Manga Book Club - What Do We Read Next? (Mar 2024) (Patreon)

SORRY IF YOU SAW THIS POLL TWICE, I MESSED UP THE FIRST POST AS PER USUAL AND PATREON DOESN'T LET YOU EDIT POLLS HA HA HA HA DAMMIT

After two shorter Book Club meetings we're looking to jump into a slightly longer series again. Not quite One Piece Long, but something that requires multiple sittings to finish.

Multiple choices are allowed. Please limit your voting to no more than 2 choices.

GOLDEN KAMUY - (Western/Adventure/Cooking Manga???/Very Gay) - 31 Vol.

The single best Western I've ever read.

Years ago, a famous criminal hid a vast stash of gold in a secret location. After he was captured, he tattooed a complex map to the gold on the backs of dozens of other prisoners. The prisoners escaped in a violet riot, and now the only way to find the treasure is to hunt down the convicts hiding across the Hokkaido wilderness.

60% Western, 40% survivalist cooking guide, 100% gay. If you like drawings of big muscley men, this is the series for you.

Golden Kamuy is one of my favorite manga of all time. Bo and I have finished it, Aloha has read almost all of it. We're all interested in re-reading it.

CONTENT WARNINGS: Extremely graphic and fairly gory (a dude gets his face ripped off by a bear at one point and they do NOT cut away). Also a good deal of sexual content. No on-screen sex but a lot of talk about sex and one battle in particular that's really raunchy. If you know, you know.

PANDORA HEARTS - (Mystery, Fantasy, Shonen but like for Girls) - 24 Vol.

Oz, heir apparent to a great noble house, attends his coming of age ceremony. However, he is attacked my mysterious men in robes and sent to another dimension where he meets a strange girl named Alice. Working together, they escape their prison, but find they have both been flung into the future. Oz joins a group called Pandora who fight by forging contracts with creatures like Alice known as "chains". Between fights, Oz and the others investigate the tangled web of mysteries behind his own disappearance and the world of chains known as "the abyss".

Yam has been explaining this one to me. She spent like 6 hours walking me through the arc of the mystery and the clues and when I thought we were at the 80% mark it turned out we were at the 30% mark so there's a lot more going on than I expected. Full of pretty boys. Made by the Vanitas lady.

Yam has read this one, nobody else has.

BERSERK - (Dark Fantasy) - 41 Vol.

Guts, a former mercenary now known as the "Black Swordsman," is out for revenge. After a tumultuous childhood, he finally finds someone he respects and believes he can trust, only to have everything fall apart when this person takes away everything important to Guts for the purpose of fulfilling his own desires. Now marked for death, Guts becomes condemned to a fate in which he is relentlessly pursued by demonic beings.

One of the most popular Dark Fantasy manga with beautiful artwork but be warned there be some GRAPHIC STUFF in here.

CONTENT WARNINGS: Insanely violent. Sexual assault. Nudity. Child molestation.

POKEMON SPECIAL - (Pokemon but a little fucked up, actually) - 61 Vol.

The long-running official Pokemon Manga written by a guy who can actually write. What starts out as a pretty faithful retelling of Red and Blue quickly turns insane as the Elite Four are ecoterrorists who blow up Vermilion City with a Dragonite, Ash's counterpart has to go through physical therapy because he was a POW imprisoned in ice handcuffs, and characters actually die.

I've read up through the Black and White arcs and Pokemon Special (aka Pokemon Adventures in English) is a truly wild ride. Quality varies hard from arc to arc with the high point of the series being pretty early on, but there are surprisingly good stories. Each new game adaptation is like a game of Russian Roulette. Also, this is a great series for examining how external factors can affect storytelling. The manga has several story arcs that are cut short or have sudden, insane, unsatisfying endings because the games come out to quickly because their dev cycles get worse and worse, so watching the writer scramble to generate a story is actually kind of interesting from a meta sense. Unfortunately, almost every story past the Gold-Silver-Crystal arc suffers for this. But it is interesting!

Very long, but technically we can bow out whenever if the club decides we're tired of it because most of the games have self-contained stories, so this would be like One Piece with an "Eject" button in case of emergencies.

CONTENT WARNINGS: If you read this, you will be mad at Pokemon's writing for the rest of your life because it never gets this fun or creative again. Also genuine animal violence in this, Pokemon can and do die onscreen.

20TH CENTURY BOYS - (Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi) - 22 vol.

From the same Mangaka as Pluto! Kenji Endo is a normal convenience store manager who's just trying to get by. But when he learns that one of his old friends going by the name "Donkey" has suddenly committed suicide, and that a new cult led by a figure known as "Friend" is becoming more notorious, Kenji starts to feel that something isn't right. With a few key clues left behind by his deceased friend, Kenji realizes that this cult is much more than he ever thought it would be—not only is this mysterious organization directly targeting him and his childhood friends, but the whole world also faces a grave danger that only Kenji's friends have the key to stop.

ZATCH BELL - (Shonen, Action-Comedy) - 33 Volumes

One day dozens of strange puppet-like children calling themselves Momodo appear. The momodo are from the momodo world and are taking part in a giant battle royale. The last one standing becomes the king of their world, but the momodo must take on human partners who control the use of their powers with a spell book. The series follows smart-ass Kyo and his goofy partner Zatch/Gash as they face other momodo and try to be the last to survive.

I started this manga once several years ago and fell off because I was busy, but I remember it actually being pretty funny! The art is pretty uggo tho.