Review: ‘Maison Ikkoku’ Collector’s Edition, Vol. 1 is Rom-Com Goodness!

For folks around my age who came of age watching anime and picking up manga for the first time in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, Inuyasha served as a popular fixture thanks to its rotation on Cartoon Network on its Adult Swim lineup. Inuyasha was a gateway series for so many. Megan Thee Stallion has talked fondly about the series to the delight and amazement of so many of us Black nerdy folks who also enjoy anime. It was a series I adored once I entered high school and continued my love of “girl falls into another world or time” genre that I immediately loved when I first started watching Escaflowne back in middle school. (Which would help identify the path of figuring out what the isekai genre was which I LOVE to this day but that’s another story!). But I knew that the look of Inuyasha looked familiar and the creator, the mangkai behind the series-her name looked familiar to. Then I remembered the assorted lot of floppies of Ranma One-Half and Mermaid Saga that I had read years prior. I actually still have some of them: randomly found issues in the comic book style floppies of those manga series that were pubbed in the 90’s that I noticed weren’t printed how manga was usually read. It wasn’t flipped to the way I know manga was traditionally read in Japan. I loved those stories, couldn’t make much sense of them since I reading issues out of order, but I loved the fantastic or fantasy element in them. I loved the magic. In Mermaid Saga, there was definitely a supernatural pie…