Top Ten Tuesday is an original weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish.

This Week’s Theme:
Favourite Visual Stories

Initial Thoughts:

Younger me was huge on visual books. Maybe even now too. There’s something special about visual stories — be it comics or mangas or picture books — that makes reading that much easier to digest.

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Adulthood is a Myth (Webcomics)

This book is for the rest of us. These comics document the wasting of entire beautiful weekends on the internet, the unbearable agony of holding hands on the street with a gorgeous guy, dreaming all day of getting home and back into pajamas, and wondering when, exactly, this adulthood thing begins. In other words, the horrors and awkwardnesses of young modern life.

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xkcd (Webcomics)

It is so easy to just keep clicking random and finding new obscure strips of comics to read. It’s both a fair balance of comics that go over my head and others that hit the nail on things.

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Heart and Brain (Webcomics)

Once again, it’s realistic things that hit me right in the heart.

From paying taxes and getting up for work to dancing with kittens and starting a band, readers everywhere will relate to the ongoing struggle between Heart and Brain.

Heart and Brain: An Awkward Yeti Collection illustrates the relationship between the sensible Brain and its emotionally driven counterpart, the Heart.

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The Oatmeal (Webcomics)

As the creator of a really fun card game, Exploding Kittens, I love the stories found at The Oatmeal and otherwise.

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Shokugeki no Soma (Manga)

Still remains the few mangas I try to follow regularly. It’s basically food porn in drawn form.

Soma Yukihira’s old man runs a small family restaurant in the less savory end of town.  Aiming to one day surpass his father’s culinary prowess, Soma hones his skills day in and day out until one day, out of the blue, his father decides to enroll Soma in a classy culinary school!  Can Soma really cut it in a school that prides itself on a 10 percent graduation rate? And cacn he convince the beautiful, domineering heiress of the school that he belongs there at all?!

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Shingeki no Kyojin (Manga)

Get. Fucking. Hyped. For. Season. 2. Of. The. Anime.

In this post-apocalytpic sci-fi story, humanity has been devastated by the bizarre, giant humanoids known as the Titans. Little is known about where they came from or why they are bent on consuming mankind. Seemingly unintelligent, they have roamed the world for years, killing everyone they see. For the past century, what’s left of man has hidden in a giant, three-walled city. People believe their 100-meter-high walls will protect them from the Titans, but the sudden appearance of an immense Titan is about to change everything.

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Naruto/Bleach (Manga)

The mangas I grew up with…both of which we don’t speak abut no more because of the unfulfilling endings (that were told me rather than experienced because it just dragged on for too long).

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D. Grayman (Manga)

This was great when I read it but it lagged behind due to the author’s sickness that I never really got around to continuing it. That still doesn’t discount its greatness though.

Set in a fictional end of the 19th century England, it’s the story of Allen Walker, a 15-year-old boy who roams the Earth in search of Innocence. Washed away to unknown parts of the world after The Great Flood, Innocence is the mysterious substance used to create weapons that obliterate demons known as akuma.

A born exorcist, Walker’s primary anti-akuma weapon is the cross that’s embossed on his red and disfigured left hand, which contains Innocence. But not only does Walker destroy akuma, he sees the akuma hiding inside a person’s soul! Together with his fellow exorcists fighting under the command of the Black Order, Walker leads the battle against the Millennium Earl, the evil being out to destroy mankind.

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I Spy (Picture Books)

If you didn’t have to compete in elementary school with hoards of other itty bitty children to fight for the two-or-three copies of these books then you don’t know what the Hunger Games feels like. These books were my jam because they killed so much time (re: “Library” class?) when I was a) not a reader, and b) definitely not a reader.

Try it out for yourself (recommended to open up the image!)

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Afterthoughts:

Because sometimes visually stories just paint a more complete picture.

Cheers,
Joey

connect: 
afterthoughtAn // twitter
anotherafterthought // goodreads
picturevomit // instagram