Tokyo These Days 1: Volume 1

This is a spectacular story, beautifully drawn and crafted. If you like comics and manga about comics and manga, you will like this. It is also about success, failure, middle-age, and perseverance. Heartbreaking and hearwarming. Read this book and the other 2 volumes.

The story and art of Taiyo Matsumoto are fantastic as usual and I look forward to the next couple of volumes. Unfortunately the art was often muddied up and blurred by the horrible print quality. There was a heavy amount of print bleed on most pages. Matsumoto uses a lot of fine lines and they were often destroyed by this bleed and the faded blacks. Print bleed is common in cheap manga but this book is under the “viz signature” series which is supposed to be higher quality and charges significantly more. It looks and feels worse than any other manga I have ever read. It is nowhere near the quality of other viz signature series I have collected such as Matsumoto’s Sunny. I’m not sure why they thought it was acceptable to cheapen out this badly while charging a premium price. Viz did not do this series justice. This is the lowest quality printing I have ever read. Check my photo to see the print bleed, it looks like a bad photocopy. The second page is supposed to be solid black by looks like a faint grey and you can see print roller marks on it.

Such a great book and really looking forward to part 2. Brilliant cover design looks amazing on my book shelf .

I get that it's at least partly subjective, but Taiyo Matsumoto is the best. I'm already a huge fan of several of his other works. His series, Sunny, is my single favorite manga and I cannot recommend that title highly enough. The first volume of his new series, Tokyo These Days, was fantastic. Its subject matter is something I wouldn't ordinarily find myself interested in: The world of writing/drawing and editing manga. But Matsumoto works his magic and it was one of most engaging stories I've read over the last year. His characters are alive and human, the most mundane moments end up being so moving, and it is, as always, just beautifully drawn. The principal downside is having to wait months for the next volume to appear. But it's worth it. Highly recommended.

A story about the love of manga and the intricate ways peoples lives intersect to make it. The characters are flawed and their lives grounded in reality. I am glad stories like these are being imported to the west, a complex story for those who are exploring more mature manga.