May 2014 Manga Picks

Last month I recommended a couple of manga I had started reading. I didn't read so much new ones this month, but I have a few old ones that I really like. I was really busy with end of the semester work and there was simply no time to waste. All my entertainment whether it be anime watching or manga reading was put on hold. It was really towards the end when I could free up a bit of time that I started to watch an episode of jdrama.

Professor Munakata

Professor Munakata studies Japanese myths and tries to uncover the truths behind it that spurred the myth. It is really fun to read the stories because the evidence he finds are really concrete and believable. Some of the myths are inexplicable even as Munakata tries to prove it, but they're still exciting to unravel. These are not all obscure myths that you find in some dark shady book. These are myths that are recognized across cultures carrying similar ideas. Munakata you can say is really an anthropologist and archaeologist jumbled into one.

Petshop of Horrors

Leon is a police officer in the San Francisco area who always ends up having his cases brought to Count D's mysterious petshop in Chinatown. Count D's petshop is a petshop alright, but the veil between dream and reality is very thin. You think it's only a small shop but customers have reported walking deep into the shop as if it were a mansion. And not to mention how many customers end up in tragic endings with their pets. It is a fantasy like manga, but I think it's also a bit of a tragedy. Count D's pets always look different to their owners and many times were meant to teach their owners a lesson. It doesn't even matter if what you saw was not what you really saw. The shifting between the dream and the reality is really tantalizing. The artwork is very beautiful to look at, not to mention all those elaborate costume designs.

Hoshin Engi

Hoshin Engi is Fujisaki Ryu's retelling of the Chinese fairy tale epic, Fengshin Bang. Rather than using Nataku (Ne Zha) as a protagonist, Fujisaki invents Taikobo whom he based off of a real Chinese historical figure. It follows the original epic closely, but puts inventive and humorous spins on the characters. For instance, Dakki (Daji) is the main seductress in both the epic and in Hoshin Engi, but Fujisaki portrays her as highly flamboyant. In Hoshin Engi, King Chu is portrayed as a good man who fell onto the wrong path as the original epic describes him as extremely evil and lecherous.

Claymore

I read Claymore first in Shonen Jump and then watched the anime. After the anime ended, I started reading the manga. The whole story is very intricately woven with Clare and Raki together to their separation and together again. It's very human ironically in a story where your characters are only partially human. With a lot of hack and slash for fans that like the blood, it's a really interesting story about how human beings create monsters to fight monsters only to have it backfire. The Organization is very shady in terms of that and loyalties don't always lie where you think they do. With more complicated characters like Awakened Beings, the story becomes more complicated.

Vagabond

Based on a novel on the famous Musashi, famed mangaka of Slam Dunk Inoue Takehiko draws Vagabond. It is extremely long and I had given up trying to finish it completely. The story goes over how Musashi learns his way of the sword through a succession of trials through combat and duels. It is a very graphic story as there are sex scenes and violent beheadings. Definitely not recommended for those under 18. If you are under 18, I highly suggest you wait. The content can be psychological sometimes not suitable for young audiences.