BLAME!

It’s brutalist architecture and cybersyn done by capitalism.

Really love the long shots that set the scene with the sheer scope of space the world is set in and all the wicked designs for whatever horror the artist decided to release each chapter

I don’t see anyone ever talking about Hellsing

That is because it’s an older manga. It was literally the only manga talked about online for a period of years.

My favorite is Naoki Urasawa’s Monster

You get people talking about 21st Century Boys and Pluto, but Monster is just a roller-coaster of drama

The short version is that it follows an up-and-coming Japanese surgeon in Germany, next in line to become head of surgery at a prestigious hospital. His ethics are put to the test when two patients arrive with grievous injuries, the first is a young boy who’s been shot in the head and left for dead with the rest of his family, the second is the mayor who has an aneurysm on the verge of bursting

The doctor is warned that if he doesn’t operate on the mayor, his career is in jeopardy, but he knows that if he doesn’t operate on the boy he’s likely to die

He chooses the boy, the mayor ends up dying and his career is left in tatters. His fiancee dumps him, the other doctors ostracize him and he’s basically all but blacklisted.

In a drunken haze, he goes to the room of the boy who’s life he saved, hoping for a sign that he made the right choice, but the boy is still in a coma.

In a fit of rage, he curses the other doctors, wishing that they would suffer like he has.

The next day, he arrives for his shift at the hospital… and the other surgeons are dead, poisoned

After being interrogated and cleared, he returns to the hospital with the news that he’s now set to become the head of surgery

Life is finally looking back up, except the boy in the coma is missing and no one knows how

At least until the boy shows back up to tell the doctor exactly what happened.

The boy had killed his own family and poisoned the other doctors as a way of thanking him for saving his life, letting him go on to keep killing and getting away with it

The doctor is left devastated, he swore himself to the preservation of life, but now that’s been turned against him

He steels himself and swears to track down the boy by any means necessary, even if that means violating his deepest beliefs and killing him

This is only the first few chapters by-the-by and it escalates and gets even wilder and more intense

I love it so much

Paperakyu, sometimes stylized as PaperaQ, is a somewhat crudely drawn and very existential story about a kid who gets infected with a disease that turns his head into a melon-like crab. It is also the only manga I have ever read that directly and explicitly condemns the Japanese government for keeping its heinous butchers in charge after WW2. I’m not sure if it ended.

PTSD Radio is the only horror manga to successfully jumpscare me, which it accomplished multiple times, and in general takes many tricks and stylistic elements from film, generally to its benefit. Ever wonder what would happen if some scavenging animals dug up an idol of an angry, ancient god of hair? No? Well, perhaps now you are.

Land of the Lustrous - some uncountable time after humanity dies out, a small island is host to a group of ageless nongendered humanoids born from the earth who are occasionally terrorized by washed-out parodies of Buddhists from the Moon. One of them, Phosphophyllite, is deeply unsatisfied with their life…

Gorgeous art. I don’t think explaining too much is a good idea, but it’s **really **worth a read.

Battle Angel Alita - in the Scrapyard, a post-apocalyptic dumping ground enslaved by the floating city of Salem/Tiphares, a smashed up cyborg head is found by a cybernetic doctor. He successfully reawakens them, Alita, though she has lost her memories. He takes her in as a surrogate daughter, but the violence and nihilism of the Scrapyard brings back some elements of her past in the form of her skill with one of the most sophisticated cyborg martial arts.

Alita’s character grows up and develops over several decades - and those changes aren’t always “good”. The first series takes place over about 14 years, and she spends several of those in a really unhealthy headspace - while there’s a fuckton of combat, the story values her development as a person far more (though it does timeskip past an idyllic “four years spent playing keytar in a crusty cyborg dive bar” to the next bit of chaos).

A really detailed art style that just loves all manner of mechanical and biological details. Great worldbuilding with really solid scifi makes the various bits of superscience far more plausible than it should be and characters who actually live their own lives offscreen.

