>>112792
Baki's one of those things that you cant binge and have to be a very specific type of fan. I agree but its more eh than sucky

>>112475
The bar is low, but One Piece is very respectful to low power-level characters and support characters.

Finished reading the first volume of Planetes yesterday. It was pretty good, but different from what I remember of the anime in a few ways. Notably, Tanabe doesn't really show up until the half-way point of the manga instead of being there from the beginning. Also much more focused on the life of Hachimaki instead of the goings on of the crew as a hole. Also quite a bit more psychological introspection than I remember the anime having. Probably want to watch the anime again and then start reading the second volume.

baki baki give me the sucky

>>113812
Yeah I've heard the manga has some pretty big differences from the anime. The anime is one of my favorite ever so I should really get around to checking out the manga.

>>94182
Never4gat about this post, finally went and read it today.
It does that thing I like quite a bit where stuff is cobbled together from random bits and bobs yet completely fits together, a lot of its architecture often feeling like an impractically detailed mix of mesoamerican stonework, Zhou bronzes, and steampunk machinery. The creatures are even wilder. I wasn't the biggest fan of the lore dump at the end, but it's still an amazing read.

It is indeed super short, 12 chapters with fairly little dialogue, super straight to the point, zero filler. You should honestly go and read it right now, it's insanely better than any youtube video you could tune into and shorter than all those essays that are so trendy nowadays.

Top-tier paneling.
Love the Serpent's design too, reminds me of OFF's Judge. (Really, it reminded me a lot of OFF in general.)

Wan moah

I've been reading the Mushoku Tensei manga and have read up to volume 7. I kinda want to keep reading it, but I really don't. It's a very unfaithful adaptation. The pacing is completely off, scenes are completely changed regularly, others are not included at all, and the characters have lost a lot of their depth and become more exaggerated. The only reason I can think of for the manga being this different is because the artist felt pressured to meet timelines, and felt pressured to make something exciting and that would sell well. The only comparison I can think of is like the anime adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist, but that at least had the excuse of running out of source material and so continued in its own direction. In this case, the LN was released years before the manga. I was curious if anyone else noticed just how different it is from the source material and decided to read some reviews on MAL, but most of them amounted to, "Creepy pedophile manga DO NOT RECOMMEND"... I guess I shouldn't expect much from a popular website what with Japanese media being somewhat mainstream, but it was still somewhat disheartening...

Anyways, here's an example of just how different things are between the manga and the source light novel (and anime):

Manga: Geese gives Rudeus a pair of Eris' panties as a parting gift as they reach Millishion. Rudeus then decides to go to the Adventurer's Guild at Geese's suggestion. After seeing people pull out their swords in an argument, Rudeus tries to diffuse the situation by trapping them in mud and knocking them unconscious with his stone bullet magic, but misses a single person. Rudeus in a split second puts Eris' panties over his face to hide his identity and then the person he failed to knock unconscious slices the panties off of Rudeus' face. As it turns out, the person who sliced the panties off of Rudeus' face was his father, Paul. Rudeus tells his father, about his adventure up to this point, but Paul chews him out for not thinking about what could have happened to the rest of the people who were involved in the displacement incident and for missing his message he left at the Adventurer's Guild at Wind Port and Zant Port. Now, this feels extremely weird for one simple point: in the manga, Rudeus regularly thinks to himself "what happened to everyone else in the displacement incident", but when Rudeus is getting chewed out by his father he thinks "it never crossed my mind that the whole Fittoa Region could have been affected." What? No, you literally thought about it a whole bunch!

LN and Anime: Geese leaves Rudeus, Ruijerd, and Eris just before they enter Millishion and tells Rudeus to visit the Adventurer's Guild. After entering the city, they decide to splurge on a nice inn to stay at and Rudeus tells himself he's finally going to spend the day writing a letter to his father, to tell him that he's safe, while Ruijerd and Eris can spend the day however they want. After some time, Rudeus decides to head out and explore Millishion and sees a child being kidnapped and trails them into a warehouse. He hides among the boxes and shouts out in embarrassment when he realizes he's hiding in a box full of panties. He then quickly puts a pair over his face to hide his identity after realizing his cover was blown. After fighting with the kidnappers, his father enters the warehouse and despite being drunk nearly kills Rudeus, only stopping after slicing the panties off Rudeus' face and recognizing that he was fighting his son, Rudeus. They decide to catch up in a bar next door and Rudeus explains what happened up to this point and gets chewed out by his father because Rudeus had had a carefree adventure and never thought about what happened to everyone else. Rudeus then beats up his father, only stopping after being pushed off of Paul by his younger sister Norn, who he hadn't seen since being teleported to the Demon Continent. Norn scowls at Rudeus, not recognizing him as her older brother, and yells at him to stop bullying her father. Rudeus then goes back to the inn and wallows in guilt for not once thinking about what had actually happened to anyone else, and for missing the messages posted by his father at the Adventurer's Guild in Wind Port and Zant Port.

