It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of SEGA’s final home console, in fact, I still have my Dreamcast set up (alongside my PS2, PS3, PS4 and Xbox One), it played a massive part in my teens. I still remember buying it from Gamestation in Nottingham (the one near the old Odeon cinema, that […]
Category: Books
Why are we still talking about comics as a genre?
A few weeks back I happened across a typical lockdown/buzzfeed style article, wherein the author discusses a list of things that popular opinion dictactes you should check out. In this the author lists five Graphic Novels that they believe everyone should read (Watchmen, Maus, Ghost World, Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid in the World, Fun […]
Ping Pong volume 1 – Taiyo Matsumoto
Sports manga is a genre that I’m not sure has developed widespread popularity outside of Japan, there it’s pretty huge, readers love consuming stories portraying a characters rise from nowhere to ultimate glory, especially in a high school setting. Despite knowing this, I’ve never read a sports manga myself, that changed with Ping Pong by […]
RWBY The Official Manga vol.1
When I saw RWBY The Official Manga volume 1 appear on NetGalley I thought it’d be the perfect chance to get into something I’d seen listed on Netflix. I imagine I’m not the only one to presume that this franchise had followed the “normal” route of being a manga series in Japan first before being […]
Romford Pele: It’s Only Ray Parlour
Thus far I’ve only really covered genre fiction, manga and comics on these book-related posts. But I wanted to take a moment to talk about the latest book I’ve read. You see, I quite like autobiographies, they’re almost always light, easy reads and I can normally read them quite quickly, especially if it’s someone talking […]
Not Your Idol – Aoi Makino
“Not Your Idol” is “Not My Normal Kind of Manga”, so, with that in mind, my opinions and comparisons are possibly going to be a little outside of what this books’ target audience is used to. Not Your Idol follows Nina Kamiyama, formerly “Ren-Ren” of the Pure Club idol group. Nina chose to give up […]
Hell’s Paradise: Jigokuraku – Yuji Kaku
Shonen Manga has become fairly predictable, most taken on the tropes that popular stalwarts such as Bleach and Naruto tackle in their initial issues and then building from there. You often get the hero that the reader is supposed to identify with, they’re usually either forced into having some excellent powers that they have to […]
A Feast For Crows – George R R Martin
As mentioned in my Asterix post, Book Club is on hiatus at the moment until things begin to look brighter here in the UK and it’s safer to meet as a group and socialise again. That being said, I’m still actually playing catch up from February when things were tough for me personally (I still […]
The Kingdom of the Gods – In-wan You, Eun-hee Kim & Kyung-il Yang
It seems a bit, well, off, to be discussing a zombie apocalypse story amongst the current COVID-19 pandemic, where over a third of the worlds population (at the time of writing) are in some kind of lockdown. But hey, thats where we’re at. The Kingdom of the Gods is the Manwha (Korean Manga) that the […]
Asterix in Britain – René Goscinny & Albert Uderzo
When Close Encounters posted on the Books With Pictures Facebook group page that we were going to be reading an Asterix book, I’m not going to lie, I had two thoughts, the first was “but isn’t that a kids book”, then it was “wow, I’ve not read one of those since Year 8” and it […]