Favorite manga of 2004
I was going to write up more of last year's manga before I did this, but that was in January, so clearly that plan isn't going so well. Also, some of my friends have mentioned that they've succumbed to my brainwashing started to think about maybe trying manga someday and I would hate for you to try the wrong one and be put off the medium forever. Especially if you also sued me for compensation for psychological damages.

So here's a brief list of my favorite manga from 2004. As with books, US/UK comics, and anime, I am picking my favorites from what I read last year, regardless of the year of original or official English-language publication. It's in alphabetical order by title, which is how most bookstores seem to be shelving them. Names are given in the Western order, family name last. I'd write a general overview of why I like manga, but I pretty much already covered that in the anime post; the storytelling conventions are essentially the same even when works weren't adapted from manga to anime in the first place. (Well, there are differences in the visual conventions for still and moving media which are worth discussing--but not now, because the point is to post this before June.)

1. Kaori Yuki, Angel Sanctuary
   Availability: 7/20 volumes
   Art style: Pre-Raphaelite gone Goth gone manga. Gorgeous drawing, horrible panel layout.
   Summary: Angels and fallen angels and pretty boys with swords (plus pretty boys who are swords), secret identities, doubles and twins, reincarnation, genderfuck, and incest.
   
   This would have to be the first one.
   
   Sometimes I think about just giving up on analysis and just doing a page-by-page recounting of the plot, because it's very difficult to describe Kaori Yuki's work in a way that does it justice. Her plotting exceeds snark the way the Bush administration exceeds satire. If you don't have a taste for over-the-top Gothic melodrama, there's no point in even starting this one.
   
   Once upon a time, the Organic Angel Alexiel rebelled against God, whose armies were led by her twin brother, the Inorganic Angel Rosiel. Alexiel's armies was made up of fallen angels and demons, which are called Evils, because Japanese notions of English are frequently logical and wrong. In the final battle, Alexiel manages to trap her brother in the earth before she herself is captured and her armies defeated. Alexiel's body is imprisoned in a crystal and her soul is sentenced to reincarnation in an endless series of really sucky lives.
   
   Flash-forward to July 1999. (Japanese apocalypses always take place in July 1999; it's a constant, like angels who shed as if they had mange.) Alexiel's current incarnation is a fifteen-year-old boy named Setsuna who is discovered and chased by a vast number of demons and angels who love, hate, want to use, want to fuck, or want to destroy Alexiel, in some cases all at the same time. Setsuna--you will remember he's fifteen--is less concerned about the impending apocalypse than he is about the catastrophic state of his personal life: he's fallen in love with his younger sister, Sara.
   
   I've read the entire series in scanlations. The storyline is divided up, as you might expect, into the journey on the earth, the descent into hell, and the ascent to heaven--only, given the backstabbing, politicking, betrayals, and powerplays going on, the differences between the three places are sometimes difficult to discern. It's hard to describe any of the characters because practically all of them have at least one secret identity, if not two. I will briefly note my favorite character, Kira, Setsuna's extremely cool and unshockable best friend, who turns out to have been following Alexiel through lifetimes; he gets my favorite line of the series and quite possibly ever: "After all, even before he was born, Setsuna was still my girl."
   
   The attractions of the series are the very, very pretty art; the insane and insanely complicated storylines; the intense and passionate character interactions; and what turns out to be a complex and sometimes contradictory take on gender, power, religion, love, and pain, and how they create or transform personal identity. There are few artists so thoroughly devoted to the idea that hate is very close to love, and that all hatred is self-hatred at the core, as Kaori Yuki. (Also see her other long series, Count Cain/Godchild, which has significant thematic similarities to Angel Sanctuary.)
   
   I should note, by the way, that the panel layout improves considerably over the course of the series; by volume seven, there are even some pages that are worth talking about as good examples rather than, well, examples of How Poor Layout Choices Happen to Good Art. I'm also finding, on my fourth or possibly tenth read, that the plot, although still insane, is set up much more thoughtfully than I'd realized and that some of the more bizarre plot twists are foreshadowed from very early on.
   
   Avoid the anime; it's awful.
   
   
2. CLAMP, Clover
   Availability: 4/4 volumes
   Art style: You could use this as an introductory text in the use of negative space. Then you could go back and use it for the graduate course.
   Summary: In a broken-down, totalitarian cyberpunk/fantasy world, a soldier is brought back from retirement to protect a powerful young girl from mysterious enemies.
   
   I'm going to be lazy and just quote my earlier review:
   
   

   From the very start, these books feel like a mystery; like you'll need to peel back layers, carefully, to get at the full picture beneath. Then the layout--rather than being basically contiguous strips, squares, and rectangles, with the occasional shift in layout, as I've seen in other manga and in US comics--makes an extraordinary use of negative space. There is more blank space in this comic than any other I've seen.[... The art creates] a haunting, yearning feeling and the sense that you have to connect all the words and images together yourself, because all you're given are fragments and the meaning you can tease out from their arrangement.

