Manga - Shutterbox

I try to read manga when I can because usually the artwork is beautiful. One fantastic feature of manga are the sidebars written by the authors - they're like a mini-blog, so you get snippets of information about the books and the writers themselves. In this section, I'm going to show some of my favourites when I can.


Shutterbox
Rikki and Tavisha Simons


From the blurb: On the surface, Megan Amano seems like a typical Los Angeles girl, attending college and spending a good time of her afternoons in therapy. However, when Megan dreams, she travels to a place unlike any other - a supernatural and surreal college, one any recent high school graduate would die to attend. And usually they must... for Merridiah University is the afterlife's premier educational institute. But for Megan a great exception has been made. 


I have to say, this series is incredibly difficult to get hold of. It seems to be out of print despite being a fairly new series, but if you can find a copy, buy it! It is available on e-readers, though. Now I just need to get an e-reader. It's an American manga so it reads left to right. 


This series is deliciously quirky, with a bird acting as someone's conscious, a "camera ghost" and a skeleton who puts the scare in scarecrow. There are flying rabbits called Beebos. But it's Megan who gives the books their charm as she stumbles through this mysterious world in  her pyjamas. There she meets the enigmatic brothers Dane and AJ who seem to neither like or dislike each other. Each acts as a guide of sorts (though one does so kind of reluctantly) but they only give her very select information - not even enough to survive at first. In a world that seems lush but can be deadly, how can she trust the personifications of the beautiful, dangerous environment?


I'm only on the third book of five published so far, but it's a great story from the start.