Ranma 1/2 by Rumiko Takahashi
For this blog post, I reread one of my top favorite mangas, Ranma 1/2! I really admire Rumiko Takahashi as an artist, and really enjoy the way she handles her stories and her characters. A comic like Ranma, that deals with a protagonist that changes from a boy to a girl via water, could have gone in a demeaning and horrible direction really quickly, but Takahashi handles it with such grace and humor that it's not really surprising that the manga is as successful as it is.
Takahashi has had success in a variety of genres, something a lot of artists can't say for themselves. She's able to portray romances in a wonderful and realistic way, and also draw insanely cool battle scenes, as seen in her other work, Inuyasha.
Genuinely, I think manga gets generalized too much in the west. It's considered a genre instead of what it actually is - the art of an entire nation. It gets disrespected in ways we wouldn't dream of disrespecting western comics, even though often enough it has more variety in story and art style than western comics have.
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