Week 10: Manga

I have been a fan of manga since I was a kid, so this isn't new territory for me. However, the kind of manga that I've read are more in the contemporary shonen genre. For this assignment I decided to branch out and read something different.

I haven't read much older manga or gag manga, so I decided to read a few chapters of Astro Cat. It was really cute and entertaining, although I assume still paying homage to the original content of Astro Boy (which I have not read). I thought the drawings were really cute, and I enjoyed the playfulness of the story.

The other comic I read was My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, which I really enjoyed. I have never read a manga that was more like a memoir, and actually took LGBT content seriously. It was refreshing, because I also haven't seen a lot of comics like this from Americans either. I thought it was really impactful, and had a lot of good and insightful things to say, and a lot of things that I could relate to on a personal level. The art style I felt was also appropriate to the content of the story she was telling. It wasn't extremely realistic or graphic, and it kept the tone of the manga charming. Although you could definitely still take it seriously.

Something that I had already read which was on the reading list was Bakuman, and it is one of my favorite mangas I've read. It has a lot of insight to the manga world and how it's made in Japan, and was actually some of my inspiration for wanting to be an artist and to tell stories. However, it also gives good insight to how hard it is for an artist to make their way in the world, and how much can sometimes be tabled when you're in the thick of your career.

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