Bleach

[epiph]

Adult Swim will be picking up the Bleach anime this fall.

The Adult Swim blurb:
Ichigo Kurosaki is an average 15-year-old who never asked for the ability to see ghosts. He was born with the gift. When his family is attacked by a Hollow, a malevolent lost soul, Ichigo becomes a Soul Reaper, dedicating his life to protecting the innocent and helping the tortured spirits find peace. Bleach, licensed from VIZ Media, debuts this fall.

I highly recommend it, although I recommend the manga even more.

This series is my current obsession. I've been watching it for about a year, and started reading the manga sometime over the summer, when I couldn't stand waiting for the episodes. I'm currently at that point with the manga chapters, but there's no higher source for me to reach for.

I recommend the manga largely because I admire the mangaka's art quite a lot, and no matter how close the animators get their copies, they are still copies. I was recently rewatching the first few episodes with a friend and was blown but the difference in the quality of the art.

As for the story, it hits a lot of shounen cliches, but the premise itself, of Shinigami (Soul Reapers/Death Gods), is a avenue for those cliches that I, at least, haven't encountered before. The mangaka has a way of keeping you on your toes, so that even when an event happens exactly as predicted, there will be some part of it that comes out of far left field.

If nothing else, you should read the manga as a personal favor to me. Because I have one other friend who reads it, and no one to discuss new chapters with. The manga is so cool right now, and the anime has departed from the manga story recently, much to its detriment both artistically and literarily.

[Apoc]

326 chapters into the manga and loving it ~nods~ I agree about the anime, manga is near always better than its adaption but the anime has done it justice...well until they go into filler arc's...seriously, the Bount arc was horrendous and this most recent one...well i couldn't bare to watch it any further...what with them suddenly stopping midway through the hueco mundo/rescue orihime arc AT THE BEST MOMENT no less (Nel=3 and the arrival of some captains hehe to skip back into the human world with a story about an annoying princess GAH.

Sooo should have left all involved in the rescue orihime/hueco mundo arc IN hueco mundo and done a filler of say Hitsugaya dealing with something in Soul Society...i'm sure they could have done a cover story rather than brought a halt to the REAL story, drives me nuts...at least Naruto seems to have learnt to plan ahead for filler...theirs is watchable!

Claymore is still my favourite manga though.