Was bought Blue in Green (written by Ram V) for Christmas, read it today and it's really bloody good. It's about a jazz musician/music teacher who goes home for his mum's funeral then finds himself delving into her history as a means to deal with his grief. Ram is writing the new Swamp Thing that starts next week, so after reading this and These Savage Shores I'm really looking forward to where he can take that character (I've only read 3 of the Alan Moore volumes and 2 volumes of Charles Soules run on New52 Swamp Thing, but enjoyed those)
Recently finished the first Perfect Edition of 20th Century Boys and need more!
It seems to be out of stock absolutely everywhere though, my comics store has it on back order but there's no time frame for when it could come back in, doesn't even come up on eBay or the likes of World of Books second hand either 😭
Manga is like f–king gold dust these days, it seems. I've had volumes of Made in Abyss on back-order since February, and even more recent series like Chainsaw Man and Hell's Paradise are impossible to find first-hand (and even second-hand copies are tough to get).
Its not a UK thing either, as even Amazon US doesn't seem to have stock – and if Amazon can't source a book, then what hope does anybody else have?
It might be Covid-related supply chain problem, but things just don't seem to be getting sizeable print runs (or reprints) like they used to.
I wish my Kindle screen was big enough to read comics on, because then at least I could get 'em digitally, but it's a squint-to-read situation with it, and I really don't like reading comics on a computer monitor or phone screen.
I heard it might be a paper thing/covid thing. I've got a sub to the Shonen app so can get all that sort of thing fine on my tablet, though I rarely read them. I was working my way through One Piece a chapter a day at the start of the pandemic but let that slip.
I've got a couple of books waiting to be read: Uzamaki, the Signature Edition of Fist of the Northstar vol.1, vol.1 of the old Transformers manga, plus I've been picking up the Persona 5 and Final Fantasy Lost Stranger volumes as light reads.
I suppose I could also raid my 17yo's bookshelves, I know shes got the complete 3-in-1s of Full Metal Alchemist and a few other ongoing series.
What volumes are you waiting on? I can check with my store if they have anything, they don't have everything listed on their website but you can get in touch with them to post out anything.
I'm looking to get a hold of Made in Abyss 5 and onwards; Chainsaw Man #1 just to get a sense of it before the anime hits; and Hell's Paradise #2+ (the first volume want quite what I was expecting and I'm intrigued to see where it goes from there).
Woohoo, my comic stores Peterborough branch managed to get a copy of 20th Century Boys Perfect Edition volume 2! They remembered I wanted one and got a member of staff to bring it to the Bedford store for me to collect.
In other news, started reading Chainsaw Man on the Shonen app, double-yah-tee-eff?
Read volume 2 of Berzerk over the weekend and it's more than earned that "Mature Content" sticker (oh, they also seal them!), what with an enemies head being sliced open (and continuing to fight) and the, erm, parasitic ? demons.
Still too early to see where the stories going but Guts isn't very likeable so far.
Oh and prior to that I read that Signature Edition of Fist of the North Star volume 1 which has lots of exploding body parts etc and is VERY 80s in basically everything, but is really fun for it, I've ready for the second volume on order for when it comes out in October.
Only read Vol 1 of Berserk but I've seen the (old, non CG infested) anime series and I think his character is largely justified though maybe not necessarily likable for a while yet. And man, FOTN, feels like JoJo completely stole its thunder in recent years but it's still a classic.
I watched up to Part 6 then read someways in, and stopped…I wanna' finish it before the adaptation (which was announced recently) is out, it was a little tough since it was the worst Part yet even though I liked Jolyne Kujo as a protagonist.
Despite not enjoying the experience of reading comics on my phone, I tried out the Shonen Jump app, read the first three chapters of Chainsaw Man, took out the 7-day trial, and proceeded to read the remaining ninety-four chapters in a couple of evenings.
It's somehow both exactly, but not quite what I expected – the ultraviolence and childish humour, I'd been warned about going in, but there are some character moments, particularly involving the "blood fiend" Power, that hit harder than I'd've thought. I also didn't expect the 97th chapter to end with an "End of Part 1" message, so I'll be picking this up again at some point in the future no doubt.
I also finally got around to picking up the third and final book in Faith Erin Hicks' Nameless City trilogy, which is an excellent YA adventure set in a Last Airbender-adjacent world of warring nations (minus the elemental superpowers). It's got great worldbuilding (I wish I'd re-read it before I started my Avatar RPG campaign, because I'd be ripping it off wholesale), strong characters, and the art is expressive if a little functional.
