Planetes
Planetes
In 2075, orbital debris from decades of spaceflight threatens every ship and station around Earth, and the Debris Section of Technora Corporation crews the small collector DS-12 'Toy Box' to sweep it up. Hachimaki, a debris hauler who dreams of owning his own spacecraft, works the dangerous, low-status job alongside the chain-smoking Fee and the quiet Yuri. The arrival of earnest rookie Ai Tanabe reshapes the crew as she adjusts to life, work, and grief in the vacuum.
Paradise Kiss
パラダイス・キス
Yukari Hayasaka is a buttoned-up high schooler whose days revolve around exams until a group of fashion design students recruits her to model their work. Pulled into the Atelier behind the label Paradise Kiss, she meets the magnetic designer George Koizumi, along with Miwako, Arashi, and Isabella, and starts trading her safe future for the runway. As Yukari falls for George and discovers her own ambitions, she has to decide what kind of life she actually wants.
Baki: New Grappler Baki
バキ
Baki Hanma tries to live like an ordinary high schooler after his time in the underground Korakuen arena, but the calm doesn't last. Five of the world's deadliest convicts break out of maximum-security prisons around the globe and converge on Tokyo, united by a single craving: to taste defeat for the first time. Baki and the arena's top fighters stand in their path, while the shadow of Baki's monstrous father, Yujiro Hanma, looms over everything he does.
GetBackers
GetBackers -奪還屋-
Ginji Amano and Ban Mido run a recovery service out of a run-down corner of Shinjuku, taking on jobs to retrieve anything lost or stolen with a near-perfect success rate. Ban wields the Snake Bite grip and the Evil Eye, which traps a victim in a one-minute illusion, while Ginji can discharge thousands of volts from his body. Their work keeps pulling them toward the Infinite Fortress, a maze of condemned towers tied to Ginji's past.
Alive
ALIVE
Tenshuu Yashiro sits on death row for killing his lover and four others. On his execution day a shadowy group offers him a choice: die as scheduled or join them. He takes the deal and is led to a sealed room where, through a window, he watches a young woman wake up host to a strange parasite that grants terrible power while consuming the person it inhabits. This is a single-volume work by Tsutomu Takahashi.
Azumanga Daioh
あずまんが大王
Across three years of an ordinary Japanese high school, Azumanga Daioh follows a circle of classmates led by Chiyo Mihama, a ten-year-old prodigy skipped ahead five grades and trying to fit in with older girls. Around her gather the spacey, slow-talking Ayumu 'Osaka' Kasuga, the easily exasperated Yomi, the loud and clueless Tomo, the quiet and animal-loving Sakaki, and the athletic Kagura. Told in four-panel gags, the series strings together their classes, festivals, and summer trips with their eccentric teachers Yukari and Nyamo.
20th Century Boys
20世紀少年
Kenji Endo manages a convenience store and raises his missing sister's baby, a quiet life far from the hero he once dreamed of becoming as a boy. When a childhood friend dies and a cult led by a masked man called 'Friend' begins spreading, Kenji recognizes its symbol: the same mark he and his friends invented in their secret hideout in 1969. The Book of Prophecy they wrote as children, full of made-up disasters, starts coming true, and Kenji must gather his old gang to stop a plan they may have set in motion themselves.
Naruto
Naruto
Naruto Uzumaki is a loud, attention-starved orphan in the Hidden Leaf Village, shunned because the Nine-Tailed Fox that once attacked the village is sealed inside him. Despite his clumsy ninja skills, he sets his sights on becoming Hokage, the village's leader. Assigned to Team 7 under the instructor Kakashi alongside the rival prodigy Sasuke Uchiha and his crush Sakura Haruno, Naruto begins the missions that will test how far his stubbornness can take him.
Rave Master
RAVE
Haru Glory is a sixteen-year-old living on Garage Island who fishes up a strange creature named Plue. Soon after, an old man named Shiba names Haru the second Rave Master and entrusts him with Plue, a sword, and one of the holy stones called Rave. Haru sets out across the mainland to gather the five scattered Rave fragments and bring down Demon Card, the criminal organization behind the world's misery, joined along the way by an amnesiac girl named Elie.
The Prince of Tennis
テニスの王子様
Twelve-year-old Ryoma Echizen, a tennis prodigy fresh off four junior titles in America, enrolls at Seishun Academy in Tokyo and joins its powerhouse boys' tennis club. He brushes aside older players to claim a regular's spot, drawing the attention of captain Kunimitsu Tezuka and coach Sumire Ryuzaki. As Seigaku sets its sights on the National Middle School Championship, Ryoma sharpens an arsenal of signature shots and starts to find a style of his own beyond his father's shadow.
ZOMBIEPOWDER.
ゾンビパウダー.
In a dusty, western-flavored frontier, young pickpocket Elwood Shepherd tries to rob the powder hunter Gamma Akutabi and ends up joining him instead. Gamma, who wields a chainsaw-sword and a steel right arm, hunts the Rings of the Dead — twelve cursed artifacts that together yield the Zombie Powder, said to raise the dead and grant immortality. Alongside Gamma's partner C.T. Smith, Elwood chases the rings hoping to bring back the sister he lost.
Girl Got Game
パワー!!
Kyo Aizawa's father, a basketball prodigy whose own career was cut short by injury, enrolls her at Seisyu High disguised as a boy so she can chase his dream on its elite boys' team. Forced to live as a male student, Kyo ends up sharing a dorm room with star player Chiharu Eniwa, who has no idea his roommate is a girl. Keeping the secret on and off the court drives the comedy.
