This top shelf is mostly devoted to manga, as its small size is only able to accommodate the small digest/tankobon style collections manga usually comes in. Most of these are old enough that I don't remember them terribly clearly and have had to pull them off the shelf to jog my memory. As there aren't actually too many, I'll just name them all, left to right.
•Spy Vs. Spy First, we have the only non-manga books on this shelf, which I stuck there because they were published in that format and thus fit pretty perfectly. These are a trio of 2009 collections of Antonio Prohias' Spy Vs. Spy cartoons, published by a Watson-Guptill Publications. I'm a fan. These strips were always my favorite part of Mad magazines when I was a little kid (and thus in the prime Mad demographic). In addition to being weird, clever and violent, they also didn't require the amount of reading or pop culture fluency that other Mad features did. It was a great pleasure to be able to read scores of the strips back-to-back-to-back-to-back (etc.) like this.
•Kill Me, Kiss Me Lee Young Yuu's manhwa series is a romantic comedy in which a pair of opposite sex identical cousins (is that a thing?) decide to swap identities and schools, so that the female cousin poses as a boy in order to get close to her crush, and the male cousin poses as a girl in order to be around a bunch of girls. Amusing complications abound. It looks like this actually ran five volumes; I'm not sure why I didn't get the fifth, as I remember really enjoying this series. Do note how faded the Tokyopop logo at the top of the spines are. There's significant sun damage to a few random volumes on this shelf, presumably because the sunlight filters through the blinds in the otherwise always dark room to hit certain books just so.
•Gun Blaze West Even all these years later, this still seems like something of a rarity to me: A manga western. This was from Shonen Jump and was the work of Rurouni Kenshin creator Nobuhiro Watsuki. Not sure why I only have one volume. Flipping through it now, the character designs look appealing. I guess this volume just didn't hook me.
•Iron Wok Jan The title chaacter is a chef who thinks of cooking as a battle, and manga-ka Shinji Saijyo fills the book with over-the-top imagery of Jan's intense cooking, in which he often looks like a maniac. As with Kill Me, Kiss Me, I apparently have all the volumes save for the very last one.
•Iron Wok Jan The title chaacter is a chef who thinks of cooking as a battle, and manga-ka Shinji Saijyo fills the book with over-the-top imagery of Jan's intense cooking, in which he often looks like a maniac. As with Kill Me, Kiss Me, I apparently have all the volumes save for the very last one.
•Sgt. Frog Mine Yoshizaki's manga takes up the most space on this shelf...and is probably the best known (well, given what is right next to it, maybe second best known) of any of the manga on the shelf. It follows a hapless little alien invader who looks just like a humanoid frog; he was meant to conquer Earth but he ends up being defeated and semi-captured by the kids in a human family, who then force him to do chores instead. Though he occasionally bridles at his fate, he seems genuinely happy, as he would prefer to build Gundam models and laze around the house than engage in the hard work of world-conquering. Gradually, others from his home world arrive to help him...each of these is a different color and has a very different personality, but, even altogether, they are generally useless when it comes to conquering Earth. There was an anime. It looks like it ran 21 volumes; I seem to have read the first 13 and, at some later point, bought volumes 16 and 19 somewhere, assuming I would eventually catch up. I never did.
•Kingdom Hearts I have four volumes of Kingdom Hearts and one volume of a Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memory, all by Shiro Amano. I am not a video game player, but the concept of this game series—Mickey, Donald, Goofy and some anime-looking human kid journey into the settings of various Disney movies—intrigued me. I knew I wasn't going to ever play the games, but I could read the comics. I don't recall liking them very much, as the original elements of the story were kind of dull and melodramatic. Semi-related is the very slim, sun-damaged volume to the right of Chain of Memories. This is Disney's Kilala Princess, and it's about a schoolgirl who goes on an adventure in which she meets various Disney Princesses (The copyright is 2000, and the "newest" princess featured seems to be Jasmine from Aladdin).
•Sokora Refugees The work of a writer named "Segamu" and artist Melissa DeJesus, this was an "amerimanga" about a schoolgirl from the real world being transported to a fantasy setting for an adventure. There's lots of "fan service" in the art. I remember liking it at the time, but I can't recall much about the plot beyond that at this point. There are only two volumes of it, and I think it was left unfinished, rather than completed in that time. Apparently, there was some controversies involving it, The writer seems to be pseudonymous (according to Wikipedia, anyway) and, like former Marvel Editor-in-Chief C. B. Cebuslkis writing under the penname Akira Yoshida, was a white guy, or, at the least, a guy with a Western-sounding name who seemingly posing as a person of Asian descent. There also seems like there might have been something hinky with the sales data regarding the book as well.
