Current Manga Rankings – 2011 – Part 1

I started reading manga a few years ago, and in that length of time I’ve acquired a surprising number of ongoing series. They have quite a bit of variety to them, from shonen to josei, weekly to whenever-the-hell-it-feels-like. I’ve had the chance to talk about quite a few of these series, and even reviewed some of them already. Since it’s the end of the year, though, I thought I would take the opportunity to rank all of my ongoing manga. This way I can discuss some series I couldn’t before, and I can state which manga I like the most and why.

30. Bleach

Here’s the thing about Bleach: it’s the one series on this list that I never read the old chapters for. It’s not something I would do by choice, but then again, I never really intended to start reading Bleach at all. One day I heard that the manga would be showing Gin’s bankai, so I read that chapter to see it and just didn’t stop. That’s a big part of why I find it so hard to get mad at this series. It takes a good deal of effort to feel anything towards it, really. I’ve been told that not caring about something is one of the cruelest things you can do to it, and that’s why it gets the lowest spot on this list.

Nisekoi – First Impressions

Always a classic.

Naoshi Komi is a manga creator who I’ve heard quite a lot about. He worked on a short lived series in Weekly Shonen Jump called Double Arts, and he also created a number of one-shots, as many manga artists do. I never got the chance to read his first series, but I have read some of the one-shots he wrote, and I’m starting to understand why this guy has so many fans. His stories have some of the most unique premises I’ve come across, which makes him stand out from the crowd. In fact, the people he reminds me of the most are the protagonists of Bakuman. Simply read the premise of his story Personant and you’ll see what I mean.

Yerocha’s 2011 Anime Awards – Part 2

Most Mysterious

Dantalian no Shoka

I was a fan of Read or Die a while back, so the idea of a series revolving around books isn’t something new. The difference, though, is that this series is nowhere near as straightforward. I’m always getting a strong feeling that there’s more to the world of Dantalian no Shoka than what we’re looking at. Granted, this is mainly because there’s so much that isn’t being explained. I still don’t think it was a good idea to center an episode around that guy with the book-powered Raising Heart, and even after the end of the series I’m not sure what his existence accomplished. It was a pretty good show, although I feel like a second season would be necessary to make sense of it all.

(Runner-Up: UN-GO)

Yerocha’s 2011 Anime Awards – Part 1

I’m sure some of you know that in addition to running a blog about manga, I’m also an anime fan. There are so many anime blogs out there that I usually leave it to the other bloggers and focus on manga. However, now that the year is almost up and I missed my chance to do the 12 Days of Christmas, I thought it would be a good idea to say a few things about the shows I saw this year.

Now I could do a Top 10 of 2011, but there’s a little problem with that. For various reasons, I wasn’t able to watch all of the really popular shows from this year. To give you an idea of the shows that aren’t included in these posts:

• Deadman Wonderland, Blue Exorcist, Toriko, Bakuman II and Usagi Drop were series I read instead of watched. The first three will be on the upcoming Manga Countdown, but it didn’t feel right to include them here when I obviously haven’t watched them.
• Tiger and Bunny and Fate/Zero are shows I just haven’t watched. I actually saw the first episode of Tiger and Bunny, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to watch the next episode. Fate/Zero just plain doesn’t appeal to me, though I may take a look after it ends.
• Mirai Nikki, Mawaru Penguindrum, Usagi Drop and Steins;Gate are shows I haven’t watched yet. I eventually plan to, and I considered holding off on this until then, but I wanted this to be out at the end of the year.

In spite of all that, there are still quite a few shows I watched this year that I wanted to discuss. And so I put together my 2011 Anime Awards. For each series I saw this year, I’ll give it an award and explain what I thought overall.

Just A Quick Update

Well, exams are finally finished. I’ve got a small amount of work to do for one class still, but otherwise I’ve started to get back on track. Manga updates should resume whenever interesting chapters start being released. Not sure when exactly that will be, but I know for certain that I’ll have a post for next week’s Liar Game, since it’s about something I thought would happen in the current chapter.

There’s also something I decided I would do since partway through exams. I wasn’t able to get my 12 Days of Anime/Manga up due to my busy schedule, but I still wanted to do something for the end of the year. That’s why I’m announcing two posts that will hopefully be out before the 31st. First is my Current Manga Ranking, which is the list of all the series I’m caught up ranked from least favourite to most favourite. All THIRTY of them! Yes, I was surprised by the number too. This also has the good side effect that I can talk about manga I haven’t been able to in the past.

Second, I wanted to eventually talk about the anime that came out this year, since I’m also a big anime fan. The problem is that not only have others been more expressive about them than me, but I’ve ended up missing a lot of the big names from this year. I do intend to watch Mirai Nikki, Mawaru Penguindrum, Usagi Drop and maaaaaybe Steins Gate. Of course this makes any top 10 list difficult, but I had another idea: the 2011 Anime Awards, where I only-slighly-seriously give out awards to the shows I watched this year and discuss how I felt about them. For example, I’ve got awards for “Best Assets”, “Best Use of Engrish” and “Best Show I Totally Forgot I Watched”. I don’t talk about anime a lot here, but I’d still like to get my word out there.

Glad to be finished finals, and I’m hoping I can go back to my schedule as soon as I can. Not that I really had a schedule before, but at least I still got posts out.