Battle Angel Alita is one of my favorite mangas, I can’t believe I forgot it :smack:. It’s a very philosophical story that deals with the questions of life and existence. Lots of fun gory battles too.
For something a little different, check out Uzumaki. It is a horror manga. Beware though, it’s very scary!
Jesus. Thanks, cletus, for reminding me about Uzumaki when the last of its horrifying imagery had finally seeped away from my poor brain. Now I’ll have to leave the light on tonight. 
I so badly want to see the movie version, but I’m a big ol’ chicken.
Lone Wolf and Cub is definitely worth looking into. It’s monstrously huge, (28 volumes at 10 bucks each is kind of a lot) but it’s fairly episodic, so you can pick it up slowly. And it’s one of those pleasant instances where something was both spectacularly influential and very well done in its own right.
Blade of the Immortal is also really good. The art’s spectacular, and the emotional storytelling is strong, too. Plot’s a bit slow, but you can’t have everything. The layouts surprisingly ‘dense’ for a manga, which almost makes it look like an American comic.
Both are wandering samurai stories, so you’ll need a very high tolerance for blood and a reasonable tolerance for women being degraded, though. LWaC is written well enough that its occasional dips into 70’s style exploitation can be pretty easily forgiven, though. And BotI behaves itself most of the time.
It’s probably a bit hard to find now, but I really enjoyed Sanctuary, a yakuza/political series that had a very strong plot. Banana Fish another mostly yakuza series started off pretty good, but I lost track of it after a fairly short time, so I don’t know how it went from there.
Battle Angel Alita starts off very strong, but the quality goes downhill fairly fast. You can probably drop it after the third or fourth graphic novel with no real loss. The manga version of Maison Ikkoku as mentioned, was a lot of fun as well.
3x3 Eyes was just re-released, wasn’t it? Fairly light anime-ish horror, but a lot of fun. I’m blanking on other SF or fantasy manga for some reason, though I’m sure a Shiro fan will show up sooner or later and threaten you with horrible fiery death if you don’t read Appleseed.
Gold Digger is worth looking into, too. It’s might technically not be manga (It’s produced in NA and written and drawn by an American) but it’s close enough. A very enjoyable exploration of pretty much all things geeky, and gets everything manga does right, right, without feeling like a knock-off.
I’m enjoying the Love Hina manga hugely (much more so than the anime, in fact) but I’m not sure it’d be a good place to start. LH is basically a big sloppy love letter to shonen manga in general. Sort of a manga loaf, made of bits and pieces of other beloved series, chunked and formed.
Which Vampire Hunter D? The good one, or the one that just came out?
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Now if only someone’d pick up the rights to Berserk . . .
I’ll second Gold Digger. My favorite, now that Ninja High School is over.
Hey, in Lone Wolf and Cub, women can be both the victims and the rivals/enemies. It’s fairly equal… and those women that are victims usually get their vengeance (ie, Ogami kills the victimizers). It is huge, though. I’ve been reading it for 2 years and only have 7 volumes. At this rate, I may have it complete in another 6 years.
Being a rabid R. Takahashi fan, I WAS going to suggest **Urusei Yatsura **(which, if you can find a VHS/DVD of any of the movies, especially the second one, “Beautiful Dreamer,” is truly worth your time and money) and Maison Ikkoku. Now I’m just going to second them both, strongly.
Record of the Lodoss War , especially Lady of Pharis, is quite worth it. I’ve only seen one book (from the Grey Witch series, above average but not excellent) outside of large conventions, so you’ll have a time finding these, but they’re pretty good if you liked the series.
If you’re in a mood, Galaxy Express 999 has relatively despressing and well written (but admittedly pointless) stories which I personally enjoyed. It doesn’t make too much sense, as it’s a sequel to a movie which is a follow-up (really, and excuse to use old, popular characters to get people interested in new ones) to a series of episodes which is a companion to a manga series which is a side-story to an excellent old something where I’ve only read one tiny chunk of it. Queen Emerelda and Captain Harlot junk to preceed will take away the barely-intelligibleness, but it won’t seem nearly as fun.
X, three pages of which my sister had attached to her bedroom wall for many, many years and nothing else of which I have seen except for the movie in '99, fascinates me. I can say very little else about it.
The manga of Akira is REALLY good (at least threw book five, I haven’t managed to read any of the later issues yet). The movie’s rather cool, but really confusing. The manga’s still a bit confusing, but the plot is a LOT more fleshed out, and really, really cool.
Bio-Booster Armor Guyver is another one of my favorites. Again, if you watched the anime, you got maybe, ohhhhh…1/1000th of the storyline mixed and jumbled. It’s a hell of a lot better in manga form. The only big problem…they stopped translating it at a really pinnacle point, so you’ll probably have to search around on the internet for fan translations.
