500 Manga Heroes & Villains

by Helen McCarthy

Fans of the Japanese cartoon art genre called manga, and of its sister genre anime—or manga-style films—will treasure this survey of an art form currently sweeping the world. The book is an illustrated history of Japanese comics, with separate chapters devoted to male and female heroes and villains, non-humanoid characters, and even manga depictions of historical and literary characters. Brief descriptive sketches of all characters accompany colorful illustrations of heroes and villains caught in moments of dramatic action. Key figures include Astro Boy, Akira, Lupin III, Pokemon, and many others. Just as fascinating are biographical sketches of several of the world's most successful manga artists including Motoko Kusanagi, as well as Astro Boy's creator Osamu Tezuka, and many others. As the first illustrated book to show and evaluate sucha wide range of manga characters, 500 Manga Heroes and Villains is an essential basic reference source for both manga fans and popular-culture historians. Approximately 200 memorable color illustrations.

Genres: Manga, Japan, Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

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Reviews

[Sophie Crane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mostly bought this book because it contains information about my favourite manga, From Eroica With Love. I do enjoy the format and the way the book is ordered. Nice image of Klaus and Dorian too and I enjoy the description of Dorian.

However, I think the author mixes Klaus up with Bannai when calling Klaus a "police chief sent to trap him" (him being Dorian) and "a cop", which is a bit of a turn-off. The weight put on the three superpowered teenagers also makes me think that the author only checked out the first book - after the second story they never again appear in the series. And, technically, the three appears long before Klaus, not after, which the "things get even more complicated" (when they show up) implies.

This makes me slightly unsure as to the amount of research to this book. Still, it is entertaining to read.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learned of some new anime series from this it was fun to learn a bit.

[T R Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this is an older book, it is still quite interesting to read and gave me information lots of series that I had either forgotten about or hadn’t heard of before and would now like to read. After a brief but informative introduction, the book lists the 500 characters in sections for Heroes, Villains, Antiheroes, Teams, etc. with each character getting between a paragraph to a couple of pages of information about them. Due to the age of the book, it is missing some characters who would become popular in later (there are no Bleach or Naruto characters) and the categorising of some of the characters is a little odd as Villain Protagonists are often listed as Antiheroes.

The book also has a some entries for influential manga creators such as Osamu Tezuka (AstroBoy) and Go Nagai (Cute Honey), as well as an entry on the Mecha genre, all of which were quite interesting.

As this is a relatively old book (published in 2006) some of the information in provided is a little dated, possibly due to using older translations (using Raito Yagami instead of the now official English translation of Light), and sometimes confuse the manga and anime versions of a character without mentioning the difference (stating that Seras from Hellsing is a police medic, which as far as I can tell was only in the original anime adaption). The author does mention, however, that she intended to fix any errors for later editions but as mine is from the first edition I do not know how many of these errors were fixed in later reprintings.

[Marina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this in Barnes and Nobles sale section.Has in my opinion a great selection of old and new popular manga. Some could use this to choose their manga based on the books content areas. Good to have for manga and anime lovers.