The most recommended manga books

I absolutely adore Miyazaki’s art in Nausicaa. Although dealing in themes of plague and pollution, the artwork really feels like it comes from a place of love. His creature and vehicle designs exude his adoration of nature and science. And everything is rendered in a soft, effortless chiaroscuro that makes reading an endless pleasure. 

But maybe the single most endearing attribute is the character, Nausicaa, herself. It seems to me, that more often than not, a hero story asks its protagonist to go through some sort of reluctant change to become a hero. But not Nausicaa. She comes to us fully formed, full of virtue and ambition. And so the story is centered on her choices. The story doesn’t happen to her, she drives it herself.

This series turns the “tortured outcast” trope on its head: these nerd characters are proud to be outcasts, and the one thing they don't want to be associated with is beautiful, popular people! I love this story because I, too, once fell into the “us vs. them” mentality against people I thought were too cool for me as a youth— people who could have potentially become my best friends! This manga series beautifully celebrates how we are all different, but still might have more in common than we think.

I wrote my undergrad thesis on the migration of visual tropes from traditional Japanese theatre (Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki) into modern art forms (Manga, Anime, Supakabuki/Anime Musicals), which was a rigorous exercise because I couldn’t just compare the tropes—I had to spend hours explaining them to my advisor. It was a fascinating (sometimes exasperating) lesson in learning to read one visual vocabulary, only to have to explain it to someone else in terms that they understood using another.

This blurred-xerox-translation-of-a-translation exercise is the central theme of Mangaman, where a Shojou-esque protagonist falls from a fantastical manga world into a comic. Visual conventions clash, where he walks the wrong way across panels, and where his speed lines accidentally stab people in the school hallway.

A blend of humor and Chinese fantasy, The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System was my first brush with the Chinese sub-genre of transmigration novels, similar but different from Western portal fantasy or Japanese isekai. The main character ends up in a world not his own, and in the process of trying to make it better, comes rather close to destroying it. That dissonance between intention and results is something I absolutely love in my heroes. Competence is boring. I want to see (and write) messiness and complacency and efforts made that perhaps weren’t thought out all the way. That, to me, is not only humor but true heroism.

Tekkonkinkreet has more raw energy than any comic I’ve ever read, like in my own book it’s the story of 2 brothers who think they’re invincible and make a lot of mistakes in the heat of the moment. The book is relentless and breaks every possible rule and is just an absolute marvel of comic storytelling.

Tsuge is another of the early gekiga greats, who only recently allowed English translation of his classic work from the 1960s and 70s. Tsuge pushed the boundaries of what manga stories were about, into more abstract and surreal areas and visual presentation. This book is, like Tatsumi’s books, a glimpse of a little-known Japan beneath the common stereotypes. Its stories are told in an understated and sophisticated fashion. Literary manga indeed. Wonderful stuff, personally I love it.

A homeless high school girl is taken in by a mysterious family, whose members are possessed by the 13 animals of the Zodiac. As she lives with the family, she slowly uncovers hidden wounds, which she heals with her generous spirit. Eventually, she falls in love with one of the two brothers her age, but which one will it be? Usually, with love triangles like this, I can figure out almost immediately who will end up together, but this one took me a while, which made the story all the more interesting.  

One of the first manga books I ever read and one of the reasons I fell in love with the fantasy genre as a whole which then spread into gaming.

Set in Feudal Japan, a school girl named Kagome one day falls in a well and finds herself in a completely different timezone, where there are demons, priestess, and a particular dog eared half demon named Inuyasha...

It's a rollercoaster ride of emotions and heart, and this one I actually wished had been turned into a game as it would have been so much fun.

I don’t know if I would actually call Witch Hat Atelier one of the best books I read this year, but I would absolutely call it one of the most intriguing.

I’m a big lover of fantasy and there is something really cool about seeing a magic system that feels fresh. On top of that, the characters are really charming and the art style is pretty cool. The protagonist, Coco, has so much excitement for magic that it is incredibly relatable as a nerd. It makes you root for her and I can’t wait to read more of her journey.

Like Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes, this graphic novel fuses Camus’s Sisyphus with Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” as a test of character: would you live your life over again for eternity?

Sukezo fails the test miserably. He’s a talented cartoonist, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so he shuffles through half-hearted money-making schemes (including an aptly Sisyphean rock-selling venture), succeeding only at making himself, his wife, and his young child miserable and increasingly hateful towards themselves and each other. 

Sukezo becomes the bad Nietzsche of popular misconception. If only success and esteem count, better to be nothing at all: a pseudo-Buddhism of disappointed, not transcended, ego. He could be beautifully and happily useless, like Zhuangzi’s tree that’s never cut down. But mistaking power for talent, he cuts himself down instead.