#i need to look at more urasawa

[skunkes]

[meion]

small update:

yayy it seems like there's a fair amount of interest in this!!

I have some other things on my plate currently, but i'm planning to make a more formal announcement post with a rough timeline around the end of the month (w dedicated accounts on twitter/tumblr)

i would really like to make this happen, but i think due to my lack of experience i ought to keep it fairly small? It would be really fun to have it go into print, but i don't feel comfortable promising that right now, without having another mod that has some experience in that area

that being said, if anyone is interested in helping mod in any areas (but particularly printing), please let me know!!

Misc. thoughts:

If it goes into print, all contributors would receive a free zine ofc (i'll pay for this if it doesn't break even lol)

IMO it would be nice for any profits to go to charity (tbd), but im open to feedback

Since someone asked, i would be happy to include writers! personally i kinda like the idea of doing small accompanying illustrations too?

Also if it goes into print, perhaps simple merch options… i love stickers now

In the meantime pls let me know if you have any questions or suggestions :0 thank u for reading!

[shiawasekai]

if you could pick one fictional world to be able to magically transport yourself into whenever you wanted, which would you pick?

That's... not a question with an easy answer. Most settings in the kind of stuff I read/watch are Varying Levels Of Very Fucked Up. Our own world is also very fucked up, yes, but I'm used to it. It's bearable.

Now, if I had to cut my losses and choose the lesser evil........ Maybe Witch Hat Atelier??? As long as you stay The Hell Away from the MC and co. it should be relatively fine!!! Maybe!!! It has been a while since I've read new volumes so I have no idea how bad things have gotten (probably really bad).

As much as I love, say, Twelve Kingdoms... That's a story that pulls no punches in telling you how miserable the average worldhopper would be.

And settings like Golarion where I would be yet another NPC to be killed? No thanks. Even less World of Darkness! Or most other ttrpg settings I'm familiar with.

I could say Bokura no Kiseki and abuse the fact the Present Time plot happens in our world but that feels disingenuous.

Oh wait at will let me rephrase this. I'm dumb sorry anon I'll reblog this with a proper answer

[meruz]

sorry if this has been asked before, but i wanted to ask about your lineart! the weight and line economy are just so nice, i get stars in my eyes looking at your lineart and doodles. could i ask what your approach to lineart is and what tips you might offer?

Wow I love these questions - Line is so interesting!!! It's a really big topic so I feel like any tips I give will be just barely scratching the surface. It's like deceptively simple...any given line drawing is essentially taking all the information we glean from seeing something irl ie light, shadow, dimension, texture, perspective, etc and boiling it down to the simplest possible visual information.

I think most commonly my line is informed by light source so like. thicker more continuous lines face away from the light and thinner more broken lines towards. and a lot of my spot blacks r simply cast shadows.

here's a more extreme example

BUT like everything to do with art there's no hard and fast rules. I use blacks when I think it'll be effective or interesting and I leave them out when I don't need em. umm couple things I find myself doing a lot... using spot blacks to make the separation between characters clearer. I like casting shadow in between characters so its easy to separate and read their silhouettes even when they're mashed together.

u can go even further to purposely create a silhouette like

to draw attention to a finger or tongue LOL. There's some comic book artists who are absolute masters at this type of stylization. Alex toth and his spiritual successor Chris samnee come to mind for me right away.

(toth)

(samnee)

I feel like I'm also often using line weight to separate planes receding in space

im naturally a really heavy handed and scribbly drawer(...?) draftsman. and im nearsighted so when i see things i percieve and break it down into big shapes over thin contours. so stuff like spot blacks and shadows came easy to me, the tricky part was making the rest of the lines lighter when they needed to be so the blacks could actually have impact LOLL. a lot of effective visual communication is about balancing contrasts. like I had to really train myself to press less hard on the pen. I think this is actually really evident if u go back in my archive to older sketches LOL

I actually feel like a lot of how I trained my hand to tackle line weights was thru stuff like hand lettering where you rly have to focus on being sensitive to that kind of thing.. contrasting strokes etc.

also exercises like figure drawing will have you flexing those muscles constantly

I'm starting to just regurgitate lessons from freshman year of art school so I'll stop here with the demos but yeah...I hope this was helpful!? I love line!!! I want to get even better at line work so I can feel confident posting work that's only line no color or value... I'll leave you with a bunch of artists who I think have particularly expressive and beautiful linework (not including toth and samnee who I already mentioned and who's work I love so much). You can probably learn much more from them than you can from me...!

