Ooh. Although I continue to struggle with digital manga (I have sooo many volumes I have yet to read), I may get this bundle.

Titles I've read at least some of and enjoyed:

- Land of the Lustrous: Sci-fi in which gemstone-based people live their lives and try to avoid being broken to pieces and captured by creepy beings that come from the moon. It's a weird series, and the world-building and action is occasionally confusing, but it's also lovely and has managed to grow on me. If you do end up finding the action confusing, the anime is streaming free for Prime members (US, not sure about other regions) and is easier to follow.

- Cells at Work: An anthropomorphized red blood cell tries to go about her business while anthropomorphized viruses and bacteria try to kill her, cause havoc, etc. It seems like the sort of series that could get old after a while, but the first volume, at least, is quality edutainment.

- Battle Angel Alita: It's been ages since I last read any of this series, and I don't know how well it holds up, but it's one of the series that first got me into manga. I recall it having dystopian elements and a cyborg main character. Oh, and yes, I've seen the trailer for the live action movie, and I deeply dislike the decision to give Alita big eyes.

Notes on some of the others:

- Pumpkin Scissors: I've read some of this and don't recall being particularly impressed. There are better "post-war period in a fantasy world" series out there.

- Noragami: I don't think I've read any of the manga, but I've seen and enjoyed the first season of the anime. The main characters are a god without any worshipers and a teen girl who gains the ability to see gods like him.

- That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: I've heard that the novels are surprisingly good. I have no idea if the same holds true for the manga.

- Mushishi: I've seen a little of the anime but haven't read any of the manga. The anime is gorgeous.

Nostalgia tempts me to get the full thing - Battle Angle Alita was one of the first manga series I ever read. However, my manga reading tastes have changed significantly since then, and I'm not actually sure I'd enjoy the series now. That leaves the lower tiers. I remember reading The Ghost in the Shell a while back and disliking the amount of text Masamune wanted readers to wade through. The first volume of Inuyashiki was unpleasant and, judging by reviews, it only gets worse from there. The first volume of The Seven Deadly Sins was generic fantasy and an enormous amount of boob grabbing.

That leaves the first tier, with Ajin: Demi-Human. I've seen a good chunk of the anime, and as long as it follows the manga fairly closely, I'd say Ajin would probably work reasonably well for me.

Imagine an entire manga series based on this idea, and you get Delicious in Dungeon, one of the series I tried out during my vacation.

An adventurer's sister gets eaten by a dragon. He wants to rescue her but has no money to buy food, so he finally has an excuse to try something he's been intrigued about for a long time: cooking and eating the monsters he kills. It's a foodie manga featuring fictional foods. Hopefully I can write up review posts of the first couple volumes soon.

I haven't had a chance to read the full thing yet (I'm not even sure how long the full thing is - it seems like the "read next page" buttons go on forever), but this is really interesting, even though I think the comments sometimes oversimplify things. Then again, it can be hard to fit things into Tweet-sized bites.

If I remember right, I started off with my dad's comics collection (Marvel, DC, DC's Vertigo imprint, a bit of Image Comics) and then discovered manga via my wonderful public library and got completely hooked on that. I now read Japanese manga almost exclusively, for some of the reasons stated by the commenters. I like that, generally, it's easy to know where to start. While there are some authors/artists who create complex worlds and series with lots of crossover (CLAMP and their billions of cameos is the one example I can think of right now), and some authors/artists who "finish" a series and then reboot it or start a related series (Masashi Kishimoto, Nobuhiro Watsuki), and folks with related light novels and whatnot, you can still usually start with volume 1 of whatever they're working on and be fine.

I like that authors and artists don't generally change during a series' run - the consistency is nice (although even a single artist's style can change drastically in a relatively short span of time - good example, Maki Murakami's Gravitation, where the earlier volumes and later volumes look like they were drawn by completely different people but weren't). Now that I no longer live near a good public library with an excellent manga collection, I also really like that you can find lots of series with a definite ending and beginning, and lots of series with an affordable total number of volumes (less than 10 or 12 is my preference, anymore).

I got started with manga back in maybe the late '90s, which I think also made a difference. First, there was Tokyopop and its cheaper volumes. Second, volumes were more likely to include translator and cultural notes back then. Those cultural notes helped a lot.

Oof, so much nostalgia right now. I miss the days when I had good feelings about Tokyopop, and when Del Rey put out volumes of manga with pages and pages of translator's notes. ::sigh::

A family discovers an Emperor penguin in their fridge. The very large penguin decides to stick around and continue being its penguin self.

I just read Katherine Dacey's review for this and it sounds weird and fun, so I'll try to remember to give it a shot sometime soon.