The only reason I'm conflicted on wanting to keep reading is because the art is pretty nice at times, and it seems like the pacing might course correct and slow down. Volumes 1 through 7 of the manga seem to cover volumes 1 through 5 of the light novel, whereas manga volumes 8 through 16 cover LN volumes 6 through 9. I feel like it'll have to course correct once Rudeus and Eris reach the refugee camp, but maybe it'll just gloss over the NSFW bits since the manga seems far more PG and fan service-y than the LN...

>>118233
Yeah, that doesn't sound too great. What made you pick it up in the first place?

>>118239
I really like what I've read of the light novel so far, and it's become something of a favorite of mine. So far I have read up to the point where the anime has stopped off at (Volume 10) and because the manga and anime are at roughly the same point in the story, I wanted to read through the manga and see what it was like. The anime is very faithful, only really having some minor, non-story changing omissions and changes, so I was hoping that the manga would be similar or maybe even a bit more faithful to the LN by including some of the parts that the anime doesn't touch on.

For example, the light novel covers other character's thoughts in more detail by changing narrators; Eris actually does read Paul's message to Rudeus at the Adventurer's Guild at Zant Port (or maybe Wind Port?), but because she idolizes Rudeus she keeps it to herself. She ends up thinking that Rudeus already knows and doesn't say anything to her because he's trying to keep her spirits up by not bringing up depressing stuff. Later on, when she sees Rudeus dejected at their inn in Millishion, she actually says that she'd kill Paul for what he did to Rudeus and truly means it; Eris both thoroughly respects Rudeus for leading them up to this point, and cares about him deeply. The anime only kind of hints at Eris' growing emotions for Rudeus as she steadily reacts less and less violently to his sexual harassment, but in the LN it's revealed that Eris had loved Rudeus before being transported to the Demon Continent and her love was solidified the moment she saw Rudeus fearlessly interacting with a Sperd when she first wakes up in the Demon Continent. The LN basically adds a layer of character complexity that the viewer can only really infer in the anime because the anime only covers Rudeus' perspective (for the most part).

So yeah... I was hoping the manga would be a lot more like that, but it's basically just a PG shounen ecchi manga with some attempts at comedy only vaguely following the story beats of the LN...

Been reading the kage jitsu manga and LN. Both are pretty good. The manga has a lot of exploitable panels. I feel like I could post this one a lot cough cough stocks cough cough.

So I've been reading a bunch of manga, predominantly horror, and have some reviews for them in the making. I had planned to open with Ride-on King, but seeing >>>/jp/72171 I might as well go with one of the most positive, for Hikaru ga Shinda Natsu. I it enjoyed quite a bit, second only to Shintaro's work that I'll post about later.

The premise is set up in an admirably elegant way: two boys in the countryside are sitting on a bench, chatting, drinking a bit, and one of the two mentions a little oddity. His best friend's accent... is off. It's been off ever since he returned from a strange trip about six months ago, and that's not the only thing standing out. Hikaru's behavior is not what it used to be. Hikaru is not what he used to be. It, rather. So, Yoshiki asks, you're not the real one, are you? Thus, a confession, a demonstration, and a threat all at once. "Hikaru" wishes above all to be a human, so please, I beg of you, I love you, don't give it away. Or I'll kill you. All that's certain now, is that Hikaru has died.

Said elegance comes from the fact that this all happens within the span of eleven pages, three of which are full-page drawings. The premise is in a sense an inverted Higurashi where the culprit is known from the get-go, and the protagonist uneasily collaborates with them in order to cover it up. They want to protect each other, Yoshiki cannot let his friend go even if he only lives on as a fake double, but their relationship is constantly in tension as wrongness encroaches upon the town in no small part due to "Hikaru's" direct involvement. And you know what else is in tension? Their sexuality! Take a good at those tags: it says BL right there on the tin. Homosexual tension with the doppelganger, who knows that you that you know. Of course, his name is symbolic: the light is what's dead and gone. It's absolutely fucking brilliant and I loved it.

