From marauding giants to magical girls, manga has some of the best stories in comics, but it can be a bit intimidating to the newcomer. The books run “backwards,” and the conventions and visual “language” are different from American and European comics (although more and more non-Japanese creators are picking up on manga’s storytelling techniques). […]
There’s nothing like picking up a volume of manga and seeing something familiar staring back at you. Whether it’s bluesman Robert Johnson teaming up with outlaw Clyde Barrow in Me and the Devil Blues or a female Santa Claus with a reindeer boyfriend in Sweet Rein, manga creators have a way taking our familiar stories […]
From marauding giants to magical girls, manga has some of the best stories in comics, but it can be a bit intimidating to the newcomer. The books run “backwards,” and the conventions and visual “language” are different from American and European comics (although more and more non-Japanese creators are picking up on manga’s storytelling techniques). […]
Back when manga was still a novelty, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, publishers brought over a lot of different series but tended to treat them all the same. By the turn of the century, the now-familiar “manga-sized” paperback, with a black-and-white interior, had become standard, and almost everything, from the cheesiest shonen battle […]
The Victorians were a fascinating bunch, repressed to the point where they covered the legs of their chairs, but indulging in all sorts of depravity behind closed doors or in the squalid streets of London. This tension between elegance and decadence is a rich mine for storytellers, and manga-ka are no exception. To whit: here […]