which mangas do you read?
I wanna talk about mangas, because recently I've been indulging in a few (especially when I have downtime at work) and realize there's a lot of good stories out there that are not just limited to anime.
The main reason I got into it was to read ahead on the plot for the animes I used to keep up with (like Naruto, Bleach, Gantz, etc.) and basically, I found there's hella more mangas than anime, and a lot of them are good! (and underrated)
A couple I just got into were:
Shamo - it's about a high school kid who killed his parents and got thrown into jail (they don't explain his motivation for killing them). believe it or not, he's the protaganist. this manga is rather graphic in content....his experience in jail is violent and abusive. he's even raped in jail.
the story climbs uphill when a certain karate teacher is introduced to the inmates and begins a regular martial arts session. the main character develops an appreciation for karate, and on a gradual level, increases his strength and technique to insane levels, and pretty much serves as his only means to surviving in jail (and he gets revenge on the inmate rapists)
however, over time, well after his sentence is up, he becomes increasingly violent, and develops a raging ambition to become the strongest man on the streets. at this point, the drama and tension in his relationships with other people are palpable, and wow...this manga is very gratifying, it's just intense the whole way through
----another manga I've been reading recently is Homunculus
this one's about man who wears a business-suit, hangs out with the homeless, and sleeps in his car every night. (his background is uncertain at first) a strange man approaches him one night in his car while he's sleeping, and offers him 700,000 yen (the equivalent of about 7,000 US dollars) to drill a hole in his head (without piercing the brain) -- it's an operation called trepanation. ancient tribes and civilizations actually used to practice this procedure for medical and mystical reasons. it was believed that with the hole in one's skull, one's capacity for imagination and intuition would be restored to that of a child. and because an adult would have more much experience and wisdom than that of a child, he could interpret and get more out of what his subconscious is feeding him....
...anyways, after the operation, the guy starts experiencing strange visions, and starts seeing people in symbolic images (eg. a yakuza boss is seen as a little boy trapped inside a large robot, or a schoolgirl is viewed as a woman made of sand - to represent a lack of concrete personality) rather than their literal human selves (as long as he covers his right eye and views with his left - implying that he's using the right hemisphere of his brain to view the world...because science states that the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body, vice versa) and he finds himself, on at a time, in extremely interesting interactions with these people as long as he's viewing their symbolic selves....
____________
but yeah, I tend to enjoy reading manga more these days than watching anime.....you can go through the stories a lot faster (it's surprisingly satisfying to skim through mangas, you get what you need) and there stories out there are so good, a lot of them would be a shame to miss.
tell me what you read!