Manga

To mark Trans Week of Visibility, ComicsAlliance has put together a list of great comics for younger readers featuring transgender or nonbinary characters. These are comics that are suitable for a wide range of ages, and come from a wide array of genres, from fantasy to electro-pop to superheroes to slice-of-life --- so there should be something for everyone. If you're a young trans or nonbinary comics reader, or if you know someone who is, or if you just want to read some amazing comics, these are our recommendations!

The Boy And The Beast is the latest film from Mamoru Hosoda, Hayao Miyazaki's heir apparent. It's a poignant fable about growing up and parenthood, as well as a stunning, fun adventure film. Screen & Page looks at the appeal of the movie, and its adaptation as a manga by Renji Asai.

There have been a lot of action figures made for a lot of superheroes over the years, but I don't think there's ever been a figure made of a hero less suited for "action" than ThreeZero's brand-new 1/6 scale figure of Saitama from One Punch Man. I mean, at least the Man-Eating Cow from The Tick --- who actually did get an action figure --- ate a man once or twice.

This has been a dispiriting, painful week, and if you're like me then you'll have turned to the world of comics to offer you a spark of imagination, excitement, and investment. We're all dealing with the last few days in our own way, and at ComicsAlliance we're determined to continue generating the brightest and loudest spark of investment with the medium that's possible. So here we continue on with Weekender, unabated, delivering you a look at new comics, new podcasts, independent comics news, festivals and awards from around the world. This will continue to be a place where we give attention to the comics that deserve it --- and feature a range of different comics voices rising up to hopefully take over and make the next few years their own.

Back when the Ghost in the Shell casting news was announced, people were understandably confused that Scarlett Johansson would be playing a character whose origins and race, as far as we all knew, were Japanese. Despite protests, production on the movie ensued, and we got our first look at the anime adaptation in a few short teasers a few weeks ago. Now, the director of the original animated Ghost in the Shell films, Mamoru Oshii, has visited the set and seen everything for himself, and it sounds like he’s not upset at all about Johansson’s casting.

Most anime is adapted from manga, often produced by the manga publisher to raise awareness and sell it overseas. But what about the anime shows or films that go the other way, adapted from the screen to the page? How do those works hold up, and what changes or stays the same? That’s what Screen & Page aims to explore. Today, we're looking at a video game adaptation that stands effectively as a horror tale in its own right, while retaining its originators' sense of mystery and unease: Higurashi: When They Cry!

Over the past few weeks, HBO's new hit series Westworld has captivated a viewership with its complex tale morality play of gods, men and machines. As great as Westworld is, it's only on for one hour a week, and soon it'll reach the season finale. If you need more of that good machines-achieving-sentience action, we've selected five of the best robotic comics for you to sample next. Love that? Try this.

Over the past few years, the folks at Digital Manga has been steadily making an effort to collect some of Osamu Tezuka's more obscure work, and now they're back with their latest. Launching this week on Kickstarter, Digital Manga's latest campaign aims to reprint Under the Air, with stretch goals including new printings of Melody of Iron and The Crater.

It's Fantasy Week here at ComicsAlliance, and it's also one week until Halloween, so what better way to celebrate both than with a look at an anime and manga about a young shrine maiden waging a war on monsters. This is Blood-C, a spinoff of a spinoff of a movie that got its own movie!

Without the massive popularity of Osamu Tezuka's trademark creation Astro Boy, the manga and anime industries might look very different today. By taking the hot topic of the time --- nuclear power --- and marrying it with a heroic child character and the influence of the Walt Disney cartoons that were flooding into postwar Japan, Tezuka not only secured his reputation as "the father of manga," but created an enduring icon of action and adventure. The book also had a very specific influence on one of the greatest mangaka of the 21st century, Naoki Urasawa, who retold one of the classic Astro Boy tales in Pluto, but succeeded in making it very much his own.