Ok, I admit it, I read comic books. And, I love the Naruto series.

I grew up on Dragonball, City Hunter, Saint Seiya, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure series. If you are familiar with Japanese manga (or even western ones), you will realize that many stories are shallow, repetitive, and cliched. When I first read (actually, watched) the Naruto series, I realize they were something different. The stories were fleshed out with back stories. Each character had motivations that drove them, and showed growth through the challenges that they faced. Even many villains had interesting stories that made the readers empathize with them. To quote an article in Boing Boing today.

These weren’t stock characters with a few choice quirks added for identification’s sake. These were kids – Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, Rock Lee, Ino, Shikamaru, et al. – with complex backstories informing their decisions, with choices made based on hard-won personal knowledge and social machinations going back generations.

I have recently started reading another series called Pluto, and it’s based on an arc in the original Astroboy series. The stories are dark (allegory to the Iraq invasion), dark (Atom has died), dark (think Silence of the Lambs), and very cinematic. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

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