What Manga's would you recommend that actually are complex and are willing to engage in the compexity instead of pretending to do it like Mha
My immediate answer is, “Get away from shonen manga,” but that’s hardly fair; there are plenty of shonen manga out there that are perfectly willing to engage with complexity! The real answer is to get away from Shonen Jump manga.
As to recommendations, to a degree it depends on what kind of complexity you’re looking for? Complex characters, allowed to be sympathetic while also being flawed and not being dogmatically punished by the narrative for it? Complex plots, not taking easy ways out or unduly simplifying or nerfing one side to make another side look better? Complex situations, where there are more than two sides and no quick and easy answers to get to a happy ending where everything’s fixed?
I keep a (not very up-to-date) list of My Favorite Anime & Manga after I once skimmed through Anime News Network’s entire work encyclopedia intending to put together a Top 100 list. I never published it anywhere, and it would badly need to be updated to reflect the last several years’ worth of my anime and manga intake before I would ever even think about doing so, but it is handy for questions like this.
Taking a spin through it, then, here are a few manga (some of which have anime adaptations and some of which don’t) that jump out at me for being particularly unflinching in their willingness to get #It’sComplicated. Unless otherwise noted, all are complete works: there are a few things I can think of that seem promising right now which I might normally recommend, but then I thought that about BNHA as well.
I’ve grouped them into three categories—themes, plots, characters—and led with Themes because, while BNHA has significant issues in engaging with “complexity” in all three categories, I think the thematic category is where it struggles the most with “pretending” to be more complex than it’s actually willing to be. I've also included a favorite cover and an extremely short story blurb so readers will have something to go on re: how the story looks and what it's broadly about.
Hit the jump!
Complex/Challenging Themes:
Ōoku: The Inner Chambers:
One sentence summary: A plague wipes out three-quarters of the male population in 1600s Japan, leading to women having to take up previously male roles, including that of shogun.
An extremely interesting series in that it easily avoids all of the most obvious traps of its premise: pure reverse harem titillation, self-flattering feminist puff piece about how much better things would be if women were in charge, or just swapping gender roles and parroting a bunch of inverted stereotypes. Instead, it’s painfully aware that its characters emerged from a long history of patriarchal society and, despite the tremendous upheaval that society has undergone, they can't so easily shake the sexist belief structure that undergirded it; the sexism just gets repurposed to other ends. Equally so, however, the system of securing a bloodline inheritance by way of a harem doesn’t become less exploitative and oppressive towards its membersjust because the shogun is a woman and the harem is full of men.
Ōoku is therefore, among other things, a long series of romantic tragedies. The demands of the inheritance system, the dangers of childbirth and illness in a time before modern medicine, and the cutthroat politics of imperial court drama mean that, even when the characters do manage to find some humble happiness for themselves, it’s vanishingly unlikely that they’re going to be able to mutually enjoy that happiness into a ripe old age.
The series covers around 250 years—up to the fall of the shogunate with the Meiji Restoration—and it’s a great read. Worth noting that a lot of people call Ooku an alternate history series, but that isn’t really what it’s going for and if it’s what you expect, you’re going to be disappointed. Rather, it’s a “hidden” history, imagining what circumstances would have to come about for there to be a 250-year-long rule of women that the history books covered up after the fact. It thus benefits from some knowledge of the real historical figures involved, but you don’t have to know all that—I didn’t, and I did just fine with it.
Pilgrim Jäger:
One-sentence summary: The Protestant Reformation if it were a Guilty Gear game.
WARNING: Only read if you can make your peace with your gorgeous, ensemble-cast, densely-literate fantasy historical manga being unceremoniously axed after six volumes, only three of which even made it to the States at all. If you can make your peace with that, though, and you think watching extremely attractive characters argue about period-accurate religious esoterica via the means of religion-themed superpowers sounds like a good time, you absolutely owe it to yourself to read Pilgrim Jäger.
