Volumes 1-12 Price: £3.99(1-6)/£4.99(7-10) Creator: Takeshi Maekawa Rating: **** Excellent value. Recommended for kids of all ages.The story of a would be martial artist. The title character chops wood with his hands, and can turn everyday objects (including his pet monkey!) into weapons, but he has a long hard road ahead if he's to survive his initiation. Aimed at a young male audience, but should appeal to just about everyone as the natural humour of the series comes across well. Often described as the 'Japanese Asterix.'
Volumes 1-2 Price: £5.99 Creator: Rumiko Takahashi Rating: *** An excellent manga, but a poor edition.Another martial artist here, but his problems are rather different, as he has a nasty habit of changing sex when splashed with water. This can lead to some rather embarrasing situations that no amount of fighting skill is going to get him out of. Very funny, and one of the most popular manga ever written. Unfortunately this edition is of much poorer print quality than the US edition, and as each volume is only half the size, it works out more expensive. Look for the import.
Volumes 1-2 Price: £7.99(1)/£8.99(2) Creator: Masaomi Kanzaki Rating: ** Only suitable for fans of the game.Yet more martial arts. (Read a bit further on in the guide if you want a bit more variety.) Based on the computer game of the same name, and consequently lacking somewhat in the areas of plot and originality. Still, it's fairly decent for this sort of thing. There is also a magazine that prints some SF2 strips.
Volume 1 Price: £10.99 Creator: Katsuhiro Otomo Rating: ***** Essential manga for SF fans. Good value.This is only the first part of this long and complicated tale. To get the rest of the series, you'll have to buy the more expensive American editions though.. This edition uses the US translation from Epic comics, which has some dubious recoloring work that will not be to everyone's taste. Still, at more than twice the page count of similarly-priced graphic novels, it's very good value.
Price: £8.99 Creator: Katsuhiro Otomo Rating: ****This early work has similarites to Akira, but is paced a lot quicker and is rather less open ended. This is a different version to the US one from Studio Proteus. Which of the two has the better translation is debatable, but this one is certainly cheaper, larger and in one big volume rather than three small ones.
Volume 1 Price: £8.99 Creator: Masashi Tanaka Rating: *** Recommended, if you're looking something different.Unusually, this manga is wordless, and there are no sound effects, so the translation is not an issue. The setting is total wilderness, so it also needed no retouching after being flipped. This is a good thing, because the artwork is excellent, a great improvement over his work on Demon. (Serialised in Manga Mania.)
Gon himself, is a small and fairly cute dinosaur who wanders around the countryside generally making a nuissance of himself and annoying all the other animals. His behaviour ranges from mischeivous to downright vicious, and you've really got to feel sorry for anything unfortunate enough to cross his path.
It is totally bizarre though and quite like nothing else I've ever seen, so I'd advise taking a look before you buy. At a pinch though, I'd recommend it. Just be prepared for something unusual.
Price: £8.99 Creator: Katsuhiro Otomo Rating: *** A mixed bag, but some very good stories.A collection of short stories from the early years of Otomo. There are some very good stories on a par with his best work, such as the Magnetic Rose, Farwell to Weapons and Fireball manga. There's also some mediocre ones, and some very silly stuff indeed. Aside from the Magnetic Rose story though, it doesn't contain the other two parts of the film of the same name, so the title is somewhat misleading.
Price: £7.99 Creators: Tony Takezaki/Toshimichi Suzuki Rating: *** Recommended for SF fans.A Bubblegum Crisis side story, that doesn't feature many of the same characters. The picture of the future presented is much grimmer, with the emphasis on cyborgs, terrorism and future technology as opposed to pop music and heroic action.
Volume 1 Price: £7.99 Creator: Masamune Shirow Rating: ***** Essential for SF fans.Another of the great classics of manga. In the far future, two mercenaries join the police force of a utopian city and discover some intriguing plots. Widely renowned for it's realistic approach to powered combat suits, politics and terrorism. Some very cute characters too. The rest of the series can be obtained in editions from the Americna publisher Dark Horse.
Price: £9.99 Creator: Adam Warren Rating: ***Not strictly manga, as it was produced entirely in the US. A prequel to the anime series of the same name, but not entirely in continuity with it. Warren's art is excellent and captures the manga style well, although some may have reservations with some of the liberties he's taken with the BGC characters. Most notably Priss who has moved from a clean-cut pop starlet into being a thrash metal vocalist! More highly recommended are his Dirty Pair series.
Volumes 1-2 Price: £7.99 Creators: Kazuo Koike & Ryoichi Ikegami Rating: **The, often violent and sexually explicit, story of an assassin who cries after killing his victims. Rather less silly than the video series, but not particularly to my taste.
