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 […]
Category: Books
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 […]
The Colony – Nicolas Debon
When we think of Anarchism in the world of comics (or graphic novels, whichever you prefer), we often turn to Alan Moore’s “V for Vendetta” and tales of attempts to overthrow those in power due to corruption, however, theres actually alot more to the ideals behind anarchism than explosions, aggression and sticking ones finger up […]
Handmaids Tale
A few months ago I picked up a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale from a charity shop, it cost me 50p, it went on the bookshelf with the intent to read it “one day”, that day came sooner than expected when during our previous meet to discuss A Storm of Swords 2: Blood and Gold, […]