feb challenge week 2 - top 10 manga

[shyshyshiloh]

from this! i’m technically late but also this is my personal dreamwidth and deadlines aren’t real. and i may be terrible at watching movies or keeping up with tv shows or reading prose or generally remembering to be a human person who experiences art but i do read a lot of manga! so here we go.

honorable mentions:

• My Hero Academia by Kohei Horikoshi — unfortunately a formative experience. like i genuinely think horikoshi is an incredible artist (i have never seen someone so meticulous about drawing hands!) and the world-building is just rule-of-cool fun lmao but oh my god. stop being weird about high schoolers and for what it’s worth also stop being weird about adult women!! are you incapable of imagining interiority for your female characters. jesus. also responsible for entrenching me in truly insane levels of fandom discourse which i would like to never return to.

• Haikyuu!! by Haruichi Furudate — i watched the anime more than i read the manga but truly this is the platonic ideal of sports serials. the passion for volleyball as a real sport is so palpable, the stakes feel interesting without being completely nonsensical or introducing literal superpowers, and i really have such a deep affection for pretty much every single character. and, while i’m not going so far as to say that haikyuu! is feminist, it treats its female characters with so much more kindness than any other shonen i’ve read.

• Yuru Camp by Afro — i actually don’t remember that much about the plot but it got me through a tough time. the little things in life, you know?

the real list:

10. Detective Conan by Gosho Aoyama — okay i have NOT read the entire series yet (tall order!) but i’m working on it. and this place is awarded not only for the manga itself but for the general place that detective conan and all its paraphernalia has held in my life. like that’s my guy! and so are all the other characters! sometimes the mysteries are ridiculous and the secret identity will-they-won’t-they doesn’t even bother to walk the line between relationship drama / running joke and there are too many characters and too many plot threads and retcons/plotholes/fillers out the wazoo but. i love it. i love the collective insanity that takes over every east asian box office whenever they drop a new movie. i love the way trying to get into detective conan feels like stepping into a rushing river without a life vest. i love the 1000+ and counting chapters and okay i actually i don’t love the terrible english localization (who is RACHEL). it’s pure theatre and i’m only here to pretend it’s cerebral mystery media while looking at explosions and crying over the death of yet another throwaway character with a crazily proportioned nose. modern-day epic if there ever was one.

9. Toto! The Wonderful Adventure by Yuko Osada — this isn’t just me having an obscure pick to be #indie, it’s a shoutout to the library i went to growing up because they were always stocking the strangest selections of manga and i would never have discovered this if not for them. i <3 tax dollars!! and unsupervised children with similarly unsupervised access to books!! toto! reminds me of long summers left alone in the house and the endless possibility of imagination and being able to lay on my stomach to read without instantly feeling neck back and shoulder pain 😖 and the story itself is just good triumphant vaguely steampunk-y fun. such a delightful but hard-to-find little series… i recently scored what i think is a good deal on all 5 physical volumes so let’s hope i’m not getting scammed.

8. My Brother’s Husband by Gengoroh Tagame — it made me laugh it made me cry it made me discover the author’s actual main hustle of extremely graphic bara porn. and then those made me laugh and cry too. idk it’s just like, there’s nothing super groundbreaking about the story especially if you’ve lived life as a gay person before, and yet there’s everything groundbreaking about it because it’s so unassuming and nuanced and heartfelt all at once.

7. Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa — my true introduction to manga and obviously a heavy-hitting award-winner in nearly every category for a reason. hiromu arakawa your mind. yes i was a dorky middle schooler who memorized roy mustang’s flame alchemy circle so that i could draw it on the back of my hand in math class but even if i’m (thankfully 😭) not that person anymore, the legacy goes on.

6. Pokemon Adventures (vols. 1-14) by Hidenori Kusaka, Mato, Satoshi Yamamoto — i know there’s more of pokemon adventures and in fact that it’s still going, but i only care about these first couple arcs. famously does a very cool job of building out the pokemon world while also hitting some of the most gut-wrenching plot beats of all time. unfortunately this series is also the reason why i can never attain true happiness, because my ideal career path isn’t whatever i’m doing now it’s being a professional transgender liar who wears a big straw hat and rides a doduo through the woods.

