Top Manga of 1999 · mirumiru

Top Manga of 1999 · mirumiru

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Part 6: Stone Ocean

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.

Mushishi

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.

Planetes

Planetes

Planetes

Hachimaki hauls orbital debris in 2075, crewing the small collector DS-12 'Toy Box' for the Debris Section of Technora Corporation. Decades of space junk now threaten every ship and station around Earth, and clearing it is dangerous, low-status work. He does it beside the chain-smoking Fee and the quiet Yuri while dreaming of a spacecraft of his own, until the arrival of earnest rookie Ai Tanabe reshapes the crew as she adjusts to life, work, and grief in the vacuum.

Azumanga Daioh

Azumanga Daioh

あずまんが大王

Chiyo Mihama is a ten-year-old prodigy skipped five grades ahead into an ordinary Japanese high school, where she works to fit in with classmates five years older. 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. Four-panel gags carry their three years of classes, culture festivals, and summer trips, with the eccentric teachers Yukari Tanizaki and Minamo 'Nyamo' Kurosawa never far away.

Paradise Kiss

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 its lead 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.

Rave Master

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 the one holy stone called Rave still in his keeping. Haru sets out across the mainland to find the four scattered Rave stones and bring down Demon Card, the criminal organization behind the world's misery, joined along the way by an amnesiac girl named Elie.

Scrapped Princess

Scrapped Princess

スクラップド・プリンセス

Pacifica Casull grows up believing she is an ordinary girl until she learns the truth: the Church of Mauser has marked her for execution before her sixteenth birthday, convinced a prophecy names her the destroyer of the world. Her adoptive siblings Shannon, a swordsman, and Raquel, a mage, become her protectors, taking her on the run across a country where legend and old magic still shape the political order. This light novel is the original source for the Scrapped Princess anime and manga adaptations.

FLCL

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.

Baki: New Grappler Baki

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.

The Prince of Tennis

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.

Samurai Deeper Kyo

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.

20th Century Boys

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.

Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Adolescence of Utena

Revolutionary Girl Utena: The Adolescence of Utena

少女革命ウテナ～アドゥレセンス黙示録

Utena Tenjou arrives at Ohtori Academy in a boy's uniform and runs into Touga Kiryuu, the boy she knew before she decided to become a prince herself. Duels in a hidden arena settle who holds Anthy Himemiya, the Rose Bride, and Utena wins her without ever wanting the prize. These two chapters retell the 1999 film The Adolescence of Utena, a reimagining of the television story rather than a sequel to it.

Seihou Tenshi Angel Links

Seihou Tenshi Angel Links

星方天使エンジェルリンクス

Meifon Li is sixteen and already running Angel Links, the outfit her grandfather left her, which protects transport companies from pirates. Taffei, her partner, turns into the blade she fights with, and Valeria Vertone and the Dragonite warrior Duuz Delax Rex handle tactics and close combat beside her. These six chapters are self-contained jobs rather than one continuous case, with Meifon taking the front line herself.

Serial Experiments Lain: The Nightmare of Fabrication

Serial Experiments Lain: The Nightmare of Fabrication

Serial Experiments Lain: The Nightmare of Fabrication

Lain sits alone in her room, starved for contact, counting off the people she has lost. Touko has turned cold toward her, her parents have divorced, and she has cut off Tomo and Kyoko. Then there is Misato, whom everyone insists was never real. Lain cuts the collar off her toy dog Bike-chan and insists Misato existed, only to find that the art supplies she remembers buying with her are gone. This short color one-shot by Yoshitoshi ABe sits alongside the Serial Experiments Lain anime rather than standing on its own.

Itou Junji Kyoufu Manga Korekushon: Chidamagi

Itou Junji Kyoufu Manga Korekushon: Chidamagi

伊藤潤二恐怖漫画コレクション血玉樹

This volume gathers seven Ito one-shots, led by the title story Chidamagi, in which a couple stranded after a car crash stumble into a deserted village where the walls are streaked with blood. It also includes Taegatai Meiro (Unendurable Labyrinth), about two schoolgirls who wander into a mountain temple whose monks starve themselves toward self-mummification, alongside Re-Animator no Ken, Isho, Hashi, Akuma no Riron, and Aibeya.

