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Post by Reptisaurus! on May 2, 2014 14:01:43 GMT -5
Because I just read 4,000-some-odd pages of 20th Century Boys over 24 volumes in three days, and Oh! My! God! you guys, it was the best comic I've read... well, at least this year.
Basically, it's about a group of kids in the late '60s through early '70s who come up with a plan to destroy the world - which one of them starts to actually implement 40 years later.
The whole thing is just an incredible tapestry of effective plotting, jumping back and fourth between multiple time periods (and a virtual reality world) covering TWO almost-apocalypses... and it's never not-exciting. (And addictive!) It dabbles in thriller, mystery (which of the childhood pals is "THE FRIEND" the masked, messianic figure who;s out destroy the world) comedy, musical narrative and... uh.. bowling. There's lots of bowling. And there's a fair amount of actual content there, as well - There's some smart thinking about how childhood imprinting defines us as adults, and how the smallest of decisions can have far-reaching consequences.
Just really great stuff. I'm kinda freaked out by how good the plotting in Manga can be, and I wonder why American comics can't do that.
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Post by Dizzy D on May 2, 2014 14:18:44 GMT -5
Once you have finished that, you might want to move on to Monster and Pluto. (Though I also like 20th Century Boys the best, that's why it was on my Top 50).
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Post by wildfire2099 on May 2, 2014 14:28:01 GMT -5
I had starting a manga thread in my head...cool! That sounds awesome, on the list!
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Crimebuster
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Post by Crimebuster on May 2, 2014 14:43:04 GMT -5
20th Century Boys is on my reading list as well.
At the moment, though, the only manga I have really gotten into is Hikaru No Go, which I quite enjoyed. Though it ended in a rather weird and fairly abrupt way.
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Post by Dizzy D on May 2, 2014 14:47:11 GMT -5
Oh, a bit hard to get and it didn't make my saga list on the old Classic Forums, despite having "Saga" in its name because it didn't apply for 2 reasons:
1. it just ended (though the original Japanese version ended earier) and
2. it's not really a saga.
Excel Saga: a comedy series and one of my favourite manga of all time.
Its art isn't fantastic, but the english translations by Viz is one of the best I've ever seen: it even has annotations in the back to explain all the cultural references, the small jokes and then goes on tangents, explaining choices made during translation to make untranslatable jokes work and so on.
Excel has just finished high school and finds a job in the organisation ACROSS that plans to conquer the Earth:
This world is corrupt! (Let's not go into how and why it's corrupt right now) and to fight that corruption the world needs a strong leader which ACROSS will provide. But conquering a world is really ambitious and probably unnecessary: conquering half the world would be enough to convince the other half that it'd be in their best interest to fall in line. Conquering half the world seems also overdone, conquering a continent would send the right message ... [skip for length]... save the world by conquering a single city!
But even conquering a single city is pretty hard when you are a two person organisation, meeting in a dampy basement. Excel is unfailingly loyal and has limitless stamina though to fulfill her task, while her leader, Lord Ill Palazzo, unfailingly disregards all her efforts and does little to nothing himself. The series twists and turns from there, introducing new members for ACROSS and their sworn enemies: Excel's neighbours who hoped to sign up for a cushy job working 9-5 for the local government, but end up as an unmotivated Power Rangers parody. Around issue 9 a plot starts to form. I'm still not quite clear on the ending and whether I like it or not.
The anime version is a fan of crossing the line humour and goes quite a bit differently.
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Post by Jesse on May 2, 2014 14:50:12 GMT -5
The only manga I am currently reading is Takehiko Inoue's Vagabond which I highly recommend. I've been looking forward to adding something new to my pull list but I'm not sure what yet. Ideally I'd like something finite as not to have to follow another title with over 300 chapters. I'd also like to get around to reading Naoki Urasawa's Monster because I thoroughly enjoyed the anime.
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Post by DubipR on May 2, 2014 14:59:04 GMT -5
When I was in my manga reading phase, I looked for manga that were about every day life instead of magical girls, princesses, giant robots and large swords. I didn't want a series that wasn't 20 plus volumes, I looked for 10 volume series and found some great slice of life stuff:
I really loved Iron Wok Jan, which was a brilliant and hilariously fun manga about Chinese cooking, ala Iron Chef. Jan is a young chef who comes from a great line of Chinese chef. He's sent to his family's rival's restaurant to learn and try to defeat them, but sort of becomes their ally in their restaurant. The food battles are visually pleasing and some of them were funny as hell. I think it was 16 volumes, but worth the read. (2004-ish?)
