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