Manga recommendations, anyone?

Because it makes little sense to write a book about visual rhetoric and ignore the fastest growing sector of the market, but as my reading experience follows the typical trajectory of Claremont X-Titles (X-X?) to Sandman and Vertigo books to Fantagraphics lust, my experience with manga comes almost exclusively from some mid-90s flirtation with Ghost in the Shell.  I know about manga and its many varieties, but I lack the sort of fluency with its conventions that I have with American mainstream and independent books.  My question to you is this:

What should I read to acquire a robust, intuitive working vocabulary with manga?

Comments

[James T]

I second GC's Battle Angel Alita recommendation (the original title was "Gunnm", or "Gun Dream"). It's extremely kinetic (what with cyborgs fighting faster than the speed of sound etc), and the dialogue and narration (as translated by Viz, at least) are frequently like nothing you'd see written by a native English-speaker (in a good, interesting way).

[Jeremy]

One final note, the most popular way to read manga is a weekly collection of stories called 'Shonen Jump'. This is where Bleach and Naruto are published, but it's a giant, thick pulp book with a ton of other stories. I've not gone through one in a while, but some of the stories can be rather disturbing (weird sex scenes for no apparent reason, sexual assaults, etc). Keep in mind these are openly read on public transit here, so I often read these over someone's shoulder. Odd.

[xaaronx]

Lone Wolf & Cub deserves to be mentioned again just because of its influence on later works (in multiple media).

One fantastic manga I haven't seen mentioned yet is Yotsuba&!

[Endy]

The suggestions people have made are generally excellent manga, but if your goal is to intuitively understand it as a generic form, rather than just impress people with your good taste, you don't want the good stuff. Groundbreaking things--Tezuka's style, Masumoto's space pirates, Shirow's distopianism, Takeuchi's blatant recasting of boy-manga tropes as girl-manga tropes, Tomino's dignified obsession with convincing his producers to stop making him create child soldier epics--are going to give you the wrong impression of the genre. Reading InuYasha won't tell you that InuYasha is a brilliant derivative of Pokemon, to understand that you have to be familiar with something decidedly un-brilliant.
So, what you should do is go down to the public library and see if they've got a collection of Shonen Jump magazine back issues. By all means the influential stuff (Maison Ikkoku, Fist of the North Star, Akira, etc.) matters, but just get the film. You want to understand manga formula, get formulaic.

[Brent P. Newhall]

An interesting question!

Actually, your best bet is to read Paul Gravett's "Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics." It covers manga throughout the last half of the 20th Century, explaining the various influences, genres, and conventions that emerged in that medium.

If you want to actually read the stuff, well, first a disclaimer: A lot of manga classics haven't made it over to America, and Americans have grabbed onto certain properties that weren't particularly influential in Japan.

If you want true *fluency*, there's nothing to do but immerse yourself in a lot of works. The manga industry is very different than the American comic industry; it wasn't dominated by a couple of major publishing houses or names for decades. It grew out of the influence of hundreds of different creators. Its standard conventions grew much more organically, from a much wider range of sources.

That said, you should definitely become familiar with the grandfather of manga, Osamu Tezuka. He essentially invented manga in its modern form. A fair number of his works are now available in English, covering a wide range of topics. "Phoenix" is considered one of his best works, and it's certainly a vast, thought-provoking manga.

A few other major works include Katsuhiro Otomo's "Akira," Hayao Miyazaki's "Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind," and Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima's "Lone Wolf and Cub."

Beyond that, dive in and enjoy!

[Chris S.]

Hmm... Well, a few years ago something like 40% of everything published in Japan was manga, so it is a huge chunk of culture. I think if you're trying to just get a feel for the medium and a sense of its currencies, perhaps one representative work in each genre would be good to read. What I can think of available in English (and manga, not anime) are:

Shojo (girls comics)
Mars
Marmalade Boy

Shonen (boys comics)
Naruto (ongoing)
Dragonball

Yumei Tantei (famous detectives)
Death Note

Sports
(not my forte, but)
Prince of Tennis
Bamboo Blade

Mecha
Anything Gundam

Fantasy
Berserk

School
Great Teacher Onizuka

Four-panel Comedy
Azumanga Daioh
Lucky Star

Business
Division Chief Kosaku Shima (available as bilingual comics)