Filling up the rest of my Shonen Jump trial by blitzing through One Punch Man, which has some of the most incredible sequences of two-page spreads I've ever seen.
I don't know if this is the right place for it but I've recently read MAUS by Art Spiegelman and it's blown me away. It appeared on my son's summer reading list, it sounded interesting so I bought a copy and read it before he got to it.
It's the only graphic novel I've ever read and it took a while to adjust to the storytelling style but it's a hell of a book however it's written (or drawn).
Essentially it's an eye-witness account of the war by a Jewish concentration camp survivor, as narrated to his son and told in comic-strip format. The conceit is that all the characters are depicted as animals - so Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs and so on - but otherwise the narrative is unchanged. This has the strange effect of somehow making the horrors seem more real, rather than less - your brain can't slide off the imagery in the way it sometimes tries to when it's depicted in a more naturalistic way.
Like you'd expect, it's a very tough read in places but a necessary one. Strangely what's stayed with me in the days since I finished it is not so much the wartime story, but the depiction of what it did to the man who survived it. What kind of person you have to be to get through that, how it changes you, and how you can possibly continue to live your life afterwards.
Anyway, is this is a comic book? It's not very comical. I'd recommend it though.
This is definitely the thread for it. I'm surprised it's new to you. Maus is fantastic and it's one of those rare comics which you'll find on "best comics" lists and "essential literature" lists.
Maus was the first "proper" graphic novel I read too, my dad had a copy on his shelves when I was a lad and I picked it up thinking it would be about animals… It had a lasting effect on me, not least because my grandma was a German Jew, who luckily got out in the late 1930s so was never in a camp, but who none-the-less went through a lot and never really got over it. We talked about the war a lot when I was younger, and Maus was part of that conversation. She was very honest about what she went through, even writing and self-publishing her version of what happened so we have it a permanent record of it in the family. She was such a lovely woman, and I miss her very much.
As for Maus - I can see it's a stunning piece of work even without that personal connection though, it's such a powerful story and a clever way of telling it. Somehow brings home the humanity (and inhumanity) by taking the humans out of the picture.
I could post this in either this or the anime thread but…I have Volume 1 of 'Kaguya-sama: Love is War' and can't even bring myself to finish it, which makes it sound worse than it is, but I was simply reading during a break and stopped because it ended and I can't really see any reason to get back to it. I just watched the first episode today to give it a shot via the anime route and it just wasn't doing anything for me. It's the new highest rated anime on MyAnimeList and people won't shut the fuck up about it, what am I not getting??????
Yeah, I've bounced off the Kaguya-sama anime a couple of times, but I've started the manga on Shonen Jump while waiting for the next Chainsaw Man and I'm enjoying it well enough as a distraction. It does feel a bit… lightweight, though. I suspect that knowing there are 200 chapters still to come (and it's not even finished yet!) is a factor – that's a long time for it to maintain this status quo.
I'm also running out of interest in Horimiya, after seven or eight volumes. It's done that shoujo romance manga thing where the main pair move into the background, only appearing as not-entirely-in-character comic relief, and swinging through the supporting cast. The anime was a tremendous, snappily-paced story that ended at just the right time, but I've already passed that point in the manga and there are still, like, four more volumes.
And, of interest only to Alastor, I've finished the Bloom Into You manga, which was so much better than the anime. I get your enthusiasm for Sayaka now, she was 100% under-served in the TV show.
Yooooo, I'm glad you finished it! In my opinion a pretty decent ending that didn't drag on with the drama at the end like some manga would have done.
I'm also glad you like Sayaka, I liked her and Miyako the Coffee lady best (and their friendship), I can doubly recommend her three part Light Novel series to you because its really good and written by the author for Adachi and Shimamura which obviously I know you've read. Basically goes from her life before Touko to what happens after. (The manga adaptation for AdaShima has reached Adachi's festival meltdown and I can't understand her because its Japanese but that's a lot of words!)
I think I counted 75 books, for 18 quid. It’s actually a combination of two previous bundles, so if you’ve been grabbing them you will already have all of these. For everyone else though this is an incredible selection of highlights from 45 years of 2000ad.
A friend of mine has been telling me for years that the Transformers comic series More Than Meets The Eye is one of the best comics ever written. Thanks to a humble bundle a couple months back I have now read about twenty issues, and you know what? I think Dave might be right. It’s full of personal stories of people trying to find a place in a post a war universe dealing with friendship, forgiveness, revenge, love, PTSD, hope, religion. It just also happens to be about giant immortal, almost indestructible robots on a picaresque space quest. It’s occasionally laugh out loud funny too.
