It’s a brand new year and what better way to ring it in than by talking about a manga that was originally published in 1983!  Not only that, but it’s also something I picked up for four bucks in a sale earlier this month.  Before anyone makes any jokes about me getting what I paid […]

… but actually it did.  I’m saying this because Naoki Ursawa’s “20th Century Boys” is now a #1 New York Times bestseller.  This is probably a one-week thing, but it’s still something I never thought I’d see even after the chart craziness of the past few months, let alone when it first came out.  So […]

Osamu Tezuka’s proto-shoujo epic wraps up much as it began.  In this second volume, the mangaka continues to churn through story concepts — Franz finding out Sapphire’s identity, Prince Plastic getting Sapphire’s boy heart, Sapphire on the brink of death with Captain Blood questing to a foreign land to save — at a shocking pace.  […]

Remember when I said that the first volume of this series did a good job of conveying the “inner sadness” of its poor little rich boy protagonist’s life?  Well, this second volume proceeds to do just about everything it can to undermine any sympathy I had for the character of Yozo Oba.  After the events […]

Longtime readers will know that I’ve banged the drum quite loudly this year in getting people to pick up vol. 13 of “Eden:  It’s An Endless World!” when it arrived after a two-year wait.  It’s not the only Dark Horse Manga series to have gone on “hiatus” as their catalogue is littered with titles that […]

After seventeen volumes, Osamu Tezuka’s best long-form series comes to an end.  There have been over a hundred stories involving the title character’s miraculous medical prowess and the majority of them have been good, if not excellent.  It’s certainly entertaining to see him break the laws of medical reality on a near-regular basis, but it’s […]

Vol. 19 of “Slam Dunk” is almost as thrilling as its previous installments.  We’re still knee-deep in the Shohoku/Ryonan match and even though the former begins the second half by six points, Rukawa shows he still has plenty in the tank to help make up that deficit.  Not one to be outshone by his rival, […]

Though the structure of this series tends towards the episodic, showcasing the various situations its cast of low-Earth-orbit window washers finds itself in, there have been hints of an uber-arc to tie everything together in previous volumes.  You’d figure that with how young window washer Mitsu’s father disappeared all those years ago that mangaka Hisae […]

Not only was this worth the year-long wait from the release of vol. 9, but my reaction upon finishing it was basically, “Damn!  I can’t wait to see what happens next!”  “Real” is in a position similar to other series like “Berserk,” “Black Lagoon,” “Yotsuba&!” and “Blade of the Immortal,” where the long waits between […]