New this update
Caught Up
Completed
Dropped
New / Completed / Dropped Series
- Blue Box #1
- Kimi ni Todoke #1-2
- Maid-sama! #1-2
- Show-ha Shoten!! #1
- Suppose a Kid [...] Moved to a Starter Town #1
- Tokyo Revengers #1
- Tokyo Aliens #1
- Usotsuki Rhetoric #1-2
- A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow #9
- Frankenstein: Junji Ito Story Collection
- The Girl That Can't Get a Girlfriend
- Goodnight Punpun #13
- Kaiu Shirai x Posuka Demizu: [...]
- Love Me, Love Me Not #10-12
- Blue Lock #2
- My Clueless First Friend #1
- Rent-a-Girlfriend #7-8
- Rent-a-(Really Shy!) Girlfriend #2
- That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime #3
Ongoing Series
- 1122: For a Happy Marriage #3-4
- Ajin: Demi-Human #2-3
- Alice in Borderland #7-10
- The Apothecary Diaries #7
- Arisa #3
- BEASTARS #3
- Beauty and the Feast #3
- Chainsaw Man #3-5
- Chi's Sweet Home #2
- Dr. Stone #8-18
- Dreamin' Sun #4-6
- Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma #2-3
- The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses #2
- Golden Kamuy #2
- Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku #3-6
- High School Debut #3-4
- I Belong to the Baddest Girl at School #3-4
- Ima Koi: Now I'm in Love #3-4
- Kaiju No. 8 #4-5
- Kingdom Hearts III ch28-29
- Komi Can't Communicate #10-11
- Mao #6-7
- Mob Psycho 100 #4
- Moriarty the Patriot #2
- My Hero Academia #17
- My Love Mix-Up! #6
- My Love Story!! #2-5
- My Dress-Up Darling #5
- My Happy Marriage #2
- New Game! #4
- Noragami #3-4
- Perfect World #3
- Sakamoto Days #4-5
- Spy x Family #9
- The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest #7-8
- Time Stranger Kyoko #1
- Way of the House Husband #9
- We Never Learn #12-14
- Yona of the Dawn #5-6
- Your Lie in April #3-4
- Yu-Gi-Oh! #3
Augghhgh why did I leave this alone for so long. I've literally read over a hundred volumes since I last updated and now I have to write about them all!!!!
Blue Box
Finally a sports manga I think I can get into. It's about students attending a prestigious sports academy and I think the reason I might be able to care about it is they largely all play different sports so far. The protagonist plays badminton and finds out the girl on the basketball team that he has a crush on is going to be living with him and his family at the start of the new school year. So far it's been light on the sports and focused more on the characters and how they approach their sport. Hopefully it continues like this because I'm a big fan of the characters so far.
Kimi ni Todoke
I think maybe I'd like this more if I'd read it before "My Clueless First Friend" (see way below) because it kind of repeated the same jokes as that one, but with more endearing characters. I'm gonna keep going a bit because I've always heard good things about this series and------okay I had written this much in my notes app and am only just now coming back to it as I post this and I read the second volume and it's definitely getting better. The characters are getting more depth and I'm enjoying it. There's like 20-something volumes to go so I hope that continues lol.
Maid Sama!
This was...... very 2000s. It's the story of a serious student council president who takes a part time job at a maid cafe and gets found out by one of her rivals and the hijinks that ensue. I can't remember if I 'dropped' this or not. I think maybe my library just had the first omnibus volume digitally and while I guess I'd be okay with continuing it, I'm not going to go looking for it. If they add further volumes, I'll read them but if not… I'm not missing much.
Show-ha Shoten!!
I read this the other day and it was really good. It's the story of a shy boy who's secretly one of the funniest joke writers in Japan, as shown by his numerous awards from write-in comedy shows. He gets roped into doing a live comedy routine with another student at his high school and loves it, so now he wants to go to the top to become famous through comedy to have another shot at meeting a girl he knew as a child who moved away and changed her name after her mother's remarriage. But first he has to prove to his parents that he's good enough to concentrate on this instead of his studies. I'm really excited for more volumes.
Tokyo Revengers
I was surprised that I enjoyed this, but I'm always a sucker for time travel fix-its. It's the story of a deadbeat who manages to go back in time and decides to use this ability to rescue his middle school girlfriend who's destined to die to gang violence. The characters are surprisingly likeable for being rough and tumble middle/high schoolers (not usually my fave character archetype in manga) and as I said, I've got a soft spot for this sort of thing.
Tokyo Aliens
This is one of the many manga I picked up to read the first volume of, fully expecting to drop it there but… I liked this one, lol. It kinda reminds me of Men in Black, in that there's a bustling alien tourism industry on earth and it follows a boy who gets recruited into a special sector of the Japanese police who deal with aliens. He finds out that his late father, who was a police officer killed in the line of duty, was actually also a special agent with this part of the police and there's more to his death than originally thought. It has really clean art that's easy to read through, so I'm happy to keep going.
