Autumn 2022 Manga Book Shelf Spotlight

September has finally rolled into the arena and it’s still too hot for sweater weather and anything pumpkin spice, if that’s your thing. This is a perfect time for a seasonal check in to spotlight a few gems on my physical and digital bookshelves for anyone looking for some new manga to read! Romance, school life, yakuza–you name it! I got it!

Blue Period Creator: Tsubasa Yamaguchi Translator: Ajani Oloye Publisher: Kodansha Genre: Drama, School Life Age Rating: 16+ Available Formats: Digital & Physical Ongoing or Completed: Ongoing Anime Adaption Available: Yes, Netflix Blue Period is one of my favorite ongoing manga series at the moment. When I reviewed the first volume, I wrote that it was a stunning debut about passion, art, and youth. As I kept reading this series about a high school kid who stumbled upon a new passion: painting, I was not prepared for the amazing story I would lose myself in. Hitting somewhere genre-wise between seninen, drama, and school life, it has a healthy dose of coming-of-age vibes too. Yatora, our protagonist who has had a late start in creating art enrolls in prep school to help him prepare for art school exams. It was a thrilling arc that really resonated with me as he constantly found himself hitting walls again and again as he was figuring out his weakness as an artist and how he saw the world. Catching up with volume seven revealed that our boy earned his way into the nation’s most competitive art school in Japan. Yator…