NaBloPoMo Post #23: Manga
NaBloPoMo Post #23: 26th November 2008
Okay, it’s a bit daft for me to be talking about manga when I haven’t sat down and read any for absolutely ages, but I thought I’d talk a little bit about my favourite manga genres and manga authors.
I actually started reading manga a long, long time ago - way back when I was still in primary school. There was a manga series available at my local library. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called or who wrote it (it really was ages ago, I can’t have been much older than about ten or eleven). But it was a martial arts series, one of those ones that involves lots of training before being good enough to beat up the baddies. I definitely remember at least one scene where the guy meditates and focuses enough to be able to slice a raindrop in two with his hand. I was really addicted to it and because it was a long series I was always on the lookout for the other volumes of it. But libraries being libraries, some of the volumes they didn’t have so I don’t think I ever actually finished the series! I wish I knew what it was called.
After that I didn’t read any manga for a long time - it was only after I started Uni that I got back into it again, and that was because in my foolishness I decided to start buying the Bleach manga when it first came out. Little did I know how bloody long it was!! I got up to about volume 16 and gave up, but by that time I had started collecting some other series. I love Tite Kubo’s artwork, though - the crappy art in the anime, especially the filler arc, really spits on his skill D:
I can’t remember who it was that introduced me to Yu Watase - I think Ho-man started it by talking me into buying Imadoki. Cheap bastage reads most of his manga by talking other people into collecting it and then borrowing it off them XD I love Yu Watase’s artwork because the lines are so crisp. And her men are HOT - take a look at Koki, for instance. Her storylines are also surprisingly gripping for shoujo manga, and she’s sure as hell not averse to kicking the usual soppy shoujo ending in the face. I spent a whole frickin’ year collecting Ceres Celestial Legend, and it was full of DRAMA and ANGST and surprisingly gory for a shoujo manga - and after all the horrible things that happened to Aya I thought she might finally get a happy ending with the man she loved. But when I got the final volume, upon reading the ending I sat there in dumbstruck horror. No, no way, I just couldn’t believe what she’d done, but yes, she had! ARRRGH! I can’t say much more than that or else I’ll spoiler anyone wanting to read it. But gaaah!
Pretty boys aside, I do have other favourite authors. The main genres I like are slice of life, shoujo and mystery, with the odd shounen series thrown in. One of my all time favourite manga series is actually pretty old - the Kindaichi Case Files by Yozaburo Kanari. The protagonist is Hajime Kindaichi, grandson of a famous detective. But no Gary Stu is he - he’s actually a bit of a layabout and pretty hopeless at school, but his mind is sharp even though he’s totally inept when it comes to girls XD The storylines are very cleverly executed, though a lot of the themes outside the threads of the actual mystery are pretty recycled. Miyuki, the female love interest, always seems to be endangered in some fiendish fashion and the mysteries inevitably take place in some isolated environment where nobody can go back to the main town for help, allowing Kindaichi to take the helm.
However, despite this the mysteries are still very gripping and all the clues are right there in front of you, but try as you might you just can’t figure out how they all piece together until Kindaichi’s final denoument in the last chapter. At which point I go back through the volume and think “Oh yeah!!” Sometimes murder mysteries are so complicated that when it comes to the denouement you’re still trying to figure out who is who and when they show you all the clues you missed, you just think “Oh I never would’ve gotten that” and stop really caring. I tend to find that in the Poirot dramatisations on TV. But in The Kindaichi Case Files the cast is pretty simple and you can follow Kindaichi’s logic pretty well. Sometimes over the course of the case he’ll flag up things that are important later on, and I have fun reading through and trying to figure out who did it based on the clues I have.
Now in terms of slice of life, I think my two favourites have to be Azumanga Daioh, by Kiyohiko Azuma, and Aria/Aqua by Kozue Amano. The Japanese have slice of life down to such a fine art, both in storytelling and in graphics. You can see the front covers for Aria here. They really are beautiful. It tells the story of Akari, who travels to a terraformed Mars to learn how to be a gondolier in the watery city of Neo-Venezia. Nothing happens in it. Seriously. But nothing happens in such a beautifully drawn way, and the simple things that they talk about make me realise how unnecessarily complicated and cluttered the life of an average human being in this day and age has become. One chapter is all about how they hoist the gondoliers out of the water one hot summer’s day to give them a good clean - it reminds me of helping my Dad wash the car in the summer holidays, and what fun it was.
