Suggestions For "Literary Art" Manga?

[Tanakh]

1) Junji Ito's works, if that is your cup of tea.
2) Cesare (by Souryo Fuyumi)
3) Liar Game
4) Team Medical Dragon
5) Doubt (by Tonogai Yoshiki)
6) Hikaru no Go
7) Bartender (by Joh Araki)

The rest of Ito's good, but not quite as good as uzumaki for me. For an amazing shonen/horror Dororo can't fail.

Cesare.. i tried to read one chapter, couldn't get past the Shōjo look.

The psicological ones, Doubt, Liar. I like em, but for some reason enjoy those kinds of plots more as a subplot, like in One Outs and Last Inning.

Hikaru no Go it's a fantastic shonen, but i tried to kept myself away from reccomending shonen manga because he will eventually read those anyway. It is a good example of a manga that works much better printed than animated though.

BTW, there is this manga about a manga reading club, slice of life, really good... damn, can't remember the name, anyone? Probably not a good introduction to mangas though, wayyy too geeky.

Well One Piece isn't over but it's not running for the sake of it self.

One piece is among the best shonen's ever, it is indeed an amazing work that ranks with the best of Toriyama and Tezuka's shonen work. But it's not that easy to see the "literay art" of it, altough it's the closest work that i have read to Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais.

 

[WaruTaru]

BTW, there is this manga about a manga reading club, slice of life, really good... damn, can't remember the name, anyone? Probably not a good introduction to mangas though, wayyy too geeky.

If the manga reading club involves anime discussion, annual trips to comifes, drawing actual manga and cosplay, you're probably thinking of Genshiken.

 

[Tanakh]

If the manga reading club involves anime discussion, annual trips to comifes, drawing actual manga and cosplay, you're probably thinking of Genshiken.

This is the one. Lovely stuff, was one of the mangas i read in a couple of days so memory is fuzzy about it, but as a manga addict it had great moments.

And the cosplay, drool...

 

[Queen Michael]

Oh, and let's not forget the manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi. His gekiga manga is great. Get "The Push Man and other stories" and read it. It's amazing, and most likely unlike any other manga you've ever read.

 

[Tanakh]

Oh, and let's not forget the manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi. His gekiga manga is great. Get "The Push Man and other stories" and read it. It's amazing, and most likely unlike any other manga you've ever read.

Wouldn't know about that one, but A Drifting Life is quite amazing. Talking about that, anything that has won the Tezuka award is certanly worth reading.

 

[SckizoBoy]

The best and most well-known example I can think of is Death Note... any suggestions for manga that isn't just running for the sake of itself, but is a complete, well-crafted work of literature/art? Something with a moving, well paced story that doesn't just degenerate into a stereotypical battle manga after five or six chapters.

Good examples: Heart no Kuni no Alice, Full Metal Alchemist (arguably), The Breaker (arguably)

Bad examples: Deadman Wonderland (GREAT for the first five chapters), Alive: The Final Evolution, The Breaker: New Waves (sellout)

Nnnnn... it depends on one's definition of 'literary art', 'cos the snobbish definition necessarily negates the inclusion of virtually everything you've mentioned... plus, it is too prone to the prejudices of the reader. I'd say that Aria is 'literary art', but other manga readers and critics alike would tell me I'm a fucking ponce.

Unfortunately, while I agree that the first seven volumes of Death Note are damned good, it isn't 'literary art' in the traditional sense because it is far too cerebral, but not sufficiently emotive, unlike, say Orudo-homu no Haibane-tachi. And under the precepts that you've intimated, I wonder why FMA is 'arguable'...

Still, my list:

Nodame no Cantabile
Gunslinger Girl
Aria/Aqua
The Grey Feathers of Old Home
Hourou Musuko

... sure there are more, but I'm not reading much manga these days...

 

[Queen Michael]

Oh, and let's not forget the manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi. His gekiga manga is great. Get "The Push Man and other stories" and read it. It's amazing, and most likely unlike any other manga you've ever read.

Wouldn't know about that one, but A Drifting Life is quite amazing. Talking about that, anything that has won the Tezuka award is certanly worth reading.

I agree on both counts.

Faurthermore, the manga of est em [sic] is great. Please don't be scared off by the fact that it's yaoi; it's well-written stories that just happen to be about men in love.

The manga of Natsume Ono is definitely what I would call "literary" as well. Try not simple [sic], it's a good one.

 

[Tanakh]

Faurthermore, the manga of est em [sic] is great. Please don't be scared off by the fact that it's yaoi; it's well-written stories that just happen to be about men in love.

If Loveless is any mark, then the yaoi mangas seem quite good. Still i can't seem to get into them, but at the very least they have entertained me much more than the shojo or harem mangas. Hopefully est em might try to do some less niche work, we'll see.

 

[BishopofAges]

Honestly, I liked One Piece for its story, and the fact that some of the most obscure background character looks like he has some thought put into it.

I have read some like Sankarea or Franken Fran (spelling could be off) that are well written, though sometimes episodic, but it works for character progression. (I do warn, both examples include a good deal of nudity and sometimes gore.)

Some of this has skewed towards artful and well written anime as well, to which I would include Ghost in the Shell just for the interesting differences between movies/series.

 

[Smertnik]

Well, in case you're just looking for quality seinen stuff with some action going on, then here're some (surprisingly) yet unmentioned works:

Parasyte (my all-time favourite manga - great action, really interesting characters and a crisp story with the right length. - It's about a guy whose arm gets infested with a parasite-like alien who through various circumstances ends up fighting against some of the other parasites who started living among the humans. Sounds cheesy but it's not.)

Monster (probably the one I'd consider "Literary art" - A surgeon saves a kid from a fatal wound who ends up becoming a murderer. When the surgeon finds out he decides to pursue and kill the guy to "undo" the fact that he saved him)

20th Century Boys (the quality of the story is debatable - the writing is certainly great, as it's from Urasawa as well, but the manga drags on noticeably on multiple occasions and the ending could have been much better. Still definitely worth reading, though. I won't bother describing the story as it's pretty complicated.)

Akumetsu (possibly the least sophisticated of the bunch. Lots of action and elaborate discussions of politics - Not much to say about the story without spoiling but basically it's about a guy killing off "bad" politicians by suiciding along with them in a spectacular way)

 

[Queen Michael]

Faurthermore, the manga of est em [sic] is great. Please don't be scared off by the fact that it's yaoi; it's well-written stories that just happen to be about men in love.

If Loveless is any mark, then the yaoi mangas seem quite good. Still i can't seem to get into them, but at the very least they have entertained me much more than the shojo or harem mangas. Hopefully est em might try to do some less niche work, we'll see.

est em's mangas is nothing like Loveless (which I found boring, but more power to you if you liked it). They're realistic (as opposed to fantasy and sf) dramas.

Oh, and another manga that suits this category is Eagle. It's a story of an Asian-American trying to become president. A reporter doing a story on him is the protagonist. Very, very good. And it's one of those mangas where they behave like real people and not like comic book characters, which I always took as a reliable sign of whether a manga is serious or not. Though it has no connection at all to whether it's good or not.