We're doing another round of manga sequels, prequels and spinoffs at The Manga Test Drive, starting with a supernatural mystery series set in the world of The Ancient Magus' Bride: mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2026/07/revi...

At Renaissance Josei, I talk about Tokyopop's latest attempt to turn themselves into a multimedia empire by selling shares of themselves. Let me convince you on The Perils of Investing In Tokyopop: renaissancejosei.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-...

Hey folks! Sorry for the extended break, but we've got a brand new piece coming out tomorrow on Renaissance Josei! Meanwhile, our $5+ Patrons can read it right now: www.patreon.com/MeganD/posts...

Our month of flowery titles continues with The Eccentric Doctor of the Moon Flower Kingdom. It's a title that clearly owes a lot to The Apothecary Diaries but doesn't have a lot of original ideas of its own to offer. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2026/04/revi...

April showers bring flowery titles to The Manga Test Drive, starting with Sakura's Dedication. Dedication to what, you might ask? Why, being the the blandest shojo romance I've read in a while. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2026/04/revi...

We're not going to forget the many shojo heroines who have had to pose as boys over the years. Vampire Dormitory is just one of the latest examples...but not one of the better ones. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2026/03/revi...

Yubisaki Milk Tea seemed to promise something different: a straight teen romance starring a casually cross-dressing lead. Too bad it's mostly focused on awkward fanservice and making excuses for the lead's mixed messages to deliver on that promise. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2026/03/revi...

This month I'm looking at some the different ways manga plays with gender. Since it's also the time of year when the new school year start in Japan, I thought I'd start with Thigh High: Reiwa Hanamaru Academy. It takes your standard fluffy girls' school premise and changes only the sexes involved.

Happy Crappy Life is a rare sort of BL that acknowledges the messiness and awkwardness of small-town life, second chances, and butt sex, all while looking gorgeous and being laugh out loud funny to boot. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2026/02/revi...

It's hard enough to find a good sex comedy manga (pun not intended), and mean-spirited, cowardly crap like Peter Grill and the Philsopher's Time isn't helping things. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2026/02/revi...

It's another month of Bad Romance manga, and what could be worse than a romance that begins with a demand for divorce? To Sir, Without Love: I'm Divorcing You should be a tawdry bodice-ripper, but it's too cold and unbalanced to be any fun. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2026/02/revi...

Gate Keepers isn't just a failed sci-fi manga from a forgotten franchise. It's also possibly the most blatant Sakura Wars knockoff I have ever seen. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2026/01/revi...

Suihelibe! is obscure even by CMX standards, the story of a boy and an alien girl trying to capture creatures as part of the school biology club that's too lifeless to be fun. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2026/01/revi...

This month we're looking at sci-fi manga, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more hard sci-fi manga than Planetes. It's the story of working-class space junk collectors from the creator of Vinland Saga. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2026/01/revi...

Let's wrap things up for The Manga Test Drive this year with our annual look in the Rear View Mirror and announce this year's Holiday Review Giveaway winner: mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/2025...

Our final Holiday Review is another miracle manga license: Stop!! Hibari-Kun, an early 80s comedy manga with a trans heroine that has aged way better than you could imagine: mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

We got a lot of older manga licenses this year, and that includes the first-ever English release of Cat's Eye. This classic phantom thief story from WSJ has plenty of style, but it's brought down by its repetitiveness and the dumbest detective ever. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

This year saw a lot of miracle manga licenses. That includes Viz's release of Kingdom, a long-running shonen spin on China's Warring States period. For me, it was not worth the wait, as I found this first volume DEEPLY underwhelming. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Of course, it's also fun to see manga creators take traditional horror creatures like...oh, idk, a vampire, and put them somewhere unexpected for laughs and cozy fish-out-water humor. Maybe someplace like a bathhouse? mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Mansect is a 1970s horror manga about guys who turn into vaguely insectoid melted monster men, but somehow its gender politics are even scarier than that. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

2025 was a good year for Apothecary Diaries writer Natsu Hyuuga. You Can't Bluff the Sharp-Eyed Sister is one of 2 manga adaptations of her work that came out here, a mystery series that will feel familiar...maybe a little too familiar. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

