You know how sometimes when you're not quite asleep, you think you're maybe dreaming, but then you're convinced you're really awake even when you're not? You know ...
What does a manga artist do when he lands in jail as severe punishment for a minor offense? For Kazuichi Hanawa, an established artist known for his fantasy volumes set in the Middle Ages, reality shockingly became a tiny cell for three years in the...
Take notice: this is every parent's worst nightmare come true. Without warning, 15-year-old Megumi disappears, seemingly without a trace. Her mother has no idea why she might have left or where she might be ...
"This manga has a positive outlook on life, and so it has been made with as much realism removed as possible." Thus begins award-winning, prodigious Japanese manga artist Hideo Azuma's tri-part reminiscences that capture three highly difficult periods of his life, indeed presented with so...
First reaction: WOWOWOWOWOW! What a fabulous first manga for the new year. Indeed, nothing is simple about this all-in-one-volume story ...
Slim and gorgeous, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, couldn't be more different from the 10-volume, powerfully resonating Barefoot Gen series in scope and style. But don't let its whimsical beauty fool you for a moment ...
The final volume of Keiji Nakazawa's 10-part Barefoot Gen series begins in March 1953, almost eight years after the widespread decimation of August 1945 caused by American-dropped atomic bombs. Gen and his friends have established a routine in their young lives, with Ryuta, Katsuko, and Musubi working...
Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa's graphic testimony continues in the penultimate volume of the heart-wrenching Barefoot Gen series, finally available in an unabridged English translation of all 10 volumes from San Francisco's renegade publisher Last Gasp. Alone and newly homeless, Nakazawa's fictionalized stand-in, Gen Nakaoka, moves in with...
Strong, no-nonsense, independent Kanna takes center stage again in volume 06 (that's her in color on the cover), in a world shrouded by the choking control of the all-powerful Friends. When bumbling Detective Chono comes looking for drag queen Britney, Kanna know she's got to...
Although the second volume of Ōoku, a recently introduced (in translation) gender-bender series, this latest could definitely read as a stand-alone love story. And quite a unique and memorable one at that! The series' premise is that in an alternative history of premodern Edo Japan, the mysterious...
Yuki Tachibana (whose first name means 'snow,' and last name means 'standing flower') is not your average first-grader. He draws strange pictures on his desk that unnerve his other classmates. He can see things no one else can. He talks to the invisible Super Star,...
Europol's greatest robot, Inspector Gesicht, arrives in Persia on a "hunch" – can robots have hunches? – that he's finally figured out who's behind all the gruesome murders of the world's greatest robots. The trail takes him to Amsterdam where he follows the mysterious Sahad,...
If you liked Koji Suzuki's freakishly scary Ring/Spiral/Loop trilogy, you'll definitely appreciate this fairly recent (I just discovered it at our local library!) horror series. Uzumaki means whirlpool, swirl, vortex ...
To teach the value of life, the National Welfare Act places a timed nanocapsule in one out of every 1,000 first graders' immunization syringes. On a predetermined date between the ages of 18 to 24 – with just 24 hours notice to the moment to...
The remarkable story begun in The New Sun continues in this second volume of Taro Yashima's graphic memoir, a strikingly simple combination of pictures and brief text that capture a man's journey away from his homeland. Long out of print since its 1947 first printing, Horizon...
What an amazing, unique, and LUCKY find! First published in 1943 by one of the oldest U.S. publishers, Henry Holt and Company, and in spite of excellent reviews plus a multi-year marketing campaign by both publisher and an early publicist who worked to get the...
Another warning: The body count is staggering by series' end. While most are bad guys, or anonymous innocent bystanders (who are disturbing enough to see splattered across so many pages), the ONE that breaks your heart ...
Just in case you need a refresher, every volume from 11 until the final 18 now opens with a summary and who's who ...
It's been almost two years since I first discovered this series (vols. 1-4) and they certainly haven't lost any of their chilling zing! I don't remember that they came with a "Parental Advisory | Explicit Content" warning sticker before, but they certainly do now, so...
Full disclosure: I pre-ordered all the scheduled next volumes for this series, too. Anything that has "Urasawa" on the cover, I'll be greedily reading ...