Big names:
Tezuka Osamu (the "god of manga")
-Phoenix
-Adolf

Naoki Urasawa
-20th Century Boys

This only scratches the surface, but it should give you an idea of the major themes. Although not a manga, I also recommend watching the "Evangelion" TV series, because it had a profound impact on manga and anime in the 90's. There are manga spinoffs, but the TV series is the original. Also "The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi," which is actually a book available in translation (with a popular TV spinoff) also for the profound impact it has had in the 2000's. Also, you should check out Hiroki Azuma's "Otaku: Japan's Database Animals" for a discussion of anime/manga/gaming "otaku" culture as situated in postmodernity.

[Martin Wisse]

tvtropes.org's manga/anime section is a good start at getting some of the lingo right.

[unclaimed smegma]

Actually, if you really want to ease in, I believe Scott Pilgrim gave this Westerner an intro into Manga. It is completely non-Japanese, but it plays with the tropes and allows one an insight into the genre. From there, you can go with the more hard-core stuff.

[Margaret]

I'd strongly recommend Pluto, by Naoki Urasawa, especially in conjunction with Astro Boy. It's a reimagining of a single chapter from Astro Boy, fleshed out and made very powerful. (It'd be interesting to compare the storylines and the different visual approaches.)

I also agree with the commenters above who suggest trying some of the more formulaic works as well as sampling different genres. Maybe take a few from different genres -- Fruits Basket for shojo, Naruto or Bleach for shonen (or Fullmetal Alchemist, though the focus there seems to be less on we fight now! and more on long-running plot), 20th Century Boys or Monster for seinen, one of the really creepy ones that I can't even think about without getting the willies for horror... Are you looking for more of an overview, an introduction to the form, or just a lot of good recommendations?

[The Modesto Kid]

This might be of interest: Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century: A New Generation of Historical Manga

[RWM]

An introduction to manga is tricky, as its conventions vary a great deal based on genre. The textual conventions are different enough to make treating manga as a distinct medium useful in some respects- conventions of flow and composition developed in a very different way.

Broadly, I would separate manga into the commercial and "non"-commercial, "serious" areas- there is a lot more of the former, which is cheaper and frequently more profitable. This profitability is also part of the anime-manga overlap: even more so than in the US, intellectual properties in Japan are spread and exploited across as many mediums and forms as possible.

Naoki Urasawa and Tekuza Osamu are certainly among the two most famous and well known names in the field of serious, convention-defining manga. Commercial manga are trickier to define, because the field of conventions is broad, complex and varied. Chris S's list is a great place, but keep in mind that each of the subheadings has its own distinct subdivisions and cross-pollinations. I might add Welcome to the N.H.K , which is a good example of both a novel rewritten in manga form, and an example of the emergent postmodern trend in japanese culture- superflat and so on.

[Jay]

I'll certainly second Ranma 1/2, which was hugely influential in the 90s. Dragonball Z and Bleach are also good calls. I haven't seen many recommendations for girls' (shoujo) and womens' (jousei) manga here. I don't really know that market, so I'll just recommend that you look into them. Evangelion and Hellsing have excellent anime (the Gonzo version for Hellsing), but the comic is much more lackluster. As an offbeat choice, I'd suggest Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, a horror manga (very creepy, gross at points). The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was popular a few years ago. Love Hina and Tenchi cover the "dork surrounded by babes" genre. Excel Saga parodies a lot of other anime, so it may be helpful. "Magical Girl" series aren't as popular as they used to be, but Sailor Moon is a good place to start.

Hope this helps.

[Rob]

You're probably feeling inundated at this point, and many people have made good points about whether or not you want to grasp manga as it exists as a major facet of Japanese culture or as an artform that Western comics fans appreciate. But given the trajectory you outlined, I'd second all the recommendations for Tezuka's "Buddha" and Miyazaki's "Nausicaa". And I'd throw in Taiyo Matsumoto's "Tekkonkinkreet" (aka Black and White), which is heavily influenced by European comics and isn't much like other manga, but is beautiful and weird.

