Every anime season, there are so many shounen and seinen anime series made. Or series based on light novels for guys. Stuff based on shoujo or josei manga is much more rare. While series based on video games for girls are on the rise (yay!) it’s not quite the same as having a series based on shoujo manga. At best, we can hope for maybe 1 or 2 shows a season. If we’re lucky. There are so many great shoujo manga I would love to see animated! (and some that I’d like to see more of, like a 2nd season of Skip Beat! or Legend of Basara) It was hard to narrow it down to a list of 10, but this is what I tried to do here. This is just my wishlist. I wish I could link to my own summaries for each series, but because I’ve been so lazy lately, I haven’t actually talked about a lot of these on here. I hope to remedy that soon, now that my site redesign is finally done.

Chime in down in the comments if there are other shoujo series you’d like to see animated!

1. Hirunaka no Ryuusei : This is a popular series right now. It has quite a few volumes, so there is plenty of material. While the story is fairly standard teacher-student stuff, the mangaka’s artwork is really simple and lovely. I think it would look really nice animated! I can even imagine some gentle or quirky music to go along with it.

2. Seishuun Otome Bancho! : I kind of want this one animated for the opposite reason as Hirunaka no Ryuusei. While that one has simple, clean, attractive character designs, this series has insane wacky faces everywhere and lots of slapstick. The heroine is so energetic, and she goes through so many wonderful expressions, I think seeing them in motion would be hilarious! I can imagine a wacky OST to go with it!

3. Himitsu no Ai-chan : This series has sort of a modern, slightly edgy style, with a heroine who looks a bit like a punk tomboy. Plus there is her maid persona, so there is a lot of visual interest that could attract a male audience.

4. Last Game : I like this one because it’s a rare shoujo in which most of it takes place after high school. It also has a good chunk of content from the guy’s point of view. There are hints of KareKano or Special A here, the way the guy competes with the girl for top honors and all-around perfection. And the girl reminds me in some ways of Sawako from Kimi ni Todoke, though perhaps not quite as simple. But she’s really clueless in a…strong way.

5. Kanojou ni naru hi Another: Ooh, a gender-bending series~ This is a high-concept manga that would make for a good anime, or at least a couple of OAVs. Boys suddenly turning into girls? There are a lot of different directions a series like this could go. Both the original series and the sequel ‘Another” would be great to see.

6. Nanohana no Kare : There is probably not enough manga out yet for this one to be animated, and I guess there isn’t enough of a ‘hook’ or gimmick to really catch anyone’s attention, but I really liked the 2 volumes of this series that I’ve read so far. I suppose it’s because the girl falls for the guy because of his behavior, who he is, instead of for his good looks or any social status at school. That stuck out to me, in a sea of school princes and sports stars or idols.

7. Momoiro Heaven : Then again, idols can be fun too. This comedy would make for a fun anime simply because of the ridiculous premise, and all the visuals of the ecchi novels that the heroine writes. Her imagination is great, and the situations she comes up with to write about would be good to see in motion.

8. Ame Nochi Hare : This is another gender-bender series about 5 guys who turn into girls when it rains. The manga explores how each guy deals with the situation, and how they relate to each other as a group. All kind of romantic relationships are explored here too. And the art is nice~ I can imagine some lovely watercolor backgrounds…

9. Marmalade Boy Little : Surely this will be animated, right? I really want to hear Kouda Mariko come back as Miki! And Okiayu Ryoutaro as Yuu! This would be so great. Hopefully they’re just waiting for enough manga story to build up before they start animating. Right? Please…

10. Tonari no Atashi :  I picked this one because even though it seems like a typical love-polygon shoujo, the ending was totally not what I expected, and I found it really refreshing! I’ve read so much shoujo, that it’s rare when a series manages to surprise me!  The characters really grew and developed over the course of the series.

Honorable Mentions:

* Kokoro Botan : Yeah, it’s a high school love polygon manga, and with the recent series of Ao Haru Ride and Wolf Girl & Black Prince, this one may be more of the same because of the sadistic boy but… I love this mangaka and want to see something by her animated!

