A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Complete in three volumes, this manga is a cozy post-apocalypse tale about the adorable adventures of a young girl and her beloved pet giant mutant tentacled spider.

It’s also a cooking manga.

12-year-old Nagi is living alone and lonely in the mountains since her dad wandered off. But luckily, she encounters and adopts a giant mutant spider baby, which she names Asa. Asa doesn’t speak, but they and Nagi communicate just fine anyway. (Nagi uses “they/them” pronouns for Asa; it’s not stated whether it’s because Nagi doesn’t know Asa’s gender, or if she does know and Asa is nonbinary.)

Each chapter features Nagi and Asa having some kind of adventure and also cooking, so you get titles like “Danger & Pita Pockets.” Recipes included. That is, Nagi or people who Nagi meets cook, and Asa helps out, eats, and carries trays of food on their back.

I only read the second two volumes of this—Lyda and Mason left it with me, along with other manga, to mail back to them. But it was easy to pick up on earlier events, which I gather prominently featured pumpkin dumplings.

Giant Spider & Me is bizarre and also extremely sweet. Some people think Asa is a dangerous monster, but nothing ever gets too threatening and the love between a girl and her giant spider always carries the day.

Adrian Tchaikovsky would enjoy this. I did too. It’s like there’s some kind of conspiracy afoot to make me fall under the spell of our new many-legged overlords, I mean our adorable arachnid friends.

Giant Spider & Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale Vol. 1

This will probably amuse only three people, but it will probably amuse them a lot, so I will post the link. For reasons explained at the top of the linked post, I was challenged to make up the summary of a truly insane fanfic, complete with pairings and warnings, and it occurred to me that you could get a lot of insane out of Angel Sanctuary alone.

But just for fun, I did a crossover with Bleach and the Mahabharata. Warnings include but are not limited to clonecest, death of God, and blasphemy in three different religions.

telophase mailed this to me. It completely lives up to her promises.

It is the geekiest and most specialized and most awesome thing ever. It is a manga about ekiben otaku! I think it is called something like "The Solitary Love of Ekiben." (It's in Japanese.)

Ekiben are specialty bento sold at train stations; each station has its own, packed with local delicacies in unique containers. Otaku are crazed fans.

A chubby bearded guy who loves ekiben takes a trip across Japan to try every ekiben in existence. He meets up with a woman who also loves ekiben. Separately and together, they get on trains and eat bento.

In each chapter, they get on a train, obtain an ekiben, and photograph it unopened and opened. There are intricately detailed ekiben drawings, labeled like anatomy diagrams. They exclaim in joy over it, then eat it with expressions of ecstasy. I think they may also be trainspotters, as the ekiben porn is interspersed with train porn (including geeky explanations and diagrams of routes and schedules) and the occasional bit of scenery porn. There are four volumes of this, though I only have one.

Like I said: the most geeky and awesome thing ever. I hope telophase will post scans.

Realistic manga about two young women named Nana trying to make it in Tokyo; one's a punk rocker, one's still looking for her place in life. There are boyfriends involved, and other friends and band members and the world's cutest groupie, but the real love story here is between Nana and Nana.

I continue to be enthralled by the intricacy of the relationships, touched by the emotion, impressed by the realism, and terrified by the increasingly ominous narration.

( Read more... )

I realized the other day, while reading an excellent new manga which I shall not name for fear of spoilers, that a lot of manga men have one missing or blind eye. There I was, peacefully reading, and suddenly a man whom I had not expected to do such a thing suddenly revealed that he had one fake eye, which he did in the classic manner of popping it out without warning.

And so I bring you the great manga eyeball angst-off! Note that I have not spoiled anything by not naming which eye trauma goes with which character. Do not spoil anything unless you use white-out.

[Poll #925837]



For bonus credit, state your theories on the prevalence of missing eyes, blindness, why it's only men and generally only the attractive ones, etc.

For super bonus credit, name any female characters with missing or blind eyes.

Mely made a post discussing recent manga and comic books which made me run out and buy some. I can't improve upon her descriptions of Fuyumi Soryo's Eternal Sabbath or Hope Larson's Gray Horses, except to say that I adored them both and highly recommend them to anyone.

The first is spooky, sometimes funny, and pits a charmingly obsessive woman scientist against a mysterious young man with the power to, among other things, make people think he's a member of their family. The second is sweet and wistful and reminds me a bit of Carla Speed McNeil's Finder, a bit of everywhere I've ever traveled to, and a bit of being a child and reading some classic kids' book for the first time.