News and reviews for the discerning manga fan
February 9, 2012 marked the twenty-third anniversary of Osamu Tezuka’s death. His career in the manga industry spanned five decades, from the early days of the akahon market to the industry’s zenith, when comics accounted for nearly 40% of all books sold in Japan. Over the course of his life, Tezuka produced more than 150,000 [...]
From the early 1920s through the late 1950s, before television became a fixture in Japanese homes, audiences flocked to kamishibai performances on street corners and parks around the country. A kamishibaiya (storyteller) would pedal from village to village with a butai (small wooden stage) perched on the back of his bicycle. When he arrived in [...]
Looking for a spooky manga to get you in the right frame of mind for Halloween? Below is a partial list of all the horror titles that I’ve reviewed here at The Manga Critic. Keep in mind that my definition of horror is similar to MMF host Lori Henderson’s: I view horror as any type [...]
InuYasha was the first comic that I actively collected, the manga that introduced me to the Wednesday comic-buying ritual and the very notion of self-identifying as a fan. Though I followed it religiously for years, trading in my older editions for new ones, watching the anime, and speculating about the finale, my interest in the [...]
Digging into The Manga Critic archives, I made a surprising discovery: though I’ve read almost every Rumiko Takahashi story that’s been translated into English, I haven’t reviewed much of her work. The three reviews I did find explored manga from two very different stages of her career. The first, Mermaid Saga, ran on and off [...]
Most American readers know Rumiko Takahashi through her work in Shonen Sunday, but Takahashi has a foot in the seinen world as well. Maison Ikkoku ran in Big Comic Spirits from 1980-87, alongside Area 88 and Wounded Man, while short stories such as “To Grandmother’s House We Go” and “One Hundred Years of Love” appeared [...]
Why would any sane person commit to reading a series that’s still going strong after sixty volumes? I can think of three compelling reasons why you should set aside your shonophobia — that’s Latin for “fear of incredibly long series with interminable fight scenes and characters who do their best” — and give Eiichiro Oda’s [...]
I’d like to take a minute to thank everyone who contributed an essay to this month’s Feast. For all its beauty and richness, To Terra is a challenging, flawed work that is clearly the product of a particular time and place. All of the participants rose to the occasion, contributing some terrific prose in service [...]
Discussion and debate: they’re the essence of any good book club, whether the group focuses on British murder mysteries, Oprah’s favorites, obscure Russian literature, or, yes, manga. As part of the May Manga Movable Feast, therefore, I invited all MMF participants to participate in an informal round table discussion of To Terra. Four reviewers accepted [...]
Though Vertical has published two series by Keiko Takemiya, the Magnificent 49ers’ work remains largely unavailable in English, with a few exceptions: Yasuko Aoike’s From Eroica With Love (which debuted in 1976 in Akita Shoten), and Moto Hagio’s short stories “A, A’ [A, A Prime],” “4/4 [Quatre/Quarts],” “X+Y,” and “They Were Eleven.”* These four stories [...]
When I lived in New York City, I went on my share of awesome first … [Read More...]
GTO: 14 Days in Shonan is loud and silly, the kind of manga in which … [Read More...]
Among the many books I read and loved as a child, few left as … [Read More...]
Below is a list of helpful English-language web resources about manga and manhwa. I update this page … [Read More...]
Since joining the Good Comics for Kids team in 2008, I've reviewed a variety of comics, graphic … [Read More...]
|
|
Recent Comments