I don’t see anyone ever talking about Hellsing. Why I enjoy it, it’s edgelord but with a heart of gold. I love the factions that fight against each other in this secret war that involves the paranormal and vampires in modern day. It’s got guns and magic and the art is good.
Another one I like is Ragnarok (into the abyss is the english title). It’s a manwha by the korean artist behind the game with the same name. Again another little edgelord romp with a heart of gold, I see a pattern. Plus again I enjoy the art and it reminds me of old school 90’s anime schlock with katanas and magic powers that I fell in love with as a kid.
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
Been meaning to read monster, I watched a bit of the anime with a girlfriend of mine at the time, enjoyed it!
The anime is really good too, it’s actually one of the most straightforward adaptations I’ve ever seen
Almost 1:1 with the manga
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.
wrt paperakyu: it is finished. the final chapters are available from the author’s salepoint on itch, here is the link (used to be gumroad). it’s good, worth the price to see the resolution (source: bought it and read it)
and here’s the mangadex for the first volume and a half (link)
and for those of you that need a little oomph to check it out: chapter 1 page 17 (it’s officer dogface!)
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.