+Anima

+Anima

+Anima

Cooro is a +Anima, one of a feared minority of humans able to turn parts of their bodies into those of animals; his own transformation gives him a pair of black crow wings. 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 looking for a place where they belong.

Gokusen

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

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.

Cowboy Bebop

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 chapter 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.

ZOMBIEPOWDER.

ZOMBIEPOWDER.

ZOMBIEPOWDER.

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 twelve Rings of the Dead, the cursed artifacts that together yield the Zombie Powder said to raise the dead and grant immortality. Alongside Gamma's gunslinging partner C.T. Smith, Elwood chases the rings hoping to bring back his sister Sheryl.

GetBackers

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.

Slayers Original Movie Screenplay Book

Slayers Original Movie Screenplay Book

劇場版スレイヤーズおりぢなる

This volume collects the shooting scripts for the three Slayers features that put Lina Inverse and Naga the Serpent on screen: Slayers Return, Slayers Great and Slayers Gorgeous. The screenplays run as written, so the dialogue and staging appear before the animation shaped them, and a set of short omake comics is bound in alongside. It is a reference book for readers who already know the films rather than a prose entry in the Slayers series.

The Music of Marie

The Music of Marie

Marieの奏でる音楽

On the island of Pirito, the mechanical goddess Marie drifts through the sky above a peaceful world whose people never turn to hatred or violence. Down in the factory town of Gil, Kai grows into a young man and begins to hear Marie's music, a melody no one else can perceive. His childhood friend Pipi, who dreams of building a flying machine like her father's, has long cared for him, while that music keeps pulling Kai toward what Marie really is.

Girl Got Game

Girl Got Game

POWER!!

Kyo Aizawa expected the cute Seisyu High girls' uniform and got a boy's one in the mail instead. Her father, whose own basketball career ended when he tore his Achilles tendon, has enrolled her as a male student so she can carry his dream onto the school's elite boys' team. Living as a boy also means the boys' dorm, where her roommate turns out to be Chiharu Eniwa, one of Seisyu's best players and most popular students, who has no idea she is a girl.

Alive

Alive

ALIVE

Tenshuu Yashiro is on death row for killing the four men who assaulted his girlfriend and then killing her as well. On the day set for his execution he is offered a swap: die on schedule, or submit to an experiment. He takes it, and he and another condemned man, Gondo, are shut in a comfortable room with food, drink and nothing to do but wait. What the people watching want to see is how a parasite said to feed on murderous intent takes to hosts like them.

Turn A Gundam

Turn A Gundam

∀ガンダム

Loran Cehack reaches Earth as a Moonrace scout and spends two years living as a local, working a mine and hiding where he came from, while Queen Dianna Soreil negotiates for her people's return. When impatient settlers force the descent anyway, the mobile suit sealed inside the White Doll statue is dug out, and Loran takes it. This manga runs the Turn A Gundam story from that first quiet stretch on Earth through the war it interrupts.

Turn A Gundam

Turn A Gundam

∀ガンダム

Centuries of forgetting have left Earth at a pre-industrial standard of living while the Moonrace kept its technology intact and its eyes on the planet below. Loran Cehack, sent down ahead of the return, ends up at the controls of the Turn A Gundam once the settlers stop waiting, caught between the people who raised him and the people he came from. Dianna Soreil, queen of the Moonrace, is still trying to keep that return peaceful when the shooting starts, and this light novel follows both of them through it.

Family Complex

Family Complex

ファミリー・コンプレックス

Akira Sakamoto is fourteen and, as he sees it, the only ordinary-looking person in a household of six. His parents and siblings are striking enough that strangers stop to look, and every family dinner feels to him like a comparison he loses. Pulling away from people who have never once judged him starts to look easier than staying, which is the real trouble. The same family turns up again in Princess Princess, where an older Akira runs the student council, but this volume keeps to the house.

The Day of Revolution

The Day of Revolution

革命の日

Kei Yoshikawa collapses at fifteen and leaves the hospital with a diagnosis that undoes the rest of his life: he is genetically female, and the body he grew up in was the anomaly. A year of treatment later he returns to the same high school as Megumi, a girl whose resemblance to the missing honor student Kei Yoshikawa nobody can stop remarking on. Her friend Makoto, one of the few people who know what happened, keeps the rumors at bay while the school's most powerful clique decides it wants Megumi for itself.