More than so any other manga I'm going to review, the visuals do a beyond excellent job at carrying the atmosphere. It uses varying angles, rotation, warping, impeccable lighting, onomatopoeia with great freedom, and some touching abstractions here and there to truly convey the moment's feel and enrich Yoshiki's depressed sadboy mug. There's a part with a bathtub where the main body of water and its splashes and the bubbles inside and the droplets flying out all have a texture that's just a joy to look at. "Hikaru's" real form, too, is not far from the typical body of his kind, but a little twist and a huge amount of detail make it into a superb execution that is rather reminiscent of Bibliomania's gorgeous art.

I can't speak as positively of the plot, its developments are not something that will shock you (at least so far), but I also wouldn't call it predictable. Investigating the surrounding mystery is not as strong as the suspense itself, the atmopshere and the noise, the main two and their warped romance, those are the heavy hitters. It's clearly josei, and the author's previous oneshots include in one story two friends being complicit in a murder and in another outright homosex so it's interesting to see this kind of progression. I do want to note that in chapter 16 Yoshiki does something I respect quite a bit, he may look weak but his resolve is commendable and it really caught me off-guard. Also, I'd recommend skipping the extra chapters and leaving them for later since they kinda obstruct the flow of the story.

Oh, last thing, don't torrent Yen Press' version, the scanlation is noticeably superior. At the same time, that one is FUCKED right now because they lost their translator:
https://desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/a/image/1710/25/1710256903197.jpg
And that's the real horror right there. You can at least read it in Japanese here (spoilers, of course):
https://web-ace.jp/youngaceup/contents/1000183/episode/

>>122029
Looks neat, I'll give it a try.

>>87056
I've been reading Tower Dungeon (the new Nihei manga) as it comes out and it has been quite interesting so far. It's also interesting to see that it has been more popular than his previous recent-ish series, at least on 4/a/, where it has routinely received dump threads ~\(≧▽≦)/~

I recently finished Happiness, which I liked quite a lot - I do have a soft spot for romance (and vampires too). This was the second manga by Shūzō Oshimi that I've read, the other being Blood on the tracks, which I thought was ok. I did read that one in a day however, so I'm sorry for the bit of speed reading - I should've slowed down, I think I spoiled it somewhat, especially with the slow pacing in the second half.

>>122283
Yeah I don't think Nihei ever made a bad manga. Tower Dungeon is pretty different from his usual cyberpunk/sci-fi stuff but still interesting. I don't think he's as good at drawing medieval architecture as he is with sci-fi architecture/structures though.

Moving onto the next horror author...

Hiromi Dollase's paper Shōjo Spirits in Horror Manga opens with Kazuo Umezu as the one who kickstarted horror stories in shoujo, whose work took the happy and beautiful conventions of the time and flipped them by injecting terror into them, like his 1965 Mama ga Kowai that the collection Hebi-Onna kicks off with. What he did there was take the familiar mother-daughter relationship and make the okaa-san into a monster, which may sound simple but that kind of timely inversion must've been very powerful given it led to a subsequent boom in the genre. She even calls it "epoch-making," so nothing to scoff at considering the impact of shoujo manga in general. He's considered to be a titan, interestingly enough Ito has a specific oneshot talking about his relationship with him called Master Umezz and Me and it's pretty neat. Whenever Umezu's characters face the terrible and their eyes grow dark or sullen, that's when you can see where Junji Ito picked up that exact same technique from. Mentions here too at 20:50 (talking with Naoki Urasawa):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0ZtMuCDlck&t=1250s

Hebi-Onna's motifs certainly never left Umezu, as women losing and/or struggling with their often cursed beauty is a mainstay across his decades of work, present since the start alongside antagonists hidden in plain sight, disguised or totally invisible and which only the main character can perceive, who's distrusted or directly abused by adults typically complicit (knowing or unknowingly) since these MCs are overwhelmingly children. These kids have to deal with the intergenerational trauma their parental figures are passing onto them, serving as the source of further trouble. Harder to explain is his usage of dreaming or psychic powers, which is frankly all over the place and I found it to be a major culprit behind his sudden and unsatisfying endings.

You can tell its age not just from how it looks but by how it's structured. The art style is recognizably ancient particularly in Reptilia/Hebi-Onna, but his paneling is also starkly different from today's standards: there are no frameless vignettes, no panels that stick to the border of the page or have diagonal sides, nothing that sticks out of a frame, it's all rectangular, encapsulated, gridded. Many pages are made up of an array of twelve squares arranged as 3 by 4, or something close to it. You could almost call it modular, following a standard all throughout. Devilman was coming out in the early 70s at the same time as Drifting Classroom, and it's insane how much more modern it looks in this regard despite being fifty years old. It basically pulls every trick in the book, so I have to wonder whether it was so well established by then or if Nagai was that much of a pro. In any case, Umezu stuck to his own style throughout those four decades of work.

