If you liked Spirit of Wonder
12 manga like Spirit of Wonder
Picked for the same feel: the genres they share with Spirit of Wonder (romance, comedy, sci-fi), the same creators, and what readers keep together. Each opens where it is read legally.
Manga like Spirit of Wonder
Sci-Fi · Seinen1. Wahhaman
by Yoshitoo Asari
- Action
- Comedy (shared)
- Mecha
- Sci-Fi (shared)
An immensely powerful combat machine awakens after ten thousand years, ready to make an impression on the modern world. There is only one difficulty: Wahhaman has completely forgotten his mission. Built to withstand almost anything and strong enough to overturn everyday expectations, he has little understanding of what he is supposed to do with those abilities. The people around him try to fit this extraordinary visitor into their own lives, often with chaotic results. His mechanical body and strange responses make ordinary encounters unpredictable, while the unresolved circumstances of his past suggest that his arrival cannot remain a harmless curiosity forever. Yoshitoo Asari uses the contrast between overwhelming power and bewilderment for a distinctly eccentric robot comedy. As the story develops, its science-fiction mysteries give the jokes a larger setting, asking what remains of a weapon when its original purpose has vanished from memory.
Read on Comic DAYSOpen
Sci-Fi · Seinen2. Space Family Carlvinson
by Yoshitoo Asari
- Comedy (shared)
- Sci-Fi (shared)
A travelling troupe of alien entertainers collides with another spacecraft and discovers a single survivor: a human baby. Unable to identify her home, the performers settle on a nearby planet and agree to act as her family until someone comes to claim her. Years later, the little girl, Corona, regards this extraordinary household as perfectly ordinary. Her mother is a furry creature, her father resembles a formidable robot soldier, and the neighbours are no less unusual. Their attempts to raise a child turn alien biology and spacefaring technology into the ingredients of domestic comedy. The troupe's improvised arrangement gradually becomes a life shared together. Yoshitoo Asari builds the series around the contrast between strange appearances and familiar affection. Everyday misunderstandings, playful science-fiction references and Corona's curiosity give this eccentric space family its warmth, while the question of where she belongs remains quietly present.
Read on Comic DAYSOpen
Sci-Fi · Seinen3. Planetes
by Makoto Yukimura
- Drama
- Philosophical
- Sci-Fi (shared)
Humanity has expanded into space, but someone still has to collect the rubbish it leaves behind. Hachimaki works aboard an orbital debris ship, removing objects that could destroy passing spacecraft. He dreams of travelling farther than this unglamorous job allows, even as his doubts and the demands of earning a living keep pulling him back. His colleagues bring their own reasons for staying in orbit. Yuri carries the memory of a wife lost in a space accident, while Fee approaches the dangerous work with practical resolve. Beyond their small crew, nations and corporations carry Earth's inequalities into the new frontier. Makoto Yukimura makes space exploration a story about workers, ambition and human connection. Carefully imagined machinery and the physical dangers of orbit sit alongside intimate questions about grief, responsibility and the lives people hope to build when distance alone cannot solve their problems.
Read on Comic DAYSOpen
Seinen · Comedy4. Saint Young Men
by Hikaru Nakamura
- Comedy (shared)
- Slice of Life
Having successfully brought the last millennium to a close, Jesus and Buddha decide to take a well-earned vacation on Earth. They rent a modest apartment together in Tachikawa, a suburb of Tokyo, and try to enjoy ordinary life without attracting attention. Buddha pinches pennies like a careful homemaker, while Jesus is prone to impulse buys and loves blogging. Shopping trips, festivals, bathhouses and summer holidays become comic adventures, as their holy habits keep surfacing: halos that light up, miracles that happen at the worst moments and neighbours who think they are just two eccentric young men. Hikaru Nakamura's gentle, affectionate comedy finds humour in the most mundane situations. It won the Manga Taisho Award and the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, and was adapted into an animated film and a live-action series.
Read on K MANGAOpen
Seinen · Romance5. Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You
by Jinushi
- Comedy (shared)
- Romance (shared)
- Slice of Life
At forty-five, office worker Sasaki is worn out by the corporate grind. His only comforts are a cigarette behind the supermarket after work and the friendly smile of Yamada, the cashier who rings up his shopping every day. When Yamada is not there after a particularly bad day, a striking stranger invites him to smoke with her instead. Sasaki thinks he has found a new smoking buddy in the cool, teasing Tayama. What he does not realise is that he already knows her: she is the same cashier, showing a completely different side of herself. Their evening breaks become a little world of easy conversation, while Yamada wonders how long she can keep up the double act, and Sasaki slowly lets his guard down. Jinushi's romantic comedy is warm, funny and quietly grown-up, a story about two tired adults who each find in the other a place to breathe at the end of the day.
Read on MANGA UP!Open
Sci-Fi · Seinen6. Battle Angel Alita: Last Order
by Yukito Kishiro
- Action
- Sci-Fi (shared)
After her final battle with the scientist Desty Nova, Alita wakes up somewhere she never expected: inside Zalem, the floating city that the people of the Scrapyard below always believed was paradise. What she finds is a place of fear, cruelty and decay, and her close friend Lou is in danger. With a new body and old enemies everywhere, Alita fights her way through Zalem to reach Lou, while the secrets of the sky city and of her own past slowly come to light. The search soon carries her far beyond Earth, to the colonies of space and the Zenith of Things Tournament, where the greatest fighters in the solar system meet in brutal, spectacular martial-arts battles. Yukito Kishiro's sequel sets aside the original ending of Battle Angel Alita and takes the story in a new direction over fourteen years of serialisation. It combines hard science fiction, philosophy and some of the most detailed fight choreography in manga, and was later continued in Battle Angel Alita: Mars Chronicle.