Charles dana gibson LOL

Matias bergara

tonci zonjic

naoki urasawa

Daniel warren johnson

shiyoon kim

michel breton

also yoji shinkawa, tomer hanuka, leo romero, I feel like I'm gonna post this and think of so many more. there's so many good artists...!

[itzrafee]

A thing on Uran and Helena in Pluto

Okay a short little thing on Pluto. Uran and Helena are my absolute favourite characters in Pluto. Urasawa has always had amazing side characters, from Mr. Rosso in Monster to Lee Harvey Oswald and Jackie in Billy Bat to God in 20th Century Boys, but very few have tied off the emotional ends of the story like Uran and Helena.

Maybe I'm projecting here but much like myself I feel like Urasawa is absolutely obsessed with Frankenstein. And he recognizes the influence Frankenstein has on Dr. Umataro Tenma. Or at the very least, the similarities between the two. And so when he made the protagonist of one of his most popular works Monster, Dr Kenzo Tenma, he solidified that connection. Kenzo Tenma calls back to Victor Frankenstein needing to end his creation while also calling back to Japan's other famous Tenma, thus making the connection explicit. Another throughline between the three of them is that all three are father figures to their creations and have obligations to their children, though all three have varying levels of success with them.

I've only read what I like to call Urasawa's "Core Four", conspiracy minded thrillers that are essentially road trips featuring usually two main protagonists that we see the world through, Monster, 20th Century Boys, Pluto and Billy Bat. Though I still haven't caught up to Asadora and that could still possibly fit this mold, Urasawa's Core Four share a lot of themes and ideas. One of the most important being the responsibility for one's creations, whether it was Kenji Endo and the Book of Prophecy or Kevin Yamagata and Billy Bat or Dr. Kenzo Tenma and Johan, all of his protagonists could arguably be seen as someone with the need to take up the responsibility of their creations. So where do the protagonists of Pluto fit in there? That's where Uran and Helena come in.

But first, we should take a look at Pluto's themes. While I could be wrong, at a cursory glance, I feel like the general consensus towards it's themes is that it's about hatred. I don't really think that's what it is as I feel like Urasawa is more trying to show us what it is to be human and what it is to be alive. And in that, he has a hidden protagonist in Pluto. Someone who's influence snakes through the plot and isn't seen much, but without who the story's themes would remain incomplete. Pluto tackles what it is to be alive through many things, such as memory, sadness, grief, hatred, love and parenthood. But none of that works without the realization by Tenma of his own mistakes. And Uran and Helena bookend these revelations and are absolutley key to understanding that.

In my favourite chapter of the series, Chapter 37, Uran goes from person to person as she finds a way to deal with her grief and eventually comes across Tobio's grave, Tenma having left recently. It's an absolutely beautiful chapter that shows Uran's humanity and Urasawa's love for sharing these kind and soft moments. But it also sheds a light on Tenma as Uran realizes someone who was grieving has just left. Without saying much at all we realize that Tenma has finally realized his mistakes. In the process of grieving one son, he lost the other. While remembering Tobio, he let Atom go. His grief towards Tobio is clear in the following chapter, Chapter 38. All of the things he wanted Atom to be; Tobio come back to life, Tobio's ghost punishing him, Atom rejected. And Tenma could only see that rejection, and not what he had, another son.

Uran shows us very clearly what Pluto, the story, is. It's a chapter in their lives. And we've come into a story nearing the end for Tenma. And it's through the humanity of two absolutely amazing characters in their own right, Uran and Helena, that we are able to so fully understand Tenma. Despite being robots, these two characters are the most alive of everyone. They love fully and freely and are catalysts of change. Uran's vibrant and full of life in a way that really sticks out. And Helena has such depth that it's evident in every scene she's in. She's not pointed out to be made by any famous scientist so all the life she has is her own. These two represent the life of robot's more than any other characters in the series.

So it's that much more poignant when Helena finally breaks down after putting on such a strong front of everybody. Grief intersects and she brings out Tenma's sadness as well. They've both been putting up such strong fronts that it's heartbreaking to see them collapse. It completes Tenma's growth and strikes a heartbreaking contrast between the two. Tenma became the way he is through the loss of his son whereas Helena doesn't even get to remember her own loss. It makes you wonder if the grief for her and Geischt's child compounds her sorrow too.

