Been reading it lately, and it helps reduce my scrolling time. I’ve hardly read any, so you can recommend really popular stuff, too.
I’ve read Vagabond, 20th Century Boys, Claymore (years ago), and some berserk. I just finished reading Teppu, which I thought was an interesting subversion of a lot of anime tropes. I also liked that it was a short run (only 8 volumes). I guess I like seinen, but I’ve also enjoyed josei like She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat.
Anyway, no shonen please. Hard mode: please nothing about high school
The concept of a basically invincible lone lunatic antihero, mostly, though his power is more something weird about duplicating to create ablative versions of himself or something? I’m still unclear on what he’s doing or what his power is even though it’s halfway explained pretty early on. He’s kind of silly, but not in Deadpool’s particular style.
I was absolutely blown away by how it’s both incredibly absurd but also positive and good. I’ve just started watching the anime adaptation and that’s also very slick so far, and is actually colorful and vibrant to the point of absurdity as a reflection of the main character shaking off his depression and noticing how vibrant and colorful the world really is even as that world is ending around him.
Oh Booty Royale is absolutely trash, it’s just also fascinating because as much of a cumbrained weirdo as its author is he’s also clearly at least somewhat leftist and is constantly interjecting like actual stories about real things into his silly borderline-hentai manga that’s like 50% slice of life stories about how shitty and exploitative the idol industry and its skeevier adjacent industries are and 50% weird martial arts nerd stuff, and then trying to also handle queer issues as respectfully as a fundamentally exploitative story can and in a way that’s also an explicit condemnation of real-world bigotry. It’s too weird and gross to like actually recommend to anyone ever, but it’s also an absolutely fascinating spectacle because of how it vacillates between horny weirdness and stuff like stopping the story to educate its readers about the Rohingya genocide.
I’m not even joking, that’s an actual thing that happens towards the end of IIRC volume 12, it just stops the story completely to talk about that and then follows it up with what is basically “and fuck the Japanese government for putting refugees in inhumane camps and having fucked up racist immigration laws, btw two of the characters go on to become international human rights advocates working for the UN in subsequent decades,” because writing these random epilogues about characters going on to be great people is also a frequent thing it does, like it making some creepy little sexpest kid in the earlier chapters go on (50 years later) to be a prominent judge with an unshakeable moral compass because of how good and merciful the protagonist was towards him that one time.
It’s absolutely unhinged and I don’t know whether to be impressed or disgusted by it.
Kinda reminds of a sequence in the middle of Animal Man where the story kind of just stops dead and the author looks to the reader and says “slaughtering dolphins is bad”