Been reading it lately, and it helps reduce my scrolling time. I’ve hardly read any, so you can recommend really popular stuff, too.
I’ve read Vagabond, 20th Century Boys, Claymore (years ago), and some berserk. I just finished reading Teppu, which I thought was an interesting subversion of a lot of anime tropes. I also liked that it was a short run (only 8 volumes). I guess I like seinen, but I’ve also enjoyed josei like She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat.
Anyway, no shonen please. Hard mode: please nothing about high school
Dungeon Meishi for a recent one.
Otherwise my pick is Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood (my favorite anime/manga)
Hm, yeah, people do be talkin about dungeon meshi.
It’s ongoing, right? I have a habit when I read/watch something ongoing and I get to the point where the content runs out, and then I just forget about it and never go back
Nah the manga ended last year i think, its complete the anime is like the first half of the manga
I recently read Fullmetal Alchemist since a podcast I like was covering it, and it’s definitely one of the best “battle shonen” manga (especially considering that it’s like 27 or so volumes in a genre that has these endless books).
And the battle party is totally secondary to the story which has amazing political intrigue, government conspiracy and the nature of humanity.
Each character really brings something to the table and there are very few characters that I can’t remember. Lot of really good leftist reads of the series as well.
Since this is being asked on Hexbear and not r/manga, I’d recommend “Sensou wa Onna no Kao wo Shiteinai,” the manga adaptation of Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of War.” That book is a collection of interviews with female soldiers of the Red Army that fought in the Eastern Front of WWII. As with all things USSR that see the light of day in the English speaking world, the author is an anti-communist, which is why she won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book. However, the work is still worth reading because the interviewees are all Soviet war heroes and their deeply personal stories are the focus. Alexievich’s “capital T Truth” fetishist shtick means that she doesn’t often editorialize or interject, for example, every time Stalin is mentioned with “By the way, dear reader, remember that he ate all the grain” like Western accounts of socialist history do (though there are a billion footnotes crammed in the book version that “clarify” the interviewees’ narratives with the anticommunist correct-think “fact checks”). The illustrations really bring to life the stories of the interviewees in a vivid way and so it’s worth checking out.
Some great historical fiction include “A Bride’s Story,” set in 19th century Central and West Asia, with a great cultural anthropology-lite style narrative, and “Song of the Long March,” which is set in Tang China and has a great portrayal of the deeply interwoven relationships between Han Chinese and Uyghurs in that historical period. I actually came across that work before all the Western atrocity propaganda started clogging the airwaves in the late 2010s and I’m personal grateful to it for pre-emptively being my first impression to the Uyghur Chinese people rather than having some shoddy copycat Holodomor 2.0 plagiarized slop become the introduction to that culture.
As a purely personal aside favorite, I’d also recommend “Fire Punch.” It has a lot of the typical anime genre nonsense and really, the only reason I’d recommend it is that it has one of the best portrayals of an LGBT character in manga and anime. I was deeply struck by it personally and I’ve also seen heteronormative responses to the manga remark that the character humanized “LGBT individuals” as something beyond a “concept” for them.
“Song of the Long March,” which is set in Tang China and has a great portrayal of the deeply interwoven relationships between Han Chinese and Uyghurs in that historical period
Interesting. Any reason it’s named after the long march despite being in a wildly different historical period?
I wanted to make a joke about that, but in seriousness, I would guess that the term “Long March” in contemporary Chinese culture, through the legendary status of that heroic campaign, has become rhetorically synonymous with a personal journey of perseverance and struggle basically akin to how Western cultures use the term “odyssey” from “The Odyssey.” It’s (justifiably) become one of those culturally enmeshed figurative terms, like how TERF island likes to append Dunkirk to the end of everything: “financial Dunkirk, political Dunkirk, etc.”
The title likely is an allusion to that or maybe laconically pointing out just that the protagonist absolutely gets their daily steps in because they’ve meandered all around Tang China.
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is my personal favorite.
Land of the lustrous
Set in a world inhabited by “jewel people”, it chronicles their efforts to find the place where they belong and defend their way of life
Sounds like Steven Universe anime? O.o
Seriously, this might be it, tho. Seinen, slick art, fighting girls, and it’s complete. Pretty much checking all my boxes.
I really liked BLAME! if you like cold, alien anime about people in a decaying concrete world.
Edit: manga* I don’t know why I said anime. Got anime on the brain (always).
Ooooooh, that art is looking SICK
I love the premise of being lost in an impossibly large decaying city. House of Leaves vibes