Sgt. Frog

Sgt. Frog

ケロロ軍曹

Keroro, a frog-like alien platoon captain, is sent to scout Earth, codenamed Pokopen by his species, ahead of a full invasion, but he crash-lands and loses his equipment when Fuyuki and Natsumi Hinata discover him hiding in their house. Rather than report the security breach, his superiors leave him stranded, so Keroro settles into the Hinata household while four other advance-team agents scattered across the planet slowly resurface. Each chapter follows his halfhearted invasion schemes, which usually collapse into chores, hobbies, and Japanese seasonal events instead.

Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase

Tsukuyomi: Moon Phase

月詠 -MOON PHASE-

Kouhei Morioka, a freelance photographer from a family of exorcists who seems to have inherited none of their power, travels to a German castle on assignment and meets Hazuki, a young vampire held captive there. Hazuki bites him and declares him her servant, only for the bond to have no effect at all. She follows him back to Tokyo and moves into his grandfather's antique shop, where Kouhei, his exorcist cousin Seiji and the rest of the household are pulled into cases of talking cats, spirits and other supernatural intrusions, while Hazuki keeps searching for the mother who left her.

Battle Royale

Battle Royale

バトル・ロワイアル

A totalitarian government drafts Shuya Nanahara's ninth-grade class onto a sealed-off island, arms them, and fits them with explosive collars under a program with one rule: kill or be killed until a single student remains. Shuya refuses to play along and instead tries to protect the people around him, starting with Noriko Nakagawa, even as the government broadcasts the results as spectacle. This 1999 novel set the template later carried into the manga and film adaptations, staying grounded in the students' first hours of confusion and dread.

Saiyuki Gaiden

Saiyuki Gaiden

最遊記外伝

Five hundred years before Genjo Sanzo's journey west, a golden-eyed child later named Goku is dragged into Heaven and placed under the reluctant care of the minor god Konzen Douji. Goku grows up alongside the soldier-gods Tenpou Gensui and Kenren Taishou, forming a found family that draws the attention of the troubled war-prince Nataku, even as political factions in Heaven look for ways to use the three men for their own ends. Kazuya Minekura's prequel manga follows their friendship as Heaven's politics close in around them, laying the groundwork for the Saiyuki story to come.

Naruto

Naruto

NARUTO -ナルト-

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.

Real

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.

Kanon

Kanon

Kanon

Yuuichi Aizawa returns to his snowbound hometown after seven years away, unable to remember most of what happened there as a child. Settling back in with his cousin Nayuki Minase, he crosses paths with the sweets-obsessed Ayu Tsukimiya and other girls tied to memories he's lost, each encounter pulling a piece of his forgotten past back into view. This light novel series novelizes Key's 1999 visual novel Kanon, retelling each heroine's route as a separate volume.

Boogiepop Doesn't Laugh

Boogiepop Doesn't Laugh

ブギーポップは笑わない

At Shinyo Academy, a new drug is spreading through the student body just as several classmates start vanishing without explanation. Adults write it off as runaways, but the students whisper about Boogiepop, a shinigami said to appear whenever the school is in real danger. Touka Miyashita and four classmates start piecing together what's actually happening, following leads that connect the disappearances, the drug, and the urban legend everyone assumes is just a story. This manga adapts the first novel of Kouhei Kadono's Boogiepop series.

Beyblade

Beyblade

爆転シュートベイブレード

Tyson Granger sets out to become the world's greatest beyblader, teaming up with Kai Hiwatari, Max Tate and Ray Kon as the Bladebreakers, with the group's tech specialist Kenny looking after their gear. Each of their tops houses a bit-beast, a bonded spirit creature that powers up the blade in battle, and the team fights its way through regional and national tournaments to prove itself. Created around Takara's spinning-top toy line, the manga went on to become the basis of the Beyblade anime.

The Big O

The Big O

The Big O

Roger Smith works Paradigm City as a professional negotiator, one of the few people still willing to operate in a metropolis where every resident lost their memories forty years ago. Backed by android partner R. Dorothy Wayneright and his butler Norman Burg, Roger settles disputes by day and pilots the giant robot Big O when talk fails, digging into the city's buried past one case at a time. Published alongside the television anime, this manga takes the same premise in its own direction.

Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpuuchou

Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kenpuuchou

東京魔人学園剣風帖

Transfer student Tatsuma Hiyuu arrives at a Tokyo high school where the delinquent Kyouichi Houraiji already suspects something is wrong: corpses are rising as the Reborn Dead and stalking the city after dark. The two team up to hunt the undead alongside classmates Aoi Misato and Komaki Sakurai, uncovering the occult forces behind the attacks. This manga adapts the 1998 tactical RPG that started the Tokyo Majin Gakuen franchise.

R.O.D: Read or Die

R.O.D: Read or Die

R.O.D -READ OR DIE-

Yomiko Readman can turn a scrap of paper into a throwing blade or a sheet tough enough to stop a bullet, a power that makes her the top field agent for the British Library's Special Operations Division, even though she'd rather spend the money on more books. This manga prequel to the R.O.D OVA follows Yomiko before that story begins, including her first meetings with novelist Nenene Sumiregawa and with Wendy Earhart, then still a British Library apprentice working undercover as a schoolgirl.

Neko Majin

Neko Majin

ネコマジン

Neko Majin, a scrappy cat-creature with Dragon Ball-style attacks like the Nekohameha, throws himself into brawls and practical jokes across a string of loosely connected one-shots. As the series shifts into its later Neko Majin Z chapters, an overweight Saiyan named Onio and Freeza's son Kuriza join the cast, pulling the parody deeper into Dragon Ball's own world and cameo appearances from Goku and Vegeta. Akira Toriyama drew the strip on and off for six years as a self-parody of his own most famous work.

Liar Game: Roots of A

Liar Game: Roots of A

LIAR GAME roots of A

The title story follows Shinichi Akiyama during his university years, when a criminal psychology assignment to build a profile of a stranger from scraps of evidence pulls him into the kind of high-pressure deduction game that later defines his life in Liar Game. The rest of the volume collects five earlier one-shots by creator Shinobu Kaitani, from a darts gamble to a two-part story about forbidden divination, each with its own protagonist and its own corner of high stakes. Only the opening story ties directly into the main Liar Game series; the rest stand alone.

Amon: The Darkside of the Devilman

Amon: The Darkside of the Devilman

AMONデビルマン黙示録

As paranoia spreads through Tokyo over rumors that demons are hiding in human bodies, ordinary people start turning on each other, hunting neighbors who might not be who they claim. When tragedy finally breaks Akira Fudo's mind, his demonic other half, Amon, breaks free of him and turns that violence back on both humans and demons alike. This manga reimagines the final chapters of Go Nagai's original Devilman story from Amon's perspective.

Neo Devilman

Neo Devilman

ネオデビルマン

Eighteen short stories, each by a different artist, revisit the world of the original Devilman. Some fill in episodes around Akira Fudo and the war between humans and demons; others follow people with no link to him at all, caught in the same catastrophe somewhere else. Nothing here is meant to line up into a single continuity: every chapter is a self-contained take on the same setting, free to contradict the ones on either side of it.

One Piece: Taose! Kaizoku Ganzack

One Piece: Taose! Kaizoku Ganzack

ONE PIECE 倒せ!海賊ギャンザック

Luffy, Zoro and Nami are starving on a small boat when a sea monster attacks and carries Nami off, leaving the other two washed up on an unfamiliar shore. There they meet Medaka, a girl whose village has lost all of its men to the pirate Ganzack, her father among them. Getting Nami back means getting inside Ganzack's base, which is also the only way the villagers come home. This novel retells the 1998 short film that was the first animated One Piece production, made before the television series began.

Crows: The Aftermath

Crows: The Aftermath

その後のクローズ

Right after the end of Crows, Kawachi Tesshou and Takeda Yoshimasa, fifth-generation head of the Front of Armament, force their way into Suzuran hunting the pair who attacked Tesshou's sister, years before Tesshou will inherit the gang's sixth generation himself. A second story returns to Suzuran with Zetton now a second-year, as a fresh intake of first-years starts another war over who runs the all-boys school. Both halves bridge the gap between Crows and its sequel, WORST.