AX Volume 1: A Collection of Alternative Manga Paperback – October 18, 2010

I really enjoyed this book. There are some interesting stories in here, including a story by an artist I recently found & had no idea he created manga. One particular story was a bit disturbing to me, but one way to view it is simply as the creator's form of expression. It is a nice addition to my collection of manga, & I plan to buy any additional volumes.

Excellent. Genuinely absurd, shocking, funny, and sad. The art styles are varied and the stories are well curated. The book itself is beautifully designed. Highly recommended for all fans of comics or good stories. This will give you something truly different.

i love to explore manga, so this anthology is convenient. but it wasnt really worth the price in my opinion. maybe it would be more impactful to younger audiences

This volume has some very different stories in them. All interesting. Great buy if you like finding new manga and writers to read.

Not for the faint of heart. You probably will be offended by at least some of this material. It challenges the reader immensely... however if you are up for the challenge there are a few rewards to be had. Some of the stories are extremely explicit (sexually graphic), and some are violent. All are... unusual.Now I know with everything I stated above you are wondering, "why did they give it a four star review?"... I'll tell you why. It gets four stars because it is like nothing I have ever encountered, and it left me thinking about it long after I was through reading. I will revisit certain stories time and again, either to try to better understand the art, or to try to make some sort of sense out of the chaos, or on the occasion where a story truly landed and resonated to appreciate it for what it is.To try to frame it against some more popular manga in the english reading world, if you enjoy both Inio Asano's work and Junji Ito's work, you may consider giving this a shot (I'm not guaranteeing it will be for you, but there's a chance... it will be more graphic then works from either of those artists at times). If you are out there for Dragonball Z/Naruto/One PIece and the other Shonen works, probably give this one a hard pass.

Great book, came in perfect condition

This book will challenge some readers.For Western comic readers, there is the adjustment to manga-reading order, of course. If you can't handle that, you won't enjoy this book.For comic readers who want a long operatic narrative, you may be disappointed to find that this is a collection of short pieces by done by a stable of diversely styled creators. Some of the pieces contain only the slightest trace of traditional narrative and function more like a T.S. Eliot poem than a Dr. Suess parable. Ever wonder what it would be like if Italo Calvino and Charles Bukowski made manga? If you like 1960s-1970s Western underground comics, you'll like this. It's a book for folks who see the word "underground" as a genre, a manifesto, a fetish.For comic readers who want superheroes, no.For comic readers who object to use of urine, semen, vomit, excrement, bondage, voyeurism, sexual anxiety, sexual violence, prostitution, satire, and foul language, there is some material in this book for you, but not much. This book is loaded with some crazy sex stuff. Some of it is quite poetic, but a lot of it would be considered filthy by my mother's standards and she's a pretty liberal lady. In fact, I would be nervous to read this book in public because somebody looking over your shoulder could get the wrong idea. I will definitely be lending this book out to my friends though because it's the kind of art you want to share.For comic readers who only read books in color, this book is black and white so grab your crayons.I recommend this book to fans of Stray Bullets, John Waters, Robert Crumb, Love and Rockets, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, and Paul Pope. I also recommend this book to perverts, poets, and the curious. Not all the pieces are erotic, but they are contain an element of the outsider, the taboo, the awkward, or the experimental. This book will liven up your bookshelf.

This is a great collection of short stories. Some are hard hitting, some are funny and some suck. A shame this series didn’t continue. Nice to see a broader spectrum of artists work in Japan. In America we are really forced to only see a limited number of working artists and writers because not much is published here. Especially older manga. There are some great stories and artists who haven’t gone international and this helped us peak into who we are missing out on.