Manga Thoughts: Emanon 1: Memories of Emanon

After sweeping one side of the “manga shelves” at the area bookstore without much luck finding the titles that should have shown up one week, I emerged from the narrow aisle to see a lone manga volume sitting out on a display table, and was inclined to think someone had taken it off the shelf and not put it back. It just happened to be one I’d taken a little notice of before without actually seeking copies out, probably weighted by the way even “read” volumes pile up for me. Now, though, my mood was a little different. I went ahead and purchased the first volume of Emanon by Shinji Kajio and Kenji Tsuruta, knowing little more about it than it was a period piece set in 1967, the art looked good to me while tilting towards realism (there’d been an excerpt in the “turn the magazine upside down” centre section of Otaku USA), and Dark Horse seemed the lone “publisher of manga” in English for which that was a side line (I’d recently bought the “trade collection” of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 comic from them to see how things ended). The volume turned out interesting, although being surprised by just how it might be classified leads once more to the apparent threat of “to talk about my own surprise risks denying others their own.”
( Spell it backwards )