For most of my life I have been incredibly stubborn about watching anime and reading manga. Besides 4kids morning slot shlock like Pokemon, Digimon and One Piece (before you ask, I prefer this remain my only interactions with it); I outright refused to watch or read them for various reasons - mainly weebs! They're scary and turn people off it all!
That changed recently however with an unplanned, spur of the moment purchase of Junji Ito's Uzumaki in a bookstore. They say it takes one good book to change a life or whatever and holy shit was that good. I followed that up (months later, after many attempts by friends to get me into it) with a complete read of Chainsaw Man, which I also enjoyed a lot! So I decided that I was gonna spend my 2023 catching up on all the things I missed.
This section serves as a bunch of shorthand reviews of everything I've consumed so far. I regularly run polls on my Twitter on what I'm doing next, and you can check out my Anilist to stalk exactly when I'm doing so.
An incredibly good starting point. I had, admittedly, read Ito's The Enigma of Amigra Fault prior, but much like Squidward nibbling a bit of that Krabby Patty in that one Spongebob episode, I'd just gone "it's alright" until I spotted Uzumaki in a local bookstore. Spur of the moment, I bought it, went home, and read the entire thing in one afternoon - just like Squidward had proceeded to chow down on a shitton of Krabby Patties, because guess what, it was good! Really fucking good!
On the actual contents of the manga itself: This is actually a compilation of a monthly serial, which shows with the initial few chapters being disjointed spiral-based horror tales, and the final lot of chapters essentially being one long unbroken story. If you're looking for some of the prettiest art in manga, some of the best storytelling you can find, or frankly just an amazing piece of horror media; it's relatively easy to find the complete thing to read, and its nice and short!
Read after months of peer pressure. Was so good I got all 11 physical volumes of the first part! I'm not particularly... fond... of shonen tropes (this is partly why I avoided this all for so long), but Chainsaw Man does an incredible job dodging them like its life depends on it. It's a little slow to get going, but the characters are so inherently fun to follow that you don't give one and keep reading. Worth it for the final two volumes alone. The way it concludes is incredible. Worth a look at the very least!