Paradise Kiss and Hana Yori Dango were 2 shojo romance series that I devoured. Paradise Kiss was 5 volumes about fashion school and romance. Hana Yori Dango was high school romance story of a gal who fell in love with one of the richest and most popular guy in school.
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Post by Reptisaurus! on May 2, 2014 15:42:49 GMT -5
Once you have finished that, you might want to move on to Monster and Pluto. (Though I also like 20th Century Boys the best, that's why it was on my Top 50). Yeah, that was definitely one of the reasons I read it! - Also I owe the Iowa City public library a hundred dollars which I can't afford right now, so I was looking through the University of Iowa college library and they had all 24 volumes. Oddly, I have read Pluto (and my Manga reading is really limited) but it didn't do much for me. As a Classic Comics guy, more serious versions of older material are always gonna be a hard sell, I guess. I'll try'n check out Monster pretty quick, though. |
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Post by thecolortechnic on May 2, 2014 16:22:16 GMT -5
Because I just read 4,000-some-odd pages of 20th Century Boys over 24 volumes in three days, and Oh! My! God! you guys, it was the best comic I've read... well, at least this year. Basically, it's about a group of kids in the late '60s through early '70s who come up with a plan to destroy the world - which one of them starts to actually implement 40 years later. The whole thing is just an incredible tapestry of effective plotting, jumping back and fourth between multiple time periods (and a virtual reality world) covering TWO almost-apocalypses... and it's never not-exciting. (And addictive!) It dabbles in thriller, mystery (which of the childhood pals is "THE FRIEND" the masked, messianic figure who;s out destroy the world) comedy, musical narrative and... uh.. bowling. There's lots of bowling. And there's a fair amount of actual content there, as well - There's some smart thinking about how childhood imprinting defines us as adults, and how the smallest of decisions can have far-reaching consequences. Just really great stuff. I'm kinda freaked out by how good the plotting in Manga can be, and I wonder why American comics can't do that. What's even crazier is that they release weekly (majority do at least), rather than monthly. So on top of the complex plotting they're doing it under a tight schedule. Of course we're cherry picking one of the best manga to be written, period. For every 20th Century Boys there are hundreds of fluff titles sitting on shelves. Oh a whole though I think they are on a different level than American comics. Not that American comics creators aren't as talented, but they're farther along the path of making comics (hundreds of years for them while we just started in the early 20th century) and there's a different perception towards comics (along with animation) by society as a whole. 20th Century Boys is on my reading list as well. At the moment, though, the only manga I have really gotten into is Hikaru No Go, which I quite enjoyed. Though it ended in a rather weird and fairly abrupt way. I wonder if there's a cultural difference happening here as I felt that HnG's ending was fairly typical in its open-ended-no-ending. The only manga I am currently reading is Takehiko Inoue's Vagabond which I highly recommend. I've been looking forward to adding something new to my pull list but I'm not sure what yet. Ideally I'd like something finite as not to have to follow another title with over 300 chapters. I'd also like to get around to reading Naoki Urasawa's Monster because I thoroughly enjoyed the anime. Vagabond is one of the most beautifully drawn comics. I also read Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi and it was fun to see what was left out and what was changed. Not that that was what Vagabond was necessarily based on. In fact, it's come to a point that Musashi has reached Bruce Lee levels of legend and it's hard to say what is what. But I think Musashi (the novel) is supposed to be one of the definitive accounts of Miyamoto's life. |
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Crimebuster
CCF Podcast Guru
Making comics!
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Post by Crimebuster on May 2, 2014 16:36:34 GMT -5
20th Century Boys is on my reading list as well. At the moment, though, the only manga I have really gotten into is Hikaru No Go, which I quite enjoyed. Though it ended in a rather weird and fairly abrupt way. I wonder if there's a cultural difference happening here as I felt that HnG's ending was fairly typical in its open-ended-no-ending. What was weird for me is that there clearly was an ending to the series. But then they did a whole arc afterwards anyway that left the loose ends dangling, instead of cleanly tied up as they had been. The main story pretty clearly ended when the spirit of Fujiwara-no-Sai disappeared and Hikaru and Akira have their showdown and become lifelong rivals. That's the end of the story. It tied up everything that had happened before, both in terms of plot and theme. In fact, I was so sure this was the end of the series when I was reading it, it didn't even occur to me that there would be more to the story, and I only learned of subsequent volumes completely by accident. I thought it was over! Because it really kind of was.
