From: miles@gnu.org
"Olde Tech" writes:
> Thanks, guys. My queue is getting longer every day.
A few random titles I'd recommend (not all are "great", but I thought
all were very entertaining):
* "20th Century Boys" (20世紀少年)
Vast web of twisted conspiracies, masterfully lays on a nostalgia
trip and then slowly twists it into something mega-creepy. The
backgrounds are highly detailed and gorgeous (he apparently has
legions of assistants!).
[This sort of lost its way, and bogged down in the last few
volumes I thought, but most of it was just great.]
* "Futatsu no Supika" (ふたつのスピカ)
Wistful-but-hopeful, vaguely-super-ganbaru type of comic about
kids at an astronaut school, with a weird vein of mild mysticism.
The plot is pretty cheesy -- pretty much everyone has a hidden
tragic past/present -- but done with enough sensitivity and skill
that it ends up working anyway. The occasional detailed drawings
of rural japan -- train stations, shrines, small towns -- are
wonderful, and one gets the feeling it's the part of making manga
he likes the best. The short tankoubon end-volume strips are also
entertaining.
There's also an anime "based on" this manga, but from I've seen of
that, the manga is much, much, better.
* "Dai-nana Joshi Kaihoukou" (第七女子会彷徨)
Weird, endearing, super sarcastic, sly, occasionally creepy.
Short-Stories about two schoolgirl friends in a near future that's
exactly like the present except when it's insanely different.
* "Chi's Sweet Home" (チーズスイートホーム)
Cute cat manga! Actually, really, scarily, cute. My niece and
nephew go crazy for these, though they can't read a word. [The
tankoubon are kinda expensive though, I suppose because they've
been colored.]
* "Tetsuko no Tabi" (鉄子の旅)
A self-referential manga about a manga artist who's tasked with
accompanying a super-train-otaku on various train trips around
Japan.
The kicker: it's completely non-fiction -- the creator really did
go on all these trips, and the manga simply records what happened,
with no embellishment. There's a little disclaimer at the front
that says "This is non-fiction, so I apologize for the lack of
drama," and indeed, it mostly is just about them riding trains
from place to place, waiting on platforms, etc.
Nonethless, it's highly entertaining, with a constant friction
between the train-otaku, who mainly cares about a perfectly
micro-managed and complete trip, and the author, who mainly cares
about eating eki-ben.
Throughout, it feels real -- if you've travelled by train in Japan
it will all seem very familiar, not just the scenery, but also the
atmosphere and feel -- and the artist does a great job of pacing
and applying little tweaks to keep it consistently entertaining.
In an additional bit of recursiveness, some of the characters who
show up in the manga (who of course are real people, who really
did show up) do so because they (really) read previous episodes of
the manga!
[apologies for the length of this blurb -- it's mostly copied from
an earlier review I wrote.]
* "Mahoujin Guru-Guru" (魔法陣グルグル)
This dates from the '90s, and is basically a silly/cute fantasy
manga, I think literally based on role-playing video games (I
vaguely remember reading that he was told to do exactly that) --
so it's full of weird references to such. But it's very
skillfully done, with great comic timing, and an insistent streak
of extreme sarcasm that makes it highly entertaining.
* "Tales of Failure Works" (で
そこなし物語)
Short, cute, sarcastic.
[These are all in Japanese, tho I think I heard 20th century boys
had an english translation by now.]
-Miles
--
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or
fears or wishes rather than with their minds. -- Will Durant
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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