Curated playlist
Seinen manga
- NOiSENOiSE is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Tsutomu Nihei, and it holds a particular place in his body of work: it is the prequel to his ten-volume series Blame! The reader who comes to NOiSE expecting to understand where a…
- Akira (manga)Akira is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Katsuhiro Otomo, and when its first collected volume hit shelves in Japan in September 1984, its publisher printed 30,000 copies. Within two weeks, that print run had surged to…
- Oh My Goddess!Oh My Goddess! began with a wrong number. Keiichi Morisato, a college sophomore, accidentally dials the Goddess Help Line and finds himself face to face with a divine being named Belldandy. She tells him her agency has received a system…
- DevilmanDevilman is the manga series by Go Nagai that sent a 16-year-old reader named Nanase Ohkawa into a state of shock she never forgot, and eventually led her to write her own apocalyptic manga, X, decades later. That kind of reach is rare.…
- Vinland Saga (manga)Vinland Saga is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Makoto Yukimura, and it begins with a boy who wants nothing more than to kill a man. That man raised him. That man also murdered his father. The boy's name is Thorfinn, and…
- Jinki: ExtendJinki: Extend is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Shiro Tsunashima, built around a single strange premise: two girls from different eras, different cities, and different lives are being steered toward each other by forces…
- Kurau Phantom MemoryKurau Phantom Memory begins with a birthday gone wrong. A twelve-year-old girl named Kurau follows her father, Dr. Amami, into his lab. He is close to a breakthrough in something he calls Rynax energy. The experiment misfires. A bolt of…
- Berserk (manga)Berserk, the dark fantasy manga series created by Kentaro Miura, opens with a man born from the corpse of his hanged mother. That single image tells you everything you need to know about what kind of story this will be. Since its debut on…
- Battle Angel AlitaBattle Angel Alita opens on a garbage dump. Not a metaphor, not a mood-setter, but a literal scrap heap raining down from a floating city high above. In that refuse, a cybernetics doctor named Daisuke Ido finds a severed head and torso,…
- Captain Harlock (manga)Captain Harlock first appeared in the pages of Play Comic, a manga magazine published by Akita Shoten, in January 1977. Leiji Matsumoto wrote and drew every page of a story that would run until June 1979 and fill five collected volumes.…
- Puella Magi Madoka MagicaPuella Magi Madoka Magica arrived on Japanese television on the 7th of January 2011, and within weeks it had upended everything audiences thought they knew about magical girls. On the surface, the series looked harmless: rounded, cheerful…
- RWBYRWBY, pronounced "Ruby," launched on the 18th of July 2013, on the Rooster Teeth website, and it arrived with a question its creators never expected to face: is this thing actually anime? The show was built by Monty Oum, an animator who…
- Seinen mangaSeinen manga is the editorial category of Japanese comics made for young adult men, and it sits at a crossroads that few publishing categories can claim: mass-market popularity and genuine literary ambition at the same time. That…
- Vagabond (manga)Vagabond, the manga series by Takehiko Inoue, begins with two teenagers bleeding on a battlefield in 1600, in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Sekigahara. One of them will eventually become the most celebrated swordsman in Japanese…
- Crayon Shin-chanCrayon Shin-chan is a Japanese manga series created by Yoshito Usui, and from its first appearance in 1990, it has never quite behaved the way anyone expected a children's series to behave. Its hero is five years old, lives in the city of…
- Fate/stay nightFate/Stay Night began not as a game but as a story Kinoko Nasu wrote in college with no particular destination in mind. He only completed what would become one route out of three, set it aside in 1999, and then co-founded a small creative…
- K-On!K-On! began not with a grand origin story but with a small crisis: a high school light music club on the verge of being shut down, saved by four girls who could barely play their instruments. The series, a four-panel manga by the artist…
- Monster (manga)Monster opens with a choice that changes several lives at once. Kenzo Tenma, a neurosurgeon at Eisler Memorial Hospital in Düsseldorf, West Germany, is engaged to Eva Heinemann, the hospital director's daughter. Then fraternal twins Johan…
- Sakigake!! OtokojukuSakigake!! Otokojuku has sold over 26 million copies, yet outside Japan almost no one has heard of it. That single number places it among the best-selling series in Weekly Shonen Jump history, alongside titles that became household names…
- Oshi no KoOshi no Ko opens with a murder. On the night obstetrician-gynecologist Gorou Amamiya secretly delivers pop idol Ai Hoshino's twins, an obsessive fan kills him. He wakes up reborn as one of those twins, all memories of his previous life…
- Baccano!Baccano! begins on a ship called the Advenna Avis in 1711, where a group of alchemists summons a demon and walks away with eternal life. That single transaction sets in motion a chain of events that will not fully resolve until the year…
- Cobra (manga)Cobra, the manga series by Buichi Terasawa, opens not with a hero striding across a starfield, but with an ordinary office worker named Johnson who is bored. One Sunday morning, Johnson's robotic servant Ben suggests he visit the Trip…
- Violence JackViolence Jack arrived in Weekly Shonen Magazine on the 22nd of July, 1973, and it arrived with a figure unlike anything manga readers had encountered. Seven to ten feet tall, with the muscles of a gorilla, the fangs of a wolf, and burning…
- Lone Wolf and CubLone Wolf and Cub begins with a one-year-old placed before two objects: a ball and a sword. His father, Ogami Itto, the shogun's executioner, watches in silence. If the child reaches for the ball, his father will kill him. If he reaches…
- Guin SagaGuin Saga began as a single novel in 1979 with a premise that sounds almost absurd: a warrior with no memory, no name, and a leopard mask magically fused to his skull wanders into a world of swords and sorcery. He knows only how to fight,…
- Bastard!!Bastard!! is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kazushi Hagiwara, and it is named after its own irreverence. The title alone signals what it contains: a dark wizard named Dark Schneider, a world built from heavy metal band…