Same goes for Berserk. An absolutely AWESOME anime, with probably the most f*#king disturbing ending I’ve ever seen. The manga is just as creepy. It’s all about a guy known as “The Black Swordsman” who’s got a prosthetic left arm that has crossbow attatchments to it, and carries around a huge 8ft long, three foot wide sword known as the Dragon Slayer who’s outrunning demons. He and his girlfriend are both rather insane due to the horrible shit they’ve been threw, only she’s catatonic, and he’s just bloodthirsty and insane. Lots of really creepy medieval battles and sword play, and really crazy storylines. Great stuff.
I also think Blade of the Immortal deserves a second vote. Great storyline.
Uh, good question. I don’t think it was the one that just came out, since I think it had a 198? date. (I think…)
I liked it. Only problem I had with it was some scenes were dark. Not emotionally dark, just… dark. I cranked the brightness up on the TV and still could barely see what was going on.
Y’all are giving me some good ideas! Thanks!!!
LWaC: Well, I was referring mostly to a surprisingly long section near the end where a very weird villain uses drugs to turn women into sex toys and creates an army of prostitutes. (Yes, I know we’ve all tried it, but he actually managed to pull it off) It’s so blatantly exploitive and trashy it’s both surprising and moderately hilarious. But by that point you’ll be so hooked you’ll be willing to forgive it almost anything.
The whole end quarter is a little weak, honestly. You can only watch Itto cut down so many armies before it gets repetitive. The heart of the book is the first two thirds, where most of the stories are usually about the people he deals with, not him.
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On the plus side, I also found out one of my favorite anime scenes (the end of BGC episode 6) was a total ripoff, all this time.
I couldn’t even look at spirals after reading that manga. I STILL can’t look at them without getting a little freaked. Then there was the time I saw a guy in a snail costume :shudder:.
As for Akira, I read the manga (yes, ALL of it) before seeing the movie. I guess that’s why I didn’t like the movie very much. It was seriously lacking compared to the printed version. I guess that’s what happens when you try to cram 6 volumes into 2 hours.
PS I preferred Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust to the original. I just found the original to be to old for me. Maybe if I had saw it a few years ago.
Goddamn it…how could I forget Blade of the Immortal!
Okay, I just read volume 1 of Uzumaki.
…OMG, but that’s creepy. The gal at the store said the last couple of volumes were really scary.
I may have to give them a miss.
But it was well-done.
But creepy. Very creepy.
If you want a sci fi story with interesting ideas in it, check out the original Ghost in the Shell manga. That guy’s got some ‘crazy’ ideas about life and consciousness (heh)
As for Uzumaki, I believe there are 3 volumes total. The later ones get more surreal and supernatural. I prefer the first one though for that very reason. It’s horror without going over the top (relatively at least)
cletus, I saw the DVD of Ghost in the Shell and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Is the manga any more comprensible?
I can’t believe nobody has recommended Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind by Hayao Miyazaki. His movie is of course based on this manga, but the 7-volume manga series has far more depth and intricate plot than the movie.
But I recommend watching the movie before reading the manga. The movie will seem simplistic if you read the manga first.
Hmmm… what can I say about Ghost in the Shell? I really loved the manga and film even if there were a few problems.
The author has a habit of having his characters make casual statements to each other that require paragraph long footnotes for the reader to comprehend. Sure, it’s interesting to talk about the idiosyncracies of existentialism but, while your riding a elevator with your coworker? :rolleyes: In the manga the author has the ability to explain in greater detail through long soliloquies and footnotes. In the movie there were time and production constrants which forced a lot of cutting. So if you liked some of the concepts touched upon in the film, then check out the manga for greater details and references to other books.
Keeping that in mind, I still believe the manga is more convoluted then the movie. The book is something like 600 pages! I think it took me a week of on and off reading to finish it. It’s a good way to kill a lazy sunday afternoon (or 3) though.
If you thought the movie was confusing then you’ll probably not like the manga. It throws in political subplots and inner-faction bickerings just for the hell of it. It’s hard to follow all the plot threads. The movie simplified the story to just the puppetmaster story arc but like I said they did cut out much of the explanations.
scr4, I had that same problems with Akira. I read the manga first so when I saw the movie my thoughts were “Is that it? Where’s the rest of the story?”.
Ok, I read the first Battle Angel Alita volume last night.
I liked it. A lot. Even though it was kinda violent. I liked Alita.
I also read Usage Yojimbo: Demon Mask. I was skeptical about the ronin bunny, but hey, it worked!
On my to-be-read pile, I now have Blade of the Immortal: Blood of a Thousand, Usagi Yojimbo: Grasscutter and Battle Angel Alita: Killing Angel.
I’m also reading Silent Mobius, Vol. 1, but I’m having trouble figuring out exactly what’s going on there.
Thanks for the great recommendations! Just what I needed – more things to spend $$ on…
You might check out the American version of Shonen Jump.
I’m currently enjoying their serializations of Shamen King and Naruto a whole lot … .