Vol. 1 is coming out in North America on Jan 21, 2025 courtesy of Viz! Looking forward to reading it.
I started reading Vagabond last night and am 3 chapters in. The pressure of it being the best thing ever is heavy… The art is impressive, the up close portraits are amazing. Makes me think of Lost Odyssey while I read it. Guy draws hair nice.
I know a hardcover edition of Vagabond is coming out starting next year but it’s double the price of the VIZBIG editions. I actually don’t love the trend of big hardcover manga editions. They’re really heavy and unwieldy. And quite costly. I may be a dirtbag because I tend to prefer the Viz 3-in-1 small editions with cheap paper (which are pretty hated online). Nice and light and lots of pages and cheap. I get people like the better binding of the hardcovers for longevity, that’s legit. But I just like my cheap paperback novels and manga. 
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If you want some escapism today, here are two manga podcasts I enjoyed recently.
Hosts read the first chapter of each Nihei work up to Aposimz.
A look at what went wrong (and right) with the Naruto creator’s follow up series he wrote.
Other eps of both shows are quite good.
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Ranma has been quite digestible and up there with Yotsuba in terms of manga I can read in Japanese. Recommend it for my learners.
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You may hate or you may love the arc that has no fighting whatsoever, but it’s that kind of weird introspective stuff that I think makes Vagabond really special.
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This is the 2008 printing of Dororo from Vertical; it’s still in print today as an omnibus. It feels timely given that Mangasplaining put out a sci-fi re-imagining of Dororo with Fantagraphics this past summer.
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I have this too!
I like large volume formats for tezuka a lot.
Anyway, off our earlier shinzo keigo talk, I love his instagram because he posts all his fortnite wins
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Blasted through 3 volumes of Dandadan over the past couple days and really really loving it! Some of the stuff in the 3rd volume with the mom was genuinely so affecting and out of nowhere that it made me cry lol. I just adore the freaky energy the book has and Momo is extremely good.
I will say one thing I hope doesn’t continue is constant romantic misunderstandings between our heroes. I’m already invested in their romance, the author is already invested in their romance, let’s just let it happen okay? Don’t need boring tropey stuff that plagues manga romance.
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They generally deal with the misunderstandings quickly but they really do draw it out, is what I’ll say.
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I just read Hunter x Hunter chapter 406 and am caught up with the serialization which is off hiatus. What a time to be alive. 
I am excited to read it each week. I believe that the Succession Contest arc is at the top of the rollercoaster’s big drop and that stuff is about to go absolutely wild.
HxH, in hindsight, is a series about build up and then orchestrating the fall. The Succession Contest build up is next level, which makes sense. What else could he follow Chimera Ant up with? Togashi doesn’t want to repeat himself arc to arc, that’s very clear.
I’m not quite sure what long series I’ll dig into next… Throughout my life I for some reason keep abandoning series around volume 20-ish. Naruto, Bleach, Berserk, One Piece I all stopped randomly years and years ago. I was enjoying them. But I don’t know if I should restart or just pick up from an arc. 
I had no idea this was released in separate volumes. The omnibus is huge! I would like to read it again at some point, it’s been a while. I saw SF version you mentioned too, gonna try to find it!
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All Fantagraphics manga seems to end up on Hoopla eventually and there’s a good chance your local library has access!
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Oshi No Ko ended today in a kind of silly rushed fashion. It’s weird that it has been a year of rushed finales, in series that frankly, I can only imagine the publishers would prefer to stay running.
I don’t really care too much to be super upset about it, but it is interesting, and kind of cool of Akasaka Aka to not give a super easy ending.
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Now watching
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Caught up with all the full volumes releases of Dandadan so far. Still really enjoying my time with it but a couple questions for those who are caught up to the current chapters:
- With another “harem” member introduced it feels like we’re in for even more Okarun/Momo misunderstandings to draw out the romantic relationship the story is obviously very interested in continuing to develop. Can you just clue me in on whether there’s a confession or more concrete forward momentum on that coming? I need to know lol
- Is the new nerd character as annoying as he appears to be
- Do we get a little less (CW for regular Dandadan stuff) Momo being put in sexual danger scenarios? There was another pretty nasty one in the Kito family arc that honestly just felt kinda lazy, like it’s becoming a storytelling crutch.
After finishing that I read the last three volumes of Delicious in Dungeon that I’d been putting off for a while. Unfortunately it picked up where I left it: not really carrying the momentum the series had earlier on. I felt like the series was much stronger at the beginning when there was a tighter focus on the group, the cooking, and their main goal of getting Falin back. It started to lose me as the story opened up more and they kept introducing new characters and higher stakes. By the end the whole thing is getting really metaphysical and allegorical but they keep the food theme going so everything has to be related to eating. It starts to make very little sense and it feels like the concept is being stretched too thin. I preferred when it was more focused.
Pretty disappointed that I keep reading these series that are so strong for half or 2/3rds of the series and then unravel into unsatisfying latter stages. Dorohedoro was the last one I felt like this about which was so disappointing because I absolutely adored it for quite a while.
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Okay so I did some light research to figure out where the tankobons are at right now in English. There is really definite forward momentum wrt your question, but they kind of then complicate it.
There’s an arc I think two after this that is along some of the best work the manga has done.
Kinta gets better and also just isn’t that prominent, and the two new characters coming are excellent.
It just wrapped a really really interesting arc with one of its’ best flashbacks yet. I would say there really isn’t that much goofy momo sa stuff but I could be misremembering.
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First, I would say if you don’t love the manga right now you might not love it going forward, but if you liked the first 1/3 or whatever, things very much swing back that direction. That said, if you didn’t like dorohedoro after a while my words may mean less because I liked that one allllllll the way through. Frankly even more toward the end as it tied together threads I didn’t even know were there.
To point 1 The confession between okarun and momo for sure happens though it gets “interrupted” and has to be done properly later but it does happen.
Kinta is a pointless character who remains annoying, not sure why he got included at all frankly. He gets rather sidelined overall because it didn’t really even feel like the creators wanted him there? Odd. He’s really shoe horned in after they tried to give him a bit of an arc.
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Oh I am really really into it still, been having a blast! I’m very excited to keep reading it because genuinely the cast is the best I’ve seen in forever and the art is staggering.
Thank you both for answering my questions, they’ve made me more confident in continuing! Volume 10 is coming out in a couple weeks and then maybe I’ll switch to chapters on the SJ service.
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I don’t usually like even an indication of a harem situation in these but what makes this work for me is at no time do I ever believe okarun likes anyone else, nor that momo does. If they ever changed that up I’d probably stop reading altogether!
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One of my absolute favourite musicians working in the ambient space is Lawrence English. I stumbled across an interview he did with Quietus about his early interaction with nerd culture growing up in Australia in the 80s, and how it led to the creation of his album Approach:
Approach is inspired by Yoshihisa Tagami’s post-apocalyptic manga Grey, a fairly early Viz manga from 1988 published as 9 square-bound issues. Other Yoshihisa Tagami was later published as regular floppies by Dark Horse that I’ve seen pop up in antique malls.
Photo isn’t mine, it’s from the eBay listing I bought. It’s currently sitting in the void that is the Canada Post strike but I’m really looking forward to this one.
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