Without these two and their grief, a large part of Pluto becomes inaccessible. Pluto is largely about death so when two characters come in who've never had a hand in the grim work of taking life, you see the world through a lens that's absolutely crucial in order to fully connect with all of the character's and their situations. Death and Grief has scarred the characters in Pluto. Time and time again they've chosen the worst path. They've chosen revenge and hatred. But Uran and Helena are different. Without them, the story is incomplete. They provide an alternative. They provide the path towards healing.

im sorry for this one:

[obligatorymorningfart]

Do you have any tips on how to start doing comics?

I hate to be a normie here but both Scott McCloud’s Making Comics and Understanding Comics are great resources to help to give you some basic foundational knowledge.

Another overstated but nevertheless real and honest piece of advice is just to draw some comics and never stop. I struggle with this a lot and it’s even worse when you finally sit down and all you can produce is garbage. But you just have to keep going and keep sifting and stomping through the trenches until you find something you’re proud of and then years later you’ll look back on it and see everything you did wrong BUT that just means you’ve gotten better than you were.

Invest in a ruler and lettering guide, get some 11x17 Bristol board, make 1 inch margins top and bottom, half inch margins on the left and right, and 1/4 inch gutters between panels. Read any manga by Naoki Urasawa. Read Cross Game. Read Slam Dunk. Or just read your favorite authors and pick out everything you like about what they do and try to emulate it. Doesn’t even have to be comics. Listen to music and try to translate what you like about it into comics. Hang out with other artists and draw. It’s important to see how other people do things. Draw from reference, don’t just draw cartoons. I ignored everyone who told me to practice drawing from reference bc I thought it was cheating/boring and I kick myself every day for it! It’s a real eat your vegetables kind of thing. Like still draw as many cartoons as you want but also draw your hands every now and again. A tree or a bench, maybe.

Anyway, hope this helps and good luck with making comics. I need to go make some more as well.

[seeminglyseph]

Naoki Urasawa character design really hits me like “oh right fuck I love when anime and manga looks like this”

And like I know technically no other manga looks like Naoki Urasawa but. Like. Also. It could look more like Urasawa in literally any way and be an improvement I think? Like his art is so fucking good and his designs are so damn interesting and like. No I’m not saying anime should all have non-Japanese protagonists, because I think most of his work still is focused on Japan, 20th Century Boys is I think largely focused on Japan, it’s Monster and Pluto which are more international from the three that I have any familiarity with, and both Monster and Pluto have major Japanese either Protagonists or Secondary Protagonists.

But it’s definitely fun to see an anime with a German Protagonist with a large nose and receding hairline seemingly middle aged and dealing with PTSD.

Like yeah, he’s a robot, but also they made a robot with a receding hairline who is exhausted and looks like he’s at least in his mid forties. Thank you for taking the DILF challenge seriously. These old men have facial features.

I mean shit have you seen Dr Tenma? This old Japanese man is giving me everything I needed from a sexy mad scientist. I never watched Astro Boy. I never cared about Astro Boy. I am going to fuck this old man. Good lord the things good character design can do to me.

Please revolutionize the anime industry. Put noses into the anime industry. Oh my *god* I need some fucking facial features in my anime characters.

Like yes actually the rest of the anime is also very good for other reasons but also I want these old men carnally for gay reasons and I want more anime to look like this because I’m selfish.

[cursedvibes]

if you think that a non-black author has the range to write an anti-black character, you are extremely wrong. the way gege draws hakari and miguel is anti-black (hakari’s hair isn’t drawn well or with care and his skin is drawn way too light, and miguel’s lips aren’t as bad as a lot of authors but also not good), so what makes you think he can write about it in a meaningful way?

all that’s come of this is non-black people 1) making jokes about it and 2) relentlessly harassing black people in the fandom even more than before. please don’t piss me off.

I assume with the first sentence you are talking about non-black authors writing about black characters

I never said it was perfect. In fact I criticized Gege's writing and said that if you tackle issues like racism you should do it more carefully and in-depth. But again, this all depends on Gege leaning into those aspects of his character more and exploring it to not have Miguel be the only black person in the manga. That hasn't happened so far and with the manga soon ending I doubt it ever will. I was talking about hypotheticals on how I think things could be improved.

