A Piece on Manga (part 2)

click to read part 1

What you should know if you’re going to read a manga:
A LOT of them are on the wonderful World Wide Web. The sites I would recommend are Onemanga (I think this is the better of the two) and Manga Fox (a lot of advertising but sometimes more to choose from).

I can’t really recommend manga without having a little bit of an idea as to what a person is looking for/ enjoys. But here are some genre pointers for beginners…..
Girly stuff = shoujo
Guy stuff = shonen
This feels really sexist now… I’m not saying that only girls will like one and boys the other… they’re just good starting points and once you know what you’re looking for things become a lot easier.

Ok –I’ll give a small list of recommendations:
Ouran High School Host Club
Fruits Basket
Fullmetal Alchemist
School Rumble
Deathnote
Ghost Hunt
Beautypop
Minami-ke
Vampire Knight (which came BEFORE the “twilight vampire” craze)
Kaze no Stigma
Full Moon
Soul Eater
The Gentleman’s Alliance
Shugo Chara
Toradora
Special A
Macross Frontier
Inuyasha
Chrono crusade (sometimes chrno crusade)
Fullmetal Panic!
Durarara
Skip Beat
Shakugan no Shana
Kimi ni Todoke
Rurouni Kenshin
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
Lucky star

When deciding whether or not to read a certain manga and no description/ indication of genre is present, I recommend you wiki it and just check what the genre might be.
Also if you like a certain artstyle or plot line, try searching the manga by artist. BUT don’t judge a manga by its artstyle! (At first I hated the Soul Eater artstyle but later forgot about it because I loved the story anyway!)

***MANGA IS READ RIGHT TO LEFT*** this is the traditional way it was designed to be read. It takes practice but before long it becomes easy! Sometimes publishers will try and reverse a manga back the other way for Western readers, so keep an eye out. If a manga is making more sense when read left to right it might be one of the reversed ones!

Actually I’ve just found a page by Madman (one of Australia’s biggest manga/anime distributors) that will probably clarify or explain anything I’ve left out! click here

Good luck and happy reading to anyone who wants to give Manga a go!