My biggest criticism of Umezu is his characterization. The people he writes are... extreme, histrionic. Some little kid has his dad get run over by a superstar so he spends several years laser-focused on hating, pursuing and ruining that guy's life, but it doesn't make for a good thriller because the kid's a damn gary stu whose conviction doesn't waver. This sudden insanity in a can happens more than you'd think, more than I'd like. In general, good guys are heroic because they feel it's right, and all the bad guys are evil because they're deranged in some way or form. The amount of torture they inflict on others goes well beyond the trauma I mentioned before, and both sides of the coin end up feeling fairly homogenous. This brand of horror is not particularly psychological or at least doesn't feel well executed in that regard, and although one blurb compared Umezu to Poe I don't think that's warranted. Another problem I have with him is that his work feels both too long and yet not dense enough. I honestly can't put my finger on it, but I often felt that reading something else would be a better use of my time, not because I disliked it but because it was... inefficient? Like it didn't pack enough of a punch to justify its hundreds or thousands of pages, unlike other authors. Weird stuff.

Soshite, some reviews, although shortened given how much the above applies to them.

Orochi, 1969-70 (tales of obsession)

Orochi is the least fantastic of his works, at least in the sense that they revolve around non-magical human beings in regular locations with no sci-fi or monsters at play either. Mostly. The title is its MC's name, an unexplained observer-sometimes-intervening entity that wanders the earth and decides to stick around any time a person's life piques her interest. She's not all-knowing or all-powerful, and this becomes more important later on when the tables are turned on her.

Many stories have to do with people becoming obsessed, fixated on something, you follow them and observe where this strange drive takes them. People make mistakes or do purposefully bad things, and these bring negative consequences for everyone. Lots of tragedies and things being bad from the outset. Orochi commonly comments on the events unfolding while nobody notices her, her interventions range from pushing someone away from an incoming train to blowing stuff up by pointing her finger at it.

The last story, Blood, has some remarkably good background art, seriously. Sadly, I can't say any of the stories stuck out to me, so I don't recommend it.

Drifting Classroom, 1972-74 (SUPPOSEDLY his best work, I disagree)

Frankly, I disliked it a fair bit, and I find quite odd since it's been described by many people as their favorites. One reviewer spoke of this one as Umezu's magnum opus, but... eh, no, definitely not. In short, the two things I most dislike about Umezu (bad characters and random magic) are here at its worst, the art and horror are certainly not at his best, and the plot is a jumbled mess of pure nonsense. In long...

It's a carnival of non-stop slaughter through whatever means possible, but it's barely gory while the killings are sudden and senseless. Whether it's a teacher suddenly killing all of his colleagues out of the blue, a kid whose imagination creates an invulnerable Carboniferous lobster and a killer swarm, or the fucking bubonic plague manifesting out of nowhere, there's not a whole lot of thematic consistency. It's one of those stories where people just start killing each other as soon as something bad happens, and a lot of it is due to kids being stupid, but simultaneously smart enough to build a ballista and sophisticated pit traps from scratch in like an hour, correctly identify a kid's sickness as said bubonic plague, make an electric generator out of some bicycles lying around, and carry out an appendix operation with whisky and a utility knife (to be fair, the last one is probably the part that aged the best, impromptu surgery will forever be fucked up). It's... it's dumb, that's what it is.

So the general situation and threats are nonsensical, what about the characters? Kinda crap, the people dying in droves across the constant slew of casualties are simply unimportant and there isn't any nuance to anyone's behavior, it's always retardedly extreme impulsiveness against reasonable responses from the MC and his crew. People snapping and unexpectedly harming others around them (or everyone I trust turning against me) was for a long time a great fear of mine, but when everyone is acting like an utter retard the experience is quite different. It's also not horrifying when a no-name rando gets crushed by Godzilla, it's just another dead guy, which isn't helped by the threats being so haphazard.
It has piles of dead children, true, but its fatalities are so frequent and individually so fleeting that it doesn't compare well to the terrible moments of Made in Abyss, Dark Gathering, or even Umezu's later Left Hand of God, you'll see it both happens more frequently and passes by more quickly while not having any gore, whose end result just isn't very gruesome. There are five pages of people being set on fire yet they kind of shrug it off. After that one kid is stabbed and other shot, but who cares about them? I lmao'd at the part where some girls decide to step on a boy's ween as a scare tactic.

