Essentially my version of Scott’s post here.

Sometimes I forget I’m a manga blogger amidst all the anime, but I do read quite a bit of it. I just like to turn my brain off to it a lot and since it’s easy to burn through, you see me update my list a lot but then not talk about it…probably a habit from my days where only physical volumes were available. These days, ebooks and digital releases, some of them at no cost to the publisher and close to or outright simultaneous releases, have made it really easy to read new manga.

At my craziest (as in, without focussing on anything else for a while), I can burn through almost 60 chapters a day – 56 chapters is the record I’ve set with Princess, ‘Tis Time for Torture and I don’t think I’ll equal it any time soon.

I don’t have a “set manga day”, because I’m used to erratically getting a bunch of chapters at once. In a sense, every day is manga day but it doesn’t have to be.

Some of my favourite manga right now, and where you can read them, are:

Note: Viz may not be available in your region. In that case, try Manga Plus.

Heart Gear

(from Manga Plus, on hiatus)

You’ve seen me talk up this series here before. It’s a mixture of battle shonen and discussion of what it means to be human in a post-apocalypse where mostly robots exist, with Tsuyoshi Takaki’s cool brush-like artwork to go with it – you’ll be familiar with what that means if you’ve read – or even just set eyes on – Black Torch. The fact I’m still waiting for this series, despite its hiatus, is a testament to how good I think it is.

Spy x Family

(from Viz, previously from Manga Plus, biweekly release)

A genre chameleon which can jump from kick-butt to comedy to thriller to sweet romance in very short spans of time. Spy x Family is being talked up lately and for good reason – it’s been nominated for several manga awards and appeals to basically everyone.

Kaiju No. 8

(from Viz, previously from Manga Plus, three weeks’ release then one week’s hiatus involving a “Kaiju Showcase” – lather, rinse, repeat)

This one was on Scott’s post and I talked about it in terms of differing translations here. Aside from its older protagonist, this one mostly delivers action spectacle as per its Shonen Jump Plus roots, but it does it well.

Hakaishin Magu-chan

(from Viz)

Also on Scott’s post under its English name, Magu-chan, God of Destruction, and it’s something even a hotpot can like. A cute, sometimes heartwarming comedy about the title character and his “conquest” (read: getting sentient things to write their names in his friendship diary). Also, there are lots of explosions. Looooooooooots of explosions.

I tend to like weird things when it comes to cute stuff, so I’ve become quite attached to Naputaaku’s hermit crabs and Uneras’s pigeon in recent chapters (but maybe the former is possibly due to the fact I like to play the song Crab Rave when I think about crabs…).

Shakunetsu no Nirai Kanai (Hard-boiled Cop and Dolphin)

(from Viz)

A manga which reminds me of Hinamatsuri in how it can address societal issues but also lean heavily into its absurdity, sometimes simultaneously. Despite this, it’s from the guy who did Beelzebub, Ryuhei Tamura.

The English title says it all – there’s a guy called Boyle Samejima (geddit?) who works as a cop in Shinjuku. He gets relocated to Okinawa, only to find his partner is…a dolphin? The dolphin’s surrogate daughter is hailed as a god by a cult? There are sea gangsters, brought to life by said surrogate daughter Chako’s powers?

…Okay, I admit it’s got quite a bit going on there, but you never know what you’re going to get for any given week and that’s part of what makes it so fun. (If it didn’t have boob jokes, it would be perfect…)

Hypnosis Mic: Division Rap Battle – side DH & BAT

(from Magazine Pocket, Japanese-only – may require real money/use of app’s gacha system – releases weekly on Fridays in Japan)

Considering there’s several Hypnosis Mic manga running concurrently at any one time (including a new batch starting in the next few months and the tankobon releases occasionally come with extra goodies, most notably new drama tracks/songs)…there’s a reason why I don’t shut up about this series. This one’s special because I started reading it the day it came out in Japan and there’s a bunch of new developments not seen in any other parts of the series.

Recently, I discovered Bookwalker sells Japanese-language tankobon on the cheap as e-books. They even had a booklet which was bundled with one of the FP & M releases…obviously, you can’t get drama tracks or songs this way, but nonetheless…goodbye, money. It was nice knowing you.

Note: Tankobon is a term for the standard manga volume, as opposed to magazines.

Rokuhoudou Yotsuiro Biyori

(from Comic Bunch, Japanese-only, monthly schedule on Wednesdays)

To wrap this post up, there’s this (which is not weekly, hence the weird addition to the post title). Only the first 3 and latest 3 chapters are available, a la Viz, but one chapter appeared in its entirety on Twitter. If you’ve seen the anime, you know how it’s a chill slice of life with nice cats, nice bois and nice food and that hasn’t changed, even now, but it also digs into the backstories of characters more. I was pretty shocked to find this series hasn’t really changed since its inception, as it has predecessors with the same general characters and premise called Kanbi Danshi and Kanbi Danshi Sabou.

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This only covers digital releases (or physical releases which also have a digital release) because they’re easier to access. There’s several where I’ve lost track of the release schedule (*erhem* Shinchou Yuusha *erhem*) or have been held back by the Magazine Pocket gacha system – because tickets can only be used up to a certain point for every series and then it’s points-only after that.

So what series are you reading currently? I read a lot of the Weekly Shonen Jump/Shonen Jump + series, as you can tell from this post (Jigokuraku is almost done and has been for a while now), but also a bunch of other stuff.