Vampire Hunter D Volume 8 Dramatized Adaptation Audiobook - Yet more entertaining yarn-spinnery, a decent 2-parter full of D being an amazing fighter who can defeat anyone, an interesting young lady and various other entertaining secondary characters and grotesque rogues' gallery, I'm now partway through Volume 9
Pet Shop of Horrors Volume 1 (Seven Seas Collector's Edition Rerelease) - A series of short stories about a guy who owns a mysterious pet shop in chinatown (I assume the New York one), it's generally got a quite "cautionary tales/be careful what you wish for" kind of vibe to the stories - someone comes in, buys a pet then struggles to abide by the rules and things often go poorly, though not always, there were some stories with happy endings in this first volume - there was a 4-ep anime OVA many years ago adapting a few of the early stories and I remember it being decent but the manga is a far superior experience I'd say, the art is gorgeous vintage shoujo style as it started publication in 1994 originally, also it's more nuanced than I remember from reading V.1 of the older Tokyopop singles a decade or two ago - even when things do go poorly you can generally see that the humans aren't completely unsympathetic and I appreciated that a lot, will def be picking up the next volume of these new editions (they're those ones with about a tankobon volume and a half/300 pages or so in each volume). There's also a slightly bumbling NYPD detective called Leon who is trying to arrest the pet shop owner but can't get his hands on any proof that the Count D guy who runs the shop is responsible for all the grisly deaths of ppl who visited it and bought pets there, and ends up becoming kinda friends with him, the dynamic betweent them is gold XD
Last Quarter Volumes 1-2 (originally 3 volumes in Japan but this release has a volume and a half of those in each one so it's just two) COMPLETE - A romantic ghost story, but not just that, the spirit of a girl aged about 17 gets trapped in the big now empty house where she was hanging out with a musician called Adam who she loved, before the accident she had (got hit by a car) a 5th grade girl finds her in the empty house when she (the spirit girl) is playing the piano, they become friends and the 5th grader and her friends try to figure out how to help the spirit girl move on/forward - it was a touching and engrossing work and I was particularly impressed by how well fleshed out everything felt given it’s short length, and also appreciated the differences between this manga's artstyle and that of Neighborhood Story, it's subtle but definitely there, you can see that Ai Yazawa is very dedicated to her craft from stuff like that. Definitely one of the best short manga I've read and the dynamic between the four 5th grade kids felt very well done as well
Neighborhood Story Volume 1 (Viz 2023 semi-omnibus rerelease) - I have seen the entire NS anime subbed years ago, and really enjoyed it, so I was keen to revisit it via the source manga, and so far I'm getting a lot out of it, it's a lovely shoujo series with complex, multilayered characters, and I love the adults too - Mikako's mum, the bartender guy, Noriji, the sewing class teacher and so on, I'm now about halfway through Volume 2 and I'm really glad I got them all, this rerelease has insanely good printing quality and those (French?) flap things with the front one being diecut to look like pretty lace edging or that on a doily, these are again those releases with about 300 pages per volume