Since it's not very horrifying, let's talk about the moral dilemmas so common to these survival situations: just about anything that could generate internal conflict is resolved by a third party or otherwise out of the protagonist's control. Said protagonist, Shou Takamatsu, is always steadfast and righteous with pretty much zero flaws. He's the only consistently rational and useful student, divorced from the madness to a frightening degree. With no saving graces, I must say that the plot is pretty fucking retarded overall, it introduces too many things that barely make sense and the ending is oddly anticlimactic with its happiness assured by multiple deus ex machinas, psychic time travelling bullshit and all that.

It's got over two thousand pages and yet everything seems rushed, there's too much stuff going on while doing too little with it, it's unfocused and at odds with itself. The supernatural seems to detract from the natural, as magical occurrences simply override or cancel whatever is going on every five minutes with no rhyme or reason and the kids' capabilities make no sense. Lord of the Flies was written a couple decades prior as a response to the childishly optimistic Coral Island, while Umezu's is childishly pessimistic. It's not good survival, it's not good psychology, and it's not good horror. I can see why people protested against its publication back in the day, but today? It's ridiculous, in a bad way.

Baptism, 1974-76 (evil lolidom)

Once more we find the mother as evil, that's neat, but the real kicker is its titular baptism. The first volume is from the perspective of an actress who wants to restore her beauty, and after the ritual's success it shifts to the point of view of a different person. From then on, it's the story of a nine year old girl going yandere over his teacher, and OH BOY it's been goddamn HALF A CENTURY and I cannot believe how ahead of the game this fucker was. What makes it interesting is that it's from an age prior to the codification (and fetishization) to hell and back of both the seductress loli and the yan, it really is from a different time. One of the twists in terms of Umezu's own tropes is in the disbelief, which rather than being pointed towards a well-meaning child it's the child that weaponizes it as part of her plan and directs it towards the wife. The hiding in plain sight applies to the MC too, rather than the antagonist. Admittedly, it managed to go well beyond what I expected.

If I were to recommend it I'd do so as a fun read about an evil loli doing evil loli things where the triumph of evil is terribly enjoyable, although it only doesn't hold that many surprises for a modern reader and the ending is dogshit.

God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand, 1986-88 (ultraviolent)

One of his later works, here he's and at his most brutal and graphic, goriest and gruesome. Once more the story consists of a kid running into repeated supernatural encounters, episodes, but this time the MC ends up being a lot more relevant previous powerless children. In a sense, he develops more than those who came before him.

The first volume, with the story of Rusted Scissors, this is the one that's really fucked up, easily the ugliest things Umezu ever drew and that I enjoyed the most. Plot is the usual oh we found a weird artifact in a strange place, now this cursed item is bringing calamity upon us, but the calamity is fucking god-tier. The first thing you see, literally the second page, is these scissors coming out of a child's eyes, tearing them from the inside and going not just through her eyes but ripping outwards through her skull as well, violently waking her up and screaming and bleeding all over the bed. That's the first thing that happens. Gold, pure gold.

The weakest story I believe is the next one where some kids decide to kill their teacher for the sake of "seeing her true form" post-mortem and of course there are supernatural consequences to this but it's kinda ehh. Tongue of the Spider Queen is much better (do like me a good swarm), the story of the serial killer writing stories for his bedridden daughter is great, and the longest one, Shadow of the Departed, has spirits that only the MC can see condemning people to death where they end up running into a big fish devouring others much like in Dark Gathering or Mieruko, especially in its ending fights, it's pretty cool, pretty cool.

There's not much of a point to talking about the plot or whatever, and still there's nothing to the characters really, it's the gore that matters. Rusted Scissors does this best, if I'd recommend the book it'd be only because of that first story. Truly brutal stuff.

He's got several other famous works left, Cat Eyed Boy, Makoto-chan (comedy), My Name is Shingo (sci-fi), Fourteen, and less famous ones like 母呼ぶ声 that apparently further contributed to shoujo, but honestly I think I'm good. Fourteen in particular is FOUR FUCKING THOUSAND PAGES LONG and goofy as hell, the first arc is about the accidental rise of genius man-hybrid Chicken George and his quest to bring about the retribution of nature before this future's humanity has destroyed the world in full. In the next arc, a world crisis occurs when babies start being born green. Someone described it as a manga where all possible apocalypses happen, and with its length I don't doubt it.
Dude had a damn long career and drew so much damn stuff. A titan for sure.

>>122380
I shall resolve myself to read this later! I don't think I can give a response worthy of it since it's not my kind of genre, but... wow! WHAT A MONSTER OF A POST!

>>122380
>Some little kid has his dad get run over by a superstar so he spends several years laser-focused on hating, pursuing and ruining that guy's life, but it doesn't make for a good thriller because the kid's a damn gary stu whose conviction doesn't waver
Isn't a Gary Stu someone idealized and perfect? This kind of obsession is usually a cautionary tale about moving on and living your own life or something. I guess it depends on how it's done, but since you're talking about horror I'm guessing it doesn't turn out well. Maybe a Gary Stu in this genre is someone that does a bunch of terrible things.