Houseki no Kuni:
One-sentence summary: In a world where a race of sentient gemstones in the shape of people fight for their survival against marauding spirits from the moon, one fragile young gem struggles to find their purpose.
Thought-provoking and gripping from its outset, Houseki takes some distinctly inhuman life-forms and settings to hold a mirror up to humanity, while still having characters that are deeply involving in their own right. That said, this is a show I put in the Themes category specifically for culturally Christian Western readers who are not going to immediately clock the Buddhist themes and references that probably feel screamingly obvious to Houseki’s target audience. ‘Cause look, I saw how the end of the manga for this one went down with the Tumblr crowd. It was not pretty. Houseki is a great series, but you need to understand it as a frequently grueling parable about how to reach enlightenment, not a feel-good story about a progressive and individualist protagonist triumphantly vanquishing a domineering religious patriarch.
Think Siddhartha but with rock people and a timescale such that star death can be a legitimate concern.
Mori no Asagao:
One-sentence summary: An exploration of the morality of the death penalty and its psychological effects on both prisoners and prison guards as explored through a newbie guard who finds himself feeling sympathy for a man on death row.
I will admit up front that I fell off of this one and never quite managed to get back to it, though I may one of these days—it may also be the case that I caught up to what was available translated at the time and then didn’t make an effort to keep up with it as more came out. It has a very distinct art style that I find somewhat unsettling to read in long stretches, and the main character can be very frustrating—clearly intentionally so on the author’s part, but still frustrating. But that said, good heavens, if you want a story that is going to dive straight into all the complexity that BNHA was most specifically terrified of—the humanity of criminals and the impact a harshly punitive justice system has both on them and those tasked with their care—this is the one you want to read.
The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service:
One-sentence summary: Episodic mystery solving series about a bunch of recent college grads with spiritual gifts or mundane talents related to death who form a business based on resolving the unfinished business of the dead.
It’s hard to say Kurosagi is “complex” in the sense of having a bunch of elements working towards one overarching theme because it’s extremely episodic with very little in the way of overarching plot. It's also the only thing on this list that's still running. I still want to throw it out there, though, because that episodic nature means its complexity isn't really something it would be possible for the series to walk back or chicken out of. To wit, it’s the most matter-of-fact manga I’ve ever read about showcasing the reality of a bunch of aspects of Japan, its culture, and in particular its history that a lot of people in Japan would really, really prefer not to talk about.
By that I don’t just mean pop culture stuff like idols or otaku; I mean stuff like the immensely sympathetic depiction of immigrant labor or homelessness, and its consistently critical stance on Japanese nationalism. In a particularly striking example, one story looks the Japanese readership dead in the eye and says, “This month’s mystery is going to be about Unit 731, and if they didn’t teach you about that in school, you should consider it a failure of your education.”
That’s the kind of storytelling you get when your manga is being written by a anthropologist!
So, what you’re going to get with Kurosagi is not so much “complex” in terms of how it challenges the characters (themselves a wonderful collection of misfits); rather, it’s complex in that it frankly and matter-of-factly acknowledges the complex realities its characters are living and working amidst, in the form of dozens upon dozens of corpse-colored vignettes.
Complex/Challenging Plots:
Golden Kamuy:
One-sentence summary: In early 1900s Hokkaido, a Japanese war vet teams up with a young Ainu girl to find a lost cache of gold and solve the mysteries surrounding it, but there are a lot of other people invested, in both the gold and the mysteries.
An extremely unique mix—period piece, sociological tract, cooking manga, genre-Western-by-way-of-Hokkaido, bloody action vehicle—and I think the mix itself elevates it above a lot of its more crass moments. It has a lot of moving parts, a lot of characters, and it is constantly dumping its three main factions into shakers, mixing them around, and dumping them out in new configurations. There’s not a single character in the piece who feels flat or merely functional, without that in turn meaning that they’re all sympathetic.
