I didn't really enjoy a lot of the short stories in here but I did read this to broaden my scope on 'manga' and the different styles. I don't think I'd right off recommend this to anyone. Many of the stories were... odd, to say the least.

Ax was a manga magazine similar to Juxtapoz or Heavy Metal, but a bit cruder and more subversive--at least for Japan. It was born from the ashes of the more adult and social/political manga magazine Garo when one of its founders died. In the same spirit of pushing the boundaries of what manga is and what types of art, stories, characters and ideas manga is capable of. The results aredefinitely a mixed bag. Some of these I quite liked, a fair number of other ones I didn't much like or I was indifferent to. But certainly a good collection if you want to get an idea of what, as the title suggests, "alternative" manga is like. NSFW at all! Keep that in mind if you are reading this in public, a majority of the comics have nudity and/or sex and not really censored either.

I liked this collection of off-beat manga pretty well. I'm not sure it's the kind of revelation that a book like _Eightball_ was, but maybe that's because I've already read _Eightball_. These stories I think have a similar kind of underground pedigree, taken from the magazine _Afternoon_, if I'm remembering right.

Anthologies are always hard, where you want to read till you find something great or collapse from exhaustion, so it's hard to really get a sense of individual pieces. I tried, then, to really slow this one down, to read two or three a night till I finished, whether or not what I read any one night was great or not.

And like a lot of anthologies, a lot of it didn't really move me-- there's a lot of sex here, some of it pretty transgressive by my standards. I'm not sure I'm offended by most of it, but some of the stories didn't seem to have all that much else to offer, besides that graphic sex. Others, I think, really on subverting manga tropes that I'm not totally invested in, because while I read manga, I don't read enough of it, or a wide enough range, to really catch those tropes immediately.

But there are some stories here that I do think are absolute gems. My favorite, I think, is "Enrique Kobayashi's El Dorado," which is sort of an essay in pictures, though there's more jumping between narrative levels than that would suggest. And the pictures are great-- lumpy and condensed, it's really a stand out in this collection. "Love's Bride," which gets the back cover, is also pretty great, for the way it's willing to go way out in terms of how the main character responds to his lust. Funny, shocking, and only in comics. Some, like "Puppy Love" are almost there-- weird, haunting stuff. And throughout, there's a range of art styles, some of which are really beautiful, some of which are expressive, and some which put truth to the lie that comics art-- American or Japanese style-- is rooted in the study of anatomy.

So, a mixed bag, but I'd probably buy a volume of this series a year, to expand my horizons and for the occasional winner. If the series updated more frequently than that, though, I'd probably let it go on without me.