* Kimi ni Tonari de Seishunchuu : Yep, high school. Love triangles. Angst, ahh, youth~ At least I have a summary to link to for this one :3

* Kare wa Tomodachi : What can I say? If guys can get piles of mecha shows and magical girlfriend harem shows, then I think we should also get piles of shoujo high school love polygon shows! They are so standard, but I love them anyway! This one is a few years old now, but It had a good run, and I enjoyed anguishing over all the teen relationships while reading it~

I have a small but growing collection of shoujo manga from the 1970’s and the early 1980’s. While I have just barely begun to scratch the surface in terms of reading older shoujo manga, I HAVE noticed a few common styles about them so far as I go through my books. I am not even remotely an expert on this subject (that would be Matt Thorn, lol), but I have decided to have some fun and post a few of those styles here.

1. Blondes Have More Fun

Seriously, I think it must be true. A huge majority of the retro shoujo manga that I come across features cute blond heroines. Occasionally we will get a girl with light brown hair, or a darker brunette, but a heroine on a cover with black hair seems to be quite unusual. At least, judging on my tiny sampling of old manga. Who knows, perhaps there is a giant treasure trove somewhere of titles featuring black-haired heroines, but I have yet to find it. Just look at my gallery below — you’ll notice the strange abundance of happy blonde girls.

2. Waves, Curls, and Ringlets, Oh My!

Not only are so many retro shoujo manga heroines blondes, but they also have majestic fancy hairstyles, usuallly involving curls,large ringlets, and hair ribbons. If it isn’t the pure, innocent heroine, then it is the bitchy bully girl who will have this hairstyle (she will also do the obligatory ‘oh ho ho ho’ laugh). At any rate, there is always at least one character who has hair like this. If it’s a sports manga (volleyball, tennis, etc) or daily school life plot, then it is the rival or popular girl who will wear the curls. If it’s a European Orphan Looking for Her Family/Love type of plot, it will be the heroine who has them. These hairstyles work nicely with all the frilly European-style dresses they all wear out in the Alps or whatever foreign country they are enduring their tragic hardships in.

3. Those Crazy Tongues:

Even in my small collection here, you can see some crazy tongue action going on. It seems to imply mischievousness, determination, or an “Oops! My Bad!” situation.

4. Galaxy Eyes

Wow, with the amount of sparkles and stars and eyelashes these characters have, it is amazing they can even see! I like to call this “Galaxy Eyes” since it seems like some characters have enough stars in their eyes to create a galaxy. Personally, while I think a few glimmers are cute, the overabundance of sparkles is overkill. Everyone looks like they are crying. Another common type of eye sparkle is the “window to the soul” square shine mark. These are so distracting to look at. They sort of look like soulless pits of despair.

5. The Defined Nose and Lip

For me, this (along with Galaxy Eyes) is the most noticeable style point of older shoujo manga. I can always tell in modern manga when they are parodying 70’s shoujo when a character will suddenly have this defined nose and lip. In the nose, it is a little line right at the tip to define the edge. On the lips, it is a little line that defines the top lip. It is present on both heroes and heroines. I am not sure why, but through the 80’s, these lines gradually disappeared.

6. Seeing and Eating Stars, and that Creepy Vacant Look

No, I am not talking about Galaxy Eyes again. This time I am referring to the phenomenon of stars (not sparkles) replacing character eyes and stars or hearts appearing in a character’s mouth. This usually happens when someone is surprised, or struck with a feeling of love. In particular, the hearts in the mouth thing seems to be an expression of love. I don’t really see this any more. Also, a great way they used to express a character being in shock (in a totally creepy way) or being extremely angry is to completely remove the eyes so there are just two empty sockets.

As for the plots of 70’s shoujo manga, well, just as it is today, there are plots involving everything under the sun — cute daily life romances, angst-ridden private-school melodramas, high-tension sports stories, etc. However, I will say that older manga seems more emotional to me. The characters react more strongly to every event. There are shocked poses and dramatic backgrounds, and facial expressions become exaggerated. I think it took itself more seriously? The pages seem to be packed with more panels and more dialog. It takes me a lot longer to get through an older book than a more recent one.

It is always fun to see a modern anime or manga series reference the 70’s shoujo manga style. For example:

Here is Tamaki from Ouran High School Host Club reacting in exaggerated 70’s shoujo manga style. Note the defined lip, nose, and vacant eyes 🙂

Another example is:

Here Kanako from Maria†Holic goes into total 70’s shoujo manga mode! Note the colors, the nose and lip, the scribble across the nose and the galaxy eyes and the bonus star in one eye! Then again, Maria†Holic is almost a parody of a typical old 70’s shoujo yuri girls school sort of thing. Unlike Maria-sama ga Miteru, which pretty much takes itself seriously, Maria†Holic has a lot of fun with the old-school style and situations and blends them with modern anime styles.