Real
リアル
Tomomi Nomiya is a high-school dropout weighed down by the motorcycle accident that left a girl paralyzed. Once a passionate but sidelined basketball player, he crosses paths with Kiyoharu Togawa, a former sprinter who lost a leg to cancer and now plays wheelchair basketball. Their meeting reconnects Nomiya to the game and opens a window onto a sport he never knew. Alongside them is Hisanobu Takahashi, a star high-school captain newly paralyzed after his own accident, each man circling the same court from a different kind of loss.
Mushishi
蟲師
Ginko is a mushishi, a wandering expert who studies and treats the mushi: primordial lifeforms that sit somewhere between plant, animal, and spirit, invisible to most people yet capable of altering human lives in strange ways. Because Ginko's presence draws mushi to him, he can never settle, drifting through a Japan frozen somewhere between the Edo and Meiji eras and smoking a special tobacco to keep them at bay. Each chapter is self-contained, following Ginko into a new village or household where a mushi has tangled itself into someone's body, memory, or surroundings.
FLCL
フリクリ
Naota Nandaba is a sullen twelve-year-old in the dull town of Mabase, holding his life together until Haruko Haruhara runs him over with her Vespa and revives him with a whack to the head from her left-handed bass guitar. The blow opens an "N.O." portal in his skull, from which robots built by the Medical Mechanica company start to emerge. Claiming to be a Space Patrol investigator, Haruko moves into Naota's home as a housekeeper while chasing a power called Atomsk, dragging him into chaos he barely understands.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 6: Stone Ocean
ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 Part6 ストーンオーシャン
Jolyne Cujoh, estranged daughter of Jotaro Kujo, is framed for a crime and sentenced to fifteen years in Green Dolphin Street Prison in Florida. A pendant from her father pricks her finger and awakens her Stand, Stone Free, which unravels her body into thread. When Jotaro arrives to explain that a disciple of the old enemy Dio set her up, the visit becomes a trap, and Jolyne is left to fight her way through the prison and its Stand users on her own. This is the sixth part of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure manga.
+Anima
+Anima
Cooro is a +Anima, one of a feared minority of humans able to transform parts of their bodies into those of animals, and his black crow wings get him mistaken for a messenger of death. Traveling to find others like himself, he falls in with three more +Anima: Husky, who grows a fish tail in water; the silent, bear-armed Senri; and Nana, who sprouts bat wings. Shunned by ordinary society, the four cross from town to town searching for a place where they belong.
Gokusen
ごくせん
Kumiko Yamaguchi, granddaughter and heir of a yakuza boss, takes a job teaching mathematics to class 4-2 at an all-boys private high school, where her students nickname her 'Yankumi'. The class is packed with delinquents who shrug off authority, but Kumiko's gangster upbringing gives her the nerve and street sense to win them over. She must keep her crime-family ties hidden from the school while using exactly those skills to reach the boys nobody else can handle.
Saikano
最終兵器彼女
In a quiet Hokkaido town, high-schoolers Shuji and Chise stumble through the awkward early days of dating, unsure how to make a clumsy relationship work. On a trip to Sapporo, an enemy air raid shatters the calm, and Shuji discovers Chise with metal wings and weaponry fused to her body: the Self-Defense Forces have remade her into Japan's ultimate weapon. As the war drags on, Chise grows ever more powerful and ever less human, with her bond to Shuji the last thread tying her to who she was.
The Music of Marie
マリーの奏でる音楽
On the flooded steampunk island of Pirito, the giant figure of Marie drifts above a peaceful, gentle world, watching over people who never turn to hatred or violence. In the factory town below, Kai grows into a young man and begins to hear Marie's faint music, a melody no one else can perceive. His childhood friend Pipi, who dreams of building a flying machine like her father, has long cared for him as that music draws Kai toward the truth of who Marie is.
Samurai Deeper Kyo
SAMURAI DEEPER KYO
Yuya Shiina is a teenage bounty hunter tracking the man who killed her brother across Edo-period Japan. On the road she crosses paths with Kyoshiro Mibu, a mild medicine peddler who turns out to share his body with Demon Eyes Kyo, a dreaded swordsman sealed inside him. Kyo's single drive is to reclaim his own body, a pursuit that pulls Yuya and their companions into conflict with the Tokugawa shogunate and the shadowy, superhuman Mibu Clan.
Serial Experiments Lain: The Nightmare of Fabrication
Serial Experiments Lain: The Nightmare of Fabrication
In this short full-color manga by Yoshitoshi ABe, Lain sits alone in her room, starved for any human contact, and counts off the people she has lost: Touko, who has turned cold toward her; her now-divorced parents; Tomo and Kyoko, whom she has cut off; and Misato, whom others insist was never real. Cutting the collar off her toy dog Bike-chan, Lain insists Misato existed — then cannot find the art supplies she remembers buying with her. Tied to the Serial Experiments Lain franchise, it reads as a missing fragment of that world rather than a standalone entry.
Cowboy Bebop
カウボーイビバップ
Aboard the spaceship Bebop, ex-hitman Spike Spiegel and his gruff partner Jet Black chase bounties across a star system humanity scattered into after Earth was wrecked. The con artist Faye Valentine, the kid hacker Ed, and the data dog Ein round out the crew, each episode a self-contained job that goes sideways into gunfights and gallows humor. This manga retells the Cowboy Bebop crew's bounty-hunting cases in print form rather than continuing the anime.