I’m giving the DC Universe thing a week trial - any good non-superhero DC comics you’d recommend? I’ve already got Sandman paperbacks, and I’m currently reading Nice House on the Lake in the app, which is brilliant.
I'm by no means an expert on this, but I read a lot of the older vertigo series when I was younger.
Lucifer is good, particularly if you've read Sandman. It's much more straightforward narratively than the Gaiman series, but still asks a lot of questions about purpose and predestination, and has some great fantasy sequences too.
Transmetropolitan is a great techno thriller about surveillance and corruption at the highest levels of US politics. Fantasy at the time, probably reads like a documentary these days…
The Invisibles is full on madness wrapped up in conspiracy clothing, Grant Morrison is probably insane but also writes hugely entertaining comics.
Preacher was transgressive unlike anything else I'd read at the time, but again probably tamer these days. Great characters though, and some hilarious bits amongst the shlock
100 bullets is a good solid thriller, good story well told
There must be more too, but that's it from top of head
I dunno if anybody's reading One Punch Man, but I'm getting the definite sense it's in the closing stages of its final arc.
At least, the main character just sneezed clean through Jupiter and then punched himself backwards in time, and it's hard to see where it can escalate from here.
(Of course, I've thought that about OPM multiple times before; it's still got time to go full Gurren Lagann…)
At least, the main character just sneezed clean through Jupiter and then punched himself backwards in time, and it's hard to see where it can escalate from here.
I can't remember anymore where I first heard of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (Yokohama Shopping Trip), but it's been one of those manga I've always kept an eye out for, just because the concept sounded so unique. Seven Seas have a new edition out, which means it's finally easy to to get a hold of!
Alpha is a robot who, in her master's absence, runs a cafe on the edge of what was once Japan, a few decades into a post-ecological disaster future. It's not particularly sci-fi though, and it's extremely sedate, gentle and optimistic. There are no warring factions of survivors hunting each other for meagre resources, no monstrous mutated hybrids roaming the wasteland – everybody's just very nice to each other, helping out with fuel, medicine, food, whatever their neighbours need.
Yes, the human world is falling apart – the roads are frequently swallowed by the sea and infrastructure is intermittent – but the better parts of human society seem to have made it through intact, which is frankly a message I think we all really fuckin need right about now.
It's showing its age in some respects, but it's beautifully drawn and a very relaxing read.
After Al mentioned Kaguya-Sama in another thread, I started reading it on the Shonen Jump app to kill time between Chainsaw Man chapters. I'm enjoying it a lot – 138 chapters in – but it's pretty lightweight stuff and not quite the groundbreaking, peerless perfection that some YouTubers would have you believe.
All caught up with Kaguya-sama. It's a decent read but I'll not be picking up the physical volumes – not sure it's got much revisit potential, and there are 23 of the things already.
Spy×Family dropped a (potentially) big shakeup in the final panel of its latest chapter, though! I'm glad the story's not just resting on its laurels; as an ongoing manga in a big weekly publication, you kind of expect things to progress slowly, but S×F had been pretty glacial for a while despite the generally high energy of its vignettes.
Also there's another arc coming for One Punch Man, which I'm already exhausted for.
Spy×Family dropped a (potentially) big shakeup in the final panel of its latest chapter, though! I'm glad the story's not just resting on its laurels; as an ongoing manga in a big weekly publication, you kind of expect things to progress slowly, but S×F had been pretty glacial for a while despite the generally high energy of its vignettes.
The Shonen Jump app is missing like 60 chapters in the middle of Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible (it skips from 20 to 79, though I've… acquired the third volume which covers up to chapter 32), but it's a sedate enough romcom that I've made the jump more or less without incident (is that a good thing..?) and it rejoins the story in time for what's building up to a potentially pretty big plot point.
It's not groundbreaking for the genre by any stretch – it's in the mould of Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro and Uzaki-chan Wants To Hang Out, with a socially awkward boy dragged into the wider world by a popular female classmate, though it doesn't have those shows' kinda-sadistic streak. It's just all very nice and soft, and I'm kinda digging it as a palette cleanser between chapters of Chainsaw Man (which continues to be excellent).
Someone bought me a very pretty Metabarons hardcover recently… and what the actual shitting hell am I reading?
