Black Jack Volume 1

I like this Osamu Tezuka manga for its entertaining medical craziness. Behind stories of insane, unbelievable surgeries lies a strong sense of morality and justice. (Big thanks to David Welsh, whose contest got these books to me for free.) Black Jack is a rogue surgeon, an unlicensed doctor who refuses to kowtow to the medical establishment. He requests immense fees to accomplish the impossible, such as treating sores that form faces and talk or transplanting a brain to a new […]

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Parasyte

This has been quite a year for realizing that rules don’t apply. I used to say “I don’t like horror comics”, but I should say, “I don’t like most horror comics”, because I enjoy Parasyte. That’s because the scary element — a body-invading controller — is a perfect metaphor for teenage alienation and discomfort with one’s own body. When alien worms come to possess humans, Shinichi is saved by his Walkman. He uses the cord as a makeshift tourniquet, preventing […]

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The Manga Guide to Statistics

The Manga Guide to Statistics promises to combine education with entertainment, teaching “statistics with heart-pounding excitement!” That seems a bit much for a math comic book, but it refers to the storyline driving the lessons. When Rui first meets her father’s co-worker, Mr. Igarashi, who uses statistics in market research, she develops an instant crush. She asks her dad for a statistics tutor in order to get closer to him. Instead, she winds up with Mr. Yamamoto, a younger geek, […]

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Nana Volumes 12-14

Picking up from volume 11, I figured it was time I indulged myself and got caught up on this amazing series. Time is flexible with this series, what with its narration frequently taking a nostalgic tone of wistful memory. That’s even more obvious in the first chapter, in which we’ve jumped ahead to see Hachi and her daughter (!) Satsuki and her friends gathering for a summer fireworks festival, just as they did back then (which is the reader’s current […]

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Nana Volume 11

When people talk about cyber-cheating, or whether or not online communication counts as being unfaithful, they often focus on the acts. “Did you just talk as friends or did you fool around?” That’s the wrong approach. What matters is the person’s attitude. In this volume, you can tell from the first few panels of Hachi getting a text message from Nobu that she’s emotionally involved, even though all it says is, “How are you? I’d like to talk to you.” […]

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The Quest for the Missing Girl

I checked out this mystery because I adore the detailed thin line art of Jiro Taniguchi (The Walking Man). That’s on display, but the story is nothing to write home about. In a plot that could have been part of Murder, She Wrote, mountain climber Shiga heads to Tokyo to find the missing daughter of his dead best friend. There’s more to it than that, thematically — Shiga had an additional connection with the widowed mother, and the girl turned […]

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Luv Luv: Pretty Poison, Make Love & Peace

The first Luv Luv Press title, Voices of Love, was intriguing to me, just because it was very unusual in the U.S. to see manga romance stories for women with explicit sex included. (Although there had previously been the occasional explicit shojo story.) The next two, Real Love and Love for Dessert, were pretty bad, since they seemed to emphasize the sex at the expense of believable (or in some cases, any) characterization and storytelling craft. So how do the […]

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High School Debut Volume 6

I’m surprised I’m still enjoying this manga as much as I am, because I would have expected that as it loses its shiny!newest! feel, I would be getting a little bored of it. But I’m not. I think that’s because the author, Kazune Kawahara, keeps the teen relationship realistic while plugging in lots of funny stuff and keeping the events moving. Plus, Haruna is just so enthusiastic a personality, she’s a blast to read about. As volume 6 opens, she’s […]

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