First thing, gacked from
coffee_and_ink's journal:
the first nine and a half minutes of Serenity are online. I'll point out that the link claims my OS isn't supported (fucking Microsoft-consumed world), so anyone else running Linux may be out of luck. But if you haven't seen the movie, watch this. Go now. And then carry on to the movie theatre
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I never know whether to recommend X or not. It's incredibly popular, and the art is gorgeous (well, yeah, CLAMP in their prime). The characters are mostly interesting, although a lot of that is subtextual--which makes for an interesting fanbase (also a somewhat insane one), because everyone is digging through the text and coming up with different interpretations. The downsides are that the fight scenes aren't always easy to follow, it's been on hiatus in Japan for 2-3 years and no one knows if it'll be finished, and the English translation is just UGLY. So I'm torn. ^^ (I'm not 'into' CLAMP, but I have several friends who're addicts, so I've read a lot of their work. For a short, somewhat more tightly plotted example of their work, I'd recommend . . . maybe Clover.) I keep trying to get people to read it just because I love Sorata and Arashi so much. ^^
Basara is REALLY good. Vol. 14 just came out in English, and I love this series. For some reason not many people seem to have heard of it, but I recommend it without all the qualifications.
I've been on a shoujo kick the last year or two . . . Paradise Kiss is short (5 vol.) and I really enjoyed it. It managed to not ever fall into the "guilty pleasure" camp, which impressed me.
MARS was a raging guilty pleasure, and I enjoyed almost every minute of it. The plotting is somewhat weak, so things would just HAPPEN without adequate foreshadowing, but the characters felt genuine and I adored them.
Hot Gimmick is a big thing right now, and I'm buying it without being deeply into it. It's a "wow, every single person and every single relationship is so fucked up that I somehow can't quite look away" series. I don't love the characters, and I don't feel emotionally drawn to them. But I keep wanting to see what happens. (At Anime North my Ginny was reading through it, and we'd all be hanging out, and the conversation would be abruptly punctuated by screams of rage, along the lines of "you sick, completely broken bastard!" >.> )
I haven't actually read Monster yet, but I've heard amazing things (and am in the process of getting scanlations as well as planning on buying it). What I've seen of the anime is really good, and it's a subtle psychological thing (with more emotional attachment than I'm getting from Death Note). My assumption is that the manga is brilliant.
Have you read Kenshin? I love Kenshin. ^_^ Period piece, sweet, with real pathos and a quest for redemption. And fight scenes you can actually follow.
That pretty much covers everything on my shelves, except for Utena (manga's ok; the anime is absolutely amazing) and some thing I stopped buying for various reasons--Please Save My Earth was a really good OAV so I tried the manga, and the artwork was actually so bad that I never bought past vol. 4. But I keep meaning to.
Oh, Kodomo no Omocha (I think it's marketing as "Sana's Stage" here) was good. Not brilliant, but really sweet.
And KareKano is supposed to be really good. I keep meaning to buy it (again with the 'when I have money'), 'cause I really loved the parts of the anime that were obviously adapted straight from the source (it's an anime plagued with recap eps and an abrupt ending).
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