News and reviews for the discerning manga fan
Here’s a tip for aspiring manga artists: if you’re going to spoof a genre, your jokes should be poking fun at said genre’s conventions, not slavishly adhering to them. Is This a Zombie? wants to be a send-up of magical girl manga and harem comedies, but focuses so heavily on panty shots, “accidental” nudity (of [...]
Most of the 4-koma manga I’ve read have been stamped from the same mold. There’s a quartet of teenage girls, each of whom has one personality trait, one talent or obsession, and one distinguishing physical characteristic. They all attend the same cram school, or live in the same dorm, and participate in the same everyday [...]
Soulless is saucy in the best possible sense of the word: it’s bold and smart, with a heroine so irrepressible you can see why author Gail Carriger couldn’t tell Alexia Tarabotti’s story in just one book. As fans of Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate novels know, Alexia is a sharp-tongued woman living in Victorian London — or [...]
This slim how-to manual caters to the manga fan who wants to become an artist, but finds the technical aspects of comic creation daunting. “If you’ve ever flipped through a How to Draw Manga book in a bookstore, looked at the pages that explain character design and perspective and thought, ‘I have to learn all [...]
Back in the 1980s — the heyday of Dolph Lundgren, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone — Hollywood cranked out a stream of mediocre but massively entertaining B-movies in which a man with a freakishly muscular physique and a granite jaw battled the Forces of Evil, dispatching villains with a catch-phrase and a lethal weapon. I [...]
When I lived in New York City, I went on my share of awesome first dates. Those dates followed a predictable pattern: we’d go to a funky, hole-in-the-wall restaurant, have a great conversation, and discover a mutually-shared passion for Hitchcock movies or dim sum. Second dates, however, were a different story; if someone were to [...]
GTO: 14 Days in Shonan is loud and silly, the kind of manga in which the slightest misunderstanding between characters escalates into shouting matches, bone-crunching violence, or incarceration (or all three). It’s the kind of manga in which the hero is over-confident to the point of being dumb. And it’s the kind of manga in [...]
Yakuza Cafe is a pleasant surprise, a cheerful, smutty send-up of gangster manga that playfully mocks maid cafes, foodie manga, and yakuza culture. The titular gangsters are the Fujimaki Clan, a once-feared crime syndicate who’ve launched a legitimate business: a yakuza-themed cafe, staffed by the clan’s former foot soldiers. Though the food is tasty, and [...]
Among the many books I read and loved as a child, few left as indelible an impression as Mary Norton’s The Borrowers (1952). The book featured the Clocks, a family of mouse-sized people who lived, unseen, in the floorboards and walls of an old English house, stealing small objects and transforming them into furniture, cookware, [...]
Drawn in a loose, improvisational style, Hiromu Arakawa’s Hyakusho Kizuko may remind readers of the gag strips that round out every volume of her wildly successful Fullmetal Alchemist. That’s not a knock on Hyakusho, by the way; like her fellow sister-in-shonen Yellow Tanabe, Arakawa’s omake are every bit as entertaining as her more polished stories, [...]
I’m not a big fan of squirm-inducing comedies like The Office; it’s hard to root for a loser who … [Read More...]
Are you an adult reader new to manga? Or a librarian who's looking to add more graphic novels to … [Read More...]
Back in the 1990s, Matt Thorn labored hard to make Keiko Nishi a household name among American manga … [Read More...]
Between the Manga Movable Feast and end-of-the-semester duties, I've fallen hopelessly behind in my … [Read More...]
Below is a list of helpful English-language web resources about manga and manhwa. I update this page on a regular basis, so … [Read More...]
Since joining the Good Comics for Kids team in 2008, I've reviewed a variety of comics, graphic novels, and manga for younger … [Read More...]
Though Vertical has published two series by Keiko Takemiya, the Magnificent 49ers' work remains largely unavailable in … [Read More...]
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