Category: Manga

By Hitoshi Ariga
208 pages, black and white
Published by Viz

Sometimes all it takes is a catchy premise to score a new reader. Take The Big O: a book set in Paradigm City, where 40 years earlier everyone lost their memories. Now people use pieces of the forgotten past to forge the future. Sounds great, right? Well, just keep in mind that a good premise does not automatically equal a good final product. You’ve got to take advantage of that potential and really turn it into something special.

Continue reading “Big O Vol. 1”

By Masashi Kishimoto
192 pages, black and white
Published by Viz

Naruto is a backwards series. I don’t mean that reversing the title reveals the secret word “Oturan”, and I’m not referring to the right-to-left progression of the page. No, Naruto is a backwards series because creator Masashi Kishimoto has cleverly reversed all the normal standards of a “young hero in training” comic into something uniquely different.

Continue reading “Naruto Vol. 1”

By Kazuki Takahashi
200 pages, black and white
Published by Viz

Sometimes you think you know what a book’s about before you even read it. I’ve had the extreme misfortune to both discover a Magic: The Gathering card game tournament on cable as well as an episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! and I’m not sure which was less exciting, watching people play card after card after card. So when I first encountered the original Yu-Gi-Oh! comics that spawned the hit cartoon and collectable card game, I figured I already had this book completely figured out.

Wrong.

Continue reading “Yu-Gi-Oh! Vol. 1”

By Rumiko Takahashi
312 pages, black and white
Published by Viz

If you had to pick Japanese comic book superstar Rumiko Takahashi’s greatest success, I think most would agree that it’s Ranma 1/2. With 34 collected volumes of comics, to say nothing of the 7-season/143-episode animated series, and multiple theatrical and direct-to-video stories, there’s a whole lot of Ranma 1/2 material out there. It’s best to start at the beginning, though, and with Viz’s new edition of Ranma 1/2 having just hit stores, there’s never been a better time to take a look at what started it all.

Continue reading “Ranma 1/2 Vol. 1”

By Yû Watase
200 pages, black and white
Published by Viz

When is a book not a book? When it’s a living, breathing world in its own right. It’s rather apt that in Yû Watase’s series Fushigi Yûgi (aka The Mysterious Play) the characters have just that sort of object in the form of The Universe of the Four Gods, because one could make the case for Fushigi Yûgi itself being another such item.

Continue reading “Fushigi Yûgi Vol. 8”

By Junko Mizuno
144 pages, color
Published by Viz

If you think about it, the original story of “Hansel & Gretel” isn’t terribly logical. Parents, unable to feed their children, decide that abandoning them in the middle of the forest is the answer to all their problems. (And if at first they come trapsing home, abandon them even further into the forest.) Only once they’ve avoided near-death at a witch’s hands do they come home, and all is well with their family life because now they can eat the witch’s edible candy house and not have to try and write each other off. Either these are the most-trusting, or the stupidest children in the world. Possibly both. In any event, this probably explains why in Junko Mizuno’s Hansel & Gretel, Mizuno only took a couple of specific elements she liked from the original story and threw out the rest.

Continue reading “Junko Mizuno’s Hansel & Gretel”