The Case for Manga I Still Can’t Quite Make
Full confession: I’ve never really gotten into manga. This feels like an embarrassing thing to admit given my deep and slightly unhinged love of anime, J-Pop, and Japan in general—but there it is. The closest I came was finding the first two volumes of Dragon Ball at a flea market years ago, and the happiness of that find I can still summon even now, faint but real.
It never stuck, though. Part of it was price: ten euros for something you burn through in ten minutes felt wrong, even when I was spending twice that on CDs I’d listen to once. Part of it was my brain’s inability to read anything for more than five uninterrupted minutes before it starts screaming for the internet—that was always true, before smartphones made it universal. And part of it was simpler: I missed the colors. The music. The voices. Manga always felt like the screenplay for something I’d rather just watch.
American artist Nick Gazin would probably hit me for saying that. Twice. He loves manga with the kind of devotion that doesn’t tolerate apologetics, and his list of the five best of all time is exactly the list you’d want someone like that to produce. Akira is there, obviously—the one manga that even people like me treat as untouchable. Dragon Ball, for sentimental and historical reasons that are hard to argue with. Lone Wolf & Cub, one of the great brutal epics in any medium, full stop. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which reframes the Ghibli film once you realize how completely Miyazaki was drawing from himself. And Astro Boy, the root of almost everything—the origin point that made all the rest possible.
It’s a good list. An honest list. Maybe one day I’ll actually sit down with all of them properly instead of buying two volumes at a flea market and calling that a relationship. But probably I’ll just watch the anime adaptations and feel only slightly guilty about it.