I like the manwha by the name of Priest. Jagged, gritty artstyle and demon cowboys. Basically a Priest sells his soul to a demon in order to gain the powers to fight Hell. I guess Hell has infighting and all that. Super gory and over the top.

hellsing rules.

my #1 manga you need to check out but there’s a decent chance you might not have is getter robo (GAN GAN GAN GAN) which is fantastic. all time coolest robot story. sadly never gotten a good anime that got through all the important bits. getter robo go has a weak stretch in the middle when they’re fucking around in alaska but otherwise is a constantly escalating mecha extravaganza that gurren lagann was furiously copying the design notes of without paying any attention to the thematic stuff (more on that here). it’s one of the best manga of all time, if you haven’t read it you need to

the getter reading order is getter robo -> getter robo g -> getter robo go -> shin getter robo -> getter robo arc. make sure you read the getter saga version which has a few added chapters not found in the original release. everything post alaska arc in go is 10/10 all time greatest material. insanely cool mech fights, cosmic horror, the tragedy of knowing what you’re doing is a mistake but feeling like you have no other option. ken ishikawa the goat

also gonna give a shoutout to the akira manga, which is way more fleshed out and interesting in its worldbuilding than the movie. really cool, worth checking out regardless of whether you think the movie is the best thing ever or aren’t too hot on it

Dragon’s Heaven: A girl in a post apocalyptic world reawakens a robot whose pilot died in a war 1000 years ago and sets out to fight his rival who is still wrecking havoc in the world. Pretty neat art and mechanical design - it also has a neat short OVA adaptation.

I really like black lagoon. It’s characters and setting are really well done. It also has a very class concious worldview. The main protagonist becomes a pirate because he was kidnapped and his company refused to pay ransom, to save money. It still releases a chapter every two months. One of the newest arcs was about french colonialism in west africa.

Ultimate Rock Paper Scissors.

The art is bad and it gets worse as it goes on.

Best and funniest exploration of power interactions I’ve ever seen though.

Angel Densetsu is hilarious - a 90s comedy delinquent manga by the same mangaka who made Claymore (also a good read)

Devilman is the grandpa of all supernatural/demon horror stuff in japanese pop culture and it’s actually really good. By far Go Nagai’s greatest work.

Kaiji is great - almost as long as One Piece but it’s a gambling drama that at least partially had a bone to pick with capitalism.

The World God Only Knows by Wakaki Tamiki is very good. He’s a very good storyteller that can take weird concepts and make them interesting.

I like Shadows House a lot

It’s a neat mystery thing and all the characters are very lovable and supportive of each other. Also the lack of fanservice is nice cos I can’t stand that shit.

Akumetsu is a manga about a teen who gets the powers to be in multiple places at once and come back to life, and he uses these powers to assassinate hyper realistic depictions of Japanese neolib politicians. An American equivalent would be marvel releasing a comic where the main character assassinates a politician named Boe Hanchin who looks and acts exactly like Joe Manchin. I don’t know how it was allowed to be published. It slaps.

You might not have heard of it, but there’s a little manga called Captain Underpants that even includes animation (that you have to do yourself).

I’ve always liked Hideshi Hino’s Panorama of Hell from 1984. It’s very edgelord, like the blood and guts variety. The art isn’t great but it’s unique and charming in its own way.

What I like about it is that it begins as this edgelord horror stuff about demons and hell, but as you progress further it becomes clear it’s autobiographical about the author. About how his grandparents were yakuza. About how his parents were Japanese colonists in occupied northeast China during WW2. About how his mother learned she was pregnant right after Japan was atom bombed. It gets really into his psyche and how he feels about being conceived right at a moment of such horror and death.

It’s very good and I recommend going into it with an open attitude to all the gross stuff

For something lighter I really like My Brother’s Husband. Really charming story about how to cope with loss of a loved one, and how to accept people into your family despite differences. It’s cute and a rare, but increasingly common realistic portrayal of queer people in manga.