Volumes 1-2 Price: £7.99 Creators: Adam Warren & Toren Smith Rating: **** Not Japanese, but who cares when it's this good.Another US produced work. The Lovely Angels (aka the Dirty Pair of the title, but not to their faces) are trouble consultants for the WWWA, an interstellar police organisation. Whilst their operations are usually successful, they often cause more damage than the crooks. Often described as the 'ultimate in fan fiction.'
Price: £9.99(2) Creator: Gisaburo Sugii Rating: ** Only suitable for fans of the game.An adaptation of the rather lacklustre SFII anime that has very little going for it. As with the other SFII graphic novels it was serialised in the Streetfighter II magazine.
Volumes 1-2 Price: £7.99 Creator: Keiji Nakazawa Rating: *** Recommended, but certainly not light reading.This semi-autobiographical story of a survivor of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima is rather graphic and disturbing on occasions, but this certainly serves to drive home it's message about the horrors of nuclear weapons. A very timely tie-in with the 50th anniversary of the bombing.
Rating: *** Issues: 1-2 Creator: Masayuki FujiwaraFans of anime and manga will know that the Japanese are rather keen on giant robots, but none of them are quite this big. Dodekain is, in fact, bigger than the Earth itself. A nice spoof on the genre.
Stories printed, and the relevant back issues are as follows:
Rating: ***** Issues: 1-37 Creator: Katsuhiro OtomoPartially reprinted in the GN. This version doesn't have the recolouring for most of the pages.
Rating: ***** Issues: 1-8, 29-30 Creator: Masamune ShirowReprinted in the GN. See above.
Rating: **** Issues: 31-36 Creator: Masamune ShirowAn early Shirow story set on the planet Venus. Technology and magic are interweaved to create strange effects. Almost completely unlike the film of the same name.
Rating: *** Issues: 16-19 Creator: Adam WarrenAs reprinted in the graphic novel. See above for description.
Rating: *** Issues: 9-12 Creator: Masashi TanakaIn feudal Japan, a mysterious masked man is terrorising a village. He appears to be invincible in combat, and can only be a... demon!
Rating: **** Issues: 9-14, 21, 25-28, 37-42 Creators: Adam Warren & Toren SmithDifferent stories to the GN, but just as good.
Rating: ***** (My favourite) Issues: 12-21 Creator: Masamune ShirowIn the near future, pollution problems have made the air almost unbreatheable, and crime has escalated to such levels that the police need to be armed with tanks. Very funny, but has a strong ecological subplot to it as well, and the technology is well thought out.
Rating: *** Issues: 22-24 Creator: Rumiko TakahashiSuzuko, a schoolgirl in modern Japan, is caught in a gas explosion that throws her back in time to the civil war period. An interesting time-travel and romance story from one of Japan's most popular artists.
Rating: * Issues: 1-8 Creator: Kazuhisa IwataThe big G will be familiar to most people, as one of Japan's most succesful exports over the years, but this story has rather patchy artwork and a one-dimensional plot. Tokyo gets destroyed once more... ho hum.
Rating: ** Issues: 38-43 Creator: Kenichi SonodaRally Vincent and her partner, the grenade-toting Minnie May Hopkins, are bounty hunters on the trail of a drug-smuggling gang. Although the artwork is well up to Sonoda's standards (he did the character designs for the Bubblegum Crisis and Gall Force series) this is an unremarkable story.
Rating: *** Issues: 14-15 Creators: Mamoru Oshii & Kamui FujiwaraA riot policeman lets a terrorist escape out of his gunsights. Will he live long enough to regret it? A gritty future-cop show from the director of Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor, this time trying his hand at manga.
Rating: *** Issues: 34-36 Creator: Monkey PunchWeird scratchy artwork. A bizarre sense of humour. Almost totally different to the films. Completely impossible to sum up in a paragraph like this.
Rating: ** Issues: 20-24 Creator: Kia AsamiyaAn all female team of psychics defend the world against demonic invasion. There is some very nice artwork, particularly on the lead characters. However, the plot seems rather weak and doesn't go anywhere in the short arc that was printed.
Rating: ** Issues: 25-32 Creators: Hiroshi Takashige & Ryoji MinagawaA giant ship, that could only be Noah's ark, is discovered embedded in a mountainside. Who knows what it could contain? Some nice ideas, but the story is slow, and full of formulaic fights.
This document was last updated on 25th March 1999
If you have any suggestions concerning this page, please contact:
Matt_Barber@hotmail.com