Also too, while the characters are colorful as they are, they're all products of their backgrounds, their cultures, informed by the very real period in history the author has meticulously researched for this story. Thus, while many of the cast's ambitions are personal in nature, history is alive in the present and there are some key characters who are extremely invested in making sure it's their own history that most shapes the future.
Urasawa Naoki’s conspiracy thrillers, in particular Monster and Pluto:
One-sentence summaries: Monster is about a Japanese neurosurgeon in post-Cold War Germany who inadvertently steps into a decades-long hive of government cover-ups, lingering pockets of Nazi sympathizers and child soldier brainwashing programs when he operates on a boy with a bullet lodged in his brain. Pluto is a retelling of a seminal arc of Tezuka’s Tetsuwan Atom (better known in the West as Astro Boy), filtering the story of fighting robots through Urasawa’s own lens of, well, conspiracy thriller.
An Urasawa conspiracy joint is always going to be enormously complex on the level of its plot machinations—indeed, with stuff like 20th Century Boys or Billy Bat, I find he goes too far in that direction, pushing past “plausible conspiracy story” and into “unbelievable contrivances.” But Monster and Pluto are right in the sweet spot, with both having enormously compelling, sprawling casts working their way through stories about the aftermaths of wars, the desire for power, and the many different facets of value, horror, strength, and fragility of the human (or robot) spirit.
Mizukami Satoshi’s works, especially Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer (Hoshi no Samidare in Japanese) or Sengoku Youko:
One-sentence summaries: Every Mizukami work that I’ve read is, on its most intrinsic level, about a teenaged misanthrope being pulled against their will into a series of circumstances that will challenge their jaded pessimism with friendship, love, camaraderie, and community, until in the end they are able to offer those same things in turn to others. The differences are all in the trappings: Biscuit Hammer is a “group of people tasked to save the Earth with their superpowers” modern fantasy gig, whereas Sengoku Youko is a medieval Japanese youkai versus humans scenario.
Here’s the thing with Mizukami stories that keep me coming back to them time and time again, and what makes them a great corrective to BNHA: You don’t get to stop at the bad guy that’s most convenient to villainize. You have to push all the way to the root of things, and the root of things is never an inherently evil person, but rather a person lashing out with cosmic power against the injustices to which their lives have subjected them. It’s like if you could resolve the ending of Persona 4 by bringing Izanami out of hell instead of fighting her to the death.
Complex/Challenging Characters:
Kakukaku Shikajika:
One-sentence summary: An autobiographical work by Higashimura Akiko, the creator of Kuragehime, about her path to becoming a mangaka and the teacher who was most responsible for getting her there.
Is it cheating a little to say a biography has complex characters? Not when biopics as a genre have such an issue with hagiography it's not! On that note, the thing about this one is that it’s just completely unsparing. Funny, to be sure! It’s extremely funny! But it’s also not pulling its punches about the selfish decisions Higashimura feels she made as a younger person, and the big gut punch late in its run all but vibrates off the page with her fury with herself over this huge mistake she can never undo. An honest, bracing read throughout.
Shimanami Tasogare:
One-sentence summary: A gay but extremely closeted youth meets a mysterious woman called Someone-san and, through her, finds a community in which he’s able to gradually grow into himself, sometimes hurting others and being hurt in turn, but over the course of the series learning how to face uncertainty and rejection while still being able to embrace the now.
Altogether my favorite manga about queer people working through the process of figuring out and being queer. Bright and warm and dreamy, but in that midsummer sort of way that sometimes quickens into oppressive heat and delirium before easing you back down—the imagery in more emotional moments becomes figurative and impressionistic rather than literal.
It’s also, to explain why it’s in this section about complex/challenging characters, the manga that deals most deftly with queer intersectionality that I've ever read. I love that its main character demonstrates that you can have it real bad in some ways and still not be immune to saying ignorant, ill-thought-out shit about people who have it bad in a different way from you—there are some places in this manga when emotions get heated and a lot of hurtful language gets thrown around, including by the main character, and including by people he likes very much.