As far as I can work out it’s very highly regarded (I’d never heard of it), but it has to be the campest thing I’ve ever read. “Still your ocular-water emitters and use your paleo-Meta-brain for a second, human!”
If anyone here has been wishing there was an easy way to get into 2000ad, they have just started a six issue run of The Best of 2000ad. Issue 1 includes some Dredd, some Judge Anderson and book 1 of Halo Jones (the best series of 2000ad's first ten years) and the start of Brink (the best series of 2000ad's last ten years). There's features and interviews and stuff in there too. Not bad for £15 (or less if you buy from Amazon or digital).
I'm now a third of the way through Ranma ½ – 13 volumes out of 38 – and it's fun and all but it does feel a bit… aimless.
There's very little tension to the romantic side (it's obvious he's going to end up with Akane) and the martial arts stuff is so heavily comedic that the outcome of any fight isn't really important either way.
It would help for at least one character to have a long-term goal, I think; it's all very episodic – which is also a problem I have with Maison Ikkoku's meandering. I don't know if this is a particular consequence of the long-running manga magazine format where these were originally published, or a hallmark of Rumiko Takahashi's writing, but it does take the wind out of my sails a bit.
I spent a day watching 13 hours of the Ranma ½ anime with friends. It was great but I have had no urge to return to that story. I guess it was a good adaptation because everything you have said about the Manga holds true for the anime.
Had the week off, and spent a lot of it blitzing through Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku, a historical fantasy manga about concerned criminals in the Edo era sent to a mysterious island in search of the elixir of life.
I'd read the first couple volumes but was put off continuing when I saw that they still hadn't reached the elixir by volume 11; I'd been quite enjoying it, but assuming it was going to be an endless parade of shonen battle tropes, I gave the rest of it a pass – until I saw that it's actually got an ending!
And it's great! The characters are varied, their arcs are satisfying, and the pacing is solid. The world building is coherent and later developments in character abilities make sense both from where they start and how they evolve, which is a far cry from the deus ex machina way new techniques are usually introduced in these things.
Some of the combat scenes are a little tough to follow, with all the movement lines and effects, but they're efficiently structured so confusion is only momentary, and the artwork is generally excellent (especially the background work of dense, body-horror forests).
I liked it a lot, and it's definitely worth checking out the first volume or two; if you like the tone and the characters, you'll have a blast with the rest of it.
I am on a slightly terrifying manga kick right now, it seems.
After reading all 376 currently available chapters in the last week, I still don't know how I feel about Komi Can't Communicate. It's pretty funny at times, but I'm finding a lot of it very frustrating. Though every time I feel like I'm about to reach my limit, it'll knock a couple chapters of character development out of the park and reel me right back in.
I do feel like the wind has been knocked out of my sails since my favourite character got done dirty by a big plot point and has been more or less sidelined since, though. It doesn't help that it felt like the series was going to make a really interesting break with convention before reverting to the norm in a very unsatisfying way.
I'm totally caught up now, so odds are good that, with my general "meh" feelings, I'm done with it, though I might keep an eye out for general consensus to see if it ever gets interesting again.
My manga obsession continues apace: I'm fully up to date with Kaguya-sama now (278 chapters), which is coming to the end of its run. I was never a big fan of the Shinomiya family drama so the final arc fell a bit flat for me (not least because the outcome was never really in doubt), but the epilogue chapters that have followed it are a return to the series' strengths and it's promising to wrap up nicely.
I've also started into Urusei Yatsura, but I'm quickly comign to the conclusion that it's a bit too episodic for me. I had similar difficulties getting through Ranma ½ and Maison Ikkoku, which are glacially paced when it comes to the character arcs I'm actually interested in, but utterly hyperactive about the moment-to-moment nonsense.
I read both volumes of I Want To Eat Your Pancreas over the last couple of days, and the ending hit me like a freight train.
Spoiler - click to show The whole thing is really set up for the expected tragic ending, and then it lands an entirely different one almost out of nowhere, to devastating effect.
It's not going to be up everyone's street, as a highschool romance drama, but it is definitely up mine.
I found a couple of Judge Dredd collections in the local library and realised that between those and all the Dredd books I’ve picked up in Humble Bundles, I have almost all the major Dredd stories from the 20 year/1000 issue gap in my 2000ad reading.
Five days later and I’ve read well over a thousand pages of Dredd and have filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge. It’s just so good. They have done an excellent job of building on the 40-odd years of history, bringing in old plot threads and characters and not being afraid to shake things up in the setting.
