Queries

I know very well what animow is, and the kinds of culture it's borne all over my e-neighbourhoods, but I know nothing about MANGA, other than that it is a Japanese novel form.

I've read from the highly reputable site Foure-Channe that manga is apparently far more established a cultural industry than animow, being consumed more regularly by a much wider agebase. This leads me to presume that manga is basically Japan's equivalent to our pop fiction industry: Dan Brown, Matthew Reilly, Danielle Steele, etc. but I'm curious now, and I want to dig deeper. I've read a lot of pop fiction; some of it's been really quite brilliant, so there must be something manga can offer me that's equally amazing.

Is manga exclusively or predominantly pop genre-oriented or what? Is there literary manga? Or critical manga, stuff that looks at sociology or politics or technology? Is virtually all manga based on, about, and/or situated in, Japan?

Stylistically, is all manga part of that same borg I've come to disdain simply from Internet oversaturation? You know, the eyes, the lolita portraiture, the kooky exclamation symbols. I'm bothering with this paragraph because I really don't care about the design technicalities of this stuff. I want red meat for the brain.

I know I shithang animow a lot; my disdain for what's been done with the medium so far's fairly well-known. But I think manga might actually have something in it for me.

So please refer me to some great manga, but take into account these exceptions:

--No symbologically convoluted post-apocalyptic NeoTokyo bosnian fagcon that goes nowhere worthwile.
--No 'harem' serials, unless they're megacreative.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Manga is graphic novels, but in my opinion, that is as far as the usefulness in definition goes.

Majority of the anime came out of the last 50 years are base on some sort of manga. However, only a very small portion of manga get made into anime. The type of manga that one would recommend depends largely on their availability.

Just what type of manga is available to you anyway?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Whatever's on the Internet and translated is available to me. Can't really answer that question any better.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

If you can't read Japanese or another language where niche manga are being translated on regular basis (like Chinese) , stuff available on the Interment really isn't a lot. Speaking of which, do you have any specific genre that you like? Because I was about to recommend you something in Shujo/Slice of Life genre by Kyoko Hikawa. Unfortunaly, I have yet to find a net source for her works other then From Far Away.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Cal, here is a place to download tons of manga from:

http://www.stoptazmo.com/

Just sign up for a free account and download as much as you want. Since the downloads are just small chapters you should be able to sample stuff and find something you like.

Double Post:
Also, here's a shitload of torrents for complete manga series:

http://www.boxtorrents.com/browse.ph...=id&order=desc

I was speaking idiomatically.

Even while they are very different from one another and are still in progress, I have been enjoying Yotsubato!, Yakitate! Japan, and 20th Century Boys very much. They are very good examples of their respective genres. So if your tastes encompass hilarity, breadmaking, and awesomeness, I suggest these titles as an introduction to manga.

How ya doing, buddy?

The problem with manga is that there's so much, that it's hard to seperate the good ones from the bad. The majority of it is shonen crap (action manga), but sometimes you discover a rare gem that really stand out.

My recommendations:
-20th Century Boys (Naoki Urasawa):

Quote:

Kenji and his friends start to notice a series of odd occurences related to their childhood. A mysterious cult-leader named "friend" is out to destroy the world, and it has something to do with Kenji's childhood memories.

Easily my favourite. Iattracts me to this manga is the suspense that Urasawa manages to put in the storyline, and there are constant plot twists. You get a story full of flashbacks, flashforwards, which really helps out to flesh out the background of the characters. Really worth a read.

-Monster (Naoki Urasawa)

Quote:

hen a Doctor makes the highly controversial decision to save a boy's life over the mayor's, it leads to the loss of almost everything he holds dear. His fiance, his career, his social standing. The only thing he keeps is his own feeling of self worth, knowing that he did the right thing in saving the boy, who came in first. Yet even that is threatened when he begins to learn that nothing is as it originally appeared. A trail of bloodshed pointing to the seemingly innocent child leaves him questioning even his beliefs. Whether, in the end, all lives are ever truly equal.

Another favourite, and one of the reasos I got interested in manga. The story is full of suspense, shocking scenes (not gory or anything, but just psychologically shocking), and as I've said with 20th CB, you just want to go on and on, to find out the eventual truth.

-Hikaru no Go

Quote:

Hikaru Shindo is just a normal 12 year old Japanese boy. One day, he's rumaging through his Grandfather's things to see if he can find something to sell and pulls out an old Go board. A ghostly apparation appears out of the board and tells Hikaru his sad story. His name is Sai Fujiwara, a man who was a Go instructor to the emperor of Japan a thousand years ago. However, because of bad sportsmanship during a game, Sai was accused of cheating and banashied from the city. With no livelihood or any other reason to live, Sai commited suicide by drowning himself. Now, he haunts a Go board, and wants to accomplish the perfect Go game, called the "Hand of God" which he hopes to do through Hikaru. If Hikaru will be able to do it or not (or even wants to) will have to be seen.

Call it one of my guilty pleasures, since I normally don't follow anything shonen besides this and OP. I really can't give a good reason as to why I like this one so much, maybe it's because of the incredible art, or just because you can grow so attached to simple characters. Aside from that, go matches in this one can excite me more than any generic shonen sword fight.

More to follow later.

Most amazing jew boots

If you'd like a science fiction manga that's more rooted in reality than giant robots and laser beams, try out Planetes. Keywords: space debris, rookie employee, corporate ladder, The Moon, terrorists, coworker romance, Jovian expedition -- actually, maybe I'll just refer you to the Wikipedia article.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?