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The only thing really wrong with Onani Master Kurosawa is that the translation is really, really bad and I wish someone would go and redo it some day. It's an absolutely amazing series otherwise though. The artist also did a series called Molester Man (adaptation of a 2ch thread about a guy who's initially mistaken for a perv when he tries to goonily "save" a young woman) which is really great as well.
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Sep 6, 2013 20:34
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I don't think I can ever bring myself to buy the omnibus because 4koma is a format that I just plain do not find funny. It always seems like I'm reading an incomplete joke. That said the anime is kind of the originator of the "cute girls doing cute things" format and it's easily still the best show of that type too.
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Sep 8, 2013 18:25
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One series I'd suggest too is Gunka no Baltzar. It's a series set in post-Napoleonic/post-HRE Europe although, even though it's explicitly Europe, all of the countries are instead fictional counterparts. It's about an officer for Weissen (Prussia) named Bernd Balzer getting shipped off to become an instructor at the military academy for Baselland (Bavaria), which has just recently entered into a military alliance with Weissen. It very quickly, however, turns into a story about realpolitik and the struggle between modernization and resistance to it as more countries and political players are introduced. The translation effort can be a bit slow some times but other than that it's a really engaging series if you're looking for military/political intrigue.
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Sep 12, 2013 01:07
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Actually for I'm In Mari it's done Shuzo Oshimi who's the author of Aku no Hana (aka Flowers of Evil), not Inio Asano. Aku no Hana and Asano's works should all be read regardless though. Anyway here's a suggestion since it finally looks to be coming back next month.  Teppu is the story Natsuo Ishidou, a tall and athletic high school girl who is naturally talented at everything she does such that it's made her bored and aloof, her only friend being a girl named Kei who's her teammate on the volleyball team. One day she meets Yuzuko Mawatari who's recruiting people for the MMA club. Natsuo, an ex-karate practitioner, decides to spar with her and gets her rear end kicked. Excited that she's found something she's not instantly good at, Natsuo quits the volleyball team, begins practicing MMA, and eventually joins a gym under the tutelage of champion fighter Karin Kontani in the hopes of honing her skill in MMA for one reason: to break Yuzuko's confidence and wipe the smile off her face. Teppu is a shonen sports manga about women's MMA with the twist of role reversal. The protagonist, Natsuo, would be the rear end in a top hat rival in just about any other series while the rival, Yuzuko, is more in line with the typical shonen protagonist. Natsuo's not an irredeemable scumbag but she's not a particularly nice person either: she antagonizes and picks fights with the karate club (including her old friend Sanae Sawamura) simply because she can. Her motivation for getting better is that she finds the idea of Yuzuko being good at something and being happy doing it to be annoying. The art, while starting out a bit rough at times, is generally good and it does a good job of showing off all the moves while the author will take asides to explain definitions and techniques for those who (like me) know nothing about MMA. Also for a series about women's MMA with a majority female cast created by a guy (I believe) there's really no sexualization at all. It was gone for a year and a half due to an unexplained illness the author had but it's coming back in November so now the only wait is from the glacially slow scanlation effort.
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Oct 21, 2013 19:42
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I'll throw out another suggestion. Koe no Katachi  Shouko Nishimiya is a girl who's just recently transferred to a new school, a bright, happy kid who happens to be deaf. Shouya Ishida is a boy in her class who happens to hate her and attempts to justify it but eventually his life becomes entwined with her's in a way he never really expected. That sounds like the set-up for a feel good series but... The description says that it started as an award-winning but controversial one shot that had a tough time getting published (it's since started being serialized) and once you start reading it's not hard to see why. To keep it simple, it's a rather gut-wrenching story about bullying and given how much of a hot topic that is it's the type of story that needs to be told.
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Nov 10, 2013 08:25
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Race Realists posted:I remember reading this along with ADTRW back in my guest lurking days. The complete 180 in personalty the main lead goes through just came off as fake to me Well the point is that he came to realize how awful being an anti-social loser is. By the end of the series he's not completely better but he's getting there. He's still kind of a loser but he's working his way up. It's also why he ends up with Sugawa at the end. Takigawa represents the person he needs to be: outgoing, gregarious, an all around good person. Kitahara represented who he was: a miserable shut-in that hated everyone. Sugawa represents who he is now: somebody who started out awful but, by the end, had started turning themselves around. They're not there yet but they're better people than they were at the start. There's nothing really "fake" about it, IMO. He started coming out of his shell, got his heart broken, then realized just how much the girl he liked valued their friendship, how much the guy he kept making GBS threads on cared and was there for him at his lowest point, etc. He learned the value of not being a shithead. Honestly about the only problem I have with it isn't the story itself but the kind of inconsistent/stilted translation. Actually this gives me an excuse to throw out one of my favorite series from last year (well, that was translated last year anyway), from the same artist as OMK... Molester Man.  Despite the title it's not actually about a guy who molests people. Instead it's about a goony dork walking home one evening when he notices the woman in front of him seems nervous. He wonders if maybe she's worried about a someone who could do bad things to her so he tries to catch up to her only to get branded as a molester. Things get cleared up and eventually the guy starts to hang out with the woman and her group of friends all the while looking for love. If you've ever heard of Densha Otoko/Train Man it's the same set up: originally this was a story posted on the VIP board of 2ch where the young man in question would update folks on what was going on while asking for advice, the threads were eventually condensed and made into a comic. As such the characters' names are all pseudonyms: the main character and woman are referred to as Molester and Miss Understanding (because of the initial incident) for example. Think of it as someone making a comic out of an E/N thread and you'll have the general idea. It's a pretty funny and entertaining romantic-comedy based on a real (well, as real as you can believe anything posted on an anonymous Japanese message board) story.
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Nov 12, 2013 07:48
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Actually during the year and a half the author was ill the magazine it runs in wound up switching to a monthly format so the series is monthly now. It's just that the scanlations are behind. Edit: Apparently because the translator for the group working on it pulled a radium and just plain stopped responding to any attempts to contact them. Suben fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Jan 15, 2014 |
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Jan 15, 2014 09:22
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Captain Invictus posted:May is the sole reason I don't recommend Gunsmith Cats to people. Everything else about the series is great, but she has always been one of my least favorite anime characters. Everything about her is just creepy. Thankfully the OVA exists with none of the creepy poo poo from the manga. It's just a good, fun '70s cop show style series.
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Oct 22, 2014 22:42
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