Usotsuki Rhetoric
This is a really sweet manga! It's about this girl who can hear lies when people say them, which caused her no end of trouble growing up because her honest nature made her enemies when she'd call people out for their lies. The story starts with her arriving in a new town after striking out on her own only to find the job she was relying on was already filled. She ends up as the assistant to a broke detective in town using her ability to help him solve cases and it's cute to see her find some self-worth as she learns how to handle her ability and tell white lies from bad ones. None of the cases are particularly astounding mysteries or anything, but the characters are nice and I like the premise.
Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town
This is really funny. It's a much more interesting take on the "overpowered person in an isekai fantasy setting" because it's actually... well, exactly as the stupidly long title says. (Seriously, I had to truncate it for my little list up there AND change my CSS to fit some of these titles in smh.) It's the story of this boy who moves to the big city and he's a wimp at home who can barely do anything, but his dream is to become a solider for the crown or whatever. But... when he gets there, he's
super overpowered because it turns out his native village is actually the "endgame" village where they're all stupid strong because the local flora and fauna is like max level, so to speak. So even him, the weakest of them all, is insanely powerful compared to anyone in the city. But he has no clue and the situations this creates are pretty funny.
Kaiu Shirai x Posuka Demizu: Beyond the Promised Neverland
The other long title one I had to cut up for my list... This is a little anthology of stories that the creators (writer + artist) of The Promised Neverland worked on together. I think there was even a little write-up for each short manga sort of explaining it and what inspired it. Some of them I believe were sort of... tests to see if they could execute TPN. I liked some of them more than others, but overall I like this duo so I like what they'd created together. I think it ended with a short sequel chapter to TPN which was cute. Can you tell I read this months ago and barely remember it now?
A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow
I really liked the middle of this series where everyone was kind of problematic. By the end it just got kind of boring. I suppose maybe if I'd read it all at once I might have enjoyed it more but I went quite a few months between some volumes and the pacing felt wonkier than it actually was as a result. But on the whole I guess I just kind of... expected more. It's classified as yuri/girls love but the closest it got was when everyone was really possessive of each other and even then it just kind of felt like normal adolescent friendship drama. And I guess sometimes that's just how yuri goes and you really need to look between the lines but this one really leaned into "they're really good friends" territory.
The Girl That Can't Get a Girlfriend
idk if this is """technically""" manga because it's only in English right now but the creator is part-Japanese who's lived in Japan and draws manga style and I think is trying to get this published in Japan too so? Whatever, counting it. It's an autobiographical manga of a girl's first love (with another girl) and how it goes awry. It was funny and sad and the perfect humour level for me. And I liked turning one page and seeing a figure of my favourite Final Fantasy character at one point. (Emet-Selch? In my yuri manga? It's more likely than you think.)
Goodnight Punpun
What a bizarre series. I don't think I've talked about it here before, which I suppose is the problem with my reading so much... I end up only having time to detail things I've started or finished which means all the middle of reading it goes unremarked upon and suddenly I've read 13 volumes and I'm sitting here going . . . . . . about how to talk about it. This was one of the most depressing and also weird things I've ever read! It's... at its core...? I guess? About a boy from an extremely dysfunctional family who falls obsessively in love with a girl from his class whose family is part of a cult. They're separated in elementary school and then the manga follows his life through onto adulthood where he is a useless member of society. You see his escapism evolve throughout his life but the bad luck just never really relents, not that he works hard at all to overcome anything. It's depressing!!!! Eventually he finds the girl he was obsessed with and, uh, well she's not any better off than him and while I won't spoil anything, it is not a happy ending and it is pretty, as the kids say, ****ed up.
Oh and also he's always drawn as this super cartoony little bird in an otherwise very realistic setting. It's weird, but I think the subject matter would be even more serious if there wasn't this ridiculous thread going through the whole story.
Love Me, Love Me Not
Wahh, I'd been putting off finishing this because I've come to LOVE Io Sakisaka's work. Her characters are so fresh and cute and I like their relationships. And her art is soooo pretty. This was the last of her available manga and I didn't want to be out of material so I didn't prioritize finishing this, but man, it was cute. I really liked that this one focussed on two different protagonists and how they work through things at different paces with different opinions and outlooks, but come together to help each other because of it. I liked that it wasn't heavy on the relationship drama but just gave the characters room to be who they were. I liked it better than Strobe Edge but probably not as much as Ao Haru Ride.
Although!!! Apparently this one is not the
last since she's started serializing a new series as of 2021. It's not in English yet so I might actually pick it up in Japanese as it releases.
Alice in Borderland
This is a bit more violent than I usually go for and I think lately it's gotten even moreso, but I'm still curious enough about how the world came to be how it is that I'm still sticking with it... Just half of the series to go! But I don't like it enough to read ahead in Japanese so I will simply await more volumes in English.
