Anime Blog Tracker

In the shadow of the mainstream North American manga industry, there are a handful of indies who are keeping manga weird. They’re publishing the kind of offbeat stories that you won’t read in Shonen Jump or stream on Crunchyroll, stories that are elliptical, profound, strange, funny, or unsettling in ways that My Hero Academia or Blue Lock aren’t, with artwork that has an obvious individuality.  On a recent visit to the Star Fruit site, for example, I discovered Okaya Izumi’s Drunks, a pair of stories that put a novel spin on the meet-cute. In the first, a shy salary man staggers home from a night of drinking only to fall prey to a chatty vampire who casually asks, “Do you have blackout drapes at your house?” You can guess where...