Top Manga of 1987

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 2: Battle Tendency

ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 Part2 戦闘潮流

Decades after Jonathan's fight with Dio, his grandson Joseph Joestar, brash where Jonathan was noble, is dragged into a war against the Pillar Men. These ancient superhumans created the Stone Masks and now seek a gem that would free them from their one weakness, sunlight. Joseph trains in the sunlight-based energy called Hamon under Lisa Lisa, alongside Caesar Anthonio Zeppeli, grandson of the man who once mentored Jonathan. This second arc trades the gothic horror of Phantom Blood for a globe-trotting fight against Wamuu, Esidisi, and Kars.

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Manga|0|1987

FINISHED

Tomie

富江

Shoujo

Drama

Supernatural

Tomie Kawakami is a beautiful young woman, marked by a beauty spot below one eye, who drives the men around her into obsession and then into murderous jealousy. The catch is that she cannot die: cut into pieces, each fragment regenerates into a whole new Tomie. Structured as an anthology of standalone horror stories, the series follows her as she resurfaces in town after town, leaving a trail of fixated victims and gruesome deaths behind her.

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FINISHED

Ranma ½

らんま½

Action

Shounen

Romance

Ranma Saotome trains in martial arts with his father Genma until a fall into a cursed spring at Jusenkyo in China leaves Ranma transformed into a girl whenever splashed with cold water, and back into a boy with hot. Back in Japan, Genma promises Ranma in marriage to one of the daughters of his old friend Soun Tendo, landing the prickly Ranma with the equally hot-tempered Akane Tendo. Rival suitors and other Jusenkyo victims keep the engagement in constant chaos.

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FINISHED

Itou Junji Kyoufu Manga Korekushon: Namekuji Shoujo

伊藤潤二恐怖漫画コレクションなめくじ少女

Shoujo

Supernatural

Horror

This early Junji Ito anthology gathers seven stand-alone horror stories, opening with Slug Girl, about a young woman whose body slowly turns into something that leaves a trail of slime behind her. Other stories in the collection include Washed Ashore, in which the corpse of a gigantic, unidentifiable sea creature turns up on a beach and draws a crowd, and Mold, in which a man comes home to a house that was rented out in his absence and finds a mold he cannot scrub back. The volume collects short body-horror premises rather than a single continuing story.

FINISHED

Itou Junji Kyoufu Manga Korekushon: Kao Dorobou

伊藤潤二恐怖漫画コレクション顔泥棒

Shoujo

Supernatural

Horror

Six early one-shots make up this collection, led by Kao Dorobou, in which a girl obsessed with her own beauty encounters something that steals faces outright. The volume also includes Kubitsuri Kikyuu (Hanging Balloons), about human-headed balloons that stalk their victims until they hang themselves. Kakashi, Akai Ito, Rakka, and Gosenzo-sama round out the book with four more stand-alone horror premises from Ito's early career.

FINISHED

Junji Ito Story Collection

伊藤潤二恐怖博物館

Shoujo

Supernatural

Horror

This ten-volume collection gathers Junji Ito's early one-shot horror stories from the late 1980s through 2001, originally serialized in Halloween magazine before their compilation. Stand-alone tales like Slug Girl and The Face Thief sit alongside the recurring cast of troublemaking cousin Souichi Tsujii and the reality-warped Oshikiri family saga, each story delivering a self-contained body-horror or curse premise rather than a continuing plot.

HIATUS

Bastard!! Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy

BASTARD!! －暗黒の破壊神－

Action

Shounen

Fantasy

Four centuries after the demon Anthrasax shattered the world and plunged it into a dark age, the kingdom of Metallicana comes under attack by the Dark Rebel Army bent on reviving her. Tia Noto Yoko, daughter of the high priest, must awaken the legendary wizard Dark Schneider, who long ago sealed himself inside the body of the boy Lucien Renlen. Only Yoko's kiss can rouse the arrogant sorcerer, and only she can keep his destructive power in check.

FINISHED

Only Yesterday

おもいでぽろぽろ

Drama

Slice of Life

Taeko Okajima is ten years old in 1966, working through the ordinary business of being a fifth grader: friendships, report cards, a first crush she can barely admit to herself, and a family that doesn't always understand her. The manga follows her in loosely connected episodes rather than one continuous plot, each one a small, specific memory rather than a lesson. It is the source material for the 1991 animated film of the same name, which frames these childhood memories through Taeko's eyes as an adult.

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Manga|

FINISHED

Kidou Senshi Gundam: Gyakushuu no Char - High Streamer

機動戦士ガンダム逆襲のシャアハイ・ストリーマー

Action

Sci-Fi

Drama

In U.C. 0093 Char Aznable returns at the head of Neo Zeon to drop the asteroid Axis on Earth, and Amuro Ray takes the Londo Bell task force out to stop him. Yoshiyuki Tomino wrote this three-volume novel of Char's Counterattack himself, serialized while the film was in production, and it stands as the novel line's own telling of that campaign. A second novel, Beltorchika's Children, reworks the same war with a different circle around Amuro.

#10

ONGOING

Magic Kaito

マジックカイト

Thriller

Action

Shounen

Kaito Kuroba discovers, on the eighth anniversary of his father's death, that his dad was secretly the Phantom Thief Kaito Kid: an internationally wanted magician-thief murdered by a shadowy organization hunting the mythical Pandora gem. Taking up his father's mask and cape, Kaito starts pulling off his own gem heists to draw the organization out, all while his classmate Aoko Nakamori and the high-school detective Saguru Hakuba close in on his double life. This manga is the origin story behind Kaito Kid, the recurring phantom thief from creator Gosho Aoyama's Detective Conan.

#11

FINISHED

Hanasakeru Seishounen

花咲ける青少年

Shoujo

Drama

Romance

Fourteen-year-old Kajika Burnsworth is the only daughter of industrialist Harry Burnsworth, who sets her a game: meet three men he has personally picked out, Li Ren Fang, Eugene Alexandre de Volkan, and Rumaty Ivan Di Raginei, and choose one of them as a husband. What starts as an arranged-marriage plot pulls Kajika into the politics of Raginei, a small oil-rich kingdom tied to her father's business empire, where Rumaty stands in line for the throne and the reason behind her father's game slowly comes out.

Top 250

Top 250

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 2: Battle Tendency

Tomie

Ranma ½

Itou Junji Kyoufu Manga Korekushon: Namekuji Shoujo

Itou Junji Kyoufu Manga Korekushon: Kao Dorobou

Junji Ito Story Collection

Bastard!! Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy

Only Yesterday

Kidou Senshi Gundam: Gyakushuu no Char - High Streamer

Magic Kaito

Hanasakeru Seishounen