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My first suggestion thread

Never read it but I heard Berserk's good. Also Hellsing but it's only alright.

There's lots of violence in Barefoot Gen. Horses on fire, children with broken glass melting on their faces running around screaming "Mommy, mommy! I can't see!”, suicide by grenades with heads flying everywhere, and little kids biting the fingertips off people that irritate them. It's an extremely heart wrenching story, so expect to be bawling by the end of volume one. What makes it so sad is that it's the autobiography of a boy in Japan in WWII that survived the bombing of Hiroshima, and all the horrible violence really happened. I made a deal with my mom that I'd read Night (that Pulitzer prize winner) if she read this. This was her first introduction to manga, and while she used to hate the stuff with a passion without actually having read any of it, she now she accepts that manga is a legitimate form of storytelling and art.

EDIT: I say "actually" way too much.

Wolverine Princess wrote:

There's lots of violence in Barefoot Gen. Horses on fire, children with broken glass melting on their faces running around screaming "Mommy, mommy! I can't see!”, suicide by grenades with heads flying everywhere, and little kids biting the fingertips off people that irritate them. It's an extremely heart wrenching story, so expect to be bawling by the end of volume one. What makes it so sad is that it's the autobiography of a boy in Japan in WWII that survived the bombing of Hiroshima, and all the horrible violence really happened. I made a deal with my mom that I'd read Night (that Pulitzer prize winner) if she read this. This was her first introduction to manga, and while she used to hate the stuff with a passion without actually having read any of it, she now she accepts that manga is a legitimate form of storytelling and art. EDIT: I say "actually" way too much.

I also highly recommend this timeless classic to anyone mature enough to handle it, but a word of caution to the author of this thread: don't go into BG expecting the same kind of fun, mindless violence you would find in Gantz. It shows the horror and violence of Hiroshima in a shockingly effective and mature manner, much more so than something like Battle Royal could have ever hoped to achieve (and before people start pointing out how much more explicit BR is than BG, I'm talking about how the violence is used and the purpose behind it). Nakazawa confronts the horrors of his childhood on paper (not to mention the failure of the society he lived in), and the effect is as gut-wrenching as anything you'll ever read.

Lay off Gantz. It isn't mindless; it's quite a bit deeper than people give it credit for.

Crying Freeman has a lot of explicit material, both violent and sexual. It's among the best mafia/crime-stories around imo.