Week Ten: Manga and Japanese Comics

Rumiko Takahashi is my all time favorite manga artist. I grew up watching and reading Inuyasha, Ranma, and Urusei Yatsura, so for this weeks reading I decided to read mermaid Forest. Its a super creepy manga but also a very interesting take on the folklore of mermaids. The story is about a young man named Yuta who accidentally ate the flesh of a mermaid only to discover he is immortal. After the ongoing years without aging he find out he can gain mortality by eating the flesh once again and goes on a journey to find a mermaid. Yuta comes across a village of only woman and discovers they are murmurous mermaids and try to kill him, he escapes by taking of of their own kind, a girl named Mana as hostage. Mana turns out to be a sacrifice for the mermaids in order to regain their youth and a lot of other stuff happens as well.  I really enjoy the depth of all her characters and love reading all of her work, I recently got into her newest work called Kyokai no Rinne. Its a really great story about a young girl named Sakura who can see the apparitions and a boy named Rinne who is a shinigami or also know as a reaper of souls and also Sakura's class mate. They go on ghost hunting jobs together to cross over the sprits, meeting demons and journeying over to the afterlife. Recently the anime came out and it is just as good as the manga and I'm excited to see where the story goes.

Week Nine: A Wide World of Comics

So this week I read Mobius's "Stories from Heavy Metal" and the first thing I thought about was Nausicaa. It has the the landscapes that go from dessert to forest and the same kind of strange riding birds with some variation. I wonder if with Miyazakior Mobius were influenced by each other's work? I had see Heavy Metal the movie and it just wasn't my kind of film. I didn't like all the gore and violence that the comic has also, but I love the color palette Mobius used in his work.