Azumanga Daioh is a more goofy form of slice of life, on a par with anime such as Sketchbook and Hidamari Sketch. I love four-panel comics and this is such a great example of them being done well. In the unlikely event that somebody reading this hasn’t heard of Azumanga Daioh, it’s about a group of high school girls and follows them right up to graduation. There are nine girls all up, each with their own quirks. You can read about the series here. One of my favourite characters is Osaka - she’s always daydreaming and coming out with random crap. I think I’m scarily like her sometimes XD The anime’s pretty good too!
Most of my favourite shoujo series are done by Yu Watase, but I should also mention Sakura Tsukuba - her two main series are Land of the Blindfolded, which I’m hoping to collect sometime, and Penguin Revolution.
Allow me to digress off into a rant! A lot of the manga series I collect are one-shots - I can’t afford to buy much in the way of long-running series so I tend to choose carefully what I start collecting. But what really really annoys me is when I pick up a manga series that I like, and they STOP BLOODY TRANSLATING IT!!! This is such a pet hate of mine - so many series that I have started collecting that are no longer being published here in the UK:
Kino’s Journey
Penguin Revolution
Peacemaker Kurogane
Translucent
Detective Loki Ragnarok
Tengai Retrogical
Blue Inferior
Bah!
So as you can see, Penguin Revolution is in that list - I’ve been waiting for volume 6 for AGES but I have now given up and am ordering it online. I try to buy my manga in shops to support the places that DO sell it, but when they can’t give me what I want, what am I supposed to do? They’re up to flippin’ volume 8 in the US already. Being in the UK sucks for manga D: Sakura Tsukuba’s artwork is very pretty, kind of similar to Yu Watase’s. You can see it here.
Man, it’s getting late and I’ve got to head off to inservice training tomorrow - my taxi’s coming at 7.45am tomorrow T_T I shall have to finish this off with a final recommendation.
With The Light - Keiko Tobe. In a shock horror moment Ho-man actually bought a manga, and this was what it was. It is all about a little boy called Hikaru, and over the course of the manga which starts when he is born (and is still ongoing), Hikaru is diagnosed with autism. The book focuses on his mother, Sachiko, and how she and the rest of the family deal with the diagnosis and Hikaru’s subsequent upbringing. It’s a really fascinating series that really makes you think, and portrays quite a wide spectrum of attitudes towards autism, both in school, at home, at counselling groups and within the family. I can’t really do the series justice with this description, but I would certainly recommend it to anybody who likes to read things that open your eyes and make you think.
Okay, it’s a bit daft for me to be talking about manga when I haven’t sat down and read any for absolutely ages, but I thought I’d talk a little bit about my favourite manga genres and manga authors.
I actually started reading manga a long, long time ago - way back when I was still in primary school. There was a manga series available at my local library. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called or who wrote it (it really was ages ago, I can’t have been much older than about ten or eleven). But it was a martial arts series, one of those ones that involves lots of training before being good enough to beat up the baddies. I definitely remember at least one scene where the guy meditates and focuses enough to be able to slice a raindrop in two with his hand. I was really addicted to it and because it was a long series I was always on the lookout for the other volumes of it. But libraries being libraries, some of the volumes they didn’t have so I don’t think I ever actually finished the series! I wish I knew what it was called.
After that I didn’t read any manga for a long time - it was only after I started Uni that I got back into it again, and that was because in my foolishness I decided to start buying the Bleach manga when it first came out. Little did I know how bloody long it was!! I got up to about volume 16 and gave up, but by that time I had started collecting some other series. I love Tite Kubo’s artwork, though - the crappy art in the anime, especially the filler arc, really spits on his skill D:
I can’t remember who it was that introduced me to Yu Watase - I think Ho-man started it by talking me into buying Imadoki. Cheap bastage reads most of his manga by talking other people into collecting it and then borrowing it off them XD I love Yu Watase’s artwork because the lines are so crisp. And her men are HOT - take a look at Koki, for instance. Her storylines are also surprisingly gripping for shoujo manga, and she’s sure as hell not averse to kicking the usual soppy shoujo ending in the face. I spent a whole frickin’ year collecting Ceres Celestial Legend, and it was full of DRAMA and ANGST and surprisingly gory for a shoujo manga - and after all the horrible things that happened to Aya I thought she might finally get a happy ending with the man she loved. But when I got the final volume, upon reading the ending I sat there in dumbstruck horror. No, no way, I just couldn’t believe what she’d done, but yes, she had! ARRRGH! I can’t say much more than that or else I’ll spoiler anyone wanting to read it. But gaaah!