The series believes that most people who say hurtful things—even very hurtful things!—are not inherently hateful people, they’re just well-meaning but ignorant, or trying to make themselves feel better about whatever it is they’re dealing with. That doesn’t make what they say not hurtful, it’s good to call it out, and you don’t have to stick around harmful situations! But it’s worth giving people the benefit of the doubt, too, as well as time and room to grow. Silence is not golden, says the series. You’ll be happier with people who accept you—so give people a chance to.
Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu:
One-sentence summary: A young man recently released from prison gets himself apprenticed to an elderly rakugo performer and unexpectedly finds himself the crux point between the old man’s tragic past and his uncertain future.
Yakumo is a sour old crank making bad decisions and being snarky and mean to people as he does it, so it’s lucky for him that Yotaro is a determined fool insistent on saving him from himself. I adore them utterly. A ton of other great characters in this, both in its decades-prior backstory (which takes up fully the first half of the series) and its 1970s-ish “current day” material (which bookends the first half and then takes up the remainder of the series). They’re all really wonderfully prickly and difficult.
I once described the backstory as being the tragedy of three people who all love each other desperately, but whose desires for the future are not only incompatible with each other, but are incompatible with their own personalities. All of them have some desperate wish that is irreconcilable with the defensive behaviors their respective histories have trained into them. That’s why their story ends in tragedy and why the current-day story is so defined by the grueling, frequently thankless work of getting Yakumo over those emotional hurdles so the second half doesn’t end the same way. Great piece about how you can define your own art but saving your own soul is going to take some outside help.
SPECIAL CATEGORY: It’s not complex, and it’s an anime rather than a manga, but if BNHA burned you, you should watch it anyway.
Akudama Drive:
One-sentence summary: The anti-BNHA.
I wouldn’t really call this show “complex” in the way you were hoping for, but what it is is brutally uncompromising in its simplicity. It’s all cause and effect, all, “When a government has become totalitarian to the extent this government has, bringing it down by means of violence may not be good or right, but it is inevitable. The government has made it inevitable by treating any transgression against the status quo as interchangeable with violence and by ensuring that only violent people are capable of resisting the corrupt state power.” When violence is the only tool that works, it is the only tool that will be used.
This point is made by a normal girl inadvertantly falling in with a group of such violent people and gradually becoming, at least from the POV of outsiders, indistinguishable from them. Because she has no recourse, because she is offered no recourse, she becomes the thing that she, like every normal person, was taught to fear. And this is not moral, but it is unavoidable. She, like all her colorful compatriots, is not thinking about her actions in a framework of morality, nor is she thinking grand thoughts about societal restructuring or reform and how to approach such a project both effectively and ethically. She simply has a goal and acts to fulfill that goal, consequences be damned, because the consequences if she loses are going to be the same no matter what methods she chooses, so she might as well choose the method most likely to work because the cost of failing is utterly untenable.
Akudama Drive is not a series about redemption or reform; its nominal heroes are not particularly good people (and some are much worse than “not particularly good”!). Hell, for the most part, they aren’t even tremendously humanized! Only two of them have backstories of any note and they’re not, by and large, anywhere near as sympathetic as BNHA's League of Villains. They’re broad archetypes more than they are real people, addressed, like everyone in the show, by titles or epithets rather than names. But they bring change to a country that desperately needed it all the same, and they’re damn well allowed agency and respect as they do it. And don’t let any of the above fool you into thinking it’s all dour and grim. It’s by the Danganronpa people, so the hyper-violence is all neon-colored and high-octane fun. There are a lot more ways the show is The Anti-BNHA, honestly so many that they'd deserve their own post, and it would heavily spoil the ending of the show, too, so I won’t go into them more here. But take my word for it: if you’re a Villain-sympathizer who hated BNHA’s ending, watch Akudama Drive.
When things were hard for me, I wanted to hear your rakugo. All the good, all the bad... Your rakugo has given me every emotion imaginable. That's why I can't be without it.