And I don't think there is in principle anything wrong with writing about a demographic you are not part of, otherwise stories would be incredibly monotonous and you lose the variety of real life, which isn't great either. The issue is just that you have to inform yourself before writing about what you don't know, even if it's for example writing about characters from another country. Which is usually part of any writing process, at least if you plan your story ahead. I think Gege initially didn't put much thought into how Miguel or Hakari experience racism. It's there rudimentarily in Vol 0 and Hakari's introduction and background, but I doubt they wanted to go in-depth with it. Technically they still didn't because Miguel telling Gojo once "you're being racist" was more intended as a quick message for the (assumed to not be black) readers than a real impactful moment in the story. Even in the scene itself they brush past it very quickly. But I think overall Gege is perfectly capable of improving their writing, they just need to be advised and have someone look over the work to check for internal biases. So you don't end up with things like Gojo being criticized for one stereotype, while Miguel's rhythm-based CT plays into another. Like, if they wanted to, they could absolutely write more about the experiences of black Japanese people, the source is right there and unlike with someone from Kenya, there is also no language barrier. The resources for it absolutely exist and the Black Lives Matter protest happened only a few years ago, giving their experiences more attention.

Look at the manga Billy Bat for example. Urasawa Naoki and Nagasaki Takashi have characters from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds and write about a variety of historic events including the civil rights movement in the US and it works because they did their research and listened to advisors who can speak from actual experience on this matter. That is a lot harder to accomplish in a weekly format with no co-writer, but again, I was talking about how Gege could theoretically improve things and I think under different circumstances they have absolutely the capability for that, everyone has. Otherwise media would be exactly where it was 20 or 50 years ago in terms of how diversity is handled. If they want to improve it is another thing (definitely not in this manga).

[beesmygod]

I hope you don't mind a general question about comic making. Do you write your pages out well in advance via script, or what's the general process there? (If you don't mind my asking)

sorry i take so long to reply, but i dont mind answering these at all. i never know if my answer to questions about web comic creation are useful or not. but there's also not a lot of resources out there describing how it DOES get done. someone give me a million dollars to fund a series like urasawa's manben but for web comic artists.

i write AGS basically in the most haphazard way possible (lol) in the hope that it doesn't show too badly.

in general, i have the long arc of the comic planned out in my brain. i didn't know where i was going at first; AGS was intended to be a "monster of the week arc" type series where i just put jack and maxine into situations, but it sort of evolved past that because i needed to work on something more substantial. now i know where the characters are going, where they've been, and what i want to say. just maybe not in the specific words i want to yet. i cant decide if its arrogant and stupid to write down how the comic is supposed to end in case i die but like. im not miura.

for every "book" (the overarching storylines) of AGS, i usually write down a rough outline of what i need to happen to move the plot forward, WHY it moves the plot forward, and then shuffle that around and/or add things until im satisfied with it. the last chapter's outline would have looked like this (sorry for the image but tumblr fucking sucks at making bulleted lists):

and so on and so forth.

but most of the time i think of shit that's funnier/a better idea last minute and rather than stick with the old plan, most of the time i end up switching things up last minute. USUALLY not major plot beats, those are pretty nailed down. but the path i end up taking to that beat might be shorter or funnier or just more entertaining

[comotsolebo]

While reading 'Pluto,' I had this realization that this was the first time that I had compassion/empathy for robots . Looking back at my childhood, I always felt a disconnect to movies when they tried making robots "humans" by just placing them in human like bodies or making them tell speeches about how they are more human than us. I felt that was disingenuous, preachy, and boring to describe humanity like that.

When reading 'Pluto,' I could see a robot that had no physical attributes of a human feel more human than anyone. It didn't need facial expressions to make you understand its story. I was actually surprised when I realized each robot their own form of humanity in order to live.

I recommend everyone to read/watch Naoki Urasawa's retelling of the Astroboy story.

[bmpmp3]

i shouldnt really be giving any hot takes on character design as someone who, despite having mild success in the adoptable scene in highschool, absolutely does NOT still got it when it comes to character designing (nowadays im just trying to do my best orz) but i do think one of the most important things with character design is that they serve the medium theyre in well.

like, a super exaggerated shape style triangle man with tiny legs a la mr incredible works great for an action cartoon movie but i dont know how good that style would work in a visual novel where you tend to only see the top half of the body. you wont be able to appreciate the tiny legs 😔

and as much as i goof on the visually cluttered anime boys in otome games and their odd fashion choices (kent from amnesia. at least 21 belts. 11 on one arm alone) i genuinely think they work for what they need to do, like all those fucking sashes and scarves and cords and capes and swishy things on the ikemen sengoku guys, painful to draw for me who wants to draw a goofy comic of them but WONDERFUL for an unanimated visual novel sprite, flowing clothes and hair adds a lot of movement to static images that you'll be staring at for 20-50 hours.

