Manga Recommendations

Serious:

  • Akira: Biker punks vs psychics in post-apocalyptic Neo-Tokyo. Fantastic cyberpunk art.
  • Black Magic, Dominion, Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell, Orion: Shirow Masamune's meditations on AI control of unworthy Humanity.
  • BLAME!: City grows out of control, a killer boy with a gravity gun blows up everything, searching for someone who can use a computer.
  • Hotel Harbour View: One of the most beautiful and tragic things I've ever read.

Pulp:

  • City Hunter: Obnoxious, sexist gunman romances & murders his way through bodyguard or assassin missions. Occasionally heartbreaking.
  • Death Note: I know you think you know what I think I know, but really… tries so hard to be serious about the premise it almost wraps around to comedy. I like Ruk just eating apples, watching the Humans spread death and chaos.
  • Dungeon Meshi ("Delicious in Dungeon"): The best work on dungeon ecology & cuisine ever published.

Goofy:

  • Dan Machi ("Is it wrong to try to pick up girls in a dungeon?"): LOVE, but mostly practical ideas for how an eternal mega-dungeon can work, dungeon economy, guilds built around gods.
  • Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya: Is it even insanity if reality obeys your whims?
  • That Time I Was Reincarnated as a Slime: Overpowered fanservice fantasy, but the monsters are people, and thinks clearly about what they want.
  • Urusei Yatsura: LOVE. Well, obsession and perversion, which is much the same thing. And space aliens as mythology.
  • Yuru Camp∆: Just meditative camping in slightly civilized wilderness.

What:

This was a fedi post, but I want it in a more permanent place, and I've added a couple more. I'm open to suggestions, but I have zero interest in shonen fighting manga, nor most romance. Horror works OK, but I prefer that as anime or live movies. Aria and Girls Frontline are on my to-read list, I've seen a couple GF anime eps, but I dunno yet.

Cyberpunk Manga

Most all of these are out of print, or so obscure that apparently I'm the only person I know who's ever read them.

  • Blame!: Nihei Tsutomu, Blame! anime previously reviewed.
  • Blame! Academy And So On: Nihei Tsutomu's art book, weird school side-story to Blame!
  • Noise: Nihei Tsutomu, prequel to Blame!
  • Digimortal: Nihei Tsutomu. Bleak and awesome.
  • AD Police: The serious part of Bubblegum Crisis. The anime is OK but not as good as BGC, the manga are the other way around.
  • Black Magic: Shirow Masamune's original epic of an Athena/Typhon bioroid sorceress fighting to free Venusians from an evil AI god Zeus 66 million years ago. The anime takes one minor element, the M-66 combat robots, and turns that into a well-drawn but vapid present-day (1990s) Terminator ripoff.
  • Appleseed: Shirow Masamune. "The Promethean X" are the four volumes of a girl and her cyborg boyfriend from a post-WWIII wasteland trying to "adapt" to a city created by and for bioroids, where Human people go crazy. Is civilization even possible for Humans?
  • Dominion Tank Police: Shirow Masamune. Bleaker than the very silly anime, but both are kinda light-hearted with absolute doom for humanity.
  • Orion: Shirow Masamune. Very weird Buddhist-fantasy-tech. Like steampunk but with mandalas and priests instead of Victorian aristocrats fucking you over. Main character is very much Typhon 2.0.
  • Ghost in the Shell 1.5 Human Error Processor: Shirow Masamune, the volume you certainly missed between GitS 1 & 2, which you can find new copies so I won't link to. Here Motoko/Puppetmaster hybrid learns to redesign user interfaces and jump between bodies (mostly taut young female cyborgs, because Shirow's a perv, and who isn't?)
  • Lazarus Churchyard: Warren Ellis, an immortal plastic-spiky-boy in a ruined England (post Brexit, ha!) trying to die and failing. Generally possible to get in print?

In all cases, I suggest grabbing the torrent and then just keeping all the cbz, read with your comic reader of choice.