The haul, and another Stupid Signs update

[snarp]

I bought some manga, and requested some manga off ILL, and also bought some other manga.



It's important for my senior research. It is.

(The astute viewer, who decides to go into Flickr and zoom in for some reason, will note that I have been puzzling the Quebecois again - I had to order the Pokemon and Princess Knight in French. These are some of the ones I actually seriously needed for research, which makes Sensei unhappy because he's having to take my word on what they say.

Anyway, I didn't realize Misty's French name was "Ondine." That's pretty cool. I am, however, far less enthusiastic about Gary being "Regis.")

Also, apparently the signs were, in fact, the work of a fraternity - it was apparently supposed to stay secret even after the meeting, but someone told Link. I mentioned the subject to him last night, and he admitted he knew, but claimed the only hint he would give me was that the organization started with an "f."

He then immediately caved under the intense pressure of me deciding he was talking about FLAG.

Comments

[avari-elf.livejournal.com]

Ondine is a cool name. It's pretty and delicate, but then you get to thinking about the fact that these ladies liked to pull hapless men into rivers to drown them, and it brings a whole new dimension to it...

I tried reading some mangas once, but I never could get into it. Do you have any recs for beginners? (I don't like overly-sentimental or violent stuff)

[snarp]

Misty sounds to me like an 80's girl who uses too much hair spray. I thus must side with the wicked nymphs.

*looks at manga shelf* Uh. (I may not be the person to ask for non-violent and non-gooshy...) Okay, I will try not to get too long-winded on my semi-standard recommendation schpiel - feel free to roll your eyes and walk away at any time:

I remember from GAFF that you're a serious Tolkien person, so I am honor-bound to recommend Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, by Hayao Miyazaki. It's really good epic fantasy that doesn't make you want to strangle the person with the Great Destiny. It's not exactly a gateway drug into other manga, though, since the art style's extremely Western.

Fullmetal Alchemist, by Hiromu Arakawa, is surprisingly really good, in spite of how popular it is. There is violence, but it's not the kind where the characters are enjoying themselves way too much, and it's not constant. It's a sort-of-gaslamp-style fantasy with very clean art that's not gorgeous, but also isn't going to annoy you if you're not used to crazy manga panels.

Monster, by Naoki Urasawa, gets basically the same disclaimer as Fullmetal Alchemist - there's violence, but it's not gratuitous, and again, the art's not "manga-y" in ways that would distract new people. It's about a young surgeon who saves a little boy's life against his superiors' orders. The superiors are murdered not long after, and years later the surgeon learns that the boy was the killer.

And I'm reluctant to recommend much else, because most of what I can think of that might fit your specifications has art that takes a lot of getting used to - the stuff above is all roughly classified as shounen ("boys'") manga, which tends to be more violent than shoujo ("girls'") manga, but doesn't go in as much for the kind of complicated page-design that tends to scare people away.

(If you feel adventurous about that (and about big huge anime eyes), Revolutionary Girl Utena, by Be-Papas and Chiho Saito, and Nana, by Ai Yazawa, are really good. Utena is about a cross-dressing girl who gets in very pretty sword-fights, and Nana is about two girls who have Adventures in Art and Alcohol in Tokyo. (You will actually not look like a total dork reading Nana in public, that being something I cannot properly say about anything else on the list.))

...and there is my list, I think. And I believe I will now pirate some of these plot summaries to send to my academic advisers, who have cruelly demanded synopses of everything in my senior research bibliography.