A light topic today.
Sometime after I became an adult, I started losing the ability to keep up with the vibe of shonen manga — especially action.
Demon Slayer, which blew up a few years ago, and more recent hits like Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man — I read a few volumes of each and then stopped.
Even in the climax of Attack on Titan, with those huge-scale titan battles, I ended up thinking something like, "The scale's so huge I don't even get it anymore...!" (Chiikawa energy), and scenes that once would have thrilled me just didn't land.
People recommend JoJo all the time as insanely fun, and I've tried it several times, but it was tough.
These manga are popular for a reason — they're clearly good — but I just can't bring the heat to reading them anymore.
It's the same logic as yakiniku: kalbi is delicious, but the oil gets too heavy and you can't eat anymore.
Looking back, being able to keep eating kalbi near the end of a barbecue as a kid was kind of amazing. I didn't even really know the difference between cuts of meat back then.
Of course these stories have boy protagonists — so this is only natural — but it's still sad. To be clear: it's not that the manga aren't interesting; my sensibility changed.
Recently a sequel to the once-huge Sunday series "Zatch Bell!" was announced and is running as a web manga or something similar.
It's insanely fun, but I can feel myself falling further behind the shonen-magazine vibe.
I can't fully step into the fiery lines or the emotional scenes.
Even so, it's a series I was deeply into around elementary school. Even if I can't read it with the same heat as back then, it's still fun whenever I revisit it — sequel included — and it remains a work I care about.
On the flip side, there's "Bakuman." — same shonen category, but a work I've grown to like more and more as an adult. Maybe because there's less action?
For what it's worth: Bakuman started when I was a first-year middle schooler, and I was subscribing to Jump then, so I was floored — "What the hell is this amazing series?!!!" — but somewhere along the way my heat cooled, and I stopped reading Jump.
There was a stretch when I got inspired and tried to become a mangaka, drawing and all (I bet a ton of people did that). Apparently a lot of kids got carried away and brought manuscripts to Shueisha. If I'd done that, they would've torn me apart and kicked me out.
As an adult I started watching the anime that was airing then on streaming, and I got hooked again.
The anime is especially well made — I rewatch it start to finish several times a year.
(By the way, my favorite character is Hiramaru. The banter between Hiramaru and his editor Yoshida. Hiramaru's proposal scene wrecks me every time.)
The story follows two middle-schoolers aiming to become mangaka, going through friendship, romance, and rivalry on the way to success — spotlighting a few geniuses in a plot that's almost too neat. Anyone actually aiming for the manga industry would probably find it hard to swallow.
Still, watching these earnest protagonists keep grinding through "friendship, effort, and victory" without action battles feels really good to me. Action manga is probably the same energy, just in a different form.
There's a series called "Show-ha Shoten! 1" that's probably still running — young duo becoming manzai comedians, same vibe as Bakuman, and the art is by Takeshi Obata of Bakuman — but I couldn't enjoy it much.
Different writer from Bakuman; Akitoshi Asakura, a novelist I like, is on it.
I also recently found "Platinum End," another Obata/Ohba team-up, and read it — maybe because the action was too heavy, I couldn't get into it.
Thinking about it now, I've noticed I can't read a series when the protagonist is too cool.
Aside from shifting taste, another angle might be: it's more fun when you can finish the whole thing.
I'm probably worse at "waiting a long time" now than I was as a kid.
That isn't only about childhood sensitivity changing — entertainment gets consumed faster, with SNS short videos as the obvious example, and "being funny immediately" matters more.
Web manga is rising too, and something like the much-talked-about "Takopi's Original Sin" often hits you from episode one with a protagonist in a brutally complicated situation and a shocking punchline. That kind of density may be getting more common.
(※ Side note: there's a manga by Rensuke Oshikiri called "Identity of a Narrow World" with the wild premise of a mangaka fighting to survive in the industry through violence. It's fun — check it out if you're curious. There are intense scenes where print mangaka beat the hell out of web mangaka, among other things.)
There's no doubt what I find interesting has changed as I've gotten older.
It's exactly the same as what I wrote last time about what counts as "cute."
If I narrowed the manga I've read in my life down to ten favorites for who I am now, it'd be these:
(in no particular order)
・HUNTER x HUNTER
・Kyoshiro 2030
・Usogui
・My Small Life
・BLUE GIANT
・Boys on the Run
・Robo no Fujii
・Sakura no Uta
・Kenka Kagyo
・Tokyo Higoro
※ For the titles above I basically buy by author — I like pretty much everything by those creators.
I want to try analyzing what makes something feel interesting to me.
The only pure action manga on the list seems to be HUNTER x HUNTER.
Let me try analyzing where the appeal sits.
That's it. Or: write the blog after you've done the analysis, you know?
P.S.
As a kid I always wondered why adults weren't into Pokémon when it was so fun — now I get that feeling.
If I have kids someday and they talk Pokémon at me, I probably won't keep up, and learning new Pokémon will be a slog.
Still, when I was little I used to duel myself at card games like Yu-Gi-Oh / Duel Masters, and it was boring as hell — so for games with strategy, I think I could still enjoy them and would want to play along. Learning monsters and rules would still be painful, though.
© 2024 ZUUHE