By almost any measure, 2009 was an astonishing year for manga -- so many amazing, mind-blowing, beautiful and memorable new titles hit the shelves this year, it was difficult to pull together this year's Best New Manga list. A lot of this was due to the bumper crop of great manga for grown-ups.
Just look at the 10 nominees in the Best New Seinen/Josei Manga - Drama Readers' Poll. It's filled with new titles by some of the medium's creative titans like Naoki Urasawa, Taiyo Matsumoto, Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Fumi Yoshinaga. This past year's release schedule had much, much more than 10 noteworthy debuts worth nominating in a Best of 2009 poll.
But, as in prior years, the cream of the crop largely consisted of seinen (men's) manga, with only a handful of josei (women's) titles. So rather than have an ultra-competitive seinen manga category and a small josei manga poll, I decided to combine the two genres for grown-ups, then divvy them up according to their type of story: drama/action and comedy/other. (You'll see what I mean by "other" when I post that poll tomorrow).
Anyhow, you can vote now below, or go to the poll page to see cover art and descriptions of the stories:
I made a few other changes to the Readers' Poll categories this year -- you can get a sneak peek at what's coming up at the 2009 Manga Readers' Poll page.
NEXT UP: The Best New Seinen/Josei Manga - Comedy Readers' Poll. Hang in there! Only 8 more polls to go!
Image credit: 2004 Naoki URASAWA/Studio Nuts, Takashi NAGASAKI, Tezuka Productions All rights reserved.
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