Boo! This week, I’m taking the highly imaginative step of writing about spooky manga. The twist? All three titles are penned by trailblazing female artists. First up is Mitsukazu Mihara’s Haunted House (Tokyopop), a comedy about a normal teen whose …

Revisiting AKIRA prompted me to re-read Domu: A Child’s Dream, an earlier work that helped cement Katsuhiro Otomo’s reputation as the leading manga-ka of his generation. Though both manga include elements of horror and science fiction, the two are utterly …

If Phoenix is Tezuka’s Ring Cycle, Wagnerian in scope, form, and seriousness, then Dororo is Tezuka’s Don Giovanni, a playful marriage of supernatural intrigue and lowbrow comedy whose deeper message is cloaked in shout-outs to fellow artists (in this case, …

Night of the Beasts may not be Chika Shiomi’s best work, but it’s certainly her most ambitious, a sweeping horror-fantasy with detailed artwork and nakedly emotional dialogue reminiscent of CLAMP’s Tokyo Babylon and X/1999 .
When we first meet Aria, Night’s …

The eponymous heroine of Canon is a smart, tough-talking vigilante who’s saving the world, one vampire at a time. For most of her life, Canon was a sickly but otherwise unremarkable human — that is, until a nosferatu decided to …

Common to all of Chika Shiomi’s supernatural thrillers are her butt-kicking heroines. Whether taming demons or hunting vampires, these unapologetically tough cookies always bag a fetching fellow, personality flaws and conflicting allegiances be damned.
In Yurara, Shiomi adds a wrinkle to …

Mourning the cancellation of Suppli? Still in Tramps Like Us withdrawal? Then I have something to help you heal that josei jones: Forest of Gray City, a two-volume soap opera about a twenty-something woman and her nineteen-year-old roommate—a May-July romance, …