Kingsley: Manga and Anime

For our shojo week I chose to read the first chapter of Sailor Moon. I've heard a lot about Sailor Moon but have never actually read or watched it. But despite how popular the series is I know next to nothing about it, so I figured this might be a good place to start. Sailor Moon is exactly what you'd expect from a shojo manga. All of the characters are pretty and have glittery eyes, including the boys. Usagi and Darien's relationship is romanticized and exaggerated in a way that would be any young girl's fantasy. I found it kind of funny how the characters would announce their attacks with special names, kind of like Pokemon. Sailor Moon was an interesting read overall and I'm glad I finally got to experience this iconic series. This isn't really the kind of manga/anime I'd usually watch myself so it was a nice change of pace, but I can't see myself going back to read more.

For our week focusing on romance manga I decided to read the first chapter of Ouran High School Host Club. I chose this manga to read because it was one of the first anime I watched, and boy some of these characters have not aged well. Hikaru and Kaoru's weird incest thing was always kind of off-putting to me, but I had totally forgotten about Honey. Like I straight up forgot he existed. Honey is basically a "shota", despite actually being 18, and the manga translation that I read essentially calls him "the pedophile type". This isn't really wrong considering it was probably translated from either shota or shotacon, which is basically a genre of manga about attraction to children, specifically boys, and is the counterpart to lolicon (the same thing but with girls). It's all pretty gross. Ignoring all the weird and gross characters, I was actually kind of shocked to see just how different the manga differs from the anime stylistically. The manga is a lo...

I had honestly forgotten that before the movie, Nausicaa had been a manga. Miyazaki's manga is very similar stylistically compared to his films, which I found interesting. The majority of the time I feel that when a manga is adapted to animation it differs a lot in style (see Ouran High School Host Club). The manga version of Nausicaa is also a lot deeper and darker than the movie. It is much more violent, and even Teto, Nausicaa's pet fox-squirrel, dies from radiation poisoning at some point. There are also a few characters that appear similar to characters from Miyazaki's future films like Howl's Moving Castle, but this could also be attributed to a lot of his characters having kind of similar faces in general. Nausicaa was overall a pretty interesting read and was able to hold my attention surprisingly well, considering I usually can't sit down and read a manga for more than ten minutes at a time. I would like to read the rest of it at some point.

For week three I read a bit of Golgo 13  and Cigarette Girl , two very different styles of manga that somehow fit into the same genre. The first 18 pages of  Golgo 13 are minimally colored, but the use of bright reds really emphasizes the intensity of the (somewhat ridiculous) situation at hand. This utilization of a single color really helps to move the reader's eyes around the page as well. I felt this manga, at least the portion that I did read, was much wordier at times than what I'm used to. While somewhat more text-heavy than what I'm used to, Golgo 13  was much more similar stylistically to more modern manga compared to Tezuka's work which we had read previously. Cigarette Girl is more like slice of life but with adult themes. It's very different from Golgo 13  art style-wise and almost reminded me of Osomatsu-kun. I didn't read as much of it as Golgo but found it to be much more relatable than the latter story-wise and also just more enjoyable in gener...

Ayako is definitely not the sort of story most people would associate with Osamu Tezuka. I was only able to made it to about chapter six before I had to call it quits. The story is dramatic and heavy, and it doesn't really have you rooting for any character in particular. For most of the first few chapters Tezuka makes it seem as though Jiro is the only decent person in his family, until he beats O-Ryo and lies to his family about her coming onto him as an excuse for why he had blood on his shirt. Actually, the abuse of O-Ryo is one of the reasons, among many others, for why I ended up stopping after chapter six. O-Ryo literally did nothing wrong, at least up until the point I read she was just constantly getting ripped on by the other characters with the exception of Ayako. While she is a gross stereotype of mental illness, for some reason the abuse she suffered just felt worse than that of the other characters. I don't mean to undermine the other characters' experience...