but of course on the visual novel/japanese adv game end of things u also have stuff like phoenix wright and the absolutely beautiful hotel dusk that tend to have blockier silhouettes than the fluttery flowing cloth and hair of like, a character in a bishoujo game from Key or something, but their sprites are animated which benefits from the blockier and (usually) less cluttered designs.

and theres still lots of exaggeration to be had to get very varied character designs, like the jake hunter games have a very grounded semi-realistic style but everyones posture and body types and expressions are pretty distinct, just the distinction is focused on the upper half of the body rather than the whole body like you would focus on with a comedy slapstick cartoon or like a comedy newspaper comic strip. okay its becoming increasingly obvious through what im talking about that i grew up in north america in the 00s-10s using deviantart where if ur cartoons didnt look like disney or pixar or like i dont know johnny test ur designs were considered not good enough so im still in that world. im still in that world. i hope the world is more open now

and something like the hotel dusk designs also would work well for drama or thriller comics - like i was also thinking about big sparkling shoujo manga designs and like. in a comic if ur like a garfield slapstick comedy u wanna look like a garfield, but if ur constantly doing closeups with serious emotion like a romantic drama shoujo manga, having big glittering expressive eyes and emphasizing the upper half of the character is pretty effective for the combination of medium and genre. i also think naoki urasawa's character designs would look so so good in a hotel dusk style game, that guy makes like the perfect thriller design, varied and diverse in shapes but so effective for a serious toned horror mystery thriller thing will lots of closeups of characters faces. i guess because i love serious and dramatic stories about people talking a whole lot i do gravitate towards this style of character design, where the emphasis is on the silhouette from the waist up LOL but it really goes to show that some character designs that may not fit the late 2000s comedy animation shape-based design philosophy have their own places where they thrive <- obvious thing everyone knows except for me who was on deviantart too much when i was 12

i think what im trying to say is i think big boobied super busy anime girl vtuber designs are fine, good even. i like em, i think they do the job and a lot of work goes into them. u only have a headshot/bust (heh) shown on screen 99% of the time u might as well make it with a bunch of particle effects and cool hairclips and lace and weird moving head wings or some shit. slap some sparkles on that thang

[good-wine-and-cheese]

eva for blorbo bingo 🥺?

Miss Queen Eva!!!!! I love her so very much, she's an awful disaster of a woman who never really learned how to be a person properly, she kind of got shocked out of her life of privilege and realized that if she wants anything in the Real World she has to engage with the world on its own terms and she is just not good at doing that. Her answer was to make everyone around her as miserable as herself and that's very powerful of her honestly. I love that her story isn't like, a linear road to recovery. She gets better, then she gets so much worse before she gets properly better again. It's human! It's good writing.

I don't think Urasawa dropped the ball per se but in the anime at least it feels like Eva's "I'm still in love with Tenma!!!!!!!!!!!!!" arc went on a little too long in a way that didn't add much to her story. I would've loved for those feelings to kind of just get lost amidst the animosity. The result of what we do get is that some of her scenes, while very good, are a little one-note in that she just digs so hard into that one issue. Which is fine and all but I've read Urasawa's other works and I know he can do a lot more with a similar character type. Audrey Culkin is what I would consider the final form of what he was going for with Eva in some regards. She just needed some more polishing off ya know?

Similar to Grimmer she kind of....isn't there for long periods of time and I think it's a shame! That said I don't think it would add much to introduce her earlier, the period she's gone for makes sense, I just miss her chaotic energy when she's gone.

Also yeah fandom used to be so shit to her. Tumblr seems to love her again which is good but there were people that hated she survived or just thought she was the absolute character and I am standing here looking at her relative crimes to like, Bonaparta, and going Hm Okay!! Glad that people are starting to love her again but yeah a lot of people are still so weird about her. She's a bad bitch and it's why she's great

[mejomonster]

Manga I'm reading or will read (so I guess if you have similar tastes check some out):

Death note (im not still reading, I read it long ago, still one of my favorites)

Hikaru no go (LOVE this artist, loved the cdrama adaptation, still need to read the original)

