Cinco

Coming at you with a real treat here. Many people know of Garo but AX, its spiritual successor, is still a bit overlooked. Although "spiritual successor" isn't quite right because it rose from Garo's ashes, it is, for all intents and purposes Garo2. Blue Franju, a story published in 2005 by an obscure mangaka you've probably never heard of. And as much as I liked making that joke, if you're here early, you can check the MU page of Reiroku Haru to see zero entries(I imagine someone will make one for Blue Franju eventually, but if you spotted this early...).

Topshelf put out a collection called "AX - A Collection of Alternative Manga" some 10 years or so ago. As with any anthology it's a mixed bag and some of the stuff in there has been collected in other stuff and some have been scanlated. There are very few stories in it that are meh, the rest range from okay to good to even a few really great ones. And some of the people in it still don't have anything else published or scanlated in english (such as Keizo Miyanishi, he had a cool story here). The real kicker is that this has a "vol. one" on the spine but it sold poorly and they never did more. The problem with all these small publishers doing alternative and gekiga stuff is the limited distribution, well that and the lack of coverage they get. So really, aside from a higher cost that the usual stuff, small printing numbers and general lack of publicity and attention, there's also the fact that some can kill you with shipping. If you live in the US, you might have heard of Glacier Bay Books, a small publishing company made by some ex-scanlators with some very obscure alternative manga, something worth checking out but if you live outside the US, shipping costs can be a pain in the butt(you can buy most of their stuff digitally DRM-free though, except for Glaeolia).

Anyway, Blue Franju is really good, I stumbled upon it and found the art to be fantastic. Big thanks to Gyoshi for translating this and going over it with me so we get this right, big thanks to alti for cleaning and big thanks to The Artist Formerly Known as AshneeHS, Kathulluh, for typesetting this, it was a bit harder than a regular cl/ts job. And big thanks to elemhunter for scanning this and a whole lot of other cool stuff and making them public. Hopefully we did it justice. 

Blue Franju - Reiroku Haru (oneshot)

Another oneshot from Mochi, this one's rather short but fun.

Minetaro Mochizuki - lyrical robot

Confrontation

Saruchinesu ch. 14

It be like that sometimes

Tokyo Kaido ch. 26

Betrayals, head games, conspiracies and secret cults. I just can't stress enough how much I like Atsushi Kaneko...

Wet Moon ch. 26

...or can I? See you next week.