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Another week in the books. Let’s chat about manga in the general discussion thread! Feel free to use this thread for questions, comments, recommendations, etc.

Like normal, please be careful with spoilers. I wrote a guide about spoilers in case you need a refresher on how to handle them (also linked in the sidebar).

  • UnboxiousEnglish
    6·
    3 months ago
    • DanDaDan - Decided to give this a try since the anime releases soon. Wow! That was some wild stuff. Lots of really beautiful double-page spreads, and good art in general. I really look forward to seeing this get animated.
    • Blue Box - This is another one with an upcoming anime adaptation. It’s an okay romance, but I think Kaguya-sama: Love is War and Skip and Loafer spoiled me. I put a bit of thought into what sets those apart, and I think the biggest part is seeing the perspectives of both sides of the relationship. I also like the art in those two just a little more. Blue Box has some serious same-face-syndrome between the two biggest female characters. I can only tell them apart by their hair! Overall it’s pretty good though, and I’m only about 60 chapters in so maybe it improves.
    • Witch Hat Atolier - Wow. The art in this one is incredible. I’m only 7 chapters in, and it’s slow-going since I’m reading it in Japanese, but this is easily one of the most beautiful manga I’ve ever seen. I think it’s even better-looking than DanDaDan.
    • Boox Page - This one isn’t a manga, but this week I picked up an e-reader. Wow. It’s a huuuuge improvement over reading on my phone! The good: it runs Android, so I can install apps like Manga Plus to read manga conveniently, legally, and for free. I was also able to install some big Japanese manga apps like コミックDAYS using a VPN + the Aurora store. The 7" screen doesn’t sound that much bigger than my 6" phone screen, but since it’s almost precisely the same aspect ratio as a manga the difference is actually much much larger. Battery life is great of course, since it uses an e-paper display. Speaking of the e-paper display, it looks great, most of the time. It’s a bit of a downer not having colored chapter covers but it maps the color to grayscale fairly well, even though it doesn’t support a ton of different gray levels. The bad: it’s stuck on Android 11, so I had to spoof another device to get my favorite offline Japanese-English dictionary (Yomiwa) installed. Fortunately none of the other apps I tried had any issues. Speaking of apps I tried, I installed 7 different manga reading apps developed by various US and JPN publishers. None of them supported the page turns buttons, and none of them had a setting to disable animations. E-paper displays do not like animations, and turning pages feels clunky as a result. I also tried one community-made manga app, Mihon. It supports my page turn buttons just fine and also allows me to disable animations. Very frustrating that once again buying media from the official source gives a worse experience than piracy would. The ugly: thankfully there isn’t anything that falls into this category. Overall it’s been a pretty good experience!
    • wjs018OPMEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      Make sure to check out !dandadan@ani.social where @GordonFreeman@ani.social posts manga chapter discussion threads and artwork. I imagine that activity over there will ramp up during the show’s run as well.

      About Witch Hat Atelier, I am cautiously letting myself get excited about the anime coming up next year. I haven’t read the manga source, but both Gigguk and Mother’s Basement recently put out episodes talking about how fantastic the manga is; comparable to Frieren or Dungeon Meshi.

      • UnboxiousEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        Yeah, those videos are part of what made me want to read the manga. So far everything that Geoff has said about it has been completely true. Hard to say if I can say the same for Garnt, but that’s likely just because he spent more time talking about the magic system and I’m only 7 chapters in.

    • ReluctantZen@feddit.nlEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      Boox Page

      I have the Boox Leaf and yeah, it’s great. I mainly use it with Mihon and Bookwalker. I buy my manga volumes mainly on Kobo’s webshop now and put them on my Komga server to read with Mihon’s Komga extension.

      Regarding the page turn button, if yours is anything like mine, it’s just a volume rocker to Android. So, if the other apps don’t support turning pages using the volume buttons, then yeah, it won’t work.

      E-Ink displays are clunky, but once you get over that, it’s a much better experience then a phone or tablet imo.

      • UnboxiousEnglish
        4·
        3 months ago

        Regarding the page turn button, if yours is anything like mine, it’s just a volume rocker to Android

        It actually is configurable on the Boox page! You can set it to be a volume rocker, turn page buttons, or for scrolling. I guess I haven’t tried setting it to scrolling to switch pages, but I doubt that would work either.

        Would be nice to see a more advanced configuration utility like the steam deck has; there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to push the button to simulate a swipe!