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.

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

There's nowhere I can't reach.