I can’t believe that this is the third year that I’m doing a Manga of the Year already! Time sure flies when you’re reading 55 different series at the same time! (I wish I were exaggerating but, I’m not!)
Just like with anime, it will only be a new series that started in 2024 (in the U.S., not Japan). No ongoing series from a previous year will be counted. But, since this is the third annual editorial, let’s list off the last two years’ winners!
2023: Boy’s Abyss
2022: The Music of Marie
With that being said, here are all of the new series I read this year!
Tokyo These Days
I Want to End This Love Game
Super Smartphone
You and I Are Polar Opposites
My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lvl999
Let’s Do It Already
Detroit: Become Human: Tokyo Stories
Nukozuke
Days with My Stepsister
The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy at All
Rainbows After Storms
Imaizumi Brings All the Gals to His House
The list is a bit shorter than last year’s list but there are still some good selections in there to be had! Plus, I skipped over a few new series simply because I’m running out of room! As I type this, I am approaching 1,300 physical volumes of manga and I don’t have the space to keep adding new series so I was narrowing down my new series selections to ones I was 100% genuinely interested in reading and reviewing. Otherwise, this list would have about 7-8 more entries on it and I would have about 2-3 broken bookshelves.
Enough rambling, though… let’s get on with the list!
5. Detroit: Become Human: Tokyo Stories
I, typically, do not care for AAA games; however, when I learned that this was, essentially, an American visual novel and that it involved my second favorite form of sci-fi, that being A.I., I had to play it and I’m very glad that I did because it was one of my favorite games from 2018. When I saw that they were doing spinoff stories in a manga, I got excited! DBH: Tokyo Stories feels like you’re playing the game all over again with brand-new fresh content set in Tokyo. Yes, it does have that Japanese flair to it but outside of that, it stays very true to the game in terms of storytelling. Everything I loved about the game was present here and the fact that I was getting some brand-new stories, just made this an instant include into my Top 5!
4. Days with My Stepsister
If you read my Anime of the Year, you will see that Days with My Stepsister was placed in the #2 spot but it only gets #4 here. Why is that? Well, despite the fact that the anime and manga are extremely similar, this series works much better as an anime than as a manga. You can’t feel the weight of the drama in the manga like you can in the anime. The usage of silence is masterful in the anime and the tone and inflection in the characters’ voices help drive home that drama. Here in the manga, you’re just reading words on a page. If you didn’t see the anime, I think the impact would have been lost on the readers. Yes, it’s the same story, the same situations, etc… but I just didn’t feel the weight of it. As such, it slips down two spots on the manga side of things but it’s still good enough to land a spot in the Top 5!
3. The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn’t a Guy at All
Call me a degenerate but I do love a good Yuri romance story. When you take two awkward nerds and bond them over 90s American alternative rock, and frame it around a story about not fitting into popular culture and just wanting to be yourself and sharing that love with someone who feels the same, then you have the makings for an incredible story. Aya and Mitsuki go through a journey of self-discovery, not when it comes to their orientation but much rather their interests.
They know they don’t fit in with what’s popular and all they want is to find someone who can accept them for who they are. Wrap that around Aya impulsively stopping by a record store and meeting someone she can connect with but mistake for a guy, and you have a nice splash of comedy when, in reality, this is more of a drama than anything. Everything is very well put together and the reason why it didn’t score higher is because as of the time of this writing, there is only one volume out but if the first volume can land the #3 spot, then it tells you just how good of a first volume it was!
2. My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lvl999
Yamada is a gamer who keeps to himself and doesn’t think about things like love as he has no room in his life for something like that. Akane is a girl who got roped into playing an MMORPG thanks to her now ex-boyfriend. Yamada, who mainly plays FPS games, plays the same MMO and is in the same guild as Akane, too. They not only cross paths in the game but they also cross paths in real life. When they meet, something changes in Yamada. While it’s not a sudden flip of the switch, Yamada slowly begins to realize that maybe love isn’t such a bad thing after all!
I’m a sucker for a great romance and that’s exactly what this series delivers on. The characters are well-written, the story develops in a way that is engaging and you keep wanting to read more, and some of the side characters get stories that tug at your heartstrings as well. Add in the fact that we get to dive into the world of video games, and you have a story that is sure to please (or give hope to) otakus everywhere! While it’s not BokuYaba, it’s still a very good romance story and I would easily put this one in my Top 5 of that genre!
With that… my personal 2024 Manga of the Year is…
1. Tokyo These Days
For the third year in a row, I picked something profound as my Manga of the Year. The Music of Marie was a profound one-shot that dealt with the grittiness of life in a supernatural way, Boy’s Abyss was a profound series that dealt with the mental torture of wanting to escape a hometown that keeps pulling back in, and this time, Tokyo These Days is a profound manga that deals with proving that your idealistic world is not out of reach if your idealistic world just happens to be manga.
Shiosawa believes in manga. He believes in its creators but when his magazine gets canceled, he places himself into early retirement. He can’t accept the manga industry for what it has become. There is no life in the pages anymore. It’s all about what sells, what makes money, and he feels that the very souls of the manga artists are being stamped out one by one… so he wants to prove to the world that those souls are still alive and shining. He wants to create the world’s most perfect manga, but maybe he doesn’t realize what he means by that or thinks it’s impossible.
What Shiosawa means is that he wants to launch his own manga magazine where a manga artist can publish a manga that they believe is their best work. He doesn’t want them to be tied down by rules or constraints. He wants to see the passion come out of the artist once again. What the perfect manga is… it’s whatever the manga artist believes it to be. As long as it is their story, unedited, unfiltered, and presented the way they meant it to be, then it is perfect in Shiosawa’s eyes. It’s not an easy endeavor and not everyone believes in his plan or is willing to take part in it but those that do see the passion and determination in Shiosawa and, most importantly, they see his undying love for the art form of manga, the very essence of what manga is.
While only three volumes, it was, hands down, the best manga I’ve read in 2024 and I knew that as soon as I finished it, it was going to be my pick for Manga of the Year!
So, that’s it! Those are my Top 5 Manga of 2024.
Until next year,
Ja ne!