Billy Bat (i love everything naoki urasawa has ever made. If you like mysteries thrillers and wild plots? You'll probably like everything this author made too. In this particular case, billy bat is like if Kingdom Hearts crossed with Beyond Evil and was global scale centuries scale murder world control plot, full of references and a good evil mickey mouse spoof and an evil disney and comic artists as the protagonists and a lot to say about creation and stealing ideas and originality and transforming what already exists and like. If youre both into murder mysteries AND an artist then the themes are very fascinating. Urasawa also seems to make many manga that take place in multiple countries and characters of varied backgrounds, and I appreciate the global scale of the stories and the particular perspectives it offers. Some other manga by urasawa on my to read list: Pluto, Master Keaton, 20th Century Boys, Monster)

Tomie, and anything by Junji Ito (i love junji ito! I read Remina and LOVE IT, highly recommend for horror and sci fi lovers its a short good read. Read his cat manga for some comedy and zero horror. I find his horror manga oddly comforting. I also read Lovesick and adore the way the stories end up much more about personal fears manifested as monsters while the personal fears continue as the true plot, my favorite kind of horror. Junji Ito did a manga adaptation of No Longer Human I may eventually check out, but since the original novel was written by another person im not sure I'll click with it as much)

Dungeon Meshi (to read, self explanatory, its a very kind story in terms of how you feel, nice art and characters)

Golden Kamuy (to read)

Vagabond (to read)

Devilman (reading, feels oddly like old mickey mouse and xmen comics which is pleasant, it is as gay as youve heard)

Berserk (reading, i love it to pieces and take gratuitious breaks because it clicks Too much for me. The character and world designs are very close to how i usually design fantasy worlds, including the gratuitious faerie designs im always doing, so i try not to read this When im writing as its just too close to what i click with lol. I highly recommend if you like fantasy and solid characters)

Tokyo Babylon and X by Clamp (to read)

Banana Fish (to read)

Revolutionary Girl Utena (to read)

Vinland Saga (and the animal version, to read)

Beyond the Tricornered Window (i started, its surprisingly lust filled for a ghost finding story)

One Piece (reading)

Urusei Yatsura (i love everything by rumiko)

Ranma 1/2 (ive read and watched many a time, just my absolute fave. Do you like gender shennanigans, action and romantic comedy? Well i happen to love romantic comedy, IF its bisexual and filled to the brim with action scenes and ridiculous moments. Ranma 1/2 perfectly fits that niche. So lots of fun fights, off the wall moments like a baby pig being actually a teen boy adopted by another boys fiance, a girl who turns into a cat and wants to marry Ranma when he looks like a guy and kill him when he looks like a girl, 2 anime villain level dramatic siblings in a mess with ranma and his fiance akane romantically, a rich preteen girl who kidnaps pig boy, a guy named moose who turns into a goose, its just great)

Trigun (i want to know why people love this manga)

The Drifting Classroom (i just like horror manga a lot can u tell, to read)

School Rumble (another romantic comedy slash ensemble slice of life, where ranma plas with gender and comments on societal biases, school rumble instead keeps it lighter and plays with the usual romance teen manga tropes and both uses and breaks them a lot. The lead is in love with an alien boy who does not get crushes, and is the only alien in the plot. The guy who loves the lead is a delinquent manga artist and that gets meta at points. The leads sister is the more likely usual Protagonist type but shes just into helping animals and avoiding ppl and is very similar to Komisan, one of the leads friends is like Girl James Bond. The characters all read stereotype in early eps then actually get explored in ways you wouldnt expect and wouldnt assume to go that deep. Its very much ensemble about friends, and the romance is not actually main stage despite all the crushes, so a bit like Ouran Host Club in that way. I like romances and slice of life best When they subvert tropes and do the unexpected with them, and school rumble does fun things in that way)

All the Kingdom Hearts manga (i just like kh and love the artist and little side scenes the manga adds that the games dont have. Id love to read the novels one day if i could find them translated)

Innocent (i got an ad that recommended it but it looks scary so im probably in)

Homunculus (looks scary, of course its on the list)

Detective Conan (to read, my friend LOVES the anime)

Arcana (genuinely no idea what its about, i just gave it one look and made a judgemeny guess itd be my kind of story. Ill find out)

Brutal (looks scary, so of course i added it to my to read)

Erased (my friend loved the anime so ill probably like it)

Inuyasha (i figured maybe i should finish the manga since ive Watched half the anime back in childhood)

Seven Days (theres a jdrama bl adaptation)

Takara Kun and Amagi Kun (theres a jdrama bl adaptation)

Ultras (ill be real it looks super gay but also romance heavy only and i dont care much for Only romance usually, if u like gay sports stuff this looks like REAL gay sports romance drama for adults)

Witch Hat Atelier

[very-grownup]

Numbered List of Manga

I don't really understand what's meant by the X to know me by thing going around, because I thought it was generally agreed that media consumption is not a substitute for personality, but here are 10 (licensed) manga series that stick with me.

