Me, I’m head-over-heels for Osamu Tezuka’s stuff, and a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s work, both for a long time now, altho of course Miyazaki only made a small amount of manga, I believe. (“Nausicaä” etc) And of course, mad respect to Katsuhiro Otomo for the legendary “Akira” series, plus his other works.
For sure, I also enjoyed “Death Note,” and a couple others, here and there. Moebius’ and Jiro Taniguchi’s Icaro was good, but stretched on forever, at least for me.
Anyway, if you’re passionate and/or highly respecful upon certain manga, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
* Those above are the Western-style spellings of their names, FWIW.
Whenever I was keeping an eye on my lil cousin we’d go to the public library bc it had a great section of Japanese manga and American graphic novels (usually mixed together) in the kid’s/teens section and we’d just sit there and read. I haven’t done that as much now that cuz is grown up. tbh I’m not a huge fan of manga, even of stories where I like the anime.
The only manga I thought was truly great was Miyazaki’s “Nausicaa”, which I ended up buying and reading multiple times. “Yotsuba” and “Azumanga Daioh” were pretty entertaining too.
That resonates heavily with me. About once every year or two I try to make a real effort to find some manga I might like, but come up mostly empty. I think part of it is that so much of it seems to be “shonen”-oriented, and I’m just not in that bracket, anymore.