Anyway, below is a gallery of my small 70’s shoujo manga collection. Hmm, most of what I have is from the late 70’s, and I have a few from the early 80’s added in here as well. You’ll notice they all have a similar sort of style. As the 80’s went on, this style changed quite a bit. By the late 80’s and early 90’s, hair started getting… fluffier and wispier, clothes became baggier or more sloppy, and coloring styles became more loose. Like, instead of solidly filling in lines, colors bleed around the edges more and have an airy feel to them. I will have to eventually make a gallery showcasing that style too 🙂

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I don’t have enough room on my front page for a ‘feature’ spot for every little gallery or article I want to add to this site, so I created this section to house some more writings on things I observe about shoujo manga, or link to some more galleries of artwork.

Sample Interior Artwork: When I first started this site, I used to include a small sample of what the interior of each manga looked like along with the usual cover scan. After converting the site to wordpress/blog format, I stopped doing this. However, I still have all these old interior images just sitting here on my computer, so I figured I’d create a gallery for them, in case anyone is curious. As for matching each picture to the manga it’s from? That’s a whole other project. ^^;;

Hazy Days: Something that has been bothering me for a very long time about the shoujo manga covers coming out from Shogakukan (Flower Comics) is this bizarre trend of applying some kind of translucent color haze to the front artwork, making the art more difficult to see, and making it more difficult for me to figure out if a book I see at the store is something I own or not, since I usually (ahem) judge a book by its cover ^_^; This drives me crazy. I like to see the color artwork! This is a gallery of examples of this color haze trend.

Here are some free shoujo manga wallpapers that I have gathered from various manga publisher websites. I did not make these, and do not own the rights to these in any way ^_^ These are the sizes that I could find so far.

icon-dollar Where to BUY manga!

I’m an art collector and a hoarder. I love owning the physical manga books. The sight of full bookshelves makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. If you’re interested in purchasing manga, there are many options. For stuff licensed and published in English, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any of the other usual online retailers are a good bet. Rightstuf.com also has a lot of good sales. If you live outside of the US, I hear that bookdepository.com; ships internationally. For Digital manga releases, check out Comixology I especially love all the KodanshaUSA shoujo manga on there!

If you’re interested in purchasing manga in Japanese, there are also a lot of good options.

•  Kinokuniya Book Web: If you’re ordering manga online, this, I think, is your best option. They have free shipping on orders over $50. If you’re looking for a series I talk about on this site, try plugging in the ISBN# that I list on my summaries into their Japanese book search box. If you get no results, try removing teh hyphens and searching again. If the book is not out of print, they should be able to get it for you. Even if the site lists it as out of stock in their US stores, they can special order it from Japan. The nice thing is that the free shipping includes these things, so you aren’t paying for shipping from Japan.
• Amazon Japan (japanese): Yeah, the Amazon JP site is in Japanese, but the ISBN search works here too, so you should be able to find things. And they have an option to switch to English on the display pages and checkout process, so it’s possible to order here even if you don’t know Japanese. Their individual book prices are better than at Kinokuniya, but the shipping cost makes up the difference.
• Honto (formerly known as BK1) (japanese)
• Jahoo (Yahoo Japan Auctions – Japanese): This can be tricky because a lot of sellers won’t ship overseas. You may need to use an Auction Deputy Service like Tenso.
• Mandarake
• Rightstuf

 icon-laptop  Places to Read Manga Online

Most of the comments I get on this site ask where to read the series I talk about. Well, I have to admit, I’m not much help there. All of the manga I talk about here are books in Japanese that I physically own. I’m pretty big on supporting artists and creators. This means buying actual physical copies of books or reading manga online from legal sources, not bootleg scanlation aggregator sites based in China or pirate manga apps.

If you’re in the U.S., there ARE some places where you can legally read manga online! Some of them for free even! Totally legit and given the stamp of approval from Japan and everything.

The best list of Legal Manga sites is at Yatta-tachi. They are fantastic at keeping up with what sites are out there. I would check there first.

This is my original small list. Yatta-tachi has a much better list.

• Viz
• MangaBox
• Comic Walker
• Renta!
• Crunchyroll