Pretty boys aside, I do have other favourite authors. The main genres I like are slice of life, shoujo and mystery, with the odd shounen series thrown in. One of my all time favourite manga series is actually pretty old - the Kindaichi Case Files by Yozaburo Kanari. The protagonist is Hajime Kindaichi, grandson of a famous detective. But no Gary Stu is he - he’s actually a bit of a layabout and pretty hopeless at school, but his mind is sharp even though he’s totally inept when it comes to girls XD The storylines are very cleverly executed, though a lot of the themes outside the threads of the actual mystery are pretty recycled. Miyuki, the female love interest, always seems to be endangered in some fiendish fashion and the mysteries inevitably take place in some isolated environment where nobody can go back to the main town for help, allowing Kindaichi to take the helm.
However, despite this the mysteries are still very gripping and all the clues are right there in front of you, but try as you might you just can’t figure out how they all piece together until Kindaichi’s final denoument in the last chapter. At which point I go back through the volume and think “Oh yeah!!” Sometimes murder mysteries are so complicated that when it comes to the denouement you’re still trying to figure out who is who and when they show you all the clues you missed, you just think “Oh I never would’ve gotten that” and stop really caring. I tend to find that in the Poirot dramatisations on TV. But in The Kindaichi Case Files the cast is pretty simple and you can follow Kindaichi’s logic pretty well. Sometimes over the course of the case he’ll flag up things that are important later on, and I have fun reading through and trying to figure out who did it based on the clues I have.
Now in terms of slice of life, I think my two favourites have to be Azumanga Daioh, by Kiyohiko Azuma, and Aria/Aqua by Kozue Amano. The Japanese have slice of life down to such a fine art, both in storytelling and in graphics. You can see the front covers for Aria here. They really are beautiful. It tells the story of Akari, who travels to a terraformed Mars to learn how to be a gondolier in the watery city of Neo-Venezia. Nothing happens in it. Seriously. But nothing happens in such a beautifully drawn way, and the simple things that they talk about make me realise how unnecessarily complicated and cluttered the life of an average human being in this day and age has become. One chapter is all about how they hoist the gondoliers out of the water one hot summer’s day to give them a good clean - it reminds me of helping my Dad wash the car in the summer holidays, and what fun it was.
Azumanga Daioh is a more goofy form of slice of life, on a par with anime such as Sketchbook and Hidamari Sketch. I love four-panel comics and this is such a great example of them being done well. In the unlikely event that somebody reading this hasn’t heard of Azumanga Daioh, it’s about a group of high school girls and follows them right up to graduation. There are nine girls all up, each with their own quirks. You can read about the series here. One of my favourite characters is Osaka - she’s always daydreaming and coming out with random crap. I think I’m scarily like her sometimes XD The anime’s pretty good too!
Most of my favourite shoujo series are done by Yu Watase, but I should also mention Sakura Tsukuba - her two main series are Land of the Blindfolded, which I’m hoping to collect sometime, and Penguin Revolution.
Allow me to digress off into a rant! A lot of the manga series I collect are one-shots - I can’t afford to buy much in the way of long-running series so I tend to choose carefully what I start collecting. But what really really annoys me is when I pick up a manga series that I like, and they STOP BLOODY TRANSLATING IT!!! This is such a pet hate of mine - so many series that I have started collecting that are no longer being published here in the UK:
Kino’s Journey
Penguin Revolution
Peacemaker Kurogane
Translucent
Detective Loki Ragnarok
Tengai Retrogical
Blue Inferior
Bah!
So as you can see, Penguin Revolution is in that list - I’ve been waiting for volume 6 for AGES but I have now given up and am ordering it online. I try to buy my manga in shops to support the places that DO sell it, but when they can’t give me what I want, what am I supposed to do? They’re up to flippin’ volume 8 in the US already. Being in the UK sucks for manga D: Sakura Tsukuba’s artwork is very pretty, kind of similar to Yu Watase’s. You can see it here.
Man, it’s getting late and I’ve got to head off to inservice training tomorrow - my taxi’s coming at 7.45am tomorrow T_T I shall have to finish this off with a final recommendation.
With The Light - Keiko Tobe. In a shock horror moment Ho-man actually bought a manga, and this was what it was. It is all about a little boy called Hikaru, and over the course of the manga which starts when he is born (and is still ongoing), Hikaru is diagnosed with autism. The book focuses on his mother, Sachiko, and how she and the rest of the family deal with the diagnosis and Hikaru’s subsequent upbringing. It’s a really fascinating series that really makes you think, and portrays quite a wide spectrum of attitudes towards autism, both in school, at home, at counselling groups and within the family. I can’t really do the series justice with this description, but I would certainly recommend it to anybody who likes to read things that open your eyes and make you think.