kajarainbow (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kajarainbow) wrote2006-12-20 02:16 pm
kajarainbow) wrote2006-12-20 02:16 pm
Entry tags:
On Japanese comics online!
You might've seen the Japanese comics ("manga") lining their own rows at some chain bookstores. Some good, most crap like most mediums in general. Well, there's a whole strange world of technically illegal but not prosecuted fan translation efforts going for those. Companies seem to tolerate them as useful indicators of what would be popular here, cherry-picking the fan-favorites or particularly interesting series and doing their own professional translatons and commercial American releases.
This is a good review of the whole thing: A Comics Reader's Guide to Manga Scanlations. It has some excellent recommendations, and some you might not care for. The groups it illustrates, though, are the ones with the best tastes in my mind.
My own recommendations:
Kotonoha:
Milk Closet (surreal dimension-hopping adventure)
The Music of Marie (interesting world)
Hourou Musuko (yikes, while I didn't get started that early, some of this reminds me frighteningly some of my emotional experiences as a transsexual!)
Mangascreener:
Witches (highly imaginative stories about the Infinite)
Ryuguden (bizarre, lewd time-traveling take on a Japanese folk tale with a powerfully bittersweet ending)
Believers (a tale of delusion, sex, jealousness, and cult dogma)
Omanga:
Dorohedoro (a guy with a lizard head goes around sticking world-jumping masked magicians inside his head, trying to find the on that cursed him)
Jisatsu Circle (creepy work about a suicide club that spreads like a contagion)
This amateur translation of a four-page Moto Hagio comic makes me really wish more of her work was available in English. I know of precisely three translated works. One of them is the obscure A, A' volume sitting on my shelf (quite good work but from what I've heard not as developed as her later works), one was a short story published only in some comic magazine (that linked scanlation article above is from said magazine's website), and one is the one I just linked. And that's all.
And now for a bizarre campy hell high school comic.
At first it seemed like a setup for some repetitive "girl in high school in hell" sitcom, or the like, with some fanservice. Not particularly interesting to me. But the freaky character designs and particularly odd elements took my interest. Stuff like Principal Hellvis who looks like a demonic Elvis (pictured speaking not at all figuratively in my usericon for this post), the cat with a yin-yang face, etc. And a volleyball tournament from hell with all the marches taking place on a single day. Stuff from that.
And then the plot took a turn for the bizarre. Then it took another turn for the even more bizarre, with the sort of weird appropriation of Christian mythology you see a lot of in Japanese works.
This picture really sums up a lot about the series:
You can get it here.
This is a good review of the whole thing: A Comics Reader's Guide to Manga Scanlations. It has some excellent recommendations, and some you might not care for. The groups it illustrates, though, are the ones with the best tastes in my mind.
My own recommendations:
Kotonoha:
Milk Closet (surreal dimension-hopping adventure)
The Music of Marie (interesting world)
Hourou Musuko (yikes, while I didn't get started that early, some of this reminds me frighteningly some of my emotional experiences as a transsexual!)
Mangascreener:
Witches (highly imaginative stories about the Infinite)
Ryuguden (bizarre, lewd time-traveling take on a Japanese folk tale with a powerfully bittersweet ending)
Believers (a tale of delusion, sex, jealousness, and cult dogma)
Omanga:
Dorohedoro (a guy with a lizard head goes around sticking world-jumping masked magicians inside his head, trying to find the on that cursed him)
Jisatsu Circle (creepy work about a suicide club that spreads like a contagion)
This amateur translation of a four-page Moto Hagio comic makes me really wish more of her work was available in English. I know of precisely three translated works. One of them is the obscure A, A' volume sitting on my shelf (quite good work but from what I've heard not as developed as her later works), one was a short story published only in some comic magazine (that linked scanlation article above is from said magazine's website), and one is the one I just linked. And that's all.
And now for a bizarre campy hell high school comic.
At first it seemed like a setup for some repetitive "girl in high school in hell" sitcom, or the like, with some fanservice. Not particularly interesting to me. But the freaky character designs and particularly odd elements took my interest. Stuff like Principal Hellvis who looks like a demonic Elvis (pictured speaking not at all figuratively in my usericon for this post), the cat with a yin-yang face, etc. And a volleyball tournament from hell with all the marches taking place on a single day. Stuff from that.
And then the plot took a turn for the bizarre. Then it took another turn for the even more bizarre, with the sort of weird appropriation of Christian mythology you see a lot of in Japanese works.
This picture really sums up a lot about the series:
You can get it here.