>where the triumph of evil is terribly enjoyable
No...

>The first thing you see, literally the second page, is these scissors coming out of...
NO!
Okay, yeah I had to stop. I read it and tried to be neutral but I can't.
Anyway, I'm reading through the Undead Unluck manga, but so far it's just the stuff that's been in the anime. The anime seems like it included nearly everything, but maybe that will change soon. I really don't know if I'll keep going once I reach the anime end, since it's so cool to see stuff for the first time in anime form with David Production and they said there will be an announcement in August...
Anyway... POMF!

>>122412
>Maybe a Gary Stu in this genre is someone that does a bunch of terrible things.
I'm using it to mean someone who breezes through all difficulties with ease, without any obstacles giving him trouble, uncontested. He wins, he earns a total victory, walks away happily and does move on. There is no punishment for what he's done or the people he has hurt. He simply wins.
>Undead Unluck manga
It's very nice how Andy is drawn, with his expressions and... solid? Solid look.
I spoiled myself on purpose and know that some really cool stuff happens, I think you'll like it quite a bit.

Ruri Dragon seems to be pretty popular. Will likely get an adaptation in the future. I like it.

Came across two gimmick 4komas recently:
>Wakarasero! Namaikitsune-sama
>Ichiyo is worshipped at a shrine as a fox divinity. But she is in fact a cheeky goth loli osan kitsune who gets carried away very easily. But is it really okay for a goddess to be so rude? A comedy about teaching her a lesson.
>Zenra.zip
￥nudist lolis meditating on nudism
The former is alright, it's yuri meta all the way and the beginning isn't great but it gets better after they introduce more characters and you get interactions like the loner chuuni teaching the tanuki idol how to be popular on the internet (zenzen dame). Art is okay-ish. Zenra kinda sucks, shame how he made something so boring and repetitive from that kind of premise. I don't recommend either, pic is all you really need.
>>122508
Checked it out, I laughed when she ripped through the sweater while trying to put it on. Girl suffers a lot, and her expressions match this.

For those who haven't read the Spice & Wolf manga yet, I highly recommend it. Holo isn't a Barbie doll in it (in some versions if you can find them). The artstyle is also the closest one to the LN.

>Start a manga
>Never finish
Why do I keep doing it? Can someone explain?

How does one download currently running manga? I'd like to read locally without internet. It seems like this was simpler 10+ years ago.

>>123150
Who are you quoting?

>>123150
who quot

But that's pretty normal since some manga keeps publishing forever, frequently goes on hiatus, takes long to get translations, etc. You shouldn't care too much about 'completing' them like you do with anime.

>>123151
Either download stuff directly from mangadex with: https://github.com/mansuf/mangadex-downloader or use nyaa or some private tracker like ab. You will constantly run into seeding issues with the former though.

>>123155
why is she drinking from amogus

>>123165
'ate amogus

Akebi goes on a journey to lose weight.

God DAMN akebi is so fat!

>>123260
Indeed.

>>123257
Noooooooooooooo!

>>123257
>>123258
>>123259
Wait, this isn't Akebi! Who the hell is Fuko??

>>123261
The head in the bottom panel looks like somebody erased the real head and sketched in a new one.

>>123264
Akebi Alter.

This is actually NOT by the same artist by the way. There's a controversy going on in the JP web about it copying Akebi's artstyle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dPRup3AQk8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRjoGRP8b7Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrAq1AWsRPc

>>123268
It really does look suspiciously like Akebi. Well, not suspicious, but blatant. I wonder how old the copy is, maybe they learned art from copying them like some Western artists have done with Patreon people.

akebi stealer

Oh shit, I forgot about the horror reviews. Someone told me he'd be checking out God's Left Hand, but that'll take'm some time so meanwhile moving on to the next author: Nakayama Masaaki.

What really sets this guy apart is his usage of warped bodies, contorted, warped, deformed, where limbs and facial features get stretched and curved. You have misshapen mouths with irregular teeth, wrecked noses, eyes jutting out and displaced, bloated corpses, and others that look like a photoshopped Kuon. Some ugly as sin, others a bit goofy. These are predominantly ghosts and as it happens a lot of them only the MC can see, they're prowling around often either aimlessly or stalking someone here and there so you gotta ignore them lest something bad happens, as usual. Arguably he abuses this aspect, in that a great deal of his horror comes from the monsters just being there and behaving identically to each other.

