I was inspired by the many folk here who decided to challenge themselves by reading so many books in 2013, but added my own little twist to it since I won't be able to read many books this year (though I've already finished one *cough*). I'm aiming for 50 manga series, and of course they'll have to be read completely, doesn't matter if they're oneshots or 10-volume series. And to make this extra difficult, I won't be counting re-reads~ You'll probably see a lot of yaoi in this list from now on *coughhack*, but I'll try and keep the raunchier ones off the page (of course, I can not leave them out if you want XD) or at least flag them as such. I hope to write more reviews as well!
Feel free to join in on the manga reading!~ And if you want to try this, you can change the number of series if you think 50 is too much or too little for you (honestly, I'll probably update it myself to something like 100 by June XD)
Onwards ho!
1. Tomie by Junji Ito (finished on the 12th of February)
It was pretty good; some chapters were very creepy but it never went full-blown terrifying for me (though I suppose that depends on everyone's horror threshold). The art is clean and very explicit where gore is concerned; most of the attention goes towards Tomie herself, which makes the other characters look somewhat bland in comparison (on purpose). The chapters are mostly individual stories but there are a few two or three-parters so I'd recommend reading them in order. Definitely recommended if you're a horror fan!
2. Kusuriyubi Hime by Satoru Takamiya (finished on the 17th of February) -- read here
Shoujo! Although the characters are drawn in that doe-eyed shoujo style, the artist went easy on the sparkles, so the art is fairly clean (and there are a lot of chibis!). As for the story, it's pretty standard fare - love triangle where one of the boys is normal and the other of supernatural origin, though things get interesting towards the end, which is kind of rushed but nonetheless a good conclusion to the story. Unfortunately, not much time is spent developing the characters, which makes them seem stereotypical; the least one-dimensional is the heroine, Hinaki, and even then she's the Hard-Headed Girl. I did appreciate her biting comments towards her dense friend Yume, though, pleasant change from the normal shoujo dialogue. Overall, it was better than most shoujo I've read but not that great; recommended if you want to read about a heroine who doesn't whine (almost) all the time and isn't as sickeningly sweet as the rest.
