Giant Spider & Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale Vol 1 (2016)

Nagi is a 12-year-old orphaned girl living on her own in a cottage in the woods. In the valley below a massive city has been flooded and deserted before she was even born. Surrounding her is what is left of humanity, huddled together in isolated villages. One day, while foraging for food, Nagi stumbles upon a two-metre-long spider. She names it Asa, and it follows her home.

Giant Spider & Me is a 2016 manga by writer/artist Kikori Morino, whose first volume has just been published in English by Seven Seas Entertainment (translation by Adrienne Beck). It's a wonderful new series with a very simple and traditional manga style, and a surprisingly bright and heartwarming tone. It's also one of the more original concepts for a manga I have noticed of late. Japan is well renowned for its comparatively unusual story concepts, but a 12-year-old making friends with a giant spider is one of the stranger ones. It certainly makes for a book that readers are unlikely to forget in a hurry: arachnophobes potentially need not apply.

Bride's Story Volume 1 (2008)

In the late 19th century, a 20 year-old woman named Amir has been pushed into an arranged marriage with a nearby family along the edge of the Caspian Sea. Placed into a new community with a distinctively different culture to her own, Amir must adjust not only to a new lifestyle but to her new husband Karluk - who is only twelve years old.

Bride's Story is a historical romance manga written and illustrated by the noted manga creator Kaoru Mori. It started in 2008 and has run through eight volumes to date. In 2014 the series was awarded the prestigious Manga Taisho award, after running second back in 2011. Going by its first volume it is a remarkable work, not just in terms of its strong character writing and warm-heated tone but also in terms of its exceptional art, and the careful and honest manner in which it approaches the rather unorthodox and worrying arranged marriage at its centre. There is some discomfort in recommending people read a manga about an adult marrying a child, but Kaoru Mori has done a fantastic job with this. It is one of the most entertaining manga series I have read in some time.

Tatsumi (2011)

Tatsumi is a wonderful oddity. It's an animated film, made in Singapore and Indonesia in 2011, although it's performed entirely in Japanese. Part of it is an animated documentary on the life of noted manga writer/artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, narrated by the artist himself. That documentary, however, is regularly interrupted by a series of five animated short films based on his works. The result is a strange project that straddles a line between fiction and fact, or drama and documentary. It feels unique, and due to its unusual format it presents a more wholly rounded and insightful look at an artist's life and works than a more traditional documentary could ever achieve.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi is the noted creator of 'gekiga', a specific form of mature-readers manga that he developed in order to separate his works from the more popular, child-friendly stuff getting sold at newsstands around Japan. His gekiga became enormously successful, and he was instrumental in expanding the medium into new genres and readerships. His works have a specific melancholic and rather bleak tone, and that tone is all through Tatsumi, which is both a respectful documentary and faithful adaptation.

Red Snow, by Susumu Katsumata (2006)

The tone flows from sweet to mournful and back again in Red Snow, a beautifully packaged collection of manga short stories by writer/artist Susumu Katsumata. I borrowed this book from a library on a whim, having no prior knowledge of Katsumata's work, and was pleasantly surprised.

The stories follow a genre known as 'gekiga', of which I was not previously aware. Its name literally translates as 'dramatic pictures', and was an artistic movement founded in the 1950s to distinguish its works from the more all-ages, child-friendly manga being created by Osamu Tezuka and the like. While the artwork is simple, the stories are complex and mature. It presents characters full of sadness or regret, with more realistic or adult problems. In the case of Red Snow there's a share of sexual themes as well - I have no idea if this is a common component of gekiga.

The stories are united in their pre-industrial rural setting. It eschews typical Japanese period drama by ignoring samurai and higher classes, focusing instead on the lives of countryside farmers and dirt-poor townspeople. The book's use of folklore and fantasy is extensive, although by no means overwhelming; it's almost as if the supernatural is simply as much a part of the natural world as everyday life.

New Lone Wolf and Cub Volume 1 (2014)

Lone Wolf and Cub is one of the most popular and influential manga of all time. It ran for seven years from 1970 to 1976, and told the story of disgraced samurai Ogami Itto who - after being betrayed and disgraced - travels Japan with his three year-old son Daigoro in lengthy and meticulously planned quest for revenge. It is an epic samurai drama that was collected into 28 volumes. The final sword fight alone runs for almost 180 pages. By the end Ogami lies dead, and it is his son who strikes the final blow against the antagonist Yagyu Retsudo. That's where the story ended, until writer Kazuo Koike returned in 2004 to write an unexpected follow-up. As the original artist Gozeki Kojima had died, this new series has been illustrated by Hideki Mori (Bokko).

I'm not sure why it's taken a decade for New Lone Wolf and Cub to be published in English. Certainly it took until 2000 for Dark Horse to properly release the original series, so I suppose we were pretty far behind to begin with. Late or not, I'm glad that Dark Horse are now publishing the new series, because it's incredibly good.

Ping Pong (2002)

Ping Pong is an oddity. It is a teen comedy about a table tennis championship, based on the popular manga by Taiyo Matsumoto. It has a strange, off-kilter tone. Its table tennis matches are shot like The Matrix. It is without question unlike any sports-based movie I have ever seen, and it is all the better for it. I’m not sure how many table tennis movies are out there, but I’m reasonable comfortable in asserting Ping Pong is one the best that’s been made.

Best friends Pico (Kubozuka) and Smile (Arata) are both members of a high school table tennis club, whose lives get thrown into disarray by the arrival of a new player at the school – one who is vastly more talented at the game than Pico, and whose presence challenges Smile to stop coasting through life and to start making a difference.

The first thing to commend is just how freakishly accurate the film’s cast are to their manga counterparts. Ping Pong is perfectly cast, with each character visually corresponding precisely to how they look on the page. I don’t think there’s ever been a comic-to-film adaptation with such fidelity.

Maoh: Juvenile Remix (2007)

In Maoh: Juvenile Remix, high schooler Ando struggles with the possibility that he may have psychic powers; a telepathic ability to force other people to say whatever he wants them to. Meanwhile, a group of local vigilantes are spreading across town, led by Inukai - a charismatic cult leader who may be planning more for the town than he appears to be.

Maoh: Juvenile Remix is a supernatural-themed manga by Megumi Osuga, based on a novel by Kotaro Isaka. It was originally serialised in Shonen Sunday from 2007 to 2009 before being collected into English language editions by Viz Media.

It's a largely entertaining, yet troublesome, read. As a result I'm not entirely certain what I think of it.