Bookshelf #12

This week's bookshelf has the last few of my smuttiest manga on it, those that I couldn't fit onto the previous shelf: Dragon's Crown, an Udon book about a D&D-esque adventure party featuring a scantily clad warrior woman and a ridiculously over-endowed magic user (double-checking online now, I don't think it ever even made it to a second volume); Unicorns Aren't Horny, a silly two-volume Seven Seas series about a unicorn who lives with an adult virgin whose virginity he is obsessed with (highly abstract art and mostly gentle sex comedy, although I did not see the weird-ass ending coming, as perhaps I should have); and the first volume of Uzaki-Chan Wants to Hang Out, another Seven Seas series, this one about a buxom college student's platonic relationship with her senpai (This is the series with a cover gimmick so weird I was surprised no one tried it in the '90s; the cover is embossed where the star's breasts are...I reviewed it in this 2020 post).

As for the rest of the shelf? Well, there are the latest six volumes of Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&!, which is maybe the best manga I've ever read, or at least my favorite manga. As for the previous nine volumes, they are upstairs, on a completely different shelf (The books on these shelves are all ones I acquired while living in Mentor, so between 2012 and 2024 or so; I've yet to try to reorganize everything into a system that makes more sense).  

And then there are the first three volumes of How Heavy are the Dumbbells You Lift?, which perhaps belongs with the hornier manga, given all the fan service in it, mostly around the pin-ups demonstrating particular exercises. While a weird amalgam of comedy, fan service and work out demos and advice, I thought the book was fun enough, although it got so repetitive so fast I didn't stick with it.

And there are a couple of volumes of Drawn and Quarterly's collection of Shigeru Mizuki's Kitaro and  the first two volumes of the yuri series Days of Love at Seagull Inn (I just now noticed that the first two volumes are on this shelf, while the third was on the shelf above this one).

The rest of the shelf consists of first volumes of a bunch of series I either had tried out or that I had every intention of following but immediately fell behind on. There's are books from a few manga masters here, like Rumiko Takahashi's (latest?) time-travel fantasy series Mao and Hiromu Arakawa's extremely unlikely follow-up to Full Metal Alchemist, Silver Spoon, about a newcomer at agricultural high school. That's not a subject I'm particularly interested in—and, as a vegetarian, I'm actually pretty conflicted about some aspects of it—but I'll be damned if it wasn't a really great first volume.

Scanning this shelf of pretty random fist volumes, that's definitely one I'd like to check out again and see where the series goes from there, along with Aho Girl and Nichijou, and maybe My Neighbor Seki and Kuma Miko.

This, by the way, is the last of the manga I have downstairs at my house, save for maybe two volumes or so of Star Wars manga I shelved with the few Star Wars trades I own, so it will be quite a few more weeks before I discuss any more manga in this series of posts.