But then they went and did the competition between Japan and Korea. Which was a good story, I enjoyed it. But it felt kind of like Fables after the end of the Adversary storyline. It was good, but there was no longer that central driving purpose behind it. And then, at the end of the tournament, the series just... ended... after hinting at and sort of setting up a new status quo, with a new bad guy and new goals for Hikaru.
It just seemed weird. Like, after after a book ends, if the author then wrote the first chapter to a sequel, published it, and never wrote the rest. It just felt unfinished and kind of unsatisfying.
I've read rumors that Yumi Hotta wanted to end the series where it should have ended but was pressured into doing the next arc because of the popularity of the series. I don't know if it's true or not - and since I love the characters, I'm glad she wrote the last arc and everything - but I wish we had either gotten more of the new direction or just let it end where it should have instead.
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Post by thecolortechnic on May 2, 2014 17:14:15 GMT -5
I wonder if there's a cultural difference happening here as I felt that HnG's ending was fairly typical in its open-ended-no-ending. What was weird for me is that there clearly was an ending to the series. But then they did a whole arc afterwards anyway that left the loose ends dangling, instead of cleanly tied up as they had been. The main story pretty clearly ended when the spirit of Fujiwara-no-Sai disappeared and Hikaru and Akira have their showdown and become lifelong rivals. That's the end of the story. It tied up everything that had happened before, both in terms of plot and theme. In fact, I was so sure this was the end of the series when I was reading it, it didn't even occur to me that there would be more to the story, and I only learned of subsequent volumes completely by accident. I thought it was over! Because it really kind of was.
But then they went and did the competition between Japan and Korea. Which was a good story, I enjoyed it. But it felt kind of like Fables after the end of the Adversary storyline. It was good, but there was no longer that central driving purpose behind it. And then, at the end of the tournament, the series just... ended... after hinting at and sort of setting up a new status quo, with a new bad guy and new goals for Hikaru.
It just seemed weird. Like, after after a book ends, if the author then wrote the first chapter to a sequel, published it, and never wrote the rest. It just felt unfinished and kind of unsatisfying.
I've read rumors that Yumi Hotta wanted to end the series where it should have ended but was pressured into doing the next arc because of the popularity of the series. I don't know if it's true or not - and since I love the characters, I'm glad she wrote the last arc and everything - but I wish we had either gotten more of the new direction or just let it end where it should have instead.
If that is indeed true, it sounds like Toriyama's situation with Dragonball. The original Dragonball series was absolutely amazing. And although Z has a special place in my heart it's hard to deny that Dragonball really felt like it was supposed to end after Goku and Picollo's battle. |
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Post by Jesse on May 2, 2014 18:12:59 GMT -5
Vagabond is one of the most beautifully drawn comics. I also read Eiji Yoshikawa's Musashi and it was fun to see what was left out and what was changed. Not that that was what Vagabond was necessarily based on. In fact, it's come to a point that Musashi has reached Bruce Lee levels of legend and it's hard to say what is what. But I think Musashi (the novel) is supposed to be one of the definitive accounts of Miyamoto's life. It really is absolutely brilliant artwork and the intricate details in Takehiko Inoue's inking are incredible especially his backgrounds. I mean what other artist could make a rice paddy field so interesting?  |
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Post by Deleted on May 2, 2014 18:33:26 GMT -5
I've only read a few manga start to finish. Akira and XENON, with intentions to read Lone Wolf And Cub start to finish. I've sampled plenty of Viz titles I bought for 50 cents each at this major closeout online, didn't really like any of them. I'll keep an eye on the thread though in case something looks good. On Tumblr I always see interesting looking horror manga images, but no clue what books they're from.
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Post by wildfire2099 on May 2, 2014 21:28:57 GMT -5
I have at least 1 issue of Vagabond.. very pretty, but didn't grab my attention. I don't think I've read anything start to finish, I tend to poke at stuff. Anime is the opposite, for some reason  |
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Post by Reptisaurus! on May 2, 2014 21:34:46 GMT -5
The only manga I am currently reading is Takehiko Inoue's Vagabond which I highly recommend. I've been looking forward to adding something new to my pull list but I'm not sure what yet. Ideally I'd like something finite as not to have to follow another title with over 300 chapters. I'd also like to get around to reading Naoki Urasawa's Monster because I thoroughly enjoyed the anime. Hey, the library has Vagabound too. It's.... long. |
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