My Favorite Manga and Manhwa

I'm not a manga (漫画) nor manhwa (만화) expert. If you're looking for one, I would highly recommend matttt's channels, which cover all graphic media types in fact. Through this article, I merely intend to share my favorite picks, the ones which impacted me the most, be it for entertainment or quality.

I track my reading on Goodreads, here's my profile.

If you have any suggestions of manga or manhwa I should read, leave them in the comments down below!

My Favorite Manga

The ordering on my list is way less relevant than making it to the list, but surely the number one pick on my list has got to be Blame!, by Tsutomu Nihei.

The cover for the first volume of Blame!

Blame! is much more of an aesthetic experience than a real story. The setting feels sort of boilerplate dystopian, but Tsutomu weaves a world which feels infinite, awing the reader on every page.

The infinite patterns in the world of Blame!

A page from the manga Blame! (1)

A page from the manga Blame! (2)

A panel from the manga Blame! (3)

I don't remember where I first heard of this manga, but I think it was during an amazing video on Piranesi (the book), by Jacob Geller. Besides lending his name to the title of the highly rated and recommended eponymous novel by Susanna Clarke (Piranesi), Giovanni Piranesi (1720 - 1778) was also a great source of inspiration for M.C. Escher's surreal artwork. Piranesi's drawings are just jaw-dropping.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Appian Way, in La antichità romane, 1756.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Interior Views of Rome, 1758.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carcere XIV, in Carceri d'Invenzione, etching, 1760, Warsaw University Library, Warsaw, Poland.

Anyway, let's get back to the list. Again, this is my personal ranking, not at all how I would rank them in an absolute sense. Here they are:

1. Blame!
2. Attack on Titan
3. Hikaru no Go
4. Dragon Ball
5. Dragon Ball Z
6. Death Note
7. One Punch Man
8. Berserk
9. Vagabond
10. Akira
11. Dorohedoro
12. Go! Go! Loser Ranger

Did you know that Dragon Ball is heavily inspired by one of the founding stories of Chinese mythology? Goku is basically Sun Wukong 孫悟空, the monkey king, from Journey to the West.

My Favorite Manhwa

Manhwa is the Korean version of manga. Of course, there are way fewer of these than there are manga, and I know even less about them than I do about manga, but I can mention at least two outstanding ones:

1. The Kingdom of the Gods
2. Hellper

The Kingdom of the Gods served as the inspiration for the highly rated and entertaining Netflix series Kingdom.

The poster for Netflix's Kingdom.

Manhwa seem to be even more focused on being page-turners than manga, and Hellper certainly toes that line. In Korea, you very often see people scrolling frantically through manhwa on public transport; it's almost scary how fast they can read them.

If you're a Go player, you've probably heard of Misaeng, since it also received a Netflix adaptation. Personally, I found the adaptation unbearably cheesy and unwatchable. The original manhwa is still out of reach for non-Korean speakers, but I managed to take a look at it when I was in Korea, and it seemed much more entertaining. It's a pity it might still take a while for non-Korean speakers to be able to enjoy it, maybe AI translation could speed that up.