Cannonball Read 14

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Tag: manga

Good side fight and breaking the fourth wall

Fire Force vol 26 by Atsushi Ohkubo

by Leave a Comment

It’s pretty rare for a manga volume to focus on a side character and be this good; I actually didn’t miss Company 8, Shinra, etc. all that much. Then again, the backstory and fight focus on Benimaru is interesting enough but also kind of predictable way to get to know a little more about one of my favorite characters in the series. There’s actually just a little character growth shown, although again, not much of it all that surprising. The one thing I’d like to […]

Two Very Different But Sweet Autobiographical Manga

The Bride Was A Boy by Chii

Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu by Junji Ito

by Leave a Comment

The breadth of non-fiction manga is on full display between these two very different books! The Bride was a Boy is a memoir about a trans woman’s experience falling in love and getting married. It’s also a basic primer on what being transgender is like  and a good overview on the Japanese government’s policies on trans people. I know there are enormous problems in the US right now vis a vis trans rights, which terrifies me every day as a trans person, but I’m always glad we […]

Two Different Viewpoints on Queer Life in Japan

I Want to be a Wall (Vol.1) by Honami Shirono

X-Gender (Vol.1) by Asuka Miyazaki

by Leave a Comment

I’m very much enjoying the wider variety of manga that’s being translated now, especially the autobiographical and LGBT+ books. These two volumes are a combination of both and I enjoyed them for different reasons. I Want to be a Wall is about an asexual woman and a gay man getting married, seemingly due to societal or family pressures. No one knows that their marriage isn’t straight but them, and the book follows them settling into married life and getting to know each other more. Their […]

Something old and something new

Drrr!! SH x1 by Ryohgo Narita, Suzuhito Yasuda

by Leave a Comment

I’ve been away from the Drrr!! series for a little while; I honestly thought it was over. Apparently, the novels at least keep going and I just found the first one of the next sequence of the story. The original premise is still kind of there, but with some tweaks: there’s a series of interconnected characters in this one Tokyo neighborhood and mysterious goings on (some disappearances) that may or may not be supernatural. There is one character who is not human, although Celty the […]

The value of female friends over boys wins for once

Komi Can't Communicate, vol. 17 by Tomohito Oda

by Leave a Comment

Komi Can’t Communicate is mostly a cozy manga series about high school kids and friendship. It’s reasonably predictable with no real disasters and some occasional comic moments. The protagonist Komi is the class beauty but she’s got social anxiety to the point where it’s difficult for her to speak to anyone in public, but this is taken by most people as ‘cool’. Tadano is the totally average guy who seems to understand Komi and decides to help her work on her anxiety and make friends. […]

If the formula works, might as well use it

Jujutsu Kaisen, vols. 0-12 by Gege Akutami

by Leave a Comment

I’ve been seeing comments about the anime for Jujustsu Kaisen is the best thing ever this year, so when I saw almost the first 12 books in the manga series at the library, I decided to try it out. As it turns out the whole thing is relatively formulaic (enough that missing volumes 3, 4, and 11 didn’t seem to matter a whole lot) but still has enough personality to be interesting. The basic gist is that Yuji Itadori who has just lost his grandfather […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo