I had a good, self-satisfied chuckle the other day. Dan Nguyen over on Twitter detailed the meltdown experienced by thousands of New York Times readers when, during their daily ritual, they encountered, an utterly foreign, inscrutable word. “Yesterday the wordle word was “MANGA” and for many users this did not spark joy,” Nguyen writes. “Foul! How many english speaking people would ever have heard of this word?” wrote one aggrieved user among many. The failing New York Times! Out of touch with the latest trends!
So I felt very hip for a moment, as a fortysomething dad who’s read Death Note. Look at me, down with the kids! Hanging out with the zoomers at the manga section of Barnes & Noble! Say, can you pass me the latest volume of My Hero Academia?
Of course, I am hopelessly unhip. And I like it that way, to be honest. It’s best for all concerned. But it got me thinking about manga, and anime, and my own relation to it. I like some of that stuff, genuinely, but I did have to work at it. It took effort. I want to sketch out a little bit what that effort looked like, and the benefits that resulted from it.
Earlier this year, Akira Toriyama passed away at the age of 68. A hugely influential Japanese anime and manga artist, he is best known in the US as the creative behind Dragon Ball Z, an anime series that aired here in the late 90s and early 2000s on the Cartoon Network. It was widely beloved by a stunningly wide audience. If you’re looking for a cultural lingua franca shared by white rural kids, black urban kids, and Latino kids from Texas to New Jersey, Dragon Ball Z is your best best. Substack’s own Ross Barkan wrote a lovely, moving remembrance of the series.
I’ll be honest though: I was a little too old to get into DBZ during its initial run. I was a late adolescent at the time, going to college and listening to indie rock. My exposure to anime and manga was scant, and what little exposure I received, I did not care for. As best as I can recall, the first anime I watched was Ghost in the Shell, which a guy in my Intro to Philosophy class screened for a few people. I . . . did not like it. I’ll tell you why: I found it, for lack of a better phrase, too much.
Too much of what? Too much emotion. Too much feeling. Too much earnestness. Too much sincerity. And, not enough humor, of the ironic, sarcastic sort preferred by my snarky American self, to offset all the earnestness.
I’ve written before that I have a hard time dealing with sincerity and earnestness in art. Call it an acquired allergy. Growing up evangelical, I was force-fed earnestness and emotiveness at every turn. When I started looking for art on my own terms, earnestness was the last thing I wanted.
As any anime/manga fan can tell you, the American brand of sarcasm, familiar in everything from Disney Channel sitcoms to Adult Swim, doesn’t really exist in those forms. At least, not to the same extent. The kind of humor you find in anime—and you do, absolutely—has a feel that I associate with Hollywood comedies from the 1930s and 40s. Pratfalls, gags, japes—this is the stock in trade of much Japanese animation. This brief glimpse from Neon Genesis Evangelion wouldn’t be out of place in a Perils of Pauline serial.
This is what caused me to bounce off anime, manga, the whole field. And this is also what brought me back to it, years later.
Like so many others the world over, Attack on Titan is the story that finally got me into the genre. I’ve written about it before; part of what made the show so globally successful, I think, is that’s the anime equivalent of prestige TV. Sprawling story, high production values, moral ambiguity—plus, epic battles with giants. Plus plus, that earnest emotionalism. I don’t know how many times I watched Eren vow vengeance for his mother once more, or Armin chide himself for being a weakling, or Zeke try to get his half-brother to see reason.
Unlike my earlier encounter, though, I did not find the emotionalism off-putting. Instead, I found it nourishing. Like an emotional Benjamin Button, I had somehow aged in reverse. The earnestness of manga, so often chalked to the excesses of teenage emotions, embarrassed me when I was an actual teenager. But now that I’m an adult, that very excessiveness allows me to connect with my own neglected emotions in a way I might not otherwise.
So, where should you start with anime/manga? I’ll close with a brief overview of some of my favorites of the genre. If you’re not familiar with the genre, these may be new to me. If you are, though, these are likely not.
Attack on Titan. The phenomenon! If you’re heard of it, likely it’s via the anime series, available on Hulu in the US, among other venues. But Hajime Isayama’s original manga run is just as strong, giving the world of the show an even more, if you’ll pardon the joke, fleshed-out feel.
Akira. The one that started the contemporary anime revolution we’re stilll living through. Katsuhiro Otomo created a massive manga series, then oversaw the movie adaptation. I like the manga more, personally: the scope is even more massive, creating a whole world, then crashing it all down.
Death Note. You know how, in Breaking Bad, it takes a little while for Walter White to become fully, irredeemably villainous? To the point where you can still have a discussion about where, exactly, his point of no return occurred? That is the opposite of Death Note. A high school student, Light Yagami, comes across a notebook that has the power to kill anyone. Write their name in the notebook, and they die shortly later. A more active version of the video in The Ring. No moral equivocating for Light. Immediately he becomes a psychopathic killer, terrorizing all of Tokyo. I’ve only read the manga, not seen the anime. Gripping, but there is a dropoff in quality after a major character dies.
Berserk. A sprawling manga series started in the late 80s and left unfinished at the time of creator Kentaro Miura’s death in 2021. A combination of Conan the Barbarian and Hellraiser, Berserk paints a dark medieval world, terrorized by interdimensional beings of pure evil. Perhaps my favorite manga series. Fair warning, though: it contains some very disturbing scenes of sexual violence. Your mileage may vary.