Mine is Yotsuba&! It’s just so underrated in general and I love it.
Billy Bat by Naoki Urasawa - conspiracy + political history + cosmic horror
JoJo: Steel Ball Run
My top 3 are:
- Domestic Girlfriend
- Telework Yotobanashi
- Mushoku Tensei
I know a lot of people hate Domestic Girlfriend for the ending, but I thankfully got to bingeread the entire thing during Covid, so I just got to buckle in and enjoy the wild ride.
I also binged Domestic Girlfriend early in the pandemic. I have a love/hate relationship with the series overall. On the one hand, the reason the ending is so incredibly polarizing is because the story and characters are so easy to be invested in. You really care about these three and the melodramatic messes they find themselves in. On the other hand, well, the ending. Domestic Girlfriend makes you feel something, that is for sure; and that is better than a lot of lesser series can say.
The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You
For me, the more that a manga makes me go “WTF”, the better.
190+ chapters in, it still has moments that I did not expect.
This criterion makes me biased towards slapstick comedies, but it’s my favourite genre anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Another bias that favours 100 girlfriends is that it is the longest running manga that I’ve followed from the beginning.
It’s still ongoing though, so there’s always a chance that it drops off.
So if I have to nominate one of my completed 10/10s, it’s A Complicated Sibling Relationship 4-Koma for being a roller-coaster of WTFs
I think every single person on the planet should read Yotsuba&! It’s a world treasure.
It’s not my personal favorite though - that would be The Voynich Hotel. I just love everything about it - great characters, funny as hell, great stories and even a great ending.
Some honorable mentions:
- Berserk
- Vagabond
- 20th century boys
- Monster
- Dorohedro
Kaguya-sama: Love is War. The manga itself is great but reading it live and discussing it on the old site elevated the experience even more. While I wasn’t the biggest fan of the ending, everything else was just so good it’s hard for me to give it anything but a 10.
Currently:
My gf loves girl’s last tour! Haven’t read it myself though
Claymore is fantastic. It’s also one of those series where the art improves massively over the course of its production, and it’s fascinating to see.
It starts off looking a bit wonky and uncanny, but once it gets going, there are some panels that are straight up masterpieces in their own right.
Three Days of Happiness which is actually the light novel title. The manga adaptation title is “I sold my life for ten thousand yen per year” but I like the LN title more. I recommend reading the author’s afterword in the LN if you finished the manga.
I also like The Flowers of Evil.
Dungeon Meshi
I only read The Promised Neverland and Nisekoi: False Love, so they are my only favorites.
I don’t know that I can pick any one favorite, it’s more like they come and go at different times. My current favorite is probably what I wrote about this week in the general thread, The Moon on a Rainy Night, but that is surely heavily influenced by recency bias.
A handful of other favorites of mine would be (tried hard to limit myself to 5):
Too many to list, honestly.
If I had to pick a (relatively) recent one one the top of my head, it would be Fuuka by Kōji Seo.
I get you, it’s the same thing but with video games for me
Yotsuba&! is great! I wish it got more recognition as a hilarious manga rather than just a stepping stone for Japanese learners.
My favorite though is Kaguya-sama: Love is War. The characters are all insane in the most perfect ways. Skip and Loafer is a close runner-up though; I love its characters for all being so grounded they feel more like people than manga characters. It’s a very different feel than I get from other manga.
Yotsuba is like the foster’s home for imaginary friends of the rising sun imo, it’s that underrated
Fav manga.
Long list but I’ll list the one I’ve reread the most.
Standard shonen but more mature than most. It got beat out by Bleach so it never got animated. Still completed story though cut short.
