There’s nothing in the world like San Diego Comic-Con. I mean, sure, you’re shoved into a building with eighty billion of your closest friends in southern California in the middle of July encased in foam and leather, but it’s eighty billion of your people who are just as excited as you are to partake in geeky goodness of every possible flavor.

Watching panels from my couch didn’t quite capture the magic.

ComicCon@Home was, however, a pretty amazing event, and it solved the eternal con dilemma: Halp, there are six panels I want to go to in this one hour time slot! How do I choose?

When all the panels are recorded, you don’t have to. You can watch them all (whether or not you should is another matter entirely). One of the hot topics this year was manga, which happens to be something I’m working to learn more about. Here are some books that either caught my attention or were specifically recommended by those who are far more knowledgeable than myself.

UDON Entertainment

UDON does a lot of video game tie-in stuff, so most of their catalog, even the original properties, are mostly half-naked ladies with inflated beach ball boobs. If that’s your bag, have at ye.

All the above makes UDON’s acquisition of the license for The Rose of Versailles by Riyoko Ikeda even more of a very fascinating head scratcher. Originally published in the 70s, Rose is a period court drama about Marie Antoinette and her bodyguard Oscar François de Jarjayes. Oscar happens to be a woman who was raised as a boy by her father, a general who wanted one of his six children (who all happen to be of the lady variety) to follow in his very military footsteps.

UDON’s reissue of the series is absolutely gorgeous. The company is planning a total of five hardcover volumes with sequential art, each approximately 500 pages. While the majority of those pages will be the traditional duochrome, some have a pink wash and a few are full color. A very intrepid soul went archive diving and found most of the original single issue covers (which are usually cut out of collected volumes) and a fair bit of the 70s promotional art, including posters and stickers, all of which have been integrated into the books

There’s even gilding! This is more than worthy of Her Majesty “What’s a budget?” Speaking of which… fair warning that each volume will run you about $35, but they are stunning and that isn’t out of bounds for what is, essentially, an art book.

Kodansha Comics

Weathering with You (13+) by Makoto Shinkai and Wataru Kabota: High school student Hodaka runs away from his small island home and ends up homeless and hungry in Tokyo. There, he meets Hina, a fast food worker who notices his plight and gives him a meal. The teenagers gradually become friends, and Hodaka discovers Hina has a miraculous power: she can control the weather. But what is gained can be just as easily lost to the cruelty of the larger world unless Hodaka is willing to fight. Weathering with You is the manga adaptation is Makoto Shinkai’s film of the same name.

Perfect World (16+) by Aie Aruga: 26-year-old Tsugumi Katana expects the get-together her interior design company hosts with an architecture firm to be all business until she catches sight of her high school crush, Itsuki Ayukawa. She’s thrilled to see him, and to see he’s realized his dream of becoming an architect, but she didn’t expect to discover that he suffered a spinal cord injury that left him in a wheelchair. Tsugumi realizes her feelings for Itsuki haven’t changed, but she hesitates, unsure if she wants to date someone in a wheelchair. The conflict forces her to confront her innate prejudices and decide what’s truly important to her.

Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama: Coca wants to be a witch but, alas, wasn’t born with the gift of magic. She’s finally resigned herself to a mundane life when she meets Qifrey, a traveling witch who performs a different sort of magic. Grabbing hold of possibility, Coca does an experiment that doesn’t have quite the results she anticipated. Time for a quest!

Witch Hat Atelier was this year’s Eisner Winner for Best U.S. Edition of International Material – Asia (a new category this year that is sort of bogus because it sets manga apart from other international material and was instituted due to everyone else being whiny bitches about manga dominating the international material category every year, but this book is wonderful and 100% deserves an Eisner so I’m glad it won anyway).

The Ghost in the Shell: The Human Algorithm by Shiro Masamune, Junichi Fujisaku, and Yuki Yashimoto: The Human Algorithm focuses on the daily lives of Section 9 members after the Major’s disappearance.

Incidentally, Kodansha runs a live manga discussion group on their YouTube channel Wednesdays at 3 pm PST and a Home Anime Live Watch Club on Fridays at 5 pm PST. You can find more information on their website.

Tokyo Pop

Kilala Princess: Rescue the Village with Mulan by Mallory Reaves, Asuka Tan, and Naomi Kodaka: Kilala always wanted to be a princess, but she thought she’d only have have the chance in her imagination until a magical tiara and a mysterious portal led her into the worlds of her favorite Disney princesses. Once there, she saved a kingdom and joined their ranks as a real royal. Now, bandits are attacking the countryside and Mulan and Shang need help to stop them. There’s only one person for them to call: Princess Kilala!

Zero’s Journey: Written by Tokyo Pop CEO Stu Levy under his pen name DJ Milky with art by Kei Ishiyammi, this final volume will wrap up the long-running and always delightful manga sequel to The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Other Stuff That Snagged My Brain

Our Dreams at Dusk by Yuki Kamatani (Seven Seas): New kid in town Tasuku Kaname has just been involuntarily outed and has no idea what to do. So when he meets a mysterious woman who offers to lead him to a safe place, he follows. The destination is a lounge where he’s introduced to other LGBTQIA+ folx grappling with the same conflicts, and looking for the same acceptance, Tasuku himself is struggling to find.

Komi Can’t Communicate by Tomohito Oda (VIZ Media): Komi is legendary for being beautiful and inaccessible. But when quiet Tanado finds himself alone with her in a classroom on the first day off school, he recognizes she isn’t standoffish; she’s awkward, anxious, and has a hard time making friends. Tanado decides he’s going to make it his mission to help Komi out of her shell – if he can climb out of his own.

Spy x Family by Tatsuya Endo (VIZ Media): Twilight is the best there is at what he does – and what he does is go on extremely dangerous missions to save the world. At least until the mission involves getting married and having a kid. Or at least, making the bad guys think he’s gotten married and had a kid. And infiltrated an elite private school. When he doesn’t know that his “wife” is an assassin. And his “daughter” is a telepath. Yikes.

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service by Eiji Otsuka and House Yamazaki (Dark Horse): Souls stick around for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, they get stuck until their next reincarnation, which is, I imagine, an Extremely Uncomfortable Experience. Good thing there are five students at a Buddhist university who know how to talk to the dead and are willing to carry your body anywhere it needs to go to free that pesky soul…

The SMDH Award

Breasts Are My Favorite Thing In the World by Wakame Konbu (Yen Press): Listen. I have no problem with boobs. I think boobs are pretty great. I’m mostly including this one because the cover made me snort laugh and listening to the folx on the Best/Worst Manga of the Year panel talk about it was the highlight of my day. It is about a woman looking for her perfect boob buddy. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.

Everyone wave bye-bye to your bank account. And the laws of physiology. And probably physics.