5. She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat by Sakaomi Yuzaki — first of all i love food, second of all one of the things this manga does best is that it is truly so, so kind without ever coming off as preachy. the characters and their traits/struggles/situations (and, by extension, the real-world communities that they reflect!) are treated with so much empathy that it actually makes me emotional, and the way things like discovering queerness later in life or living with deipnophobia are written about is legitimately, intentionally, earnestly informative without reading like a psa. and what isn’t necessarily put into words is powerful, too. of course it’s not, like, literal activism, but even in the times we live in right now, she loves to cook, and she loves to eat dares to dream of a world where, despite those challenges, people can be treated as, well, people.

4. Dungeon Meshi by Ryoko Kui — well ofc this is very popular right now but [voice of the most annoying person you know] i read it before it got an anime adaptation, so yeah, i’m just that cool. but of COURSE it’s popular because it’s so GOOD!!! again i love food, and i love jrpg tropes, and i love the way dungeon meshi goes “haha we are just cooking and eating monsters :D” for approximately two volumes before immediately swerving into cosmic horror and questions about the price of power. the character work and world-building are so meticulous. the artwork is incredible. everything is either one millisecond away from being profoundly disturbing or completely ridiculous. oh and laios is extremely dear to me and possibility one of my favorite protagonists of all time.

3. Medalist by Tsurumaikada — so i’ve been trying to get into figure skating for a very long time, to varying levels of success. and it actually wasn’t because of medalist, it was because of hit fe3h fanfiction rubicon by merionettes, but a few years into my flirtation with this interest, i picked up medalist and it only added fuel to that fire. it should be obvious at this point that i’m obsessed with sports narratives, and medalist has a uniquely compelling take on it by focusing on young skaters and the way their environments can make or break them and also what you do when you’re “too old” to start but try it anyway (she’s eleven. elite sports are fucking insane). and it’s so easy to be taken with sports at their highest level, but i think it takes a very specific and enduring passion to want to write about them in their most nitty-gritty, unglamorous, amateur forms… medalist is so underrated, and such a good exploration of all that figure skating can be for like, real people and not just literal olympians.

2. The Summer Hikaru Died by Mokumokuren — you can feel the humidity in these pages. you can hear the cicadas and taste the shitty corner store popsicles. everything about the summer hikaru died perfectly encapsulates the stifling nature of overlong summers, and small mountain towns, and what it would be like to live through a very unsubtle queer metaphor via being the only one to know that your dead friend came back wrong. the art is gorgeous and grotesque and tragedy is sewn into every second of the story. [voice of the most annoying person you know, again] i did also read this before it got an anime adaptation and kept a printout of one of the panels in my phone case for a very long time, which, i guess because it was blue and patterned, made my friends constantly think it was an always daily panty liner sticking out of my pocket.

1. Blue Period by Tsubasa Yamaguchi — unequivocally my favorite manga of all time. i re-read it every year. there’s so much to say about the execution, first and foremost: the art, not just from yamaguchi herself, but also from the guest artists who contribute the in-world pieces (also just such a cool creative choice that emphasizes both the love for art and the variance in characters’ art styles!). the writing and its confident, deliberate understanding of character differences and motivations. and then the way the two of them meet — sometimes there is just such a starkness to the way devastating story beats are drawn that it feels like having the wind knocked out of you. and that’s not even getting to everything blue period has to say. it’s about characters in dogged pursuit of their own personal definitions of artistic integrity, for themselves, of course, but often also because of pressure from mentors, parents, peers. it’s about how that pressure can eat you alive. it’s about how so much of that pressure comes from the inside. it’s about how art, and the desire to be an artist, can destroy you and how it can save you, sometimes all at once. blue period asks what makes people create. what makes people create differently. why some people are better at it and why some people are worse and why some people want it more and why some people don’t, whatsoever. and what is wanting, anyway? and what is being better? why do it, in the first place, at all? it’s such an achievement to tell a story like this. i’ve read it so many times and sometimes i still can’t believe how goddamn good it is.