"Lone Wolf and Cub" is entertaining, but no one seems to have mentioned that it's nearly 30 volumes. You might try to track down Shanpei Shirato's "Legend of Kamui" instead--it's very similar, but only two volumes and kind of Marxist. If you like horror at all, Junji Ito's "Uzumaki" is also great.

[SEK]

I'm not feeling in the least bit inundated. This is great material y'all are providing me. I spent a few hours in the library today looking through its MASSIVE collection of manga ... which, unfortunately, is in the East Asian Collection, and therefore not in any language I speak. But I'm planning to spend a few days parked in Barnes and Nobles immersing myself in the stuff, so the more recommendations y'all can make, the better.

[r.]

It depends: do you want something more recent, or a 'classic' of the genre? Something from the Jump! demographic of levelling-up (Bleach, Naruto, One Piece, and the amazing Kenshin), or something that goes more for characterization (say, Mushishi)? Or would you like sports manga (boxing, tennis, soccer, Go, etc.)? I'll leave the discussion of the gendering of manga alone for now, mainly because there is too much to compress into this little space.

For a recursive look at how manga get made, you could check out Bakuman, which has art by the talented Obata Takashi, who also inked Death Note (itself worth a look for the sociological impact alone). As well, it might be wise to keep in mind that the legalities of fan-based translation are, well, queasy at best; depending on the scan-group, that could go for the translations, too.

Anyhow. Arakawa Hiromu's Fullmetal Alchemist and Urasawa Naoki's 20th Century Boys are, for me, the two works of solid-gold-awesome that would reward all the cogent analysis they could get. Minekura Kazuya's Saiyuki and Reloaded have really good sequential-art-analysis-suitable panels, and they take on one of the great stories of Classical Literature and really transform it. Beyond the classics of CLAMP, Hana Yori Dango (Boys Over Flowers) and Hana-kimi (For You in Full Blossom) also continue to be cultural juggernauts well after publication. I'll shut my type now, but it's a rich field that rewards serious consideration.

[Fred]

I'm no huge manga expert, BUT! I'll second or third or whatever Osamu Tezuka, and especially recommend Adolf, Buddha and Phoenix. Apart from being very good reads, I've heard people argue that Tezuka, producing absurd volumes of manga since maybe the 1950'ies has had a seminal influence on the development of manga, but actually I'm talking out of my ass on this one. But you really shoold read the above three no matter why.

All the best
fred

[Rob]

While you're in the East Asian section, see if they have a series called "Gon" by Masashi Tanaka. It's entirely wordless, so the language barrier won't be a problem.

Drawn and Quarterly have been putting out some interesting collections of "alternative" manga over the past year or so, which might be useful for historical contrast.

Also, Fred is not talking out of his ass. There's really no equivalent to Tezuka in non-Japanese comics: individual titles of his spawned entire genres that are still popular today (his "Princess Knight" is the seed of shojo manga, aka manga for young women). It would be a bit like if Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, and Charles Schulz were one person (er, sort of). I'd also read "MW" which is extremely dark--read it alongside some "Astro Boy" and I think you'll see what I mean about there being no one else like him.

[Naadir Jeewa]

Tomie if you want a horror recommendation.

[Sarah]

This may not be the best thing for getting a solid grounding in manga's visual conventions, but I recommend, for fun, Hoshi Yoriko's Kyou no Nekomura-san. It's about a cat who works as a housekeeper, and it is fabulous. Then again, maybe it is good for visuals - there sure is a lot one can learn about pathos and kawaii from the way the author draws Nekomura-san scrubbing a bathtub.

Anyway, it's not available in English yet, but there's a French translation, if that works: http://www.amazon.fr/s/ref=nb_ss?__mk_fr_FR=%C5M%C5Z%D5%D1&url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=nekomura&x=0&y=0

[Caravelle]

Everyone's mentioned everything I could think of, but someone said we're missing some shoujo recommendations. On that front I think Nana is popular (I've only read the first few books). As for "Magical girls" not being as popular as they used to be, that scares me a little given how crazy all the little girls in my kindergarten school are about the Pretty Cure franchise. But that's anime. (the boys are all into Kamen Rider, which I haven't watched yet so can't recommend).

TVtropes has been mentioned a few times already, and I really think it would be a good resource on this front. If you don't let it ruin your life.

(PS : I love the idea that "Great Teacher Onizuka" is mundane)