   
   
   I went back and reread this recently; it was the second or third manga I read, and I was curious to see how it held up after a year of further reading.
   
   It holds up pretty damn well. This would be the first manga I recommended to my narrative-structure-junkie friends if it were only easier to find. Some of the characterization and plotting are less striking now that I recognize them as either typical shoujo tropes or typical CLAMP variants on shoujo tropes, but the style--the style is still extraordinary and the feel is still entrancing, dreamlike, startling, utterly compelling.
   
   
   
3. Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket
   Availability: 8/? volumes (up to 16 volumes in Japan; still ongoing)
   Art style: Default shoujo sweet. See telophase for a detailed analysis of some of Takaya's particular strengths.
   Summary: The Sohma family is under a curse: at all times, twelve members of the family will be cursed to transform into a particular animal from the Chinese Zodiac if embraced by someone of the opposite sex. The extremely sweet Tohru Honda (who at first looks like the most typical of sweet, hard-working, unassuming shoujo heroines) stumbles upon this secret and is taken into the family.
   
   When I first asked for manga recs, several people mentioned this and said, "But don't be put off by the premise -- it's different than you think!" I wasn't put off by the premise, which seemed no more bizarre than any of the other manga I looked at; I was put off by the cotton-candy packaging, all mint-green and pastel pink and a visual invitation to sugar shock. And it's not that the packaging is exactly wrong--the series can be very sweet--as that it's not the entire story, because the series is also very funny, very moving, and very sad. I'm going to be lazy again and quote my comments on the anime, which is very faithful to its source:
   
   

   This series has an extraordinary blend of melancholy and wistful sweetness that is very hard to describe. In the manga, Tohru explains that her dead mother taught her that people aren't born with kind hearts:
   
   

   When we're born, all we have are desires for food and material things. Selfish desires, I guess. But she said that kindness is something that grows inside of each person's body ... but it's up to us to nurture that kindness in our hearts. That's why kindness is different for each person.[...] Mom taught me that people's differences are something to celebrate.... When I thought of all the different shapes of human kindness--imagining them as round or square ... I got really excited.

   
   
   Fruits Basket is about people learning kindness--abused and bullied children, damaged adults, people afraid to reach out for help. It is, amazingly, not at all twee or saccharine, probably because it is very clear that learning to be kind is a struggle, and that the injuries that must be overcome are deep. (rushthatspeaks also suggested, persuasively, that aspects of the curse could be read as a chronic illness: something that must be endured because it cannot be cured.)

   
   
   
4. Hisaya Nakajo, Hana-Kimi
   Availability: 5/23 volumes
   Art style: Default shoujo sweet.
   Summary: Mizuki disguises herself as a boy so she can attend the same single-sex school as her idol, a high-jumper named Sano. Naturally she's assigned to be his roommates and they become friends. From my earlier comments:
   
   

   This is one of the most adorable manga I've come across yet. I wish I could get up scans of a page or two for you, because a lot of the charm is in light-handed character design; but the rest of the charm is in the characterization and the sheer good will of the characters--most of them really do mean well, and the comedies are comedies of errors rather than malice. But the characters are delicately drawn in the metaphorical sense as well: when Mizuki recalls the first time she saw Sano jump, she is clearly starry-eyed with admiration--and with the beginnings of a sexual awakening she doesn't yet recognize. What she admired, she confides in the useful dorm mascot, was his strength and grace; she wanted to be like that. Whenever she had trouble fitting in or finding friends in her American school, remembering how good Sano was and how hard he must have worked was her inspiration. Watching her move from hero worship to true friendship is a delight, and so is watching Sano gruffly give in to what are clearly well-developed protective instincts, half big-brotherly--and half not.

   
   
   This is probably the most typical of the series I'm recommending here. I'm not convinced it will appeal to people who don't already have a taste for teen romantic comedies--but I do, and I find this one completely charming.
   
   
5. Kazuya Minekura, Saiyuki
   Availability: 7/9 volumes (sort of; see below)
   Art style: I don't know how to describe this in brief. Minekura does the sexiest men in manga, but that wasn't what caught my attention first; what caught my attention first was that she was drawing the first manga fight scenes I could actually follow. I'm not terribly big on fight scenes and most of them just looked like an incomprensible mass of random body parts and motion lines--but Minekura's, they made sense, I could follow the movement. Then I realized that this wasn't just fight scenes--with Minekura, I knew where to look next, I could follow the path of the panels through the page, I could tell exactly what I was supposed to be focusing on at any point, as well as where I should look next. As is common with manga, Minekura would often show just fragments of body parts--eyes, hands, mouths--but, unusually, I never had the jerked-out moment of wondering who the close-up was of, who was looking at what, both because she controlled the panel progression so adeptly and because the individual character designs were so distinctive.
   
