This page was the brain child of Mene
Of all the manga artists I have read in English and French I would have to say that Masakazu Katsura, Rumiko Takahashi and CLAMP are the best in both writting and drawing. Since I've already talked about CLAMP on another page and sice this IS the Shadow Lady page, I'm just going to mention Katsura right now.
Katsura tends to write romances that are also wonderful character studies, DNA^2 being the best example of a character study. They deal in depth with the characters emotions to such an extent that, above almost every other author, I know exactly how the character feels. The plots of his stories tend to be unusual and always have a pinch of humor to them. They maintain a nice balence between angst and light hearted fun.
While I almost instantly fell in love with his writting, I was a bit more critical of his drawing style. When I first started Video Girl Ai I thought that it was boring that he was just trying to draw caucasions with weird hair. Junta in DNA^2 certainly changed my opinion on how weird YOTA's hair is and I grew to think that the hair is kind of fun. When I looked at the cover of the third DNA^2 graphic novel, I came to realize that they didn't look caucasion at all. I also realized that the eyes actually had a lot of depth of expression that I hadn't given them credit for. The figures of his characters are over all good. I like how all the women do not have the same figure and how he periodically changes their hair cut. My only problem is that while they all have all the right body parts, the women don't seem to fit together correctly. There is something very funky with how their legs join to their torso, but no one can be perfect.
