Currently reading
Posted: Sat Jan 14, 2017 6:07 am
I saw that Six Half, a manga I checked out a while ago, was picked up by a new scanlation group after a 2-year wait... and then I poked around a bit and saw that a French publisher actually sells the series. So I reread and caught up with scanlation to recall what the series is about, since I mostly only remember liking it, but not what I liked about it.
Anyway I'm definitely going to buy the French volumes now, and am now poking around some more to see what else the mangaka has created. I like that they draw high school shoujo series without making the protagonist endearing (well, at least the two series that I've read), and that there's an honest ugliness to the protagonist's thoughts as those girls and young women try to figure out themselves. Six Half in particular focuses much more on family and identity than on romance.
Oh, and I tweeted about this a few days ago: Sophia recommended Please Love the Useless Me to me (by the mangaka behind Lovely Complex) by feeding me this excellent essay haha. There's a lot of strength, kindness and validation in its narrative (josei manga in general)... Honestly, its kindness reminds me of Yuri on Ice's kindness in that certain side characters are integrated into the story and allowed to pick themselves up after crashing - the kind of side characters that'd be written out of the narrative in other manga once the respective conflict is over. Going to pick up the French publications of this too, since there's no English or German release.