If you were to ask Google Translate how to say “I love you.” in Japanese, it will give you the word Aishiteru or at least a form of it. However, I think that if you’ve watched and, more importantly, listened to a bunch of Japanese media whether that be anime, tokusatsu, video games etc., you’re far more likely to be familiar with another term, Daisuki. So infrequently have I heard Aishiteru that I thought to look deeper into its use and soon discovered that this word contains a surprising amount of power, so much so that some people will tell… The post The Surprising Power Of The Word Aishiter ..read more

I remember, many years ago at this point, going into a bookstore and looking at the manga that they had available there. Among the myriad of covers, one stood out to me in particular, that being the first volume of a series called “Sakura Hime: The Legend of Princess Sakura”. The art style of the main character immediately caught my attention and I immediately became curious about the author, that being Arina Tanemura, and what other series she’d done. I thought then that it may be interesting to provide an overview of Arina Tanemura, the manga she’s written as well as touching on her work out ..read more

The Harvey Awards are something that I can distinctly remember hearing about from time to time whenever a manga won an award there. I knew it was prestigious but I never thought about what the awards actually were. Therefore, I thought it might be interesting to take a quick look at the Harvey Awards, a little bit about their history, the current categories and manga’s place at the awards. The Harvey Awards were established in 1988 and are named after Harvey Kurtzman, one of the founders and editors of the magazine MAD along with a variety of other work. They were first held at Chicago Comicon ..read more

As I write this article, it is just the day after the news of Akira Toriyama’s death and I’ve been contemplating my experience with his works. The impact he has had across numerous industries from manga to anime to video games and beyond has been immense but, understandably, many people only know him for Dragon Ball and perhaps Dragon Quest. Another series of his, Dr. Slump, is highly popular in Japan but, even though I think it’s better than Dragon Ball, there is no doubt that it’s relatively unknown in the West. However, his body of work is not restricted merely to those series and I thought ..read more

As a fan of horror media, it would only make sense that I’d search for something similar when it comes to anime, manga and video games. While the survival horror genre is well established within video games, I find horror surprisingly difficult to find when it comes to the other two, anime more so than manga. Regardless, there is a franchise that spans anime, manga and video games that is heavily associated with horror. Having only just watched the first three seasons of the anime recently, I thought it might be interesting to provide an overview of the Higurashi franchise and see how this ser ..read more

You may look at the title of this article and scratch your head in confusion. Magic Realism? Surely that’s a contradiction in and of itself, right? An oxymoron of genre. If you’re not already familiar with the genre then you may be surprised at how much of it you’ve already experienced. Therefore, I thought it might be interesting if we took a look at the genre of Magic Realism, what it consists of and a few examples. So what exactly is Magic Realism? Basically, it refers to a story which takes place in a realistic setting but which has a magical or supernatural component(s) that set it apart ..read more

Having just written an article called “Taking A Look At Some Anime Based On MAL Score Vs. My Score“, I thought it logical that I should do the same with regards to manga. However, I’ve run into a few issues which necessitate a change compared to the anime article. First, I have a lot more manga that I haven’t completed in their entirety than anime, presumably a byproduct of their different distribution models. Second, I wasn’t satisfied with the selection that MAL chose when it came to my statistics page and have chosen to pick titles from my manga list personally instead. I will include a pho ..read more

Osamu Tezuka’s massive body of work is sometimes overshadowed by the success of Astro Boy, to the point where I’m only able to tell certain people who Osamu Tezuka is by bringing up Astro Boy to them. However, one of the most important series that Osamu Tezuka ever created has, itself, grown into quite a respectable franchise, one that easily attains greater critical reception than that of Astro Boy and is also commercially successful, being Osamu Tezuka’s second bestselling manga behind Astro Boy itself. Therefore, I thought it worth providing an overview of this fascinating franchise, Black ..read more

When you think of franchises from Japan, you probably think of Dragon Ball, Godzilla, Pokémon etc. but I doubt many of you think of the Blood franchise. It’s certainly not one that would spring to my mind either but I took a look at it the other day and I noticed that it actually has quite a few notable entries now which prove to be surprisingly diverse in terms of both style and media. Therefore, I thought it might be interesting to do an overview of the Blood franchise and look at the various works within it. Of course, the logical place to start with any overview of a franchise is the firs ..read more

Video games and manga have a long and intertwined history. In the early days of video games, manga was often used to promote new games or to tell stories that were too complex to fit into the limited gameplay of the time. This need has waned as video games have become more and more capable of telling their story without the aid of additional media. Regardless of this, many manga based off of video games continue to be produced and I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the more notable ones. Let’s start off with, as far as I can tell, the best-selling manga based on a vide ..read more