The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses
This isn't a very remarkable manga or anything, but I did want to bring it up in light of "My Clueless First Friend" (again, see below). I couldn't really figure out while I was reading this volume why I don't mind this manga filled with extremely repetitive gags whereas the other one was just excruciating to read but I think it probably comes down to this one not being about someone being bullied and another character's complete inability to see that. Anyway, apparently this one has 10 volumes? Not gonna lie, I think it might wear out its welcome if it goes that long reusing the same gag.
Dreamin' Sun
Not a lot to report here, but I did want to record some thoughts about this one. I admit I spent most of volume 4 extremely confused as to what was going on since it had been nearly a year since I picked up volume 3, but this manga is very strange. It once again made me realize that age gap stuff with high schoolers and older characters makes me uncomfortable when it's never confronted at all. I didn't mind it in Takane and Hana because even if it gave some pretty basic excuses for it sometimes, it at least acknowledged it. But this one is squicking me because the protagonist is crushing on her much older live-in landlord, who is a
lawyer. And once when she confesses in front of her whole school, he agrees to go out with her because (as far as we know in the volume),
his old high school teacher is there and
he was going out with her when he was in high school and he feels pressured to agree or something? And all the adults around him kept telling him he should accept her feelings. Or like, they were giving advice like you'd give one of her peers--to "come up with his answer" and to not agree to go out with her if he didn't have feelings because he'd hurt her... what!!! No! They should be telling him to kick her out so that her puppy love crush couldn't go any further!! I had this surge of hope in one volume because one of his adult peers is a police officer who saw them together and looked REALLY suspicious and I was sitting there like yes finally an adult who is going to tell him to stop dating a high schooler and... no, turns out he just doesn't like their relationship because she's not good enough for his college buddy, so hijinks will ensue as he tries to keep them apart. IT'S SO WEIRD. Like, if him being an adult isn't a big deal, then why make him an adult at all? I have a feeling he needs to be a lawyer for plot reasons, but surely in a manga you could just like... either have him be an assistant at his father's firm or find some way for him to be working as one while still attending high school. It's not really that much more unbelievable than some guy hosting a bunch of wayward teenagers who just don't feel like being at home. He could even still be the landlord if they were both in high school. Or hell, even just make him a university student? That's not so insane an age gap and you could even sort of get away with "he may be an adult but he's not an
adult adult since he's not in the workforce yet. Just... idk. It's so uncomfortable to have him so much older, making moves on her (because I got far enough that
I'm just so baffled that this is so weird and the characters seem so childish when I picked this up because I
loved the author's other work, Orange. It was a really poignant series about characters processing grief and using clues from their future selves to prevent their friend from committing suicide in the present. Everyone felt so real and to go from that to this manga is whiplash. (Apparently Dreamin' Sun was serialized a bit before Orange? So it's not even a case of one being from way earlier in their career... it's weird!
Not sure why I'm not dropping this. I think I'm a masochist.
This is already so long... gonna see if I can quickly get through the reasons I dropped the following manga:
Blue Lock
I tried to like this because it was an insane take on sports but everyone in it was just so unlikeable. I didn't want any of them to come out on top and I didn't want to read about them anymore. u_u
My Clueless First Friend
This has to be one of the most boring things I've ever read. Every single chapter is the exact same gag over and over again. The clueless overexcited transfer student misinterprets everyone's bullying of the gloomy girl as her having special powers and shuts them all down by saying it's really cool that she's a reaper or will curse you. It's the same thing over and over and over again. If this hadn't been an omnibus I would never have read two volumes of it. It's a shame it got a
little better by the end when they changed up the setting from school to elsewhere for summer vacation, but it was too little too late.
I assume it's for little kids but that kind of baffles me because I didn't think licences for those were particularly sought after in the west. Apparently this has an anime adaptation starting this season and I think it's pretty telling that by episode 3 they're already near the end of what was in volume 2 because there
just isn't anything to adapt.
Rent-a-Girlfriend / Rent-a-(Really Shy!) Girlfriend
Dropped both of these. The latter was an easy decision because I shouldn't even have read the first volume since I didn't find the girl in it compelling enough to get a spin-off, but as you can gather from the previous entry here, I just kind of give everything I see in my library's digital offers a shot lol. As for the main series, I still kinda like the hook and the characters and the drama, but for some reason I stumbled upon spoilers for the series which is still going and by volume 19 it sounds like it hasn't gone anywhere and I just don't care enough to continue if it's gonna drag out like that.
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime
Was this one of the earlier works in the isekai boom? Is it based on a novel that's a lot better than the manga version? I don't get it. I just wasn't into it at all.
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure
Oh right, this is probably blasphemy for a weeb but I dropped Jojo because I find the art ugly and the characters and story boring. I really tried to give it at least two volumes but I put off volume two for like half a year and when I finally picked it up I couldn't bring myself to even finish it. Dunno what chapter I left off on so I'm not even gonna add it to my list at the top lol.