Autobiographical work by Tezuka of the post-war years, would love to get a look at it!

Previous uploads: This, etc

An old collection of silly short pieces from Hisashi Eguchi. Appears to be out there in the P2P ether.

Previous uploads: This, for one

Stopper Busujima
By Harold Sakuishi

Man, remember this manga? It's still great. I'll take this over The Seven Shakespeares any day.

A professional baseball manga by Harold Sakuishi, the author of Beck.

Taiko Busujima is a powerful young pitcher looking to make it into the Japanese big leagues, but what he didn't count on was being signed to the Keihin Athletics, the cheapest and worst team in the league. Can he help turn the Athletics around and (gasp) win the pennant?

A gripping, edge-of-your-seat story loaded with Sakuishi's brand of wacky humor.

24 no Hitomi
By Kei Kurashima

An episodic comedy manga about a junior high school teacher who loves to stir up trouble through her pathological lying. It's a solid (if basic) manzai comedy, recommended for fans of Zetsubou-sensei in particular (it must be admitted that it can't actually top Zetsubou-sensei, though; Kouji Kumeta is inimitable).

Torokeru Tekkoujo
By Munehiro Nomura

Somehow this doesn't appear to have been uploaded here yet, despite having become something of an unexpected hit since the first two volumes came out a couple of years ago. Before getting into the manga biz, the artist behind this manga used to work at an iron factory, and he decided to wring that experience dry in order to produce this break-out hit about an iron factory in Hiroshima. Chapters are very short (4 pages) and extremely dense with trivia about what goes on in the factory workers' lives (both in and out of the factory), and the art is quite stylized and pretty much adorable.

Samehada Otoko to Momojiri Onna
By Minetarou Mochizuki

Some people will already be familiar with this one, I think, from the movie that was based on it. It's a one-volume deal, with a simple story: a badass mafioso decides to betray his organization, taking a big ol' briefcase full of its money and running off with it. The betrayed yakuza group naturally proceeds to hunt him down, get the money back and kill him. Along the way, he bumps into a girl who is living a rather miserable life out in the woods, working at a hotel under her lecherous uncle, and she gets mixed up into the whole thing. Naturally, the girl is smoking hot once you take off her glasses and let down her hair. This book was clearly drawn as a tribute to a certain kind of movie, although I don't really get to see enough movies to be able to give any examples. Reminds me a lot of Denis Johnson's recent novel (novella?) Nobody Move.

A fun ride.


Checked by Strey. Link is dead. This Shark went like jaws, except without the explosion.

Kangaeru Samurai / Yaa!
By Yoshihiro Yamada

Before he achieved popularity with Decathlon, Yoshihiro Yamada drew a bunch of shorter manga. This book contains two of those manga, plus a bonus one-shot. This is probably one of those books that only I and a handful of Yamada fans will ever love, but I'll post it here anyway.

The first story in here is called "Kangaeru Samurai", or in English, "The Thinking Samurai". In a lot of ways, he's a typical enough samurai, doing all the cliche samurai stuff, with a twist: He tends to look at the world through a philosophical lens. He references Socrates while cutting a man in two. He banters with a would-be assassin about the French revolution. He's totally badass.

The second story is called "Yaa!", and it tells the story of an office full of rather colorful employees. One acts according to some sort of office bushido, repeatedly offering to commit ritual suicide in order to atone for some small mistake; another is deeply depressed, incapable of laughter, and considering suicide. And then there's the man who they both, in a way, fall in love with...

Gunmania
By Kouta Hirano

You may recall that the artist behind Hellsing recently started a new series called Assassine, featuring a character named Eiji Bandou, a delightfully psychopathic gun-for-hire. Well, it turns out he had already run a few one-shot stories about Bandou ten years ago, under the title Gunmania. These chapters are to Assassine as Crossfire was to Hellsing, I guess.

Nanika Mochigattemasu Ka
By Mohiro Kitou



From the man behind Narutaru and Bokurano, a story about a boy with a strange power and the responsibilities that come with it. (I can't really say much else without spoiling the story.)


Checked by Strey. All links dead. MU, abiit ad maiores.

Assassine
by Kohta Hirano

A new manga by the dude who brought us Hellsing and Drifters -- if you like those two series, this should be a no-brainer for you. Basically, it's about a bunch of organized crime bosses pitting assassins against each other and betting on who kills who first. It's just getting started, so I can't say much beyond that. It's clearly more of a side project for Hirano compared to Drifters, but it's still guaranteed to be a fun ride for however long it lasts. Now's the time to hop on the bandwagon, folks.



Let's do this thang.

Koukou Kyuuji Zawa-san ('Zawa-san the High School Baseball Player')
By Eriko Mishima



A new series by a new author. It follows a girl ('Zawa', short for her surname, Miyakozawa) in a high school baseball team who's sort of in a position similar to Aoba in Cross Game -- she's talented, but being a girl, she doesn't get to participate in any official matches, and yet she trains just as hard as the rest of the team anyway, just for her own personal satisfaction. However, whereas Adachi tends to tackle Aoba's plight with low-key drama, Zawa-san is instead aimed as a low-key, slice-of-life comedy. Chapters are very short -- I think the longest one in the first volume is 11 pages -- and are frequently done from the perspective of some passer-by/s interacting with or even just watching and contemplating to themselves about Zawa and/or the rest of the baseball team. With any luck, scans of the second volume, which is already out in Japan, will surface in due time -- I know I for one am looking forward to it after this first volume, anyway.

Tantei Kitan
By Masakazu Ishiguro



An anthology of shorts done by the author of Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru. See also Present for Me, another Ishiguro anthology from the same year.

Shuukan Ishikawa Masayuki ("Weekly Masayuki Ishikawa)
By Masayuki Ishikawa



Eleven comic shorts by the author of Moyashimon.

Tamaki Toyohiko-kun Satsujin-jiken
by Akira Sasou



A collection of short comedy pieces by the award-winning author of Shindou, most of which feature murder of some sort.