome, it just is, but it's awesome too) was A Drunken Dream and Other Stories by Moto Hagio, translated and supplemented by Matt Thorn. I like good anthologies and Moto Hagio is a terrific mangaka. The stories were unexpectedly diverse and some were much wilder than I expected. I found both stories that had absurd, but clever ideas with rich humanity and perfect bittersweetness, most notably "Iguana Girl", and some that made a more shocking impression, by which I mean "Girl on Porch with Puppy". It's a remarkable collection and won the mangaka my admiration.

The Most Fund I Had Not Involving Wizards was reading Gunsmith Cats. It's a surprisingly long work from end to end at seventy five chapters, but it's always so exciting and cool with such compelling forward momentum that I never felt the least drag. The characterization isn't deep, but Kenichi Sonoda cared enough to endow his characters with more than breasts and Bean Bandit's evidently enormous penis. It's easy to get invested in them and when that fails, something cool is happening. Gunsmith Cats got me to enjoy a car chase. I hate car chases, even (especially?) in film. I must also concede that I totally dug Goldie. I wasn't so keen on certain features of Minnie May, namely that she was initially seventeen, but looked younger, entered a sexual relationship with a man twice her age when she was no more than thirteen and, or so I'm told is true in the original Japanese, is taking an herbal concoction meant to stunt her growth expressly to appeal to said man twice her age. I actually liked that she was openly, enthusiastically sexual, but there was a taste of somethingendinginphilia to it that I found unpleasant. The story was otherwise, fortunately, concerned with adult characters, cars, guns and explosions, all on the streets of Chicago; itself a refreshing choice of setting. (Man, why can't we ever get a manga set in Philadelphia?)

The Most Disappointing Thing That I Read This Year was Satoshi Kon's Tropic of the Sea. It's just a bland 'locals versus evil developers' story with a vestigial mermaid hook. There's just nothing remarkable about it. There's none of the confounding of reality with dream or illusion, social awareness or visual flare that made Satoshi Kon so well regarded an artist. I can't hate the work, but I also really can't think about it much at all. It's bad practice, but in truth, my reaction is governed by it being an entirely mundane, pedestrian work by a creator whom I associate with exceptional and distinctive ones. The runner-up for this category is Jormungand, which has so many thing going for it, but never pulls it together and ends up just really dumb with a garnish of creepy. It's too bad. Valmet, man, Valmet...

The Most F**ked Up Thing That I Read This Year was Kyoko Okazaki's Helter Skelter: Fashion Unfriendly. I don't think that I've ever felt a character falling apart and being consumed by madness this viscerally. The rough, sketchy artwork and raw, angry sexuality of the manga are very potent. Ririko's decay is tied to a perfectly effective metaphor and that does help to tie things together, but Kyoko Okazaki makes this crazy bitch so crazy, so bitchy and ultimately so tragic that it's hardly as essential as it would've been in a lesser effort.

I Never Expected To Care About Astro Boy But... Naoki Urasawa's Pluto managed to make me. Pluto embraces the names, aesthetics and themes of things from Osamu Tezuka's work that one would think jarringly out of place in a more mature, newer manga, but the author's earnestness, devotion to them and deftness make them work. Astro Boy, recast carefully as Atom is a huge part of Pluto and I found him a really appealing, impressive character. He retains the basic heroic stature of such an icon, but is convincingly filled out with struggle and conflict. Urasawa drew a really gripping, elaborate mystery in Pluto that ably appeals to a person like me who has no acquaintance or particular affection for the original source, but clearly honors it.

I'm Falling Back In Love With Norihiro Yagi's Claymore. We were never on the outs, but as I've been reading it lately, I've appreciated certain little things. It reminds us that it was drawn by a man sometimes, but I enjoy how it doesn't sexualize its cast as something like Queen's Blade does. That's not to denigrate Queen's Blade, but rather to point to how ubiquitous and profuse fanservice is in manga and anime. It never has a male warrior intrude to outdo the women or show that he's just as good. Raki is annoying, but his relationship with Clare is very genuine, he never overtakes the story and her devotion to him seems sincere as well as perhaps maternal, not slavish or undermining. There's little recourse to the heartless, dull 'Iron Lady' archetype; most of the characters have emotional motivations and display of emotion isn't denigrated. I also liked that Yagi was willing to do with Undine what Toriyama found inconceivable with female saiyans. That the manga is willing to let its women be monstrous rather than pretty sometimes is refreshing. All of that helps me to forgive its shōnen excesses (endless description of combat moves is not exciting to me) and serviceable, but limited word building.