•Legends From Darkwood Another "amerimanga" in the fantasy genre. I remember liking it at the time too, but don't remember anything about it now.
•Marmalade Boy Wataru Yoshizumi's manga features really great shojo-style art. The story is about a girl dealing with a new and unusual family arrangement...including a cute jerk of a new stepbrother. I obviously didn't stick with this one, which I guess ran eight volumes.
•xxxHOLiC/Tsubasa Next, we have a pair of CLAMP books from what I believe was the then-new publisher Kodansha. xxxHOLiC, as it's stylized on the back cover, is about a young man who takes a job working for a witch in a magic shop, while Tsubasa is sweeping fantasy series featuring magic and a spirit wolf made of fire. I recall being quite impressed with Kodansha's presentation and design, and both series were fine, but I didn't make it too far with either. A result, I suspect, of there just being too damn many comics to read.
•Red River I was quite fond of Chie Shinohara's shojo series about a modern Japanese young woman who is magically transported back to the ancient Middle East. I fell behind before Viz had even published the first half-dozen (Why don't I have volume 5...? I do not know). I had always planned on catching back up, something I thought about doing again when I saw 3-in-1volumes being published much more recently. Not that I ever did, of course; it ended up running for 28 volumes. This is a good example of the sun damage random books suffered; note how faded the first two volumes are versus the later one.
•Duck Prince Ai Morinaga's manga from CPM has a fun premise, inspired by the story of the ugly duckling, from which it takes its name. Reiichi is, according to the back cover copy, "short, fat and ugly." When he is struck by a car, he wishes to come back beautiful in his next life...and gets his wish. His face was so badly damaged in the accident, that got massive facial reconstruction surgery that, at his family's demands, made him beautiful, rather than restoring his old looks. He also hit a growth spurt while in a coma and is now tall and slim. Even the texture of his hair has somehow changed...! I obviously didn't follow this, but it certainly seems to have potential.
•Beauty Pop So, I have volume two of Kiyoko Arai's Beauty Pop, but not volume one. Why? Who can say. The copyright is 2006, which is pretty far back, in terms of my memory for comics I may or may not have even read once. I assume I did not read this one, though. It's about high school makeover artists. I suppose I should probably sell it the next time I visit a used bookstore...
•Faeries' Landing Young Hyun's series is a kinda sorta fantasy harem comedy, in which the young, male protagonist becomes the guardian of a magical faerie...and learns he is destined for 108 doomed romances. I liked it enough to read the fist three volumes.
•By The Sword This looks like a story set in feudal Japan? Despite the cover, which makes a scantily clad young woman with a sword the selling point, I didn't notice any such fan service within it's pages just now. Honestly, at this point, your guess is as good as mine regarding this book.
•Tokyo Mew Mew This is about an 11-year-old girl whose DNA is merged with that of an endangered wildcat...and four other girls whose DNA is merged with four other endangered animals. Why was their DNA manipulated? Well, it's part of an experiment to engineer superheroes of sorts to defend the world from alien invaders. It's vaguely Sailor Moon-ish, but wasn't my cup of tea.
•Instant Teen Like Duck Prince, this has an interesting but probably problematic premise. Here the star is "a homely fifth grader" who eats a mysterious package of pink nuts and is transformed into a beautiful woman! There's an element of 13 Going On 30 to it—and some of the attendant ickiness that comes with a story imagining a little girl's mind in the body of a grown woman—at least in terms of the basic concept, if not the execution.
•Dramacon This was, if I recall correctly, the print debut of web-comic creator Svetlana Chmakova, and I had bought it explicitly because I had heard such rave reviews about it online. It's about an amateur writer attending her first anime convention with her artist boyfriend...and then meeting "a mysterious cosplayer." Drama, as promised, ensues. This is copyright 2005; 21 years later, Chmakova has established a solid body of work to her name, including a series of books set at a fictional middle school with one-word titles, like Awkward, Crush, Brave and so on.
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