Seeds of Anxiety (everyday little horrors)

It's strange. You know all that stuff about focusing on the joy of the moment, of the taste of a snack, the feel of the breeze, or the view of the sunset? It's like that, but the opposite. People are walking around, doing normal things most of the time, and suddenly something macabre happens, mainly what was described above. These things are often rather silly ("he's just standing there menacingly"), but afterwards it sorta becomes... comedic? Very random, very short, like the two pages when it tells you to look out for a spooky sign on the road, someone refusing to go to the bathroom becuse the door is looking at him funny, or a spirit killing someone with one touch out in the middle of the street and flying away, in the span of four pages. Consider also this classic: https://desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/a/image/1467/52/1467528523728.jpg

It's shocking given the glowing reviews I saw, although I understand recommending this as a niche thing, a pedestrian down-to-earth mini-horror. A sprinkling of peculiar events throughout people's lives that they seem to simply live with, especially since there's commonly a lack of immediate threat. I take it these are supposed to be the seeds, but there's not really any anxiety. SoA is clearly this way by design, you're barely given any time to engage with it and even then many chapters don't show results, just vague openness. There's a much longer SoA+ with over a hundred chapters and then SoA＊, but I've no interest in it.

PTSD Radio (ancient big horrors)

Same methods, but I liked it much better. Unlike SoA, it's quite a bit more menacing with all body horror it employs and goes beyond mere implications, his ugliest creatures and moments are from here. It's a wildly non-linear story, jumping across different eras, characters, and even viewpoints of the same occurrences, splitting apart even a single sequence of events and interspersing them with one-offs and other arcs, but thanks to the iterated elements that tie these incidents together across the centuries you can see the development of this pervasive malevolence in its pursuing of villagers, their descendants, and anyone who interacts with them. It's Shinto, of course.

It is very much building up towards a resolution with its gradual reveals, but sadly the author dropped it due to the spooky horror things happening to him IRL which he illustrates at the end of the volumes, like his blood clotting and immune system going kaput. There's also some jazz about reordering the chapters and looking at the ones that have the same frequency but it's really not worth it. Anyways, although it wasn't my favorite the radio still has some good tunes to play. It's neat.

Now, THIS, this is the real shit: Kago Shintarou.

His genre of choice is what's accurately called "ero-guro nonsense," (literally nansensu) with stories that range from one-shots to two volumes at most. His work contains ample amounts of rape, amputation, disemboweling, coprophilia, skinning, childbirth, and subsequently dead babies, in whichever order you prefer, though, again, it's surreal, meta, humorous and mostly not as bad as a truly hideous eromanga. (Makes it hard to post samples when so many pages contain this, however.) What it made me feel was a queer kind of uneasiness coupled with gay chuckles.

One particular theme of his that comes up a lot and that I quite enjoyed is the mechanization of butchered bodies, as in using them as part of or converting into a contraption. Take Kagayaite!'s fascist Japan, making women into giantesses and exploiting them as beasts of burden, not just lifting and pushing stuff around but also carrying cargo in their rectum, uterus, and bladder, launching explosives from their bleeding anuses, while butchering, splicing them into monstruous war machines powered by oral sex, cannibalism, and the Japanese spirit (which physically repulses gaijin liberalism). Giantess-machine hybrids are also employed in Super-Powered Mongolia Invasion and Super-Conductive Brains although it's framed quite differently. A more mundane case is a detective ripping out her own eye and inserting various everyday ingredients into another woman to fashion an impromptu camera for obtaining evidence after being stripped of all her belongings and thrown in a cell.

In his short stories, often 16 to 20 pages long and of which he's drawn tons and tons, he gets endless mileage from a deceptively simple method: start with a random concept, scale it up through a barrage of twists, and end with its maximum expression, it gets a lot of bang for its buck. You find girls committing seppuku for fun and whipping each other with their intestines, a world where people can separate their bodies in two, a building of nightmares stacked on nightmares, perversion at a funeral whose location people can't seem to find, two gods having a battle of petty geneses, an underground addiction to using erasers, it's all a magnificent delusion that's kinda hard to spoil because of how densely packed his developments are. And he continously sticks the landing! There's a heavy element of meta too, self-referentiality as in Fraction, working with the medium in Abstraction, Multiplication, or another whose name I forget meditating on the nature of halves, and a decent amount of parodying manga tropes. Kago himself appears as a character in more than one story and gets even more meta.
His drawing style varies from nearly photorealistic to cartoony, it depends on what he's trying to do in that particular story. Though you know, what's really strange is his paneling: in a lot of his work it's often as simple as it could possibly be, even simpler and more rigid than Umezu's, yet when he breaks from it he demonstrates his ability to completely transcend any sort of formatting. Very peculiar choice to structure his manga that way.