I have Kyoko Okazaki's Pink sitting on my shelf to be read next week, along with the Uzumaki omnibus, Vinland Saga, some Attack on Titan, A Bride's Story and Wandering Son, but I feel pretty comfortable with this list.

st_owly wrote:

Things I need to start getting. I've decided to try and get all the Fumi Yoshinaga series because she's just that awesome. Antique Bakery next, I think. Then Ooku.

I think that I'm going to sign onto that too. Classicalzawa is quite persuasive. (Also, she knows where I buried the bodies)

Ōoku: The Inner Chambers is excellent, but can be very challenging and trying. The translation attempts early modern English, presumably to match the language in the original Japanese, but my experience is that this mostly adds a layer of frustration. That's worth suffering through, because it's a very intelligent and ambitious work. I think that it's best taken in large gulps, if for no other reason than that you might lose tract of things with too far between volumes.

Best New Release: I always seem to give this award to one-shots, and this year is no exception: The Strange Tale of Panorama Island. Suehiro Maruo is best known for his ero-guro, which gives me the wiggins, but this is an adaptation of an Edogawa Rampo horror story and contains nothing more extreme than nudity. Not only is the art amazing, the way that Maruo gradually builds unease in the reader is simply masterful. An honourable mention goes to the josei classic Helter Skelter.

Best New Series: Vinland Saga is the clear winner. I'd have given it the "best new release" award, but the first volume is the weakest of the series. But from here on out it's all grim, bloody, medieval goodness.

Best Ongoing Series: For this Kitoh fan it's the same as last year: Bokurano. There are only two more volumes to go, so next year should see Viz concluding it. Honourable mentions include Real (though volume 12 was the least impressive to date), Dorohedoro (still the most fun series to read) and Blade of the Immortal (closing in on what promises to be an epic finale).

Best Concluding Series: The final volume of Children of the Sea totally blew me away. I think mileage will vary a lot between readers, but I found it nothing less than transcendent. The previous volumes were outstanding too, so this series slots comfortably into my all time top ten. Not quite in the same class but worthy of mention was the ending of Gunslinger Girl. I first discovered the series sometime around 2004-05 and after ADV's demise I never thought I'd get to complete it, so a big thanks to Seven Seas for picking it up and seeing it through.

Best Discoveries: I avoided picking up the works of Yoshihiro Tatsumi for years because of reports that his stuff was really depressing. This year I finally purchased The Push Man, Abandon the Old in Tokyo and Good-bye, read all three of them in less than an hour and was left wanting more. Yes, the short stories are dark, but they depict a time period and a class of people you rarely get to see in manga/anime and they're exceptionally well executed. Almost as good as those was a 300 page scanlation I came across called Undercurrent, written by a managka (Tetsuya Toyoda) who hasn't done much else. Normally I'm not too keen on slice-of-life as a genre, but every character was complex and real, and there was an intriguing mystery underpinning the story. It's a Kodansha licence so the next time Vertical asks for feedback I'll definitely be plugging it.

Worst Discoveries: Two shoujo series I checked out as scanlations proved to be among the worst manga I've ever read. I won't bother to say much about Kiss in the Blue, other than before reading it I didn't think I'd ever encounter a protagonist more useless, weak-willed and idiotic than Hatsumi from Hot Gimmick; man was I wrong. Instead I'll save my bile for Haou Airen. Apparently at the time of writing it Mayu Shinjo was being overworked and bullied by her editors at Sho-Comi, so maybe her judgement was a little off. But that's still no excuse for brutal rape-as-love in a shoujo magazine (or any magazine, really). The gangster that provided the "love" interest was the sort of violent, predatory sociopath that girls should be warned to stay well away from. Additionally, with its amateurish execution and complete lack of believability, it was probably the worst attempt at a noir story I've come across. At one point the mangaka had written herself into a corner, so how did she solve it? The heroine suddenly fell down some stairs and suffered amnesia! Lord have mercy.

The Cancellation Blues: The good news was that Dark Horse announced the release of Eden volume 14 for 2014. I hope they now finish the thing off with a couple of omnibuses, because one volume every three years is going to take far too long. The bad news is that Eden's stablemate MPD Psycho appears to have been sent to the glue factory. On the endangered list goes The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, which seems to have lapsed into another hiatus. World Embryo appears to have been dropped by Chuang Yi.

