The Best New Manga of September 2018

Dr. Stone, Vol. 1, by Riichiro Inagaki and Boichi
Just as he is about to confess his love to the girl he has had a crush on for five years, Taiju turns to stone—along with everyone else on earth. 3,700 years later, he somehow breaks through his stone shell to find that the only other living person on Earth is his genius friend Senku, who escaped some time earlier. The world he knew has long ago crumbled away, and Senku has been busily trying to figure out how to recreate it as quickly as possible. After six months, he’s about up to the Stone Age. As more humans are revived, the situation quickly gets complicated—and that means Senku has to push harder to improve the technology of this primitive world. This manga is weirdly educational, with interesting facts about chemistry and history littered along the way as our teenage cohort tries to fast-forward through millennia of technological accomplishments.

Radiant, Vol. 1, by Tony Valente
Tony Valente is one of the very few non-Japanese comics creators to have their work published in Japan. In fact, Radiant was originally published in France, Valente’s country of origin (he has since moved to Canada), and became a big hit in Japan when it was published there in 2013 (it has since been made into an anime). The world of this series is under attack by monsters from outer space, known as Nemesis, who infect and kill almost everyone they touch. Those who survive are left stronger, and are the only ones able to battle the invaders—but they are also feared by ordinary humans. Like the best shonen manga, Radiant has plenty of action, cheeky humor, and a hero on an important mission. The series is off to a great start with this first volume.

Hinowa Ga CRUSH, Vol. 1, by Takahiro and strelka
Takahiro is the writer of Akame Ga KILL!, and this story has a similar vibe. On an island where a civil war has been waged for 100 years, a young woman warrior takes up arms to end the conflict once and for all. The twist is that she is following the footsteps of her mother, who died trying to accomplish the same goal. It takes a lot of fighting to bring about peace, it seems. This series stars an ass-kicking young woman who is willing to do whatever it takes.

Dementia 21, by Shintaro Kago
In case you’re new to Shintaro Kago’s work, here’s a warning: it is not for the faint of heart. If you like surrealistic Japanese body horror, though, you’ll find terrible delights within. This collection of stories, complete in one volume, follows a home care worker, Yukie Sakai, as she deals with the perils of the job. In one story, more and more people dump their elderly relatives in the home where Yukie is working until they all clump together into a single revenge-seeking monster; in another, a patient with psychic powers is losing her memory—and every time she forgets something, it ceases to exist in the real world. Kago loves to take an ordinary aspect of everyday life and crank it all the way up to crazy in just a few pages: wrinkle cream goes berserk; dentures try to take over the world; a highway has multiple lanes for senior citizens, drunk drivers, and people who died while driving. Fantagraphics has chosen a large, 7-inch by 10-inch format for this volume, the better to show off Kago’s clear, detailed art.

Dragon Goes House-Hunting, Vol. 1, by Kawo Tanuki and Choco Aya
A whole genre of domestic comedies has sprung up based on the world of fantasy games—Delicious in Dungeon features a group of adventurers cooking up basilisks and dragons as they traipse through an underground world, and in Little Devils, the hero has to care for the 12 children of the defeated Demon Lord. Now we have the HGTV version, starring a cowardly dragon, Letty, who gets booted out of his home and has to find a new place to live. Like many of these manga, it is broken into short stories as Letty tries various places and ends up in a cage or a trap, or just being laughed at, before he finally finds an architect who can help. The creators manage to hit on an impressive number of fantasy and gaming tropes in the first volume alone,; it’s well drawn and quite funny, a nice bit of fluff for when you’re ready to take a break from the more intense stuff.

Sailor Moon Eternal Edition, Vol. 1, by Naoko Takeuchi
Sailor Moon was one of the first shojo manga to be published in English, and it has had a loyal following ever since Tokyopop first published it in their MixxZine magazine. Now, at long last, the series is getting a deluxe rerelease, courtesy of Kodansha Comics. The first of a planned series of “Eternal Editions” is a thick, 300-page volumes, with an extra-large 7-inch by 10-inch trim size, high-quality paper, holographic covers with new art by the manga-ka, and, perhaps most importantly, a revised translation. As someone who first encountered Sailor Moon in those pocket-sized Tokyopop paperbacks, I’m looking forward to seeing this legendary series in a new format; the art in the manga is pretty busy even at standard manga size (see: Kodansha’s earlier editions), so this is bound to be a marked improvement.

Boruto, Vol. 4, by Ukyo Kodachi, Mikio Ikemoto, and Masashi Kishimoto
The creative team behind this spinoff series has done a nice job of carrying the story of Naruto and his cohort into the next generation. Boruto is hotheaded but talented,—like his father, but in a different enough way that this isn’t the same story all over again—and of course, being the son of the Seventh Hokage carries baggage of its own, as we saw in the first arc. In this volume, Boruto is assigned to be the bodyguard for Tento, the son of the daimyo, who has some father issues of his own…

Splatoon, Vol. 4, by Sankichi Hinodeya
You have to hand it to Sankichi Hinodeya—he makes a little bit of material go a long way. The Splatoon video game is a third-person shooter in which four-player teams compete to cover a given territory with their color of ink. Hinodeya not only makes that outlandish premise into a story, he does it all in black and white! Part of the secret is that he leans heavily on the tropes of shonen manga, and the book is rife with battles, underdogs, and quirky characters. New readers can jump right in with this volume, as the main round of the Square King Cup tournament is just beginning; conveniently, the characters describe their opponents with the appropriate amount of awe: “It’s Gloves!! The quick, acrobatic Splat Dualies Wielder!” It’s easy to poke fun, but this series is surprisingly readable, even for those of us who don’t play the game, and there’s plenty of goofy humor. It’s like a Saturday morning cartoon in manga form.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Vol. 4, by Akira Himekawa
In the latest volume of this adaptation of the beloved video game, Link faces the Gorons, a mountain-dwelling tribe who have had bad blood with the local humans, but he and a shaman’s daughter help to make things right—and get the next piece of the Shadow Crystal. But even as Link enjoys a post-battle soak in the Gorons’ hot springs, doubts are creeping in about the Shadow Crystal and the Shadow King. The two-woman team of Akira Himekawa has created a lavishly detailed, imaginatively drawn story that works well independently from the source material.