Overall his work is extremely Japanese, yet interestingly somewhat anti-otaku as he repeatedly makes fun of it. Closest is Harem End, but its twist premise is quickly flipped around. What I'd recommend is Mongolia and Dementia 21, the latter being by far his cleanest longform work but still terribly surreal and with the captivating theme of... old people, he goes quite far with it. I flinched my way through Dream Toy Factory with all the nasty non-fun stuff it has, and Korokoro Soushi is on the heavier end of things as well, so much cannibalism and torture. Dude can reach the depths of R18G-NSFL when he wants to, thankfully he generally prioritizes absurdism over pure disgust. (I prefer the fetuses when they're comedic.) All in all, he's an excellent artist and I earnestly recommend him. I immensely enjoyed reading his stuff.

In light of all that has been reviewed above, I think it's time to some notes on perhaps the best known horror manga even if so many people have read it, to use as a measuring stick, horror par excellence. You don't really need me to post an image of it.

Uzumaki

Uzumaki does something very, very unique: its threat doesn't come from men, man-made horrors, curses, gods, or any individual monster, what conspires against the town is a form, an ideal shape indiscriminately manifesting torture upon everything, from people to buildings, to vehicles, to the climate. All will be restructured accordingly regardless of resistance, and these capricious forces will rise again. You cannot stop it. You cannot escape. It won't let you.
The motif allows for very unique body horror, where humans warp into shapes that are alien to them but recognizable, without requiring gore to serve as shock material. Of course, Ito does employ some gore in the scar chapter, the vampiric pregnancy arc, and a little with Shuichi's hospitalized mother, which I don't find as viscerally horrifying as Rusted Scissors or Kago's work but it's still terribly well done, creative, and iconic.

It does a better job at portraying a wasteland and human behavior than Drifting Classroom, with just a few chapters. Most of townspeople grow distressed at the destruction and ensuing lack of space, but they don't stoop down to killing each other mindlessly. The kids that went around blowing things away for fun get tied up as self defense, but not sacrificed. Even as it's all coming down, they still display decency. You could say that the gangs do so as well, actually offering the protagonists the chance to join them and sharing food rather than immediately attempting murder like it happens in DC.

The eating of snail people is interesting when you compare it to cannibalism proper. That they transform and truly stop being human has been well established, as well as it happening now semi-randomly due to ramped-up spiral influence, so treating them as just a thing now requires no leap for them. Real cannibalism is fatal, it requires much more build-up and true desperation for it to be believable, but with snails there's a distance to it. It allows the characters to partake in it while maintaining uneasiness, and one of the last chapters logically applies the transformation to a child they care about, again displaying enduring decency and humanity in trying to help him reach safety as a final act of respect and kindness, contrasted with the other group that has fully let go of their inhibitions.

At the same time it's also one of the shortest long-form stories standing at just 20 chapters, whereas most others are 20-50% up to 300% longer. Very well packed.

All this horror made me remember The Anthill and Tales of Terror from the Black Ship, and maaaan bugs used to frighten me so damn much. Re-read that shit and the stupid fucking snails still fucking get me. Poe and Lovecraft are still masters, too. I also read Hideout, which is utter fucking trash. Half of its time is spent on the MC's sad flashbacks, the other half is being chased by a hideous old hobo straight out of an eromanga through nondescript caves and bunker corridors. Its retarded cheapness offends me.

But enough of that, it's about time I uninstalled tachiyomi. Further kyoumi ga nai, na~i, na~i, nai hito darake no shokutaku de... although I'll check Ito's other work for sure. In the future. Other authors mentioned as truly great horror mangaka are Suehiro Maruo (pic) and Hideshi Hino (dopey stuff), but I think it'd be better for me to go and read other genres for now. I have no idea why I went on this tangent in the first place, but for the moment I've freed myself from this venture. It wasn't too bad.

Kinda boring fujobait that's cute as hell and loves to show off itty bitty shota nippies but I still dropped it because it sucks.
Look at this kid's bulge.

Mystic murderous gay sex. Not bad.

>>124192
Ooo ye, I read that, pretty fun - not much happens but it's nice.
I did only really finished it because it's quite short, wish it had a stronger story but aw well

>>124480
Up to where I read (somewhere in volume 2) it liked to show off how cute that fucking faggot is and really put quite a bit of emphasis on their mutual attraction, but when I skipped to the end to see if it actually did anything with it I found it's just one kiss while the guy is sleeping and that's really disappointing.

Also pisssssssss.