OK, if you actually want a manga that's soothing, hyperfocused, and genuinely adult, you would do well to check out Neighborhood Craftsmen: Stories from Kanda's Gokura-Chou, an anthology about everyday artisans in historic Edo. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Ok, we need something to cleanse our palettes after that last book. Wash It Away would serve that purpose nicely...if it weren't so anodyne and obsessed with checking out its heroine. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Of course, not all the yuri manga we got in 2025 was so wholesome. JNC took a break from all that isekai to give us Gushing Over Magical Girls, where one girl discovers the sadist within herself by becoming the villainess to her favorite magical girls. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Last year we had the Green Yuri. This year we have a Red Yuri in the form of Love Bullet, a manga that's not just a viral success story but a damn good yuri manga in its own right. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Black Blood is out there asking the question few others dare to ask: can you make a BL about a man and a cyborg and make it good? mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Thankfully we don't have to worry if the straights are OK when there was so much good BL manga to choose from in 2025. That includes Haberdashery Ginmokusei, where a handsome young man sweeps in to save an anxious tailor and his failing suit shop. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Betrayed By the Hero, I Formed a MILF Party represents some of the lowest of low-effort isekai ecchi manga I've seen in a while. You know things are bad when even its smut is stiff and formulaic! mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Of course, the majority of the fantasy manga from 2025 were boring-ass isekai LN adaptations such as Campfire Cooking In Another World. This one seems like a novel combo of isekai and food manga...except it fails at making either of them interesting. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

That's not to say there weren't any traditional fantasy manga this year. Indeed, we got Dur-An-Ki, a mythologically inspired tale from the creators of Berserk. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

The Too-Perfect Saint: Tossed Aside By My Fiancé and Sold To Another Kingdom is ostensibly just another LN adaptation about a magical woman dumped by a bad fiancé only to gain a better one, but its take on sisterly love is far stronger. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Assassin & Cinderella wants to be a spicy, dangerous romance between a spy and her target...except that it's too chaste to be sexy, avoids all the danger, with a heroine too dumb to survive (much less be a proper spy). mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

There was still plenty of shojo manga to be found in 2025, including a new title from Meca Tanaka. Alas, Teppeki Honeymoon isn't one of their stronger efforts, where a strong but poor is girl forced into a fake marriage with the heir of a security company. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Yet there are still publishers willing to dig into josei's past to find unsung works such as Miss Ruki, a gentle gag strip about a free spirit and her best friend from a ladies' magazine published at the peak of Japan's economic bubble. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Of course, a lot of the josei we got this year were smutty ladicomi romances. Don't Hold Back, Lord Hades is a pretty typical example (in both good and bad ways), albeit with a mythological spin. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

2025 was a shockingly good year for josei manga (even if most of it wasn't marketed as such). I certainly can't complain if it means we got Fumi Yoshinaga's latest work, Tamaki & Amane, which might be her best short story anthology yet. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Of course, there were also some more recent sports manga released this year. There's Dogsred, a hockey manga that's also the latest from Golden Kamuy creator Satoru Noda. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

We saw quite a few releases of sports manga from notable creators this year, including Short Game. This anthology from Mitsuru Adachi revolves around relationships and (of course) baseball. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

We go from one Itagaki to another, as this year saw the first print release of Keisuke Itagaki's infamous martial arts manga Baki the Grappler. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Naturally I had to start this year's Holiday Reviews with Sanda because why wouldn't I start with the manga that's literally about a boy who turns into a buff Santa? mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/12/holi...

Our Holiday Review Extravaganza for 2025 begins tomorrow, but our Holiday Review Giveaway begins tonight! Just leave a comment here or in the post below about your favorite manga of 2025 and you might potentially win a $25 Bookshop.Org gift certificate! mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/11/its-...

For our final Mecha Month post, we're going to find out if Blind Target truly is the best of the Gundam Wing manga or not: mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/11/revi...

Eureka Seven is a cursed mecha franchise. It's not just that its anime sequels and spinoffs are all bad, but even manga spinoffs like Gravity Boys & Lifting Girl are tedious bores. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/11/revi...

From the creator of D.N. Angel comes the manga adaptation of one of Yoshiyuki Tomino's most notorious works: Brain Powered. In some ways it improves upon the material, but there's only so much anyone can do to clarify this mess. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/11/revi...

It's mecha month once again at The Manga Test Drive! There's been a recent wave of mecha-related isekai manga lately and I Was Sold Dirt-Cheap But My Power Lever Is Off the Charts is...frankly pretty typical of the genre, with all that implies. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/11/revi...

One last spooky review for you all, and it's a doozy: Naoki Uruasawa's legendary serial killer manga Monster. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/10/revi...

We return to the spooky world of Kanako Inuki with School Zone, where supernatural forces convene upon a group of schoolchildren in an interconnected but flawed anthology: mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/10/revi...

Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-Kun is a more modern and friendly take on spooky shonen manga, where a kind young boy gets sold by parents to demons only to find himself making friends and fumbling his way up the social ladder in a hellish school for demons.

We're looking at horror manga this month, starting with Lycanthrope Leo. I came to this hoping for a simple werewolf tale, but what I got was a weird old shonen manga that can never quite decide on its tone. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/10/revi...

Let's end this month with another 1960s manga, albeit one far more obscure and far less loved than Lupin the 3rd: the gritty vigilante motocycle gang shonen series Wild 7. mangatestdrive.blogspot.com/2025/09/revi...