My relationship with Tokyo Babylon is kind of backwards, because I encountered X long before I read it and thus went in knowing what was going to happen. Mostly I was just kind of surprised that it took so long to get to the ending, and I found it hard to engage with the story the way it obviously meant for me to, because I knew about Seishirou.
I love X, I really do, but it's a difficult one to recommend to people since the aspect I love best doesn't really kick in until halfway through and it's been on hiatus for a decade or so. It's a mess in a lot of ways. But the things it does well, it does very well. (And from a completely biased position, having worked on it, I note that the new omnibus edition is one of the most physically gorgeous manga releases I've ever seen.
I'm not going to try to talk you into hunting X down, because it really might not work for you, but I will frankly beg you to NOT read the original Viz edition (which could be what a library has, if it has X at all). I hate the original release's script, and I hated it long before I got to help work on the new one. :/ I find it clunky and over-adapted, in the way so much manga was back in the '90s when the companies didn't think anyone would buy manga in English unless they flipped the art and tried to make them sound like Western comics.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2015-03-09 02:07 am (UTC)I love X, I really do, but it's a difficult one to recommend to people since the aspect I love best doesn't really kick in until halfway through and it's been on hiatus for a decade or so. It's a mess in a lot of ways. But the things it does well, it does very well. (And from a completely biased position, having worked on it, I note that the new omnibus edition is one of the most physically gorgeous manga releases I've ever seen.
I'm not going to try to talk you into hunting X down, because it really might not work for you, but I will frankly beg you to NOT read the original Viz edition (which could be what a library has, if it has X at all). I hate the original release's script, and I hated it long before I got to help work on the new one. :/ I find it clunky and over-adapted, in the way so much manga was back in the '90s when the companies didn't think anyone would buy manga in English unless they flipped the art and tried to make them sound like Western comics.