Hikaru no Go (Yumi Hotta and Takeshi Obata)

Tokyo Babylon (CLAMP)

KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE (Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki)

From Eroica With Love (Yasuko Aoike)

X-Day (Setona Mizushiro)

Pluto (Naoki Urasawa)

Goodnight Punpun (Inio Asano)

Otherworld Barbara (Moto Hagio)

Banana Fish (Akimi Yoshida)

Berserk (Kentaro Miura)

Hikaru no Go

The first sports manga I read and the gold standard for Shounen Jump sports manga. The slow maturation of Obata's art with Hikaru's character arc compliment each other so perfectly (when he does his own writing I don't have time for Obata), the triangle of skill/interest/desire in Hikaru's relationship with the game, JUST PUTTING A GHOST IN YOUR SPORT SERIES AS A MENTOR TO THE PROTAGONIST -- the natural end of the series is perfect (and not undone by continuing for several more volumes) and I still think about it twenty years later and get teary. Any subject can be engaging in the right hands.

Tokyo Babylon

My age and gender mean not including a CLAMP title would be a lie. It would be like a dude my age denying having seen any Dragon Ball. Tokyo Babylon is my go-to, with the heavy contrast of the art, chunkier and less streamlined than CLAMP's later titles, and the themes of death, environmentalism, and the disconnect between people and the world around them in post-Bubble Tokyo, are things I keep coming back to in contemporary series, and looking back is both nostalgic while showing me how things have improved in terms of what's accessible and considered marketable in North America. There was a time when the idea of Tokyo Babylon being licensed was laughable! And now it's been licensed, published, and had the license lapse MULTIPLE TIMES.

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service

You should read Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. Ask me about Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. It's a kind, primarily episodic horror manga with strong anthropological roots. It's supernatural and incredibly real, with stories dealing with xenophobia, the criminal justice system, homelessness, environmental destruction, war crimes, aging populations and the lack of support, isolation, idol culture, otaku culture, employability after receiving a liberal arts education, urban legends, aliens, the dangers of technological innovation, parental loss, revenge, abortion, infanticide, juvenile offenders, cloning, blackmarket animal imports, the continued military presence in Japan, cryonics, the postal service, immigration, what if Jack the Ripper was a ghost and he possessed a cool thing you had imported and continued his serial killings as a ghost. You should read Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. Ask me about Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.

From Eroica With Love

This series started with superpowered teens, including one named LEOPARD SOLID, and Aoike decided that was boring and she made it a series about a British aristocrat with a secret identity as a flamboyant gentleman thief with amazing hair and a sexually charged rivalry with a German intelligence agent who hates him. It's amazing. It needs to be rescued. There's something like 40 volumes. The pope gets stolen. There's a car chase with a tank and a bazooka on the autobahn. It's perfect and outrageous and over-the-top.

X-Day

I love Mizushiro and she's been tragically unrepresented in English licenses (X-Day is an ex-Tokyopop license, for a one-two punch of tragedy). X-Day is about lonely young people connecting on the internet and planning to blow up their school. There was a panel that felt like my depression had been put perfectly, beautifully, heartbreakingly onto the page.

Pluto

Urasawa's one of the greats and Pluto sees him adapting another of the greats into a smart, often sad, science fiction mystery thriller, and I still haven't been able to bring myself to read it a second time, despite it being Urasawa's shortest series.

Goodnight Punpun

Have you ever read something so profoundly raw and honest and recognizable that you had to quit reading it cold turkey? I think about Goodnight Punpun a lot and I stare at it on my shelf and I know I'm still not ready to read the rest of it.

Otherworld Barbara

No one draws the way Hagio does, with lines that look like they will dissolve if you touch them, and she understands that soft, dreamy beauty should be able to encompass things that are hard and violent and bloody because girls love romance and dream realms and clones and question of identity and beautifully androgynous characters with dark starry eyes and cannibalism.

Banana Fish

I have often gone on, at length, about one of the core components of shoujo, especially classic shoujo, being BIG FEELINGS, and the hugeness of the feelings make the events correspondingly BIG AND POWERFUL AND IMPORTANT but Banana Fish ties that with extreme violence and a plot that becomes increasingly Metal Gear Solid, with impossible drugs and mind control and knife fights and snipers and torture hospitals and the American military industrial complex. And then it comes back to feelings. It's another title where you really see the art evolve, which I love, and it's one of those perfect tragedies, where you can feel bad things coming, sometimes see them coming, but there's a rightness in the tragic ending. It hits the catharsis necessary in real, proper tragedies.