   See Minekura's Website for the sexy and telophase for a more detailed analysis.
   Summary: A whacked-out retelling of the Chinese classic, The Journey to the West, in which the four protagonists travel in a jeep (which is also a dragon) across an anachronistic ancient Chinese landscape in order to save the world from a plague of insanity that's descended on the formerly peaceful youkai (demons). Or at least as peaceful as humans, which -- okay, not so much with the peaceful. But formerly sane. In Minekura's version, the holy monk Genjo Sanzo gambles, smokes, drinks, curses, and shoots people at the slightest provocation; about the only sin he doesn't commit is unchastity, and that's clearly because he doesn't like people enough to let any of them touch him. The Chinese trickster figure, the Monkey King, is a naive teenager with an endless appetite and an extremely violent alter ego. The kappa (water sprite) Sha Gojyo is a womanizing gambler with a vulgar mouth and a heart of gold; the last companion, Cho Hakkai, is a soft-spoken, well-mannered scholar with by far the most violent and disturbing past of the four; Kanzeon Bosatsu, the goddess of Mercy, is a hermaphrodite with a wicked sense of humor and a taste for transparent dresses.
   
   I've been putting off a post on Saiyuki for months because I just don't know where to start. There's so much to talk about, and it's so good, I just go in circles trying to figure out an entrypoint. And there isn't much to spring off, because, to my bewilderment, there just isn't that much commentary on it out there--or I haven't been able to find it. My comics commentary reading is divided roughly between comics bloggers who are coming over from US comics, who seem to be dismissing the series as just another ill-structured action series, too much like the US comics they go to manga to escape; and animanga fans who don't read US comics, who (with a few notable exceptions) seem to be dismissing the series as just about the pretty boys and the homoerotic subtext.
   
   The most boggling of all the comments I've seen is that the series is episodic or poorly structured. Maybe the people who are saying this stopped at the first volume, which I have to admitted is heavy on the exposition and establishing backstory; maybe they didn't get to volume four, which is where the story really takes off--and it just keeps going from strength to strength until the REALLY FUCKING COOL plot twist at the end of volume nine. (I mean, seriously, I got the upcoming revelation a few pages before the reveal and then it came and I just could not stop laughing because I was so happy that the plot had gone there, because it just turned the entire previous series inside out and set up the most fascinating possibilities for what's coming next; I don't think I've been quite that chuffed sincing see "Reprise" (Angel) air for the first time. Maybe you need to be fascinated by narrative structure, and very seldom surprised, to get this; maybe you just need to have my brain. So cool.)
   
   I'm already getting incoherent; Minekura does that to me. But I don't think I've ever read anyone so in control of pacing--the pacing of action and the pacing of information; she knows exactly what she's going to tell you, exactly when, and she's going to string you along with a narrative you think you understand, and then she's going to give you the last puzzle piece, and not only does the story you thought you were reading snap perfectly into place--it was a different story all along, and the clues were there, and now you can look back and see both of the stories you didn't know you were getting, clear as day.
   
   And this plus compelling characters with rich backstories; intricate plotting; and fascinating meditations on Buddhism, individuality, and family; humor and heartbreak. Each of the characters is shaped by memories he can't escape, even the amnesiac; and each of them, by the end, learns that for all the circumstances he couldn't control, he's still the person he chooses to be, for good or ill. (And when these guys choose ill, man, do they choose spectacularly ill.)
   
   Saiyuki doesn't exactly need my help; it regularly places in the top sellers, the sequel Saiyuki Reload just got licensed, and I am cautiously optimistic about Kazuya Minekura's other series getting licensed, too. But I am just so sorry that some people are missing out on this.
   

• Miki Aihara, Hot Gimmick, which has appalling gender politics (APPALLING) but a soap operatic addictiveness.
  
• CLAMP, Legal Drug, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, Wish and X, the first three of which are more likeable than ambitious, and the last of which has moments of extraordinary beauty and intensity but suffers from poorly handled continuity infodumps and from being, apparently, permanently incomplete.
  
• Fuyumi Soryo, Mars, which has dimmed a bit in retrospect because the conclusion wasn't satisfactory and because I'm more familiar with shoujo tropes, but which absorbed me utterly at the time (avoid the prequel).
  
• Ooba Tsugumi & Obata Takeshi, Death Note, a tightly-plotted fantasy thriller about a boy who finds he can kill people by writing their names in a death god's lost notebook and decides to rid the world of criminals. It's very smart, but the focus on plot over theme sometimes made its world feel extraordinarily narrow; I'd probably rate it higher if I had a greater appreciation of sociopathic protagonists. I expect it to get licensed any minute now.
  
• Yu Watase, multiple, for always being energetic and likable and showing solid craftsmanship.