Best non-Manga: My two favourite non-Japanese releases this year were both by Greg Rucka: the first volume of Lazarus and the second of Stumptown. The former is a depiction of a neo-feudal dystopia in which the lucky ones are in bondage to family-like corporations; the rest are referred to as "waste". Chilling but excellent. The latter is a highly entertaining romp featuring a private eye in Portland, OR. Rucka is particularly prone to the annoying tendency of American comic writers to format at least one word in every sentence into italic or bold, sometimes even more than once a sentence, but the quality of the writing was high enough for me to be able to forgive it this time around. 2013 also saw the conclusion to Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth, well worth checking out even if the rough artwork might be off-putting.

Surrender Artist wrote:

The Most Disappointing Thing That I Read This Year was Satoshi Kon's Tropic of the Sea.

Yeah, that honestly would've been my second, had I not tried to convince myself "oh, early Tezuka isn't all that bad", but yes, yes it is. Though from a completionist standpoint, I had to buy Mysterious Underground Men too. But from Tropic, I was expecting way more.... well Kon goodness. Well since it is almost Xmas, I guess I can rewatch Tokyo Godfathers for some more Kon goodness.

And damn right, you and owly better get all the Yoshinaga! I'll keep an ever vigilant eye out for more v4s of Flower of Life. What should actually win my Seriously, why was I waiting on getting this again? award is clearly the Antique Bakery anime. Some stupid cell in my brain went "but I already have the manga", then Nozomi announced the litebox, which would mean the current one would eventually go out of print. And I was going to be damned if I didn't have the chipboard box. I've still only seen the first DVDs (4 eps), but I clearly forgot that this was Fumi Yoshinaga, so the result was like falling in love all over again. You don't cuddle your pet once and go "well, I did cuddle her yesterday, I don't need to today" no! You cuddle the damn animal and enjoy it!
Oh and get the yaoi too. From one non-yaoi fan to probably another, get her damn yaoi! The sex scenes are absolutely not what makes her yaoi sexy.
And I've lost track of Ooku since v5 came out, I've been collecting them, but will wait until it's all out to read it (and 9 comes out next month, yay!) I agree though, very difficult to read, in no small part due to the Fakespeare.

My favourite discovery this year has to be Berserk. It really is a masterpiece (I won't go on as I have pined over it enough in other sections of the forum). Vagabond would be a close second.

My favourite new series will have to go to No.6 as for me it has the right amount of comedy, action, development and characterisation and wraps it all up into a beautifully drawn bow. A very close second would go to Magi. This series has made me laugh and shed a tear or two. Each volume is an improvement on the previous, the main characters are loveable the bad guys are detestable. This series is constantly moving up my list of favourites.

My favourite continuation is Claymore but with it being my favourite series it was always going to end up this way.

Surrender Artist wrote:

The Most Awesome Thing That I Read This Year was easily Dorohedoro. It's got all sort of qualities that make me pump my fist. It has weird, dark, sometimes gruesome art with a setting appropriate to style. The story has enough moving parts and bends in the path to be interesting, but the characters are in the driver's seat. That's kind of like having a drunk mental patient on uppers in the driver's seat... well, that or a giant cockroach who says, "shocking," but that's why it's awesome. The characters are pretty great, from the dude with a crocodile for a head to the one with mushroom themed magic who is f**king terrifying. It also has cool, interesting and badass women in Nikaido and Noi. There are a lot of shades of really dark grey here, but it's hard not to like almost everybody in some way... there's also a toilet connected directly to Hell. *FIST PUMP*

I totally agree with all of that and I did go check the date i bought volume 1 when I saw this topic but i started it last year. Just read volume 11 yesterday and am totally bummed that i gotta wait til april to carry on.

Now that I've suddenly started and instantly caught up on buying Berserk, I think that Dorohedoro is going to be my next manga buying project. That and maybe Animal Land as well.

Yeah i want animal land but i still need to finish some ongoing series before starting more.

Thanks for starting the thread, classicalzawa (even if it means no u in the thread title Razz

). Things have been pretty hectic for me lately and making one for this year completely slipped my mind.

That said, this wasn't a great year for manga reading for me, since I was in school and thus didn't have much of a disposable income. But I do have a favourite of the year, and it's my 2012 runner-up, Soul Eater.

