Geek of Oz

Welcome to BINGE-READ MANGA! On the first Tuesday of every month, Geek of Oz reviews a manga with a back catalogue and tells you why it's worth binging, Netflix-style. ______________________________________________________________________________ Ever had a teacher you really disliked, and wanted to get rid of? These guys do. Quite a bit.   THE STORY AND CHARACTERS Assassination Classroom is crazy. Seriously crazy. But also heartwarming. It's weird that way. After blowing up part of the moon, a sentient octopus-monster (who is later named Koro-sensei) arrives on Earth and demands to teach a class at a high school, or else he'll destroy the world in a year. The students of Koro-sensei's Class 3-E, tempted by a hefty bounty from the government, set about spending every day trying to kill him. Given that he can move at Mach 20 and is impervious to most guns, poisons and explosives, trying is the operative word there. AC has a premise that is, as shown ab...

Welcome to BINGE-READ MANGA , a new monthly feature where I look at a manga series that's been running for a while and has a good back catalogue built up. Just as Netflix exists well for cramming seasons of TV into a sitting, so too do these manga exist for tearing through six or seven volumes back-to-back. To start us off, we're headed deep into the culinary craziness territory of Yuto Tsukada and Shun Saeki's Food Wars . . THE STORY AND CHARACTERS The way I've pitched this to the uninitiated is it's Harry Potter by way of Iron Chef - you know, that really awesome old Japanese cooking show where a flamboyant man who owns a Kitchen Stadium gets chefs from around the world to compete with his own masters of specialty cooking, which had a really, really goofy (and excellent) English dub? Yeah, that Iron Chef . That's the tone Food Wars sets right from the off. Culinary prodigy Soma Yukihira helps run a self-titled family restaurant with his father, J...

I've said it before and I'll say it again; Naoki Urasawa is the greatest living manga creator. In my earlier review of Pluto volume 1 I praised the series for its sense of pace and the way in which it speeds along due in no small part due to its brevity. At three times the length of Pluto, if you include the 2 issue sequel, you'd think that the story would have a lesser sense of urgency. You'd think, but you'd be wrong. Even with a total of 24 volumes at it's disposal, 20th Century Boys moves along at a cracking pace, offering an incredibly immersive and multi-faceted universe in the very first volume. Mankind would not have made the new age, encountering the crisis at the end of the last century, that almost wiped them out... if it weren't for "them". In 1969, "they" who were still in their youth, created a symbol. In 1997, as the footsteps of the disaster slowly starts to show out, the symbol revives. This is the story about ...