Berserk

I resent how superficial readings of Berserk kept me from reading it for so long. Do I love the hyper-violence and the gore and Miura's obsessive attention to the tiniest details in his shitty, blood-soaked world? Yes, of course, it's powerful and visceral and shocking and wild, which makes the hope and the realness of the trauma and how difficult everything is and how exhausting just living is and the cycles the characters are trying to escape from more engaging. Despite everything it isn't constant, grinding misery. It's a series full of sparks of optimism and so much more than BIG MAN BIG SWORD, with hurts more complex than demonic abominations. But the demonic abominations DO look rad as hell.

[sevrai]

Took a break from silly toku shows to watch Monster and Pluto with Hayley. She read both manga years ago but this was my first exposure to Urasawa. Been wanting to get into them for a long time but never got around to it until now.

They're both really good. Pluto was definitely more to my personal tastes but I loved both stories a lot. The productions on both was great, too. Monster holds up well and Pluto had a lot of love put into it, (and showed remarkable restraint with CGI use.)

I adored Atom/Astro's characterization especially. I really liked the mix of endearing cuteness and thoughtful maturity. I found myself comparing him to how I want to write Ixis.

I don't have as much meaningful analysis or thoughts to air as I would like. Past me would probably have a lot more to say, but would also probably find a lot of the storytelling and themes lost on him. I never was the most media illiterate fellow, and it took me a shameful amount of time to become more interested in stories that don't consist of magic and fights.

I wonder if 20th Century Boys will ever get an animated adaption as faithful as these two before I get around to trying to read it...

(Now if you'll excuse me my wife and I are going to transition from traumatic character-exploration thrillers into Samurai Sentai Shinkenger lmao)

EDIT: I also feel like noting that Pluto worked well as a gateway drug in getting me to look up Astro Boy omnibus prices and grab a torrent of the 2003 series. I got my fill of Urasawa suspense but I need more little robot bastard fun in my veins.

[craetor]

Top 10 characters, as is my do-or-die duty as bestowed upon me by @5percentkira (thanks for tagging me♡). This is a rank list, except it's optional - they're all in my heart

Nui Harime (Kill la Kill), Lio Fotia (Promare) He deserved more love & attention. Promare should've been a short show., Light Yagami (Death Note) bc i need to acknowledge him in some way to not look like a fool. He's just less relatable & somewhat transparent psychologically, so i don't address him a lot. Sorry, boo. He'll just go into the layer of characters who feel kinda lacking but still in need of mentioning

Yuri Plisetsky (Yuri on Ice), Juuzou Suzuya (Tokyo Ghoul)

Senketsu (Kill la Kill), Yumeko Jabami (Kakegurui) bc of course. the anime >>> the manga btw

W. Grimmer (Naoki Urasawa's Monster), Andy Dufresne (The Shawshank Redemption)

Beyond Birthday (Death Note: Another Note) - There's not as much known about him as many others on this list (even though the mystery is what makes a character intriguing to moi), the hidden puzzle pieces & him being such a strong character in general get him a spot on here, too (love how i felt the need to justify)

Near & Ryuk (Death Note) - Also very sympathetic but have singled out flaws in way of trivia, & lack of what their competitors do show for, that have them landing all the way here

Johan Liebert (Naoki Urasawa's Monster) - He honestly deserves fourth best... The writing plays immensely in his favor on this. Also Monster & Monster fandom (the Tenjoh niece specifically) underrated fr

After these there's just nothing for a while but I also like Shuichi Saihara & Izuru Kamukura (Danganronpa) - Emo men who warm my heart🎀

Nagito Komaeda & Kokichi Ouma (Danganronpa) - Can't forget about the boys. Characters with deep-rooted psychologies that even fandom members of several years fail to capture fully. Give them a hug @ their undeniably canon protag boyfriends

L (Death Note) - Perhaps it's cause of hyperfixation, but even so, he's a type of character whose likeness I'd never seen before watching the anime. He's just so incredibly sympathetic on a personal level and, at the time of writing, pretty unbestable in my mind

Tagging @llawlieta @13eyond13 @enbykamukoma @/qageyamas @tinnyfoxts Hope nobody minds the tag. I don't have a lot of friends, or mutuals, even