Read on INKROpen
Sci-Fi · Comedy7. Ultimate Superman R
by Masami Yuuki
- Comedy (shared)
- Sci-Fi (shared)
- Slice of Life
The photography club at Harukaze High School already attracts an unusual collection of students. Its newest arrival, R. Ichiro Tanaka, makes the group stranger still: he is an android built for a purpose far grander than attending classes. In practice, joining his classmates and finding something to eat interest him much more than world domination. R's mechanical nature rarely makes him the most sensible person in the room. Club activities, school events and disputes with fellow students become excuses for the entire cast to follow increasingly ridiculous ideas. His friends accept the impossible newcomer as another part of their own peculiar routine. Masami Yuki turns a science-fiction premise into an ensemble school comedy. The humour comes from patient misunderstandings, eccentric personalities and the distance between R's intended mission and his modest daily priorities, giving the series a relaxed, playful alternative to stories about unstoppable robot weapons.
Read on Sunday WebryOpen
Seinen · Comedy8. CITY
by Keiichi Arawi
- Comedy (shared)
- Slice of Life
Midori Nagumo is broke, behind on her rent and running out of excuses. Her best friend has stopped lending her money, her landlady has stopped believing her promises, and getting a job would mean less time for fun. Every scheme she invents to get by spirals into something stranger, and drags half the neighbourhood along with it. The city around her is full of people with lives just as odd: students, shopkeepers, police officers and a small restaurant that is never quite under control. Their stories cross in unexpected ways, and a gag that starts in one chapter may only land several chapters later, when the whole town gets involved. Keiichi Arawi, the creator of Nichijou, builds CITY like a carefully timed machine of absurd comedy, drawn with clean lines and boundless energy. Warm, ridiculous and surprisingly touching, it was adapted into an anime by Kyoto Animation, and it is best read as a long walk through a town you will want to visit again.
Read on INKROpen
Seinen · Comedy9. Grand Blue Dreaming
by Kenji Inoue, Kimitake Yoshioka
- Comedy (shared)
- Slice of Life
Iori Kitahara moves to a seaside town in Izu to start university, staying above his uncle's diving shop, Grand Blue, and dreaming of a bright, refreshing campus life. Within hours he is swept into the diving club, Peek a Boo, whose members seem far more devoted to drinking parties and stripping down than to scuba diving. Iori's plans for a normal college life collapse one embarrassing misunderstanding at a time, helped along by his otaku friend Kohei, his cool, unimpressed cousin Chisa and a club of loud, muscular senpai. Yet when he finally dives, the beauty of the sea gives him something genuine to love, and a reason for this ridiculous group to keep coming back together. Written by Kenji Inoue and drawn by Kimitake Yoshioka, Grand Blue Dreaming is one of the funniest manga ever made, a college comedy of chaotic friendship and the wonder of the ocean. It was adapted into an anime and a live-action film.
Read on K MANGAOpen
Sci-Fi · Seinen10. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou
by Ashinano Hitoshi
- Drama
- Philosophical
- Sci-Fi (shared)
- Slice of Life
Long after an environmental catastrophe raised the seas, humanity is slowly and peacefully fading away. On the Japanese coast near Yokohama, Alpha, a gentle android, runs a small coffee shop, waiting for the owner who left on a journey and never returned. Her days are made of simple things: brewing coffee for the rare customer, riding her scooter through flooded towns, playing her guitar, sharing watermelon with neighbours and watching the seasons change. As she travels and meets the few people and strange beings who remain, Alpha finds beauty and contentment in a world that is quietly ending. Hitoshi Ashinano's classic is one of the great works of gentle, healing manga, quiet and bittersweet, with gorgeous landscapes and a deep sense of peace. It was adapted into two short anime series.
Read on Comic DAYSOpen
Seinen · Romance11. Kaguya-sama: Love Is War
by Aka Akasaka
- Comedy (shared)
- Romance (shared)
- Romantic Comedy
At the elite Shuchiin Academy, student council president Miyuki Shirogane and vice-president Kaguya Shinomiya are admired as the perfect pair. They are in love with each other, but both are far too proud to say so, because in their eyes the first to confess loses. So every day becomes a battle of wits. Lunch invitations, movie tickets and casual conversations turn into elaborate schemes to make the other admit their feelings first, while the cheerful, unpredictable secretary Chika Fujiwara and the gloomy treasurer Yu Ishigami keep wrecking their plans. Beneath the strategy, both are lonelier than they appear. Aka Akasaka's romantic comedy begins as a contest of pride and gradually becomes a moving story about honesty, friendship and growing up. Its sharp humour and inventive storytelling made it one of the most popular romantic comedies of its time, and it was adapted into a hit anime and films.
Read on VIZOpen
Seinen · Romance12. Skip and Loafer
by Misaki Takamatsu
- Comedy (shared)
- Romance (shared)
- Slice of Life
Mitsumi Iwakura is the top student from a tiny seaside town in the countryside, with a meticulous ten-year plan: attend a prestigious Tokyo high school, get into a great university and become a government official who can help rural places like her home. On her very first day in the city, she gets completely lost. She is rescued by Sosuke Shima, a handsome, laid-back classmate with a past he prefers not to talk about. Mitsumi's sincerity and blunt honesty soon draw together a circle of classmates, from the popular Yuzuki to the cynical Makoto and the self-conscious Mika, each with insecurities of their own that Mitsumi helps them face, often without realising it. Misaki Takamatsu's series is a bright, funny and deeply kind story about friendship and finding your feet, with a heroine who stumbles often and never stays down. It was adapted into an anime.
Read on K MANGAOpen