For as long as I can remember I’ve been reading comics, but when I hit my teens in the early-to-mid 1990’s, I began to lose interest in the spandex-clad games that were the primary offerings of the Big Two. (Marvel and DC, not Viz and Tokyopop.) Around the same time, anime had just began to rear its head as a separate bit of fandom. I had seen it before then, but it hadn’t clicked as “cartoons from Japan,” as something separate and apart from the US offerings. Whether that’s good or bad is a separate topic for another time, but I started getting into it a bit more thanks to my cousins and various friends. Bubblegum Crisis, Akira, Appleseed, and Zillion were among some of the first anime I viewed with an awareness of this separate fandom. So with my interest in comics changing, and my interest in anime burgeoning, it was just a matter of time before I stumbled across manga.

I’m pretty sure that the first manga I ever read was an issue of the Marvel/Epic release of Akira. I recall picking up one of the issues for about $8, enjoying it but deciding that it was too expensive to keep up with at the time. So while it was my first, it wasn’t what hooked me. No, that honor goes to volume two of Appleseed. I remember stumbling upon the book in the tiny graphic novel/TPB section of a CD store and just about squealing with delight. I flipped through it, blown away by the artwork and in awe of the price tag. Call me crazy, but the idea of paying $17 for that much goodness seemed like an excellent deal at the time. I greedily snatched it up and blew through it in short order. Unfortunately, finding Appleseed in the mid-to-late 1990’s was surprisingly hard–I think it took me until early 2000 before I had the entire series, and even then I was missing the Databook collection.

Still, it did several things: it made me aware that there were more Japanese comics out there, and turned me on to a little company by the name of Dark Horse. Things just snowballed from there. A buy-two-get-one-free sale at my LCS, a sale that included just about everything that wasn’t a DC or Marvel superhero book, led me to the first few issues of the Dark Horse edition of Blade of the Immortal, and that cemented me as a fan of the company and their taste in manga.

I started keeping an online journal where I’d cover things that caught my interest, including comics and manga. This was ages ago too, before the creation of Livejournal, Myspace, or anything along those lines. I was hand coding individual entries and then rewriting my entire website to include links to the new entries and the backlog. After awhile, I eventually jumped to Livejournal, and from there slowly made my way to the Tokyopop site thanks to a online promotions group I was involved with. After browsing through the TP blog entries about Naruto, school and the like I decided I may as well try to inject some of my own manly man tastes into the site and started babbling, at length might I add, about the different series I enjoyed. Katherine stumbled across my entries there, and she must have seen something she liked as she eventually invited me to come write here.

And because everyone else is doing it, here are five of my favorite manga titles–you might recognize a couple of them from my earlier mention of them.

• Blade of the Immortal by Hiroaki Samura (Dark Horse): Arguably my favorite manga and piece of sequential art to date. I started with the first and second issue and I haven’t stopped since. I’ve got an entire run of the old monthly series in a long box, sans one or two issues I managed to miss. Oddly enough, I’ve only got the first six of the collections though. It starts out simply enough, with a young woman seeking to avenge the brutal murder of he father and the rape of her mother, and a disgraced immortal samurai who seeks nothing but death. Of course, like they said in Kill Bill, revenge is rarely a straight line. The characters grow and change over time, their desires wavering, relationships take bizarre twists and turns, all with some fantastic artwork.
• Appleseed by Masamune Shirow (Dark Horse): The classic sci-fi/cyberpunk-ish tale of the far future and the exploits of Deunan and Briaerios, two soldiers turned police, as they defend the artificial island known as Olympus from various terrorist threats. Politics, philosophy, incredibly detailed artwork, and Shirow’s eye for mechanical detail all mix to create a fantastic story, if a bit dry at times.
• Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service by Eji Otsuka and Housi Yamazaki (Dark Horse): Buddhist college students with various odd talents join together to form… the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. Your body is their business. Dead but want to harass someone still? Killed and seeking some form of vengeance? Got a mysterious corpse that needs identifying? The KCDS is just for you. Black humor, strong artwork, enjoyable characters and an intriguing and underlying mystery all serve to make it one of my current favs.
• Uzumaki by Junji Ito (Viz): Long before Gurren Lagann decided use the spiral as a major plot point, Junji Ito was subjecting manga fans to the horror of the accursed shape. Three volumes of off-the-wall weird, creepy, and darkly humorous horror tales all centered around a small isolated coastal village. Ito’s eye for detail and an obvious love for Lovecraft help make this one of the best horror manga series around.
• Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwaaki (DelRey): One of the most under-read series currently being published. Iwaaki does a magnificent job at creating full realized characters and using them to examine some basic questions about the human condition. It’s quickly become one of my favorite series and has yet to disappoint.