I am generally not a fan of shounen but there is just something about Soul Eater that sets it apart for me. I was first drawn by the visual style but the characters are interesting. The villains especially are great and actually fairly intelligent too. Plus, it is refreshing to see a shounen series that at very least has a 50/50 gender split, though I feel like there might actually be more female cast members than male. And, if one of the trio could be said to be the main character, it would probably be Maka.

One thing I will say about this is that the first volume is not very good. I'm very glad that I read the later volumes first because I don't think I would have read it just based on vol 1.

I don't really have anything else for this year, since I didn't read enough. But now that I am gainfully employed, I hope to change this (as well as increasing my anime viewing, because I think I only watched two 2013 series).

For non-manga of the year, I have to go with Gotham Central because it is just made of awesome. Even if it is a bit old to be on a 2013 list Razz

Pandora Hearts remains to be my favourite series. It's a great manga if one has patience for stories with complex and meticulous storytelling that needs time before it becomes really awesome.

I haven't read much this year and the second manga which I have read is Skip Beat. Unfortunately it seems to be on a slippery slope. Kyōko was so cool at the beginning of the manga, but now she is just another dumb shoujo heroine. It hurts to see how the author has ruined her character, especially since Kyōko had a lot of potential.

Oh wow, it's time for this already? And is it sad that I was sort of looking forward to it?

Anyway!

Most Difficult Book to Read was absolutely Helter Skelter. Man, what a train wreck. I found every character unlikeable and reprehensible, Okazaki's art haunted my nightmares, and I kind of loved every minute of it. If nothing else, I thought that Helter Skelter was a very important book about what we allow to happen in the name of fashion and beauty, and I think it should be used in feminist theory classes. It cuts close to the bone and laughs at you while doing it.

Guilty Pleasure this year would be Dictatorial Grimmoire, the series that decided to turn Disney princesses into beautiful men. It has serious folkloric issues and feels like an otome game adaptation, but it's so damn weird and goofy that I can't wait for the next one to come out.

I Love It, But I Hate the Translation goes to Wandering Son. Why, why, why leave in random Japanese words like "arigatou?" Don't drag down your incredible release like that, Fantagraphics!

Finally Got My Hands On It, Yay France is a tie - this year French editions of Chihayafuru and Kids on the Slope came out, and both series are wonderful. Thus far what I've read of the former is pretty much exactly like the anime, and therefore fantastic, while the latter strays a bit more. Kodama's manga version of Kids on the Slope captures the feel of the 60s a bit more than its animated counterpart, and her short stories (unrelated to the main tale) are quirky and touching - I'd read a whole book of those if I could find one.

Best Digital-Only Release I read this year was Happy-Go-Lucky Days by Takako Shimura. More mature than any of her other works to see an English translation, the series is two volumes of vaguely interconnected short stories with strong emotional cores and bittersweet supernatural elements. DMG has it on e-manga, and it really is worth a read.

Shounen Delight is Nisekoi. It makes me not care that I've read versions of this story before - something about it is just so much fun that nothing else matters. So glad it's getting a print release!

Finally Got Around To Reading It goes to Kare First Love and the tragically unfinished (in English) B.O.D.Y. I'm not sure why I didn't read these when they came out, but they had just the right shoujo combination of melodrama, ridiculous, and charm. Plus that scene in KFL where Karin is putting a tiny contact lens into her huge manga eye is hysterical.

Re-Read It And Still Love It is Wann's k-drama on paper Can't Lose You. Yup, still addictive, crazy fun. The twins separated a birth, the upstairs/downstairs romance, the over dramatic imagery...perfect for a cold winter day.

Most Unexpected Mention of Vaginas is that whole first chapter of A Centaur's Life. It wasn't bad, per se...I just didn't expect a slice-of-life story to spend its first chapter with its heroines examining each others' privates to make sure the titular centaur's wasn't weird. Do people actually think girls do stuff like that?! (Or do they and my sisters and I were the weird ones...?)

Favorite Non Manga this year...hmm...I think it was DC's Showcase edition of Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld. I was too little to read comics when it came out originally in the early 80s, but I ate up its combination of "She-Ra" and magical girl sensibilities. Sadly the new iteration, Sword of Sorcery, was nowhere near as wonderful, making it my Most Disappointing Non Manga. I guess sometimes you just can't go back...

Some close runners up for favorites this year are No. 6, Sankarea, and a cute shoujo series called Lollipop by Ricaco Iketani, whose art reminds me a little of Ai Yazawa's.

My favorite manga for 2013 is Pink. It has a really different sense of humor and has some good social commentary.

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