Laios' entire party is wiped out by a dragon, but his little sister manages to cast a teleportation spell on everyone except herself. The three remaining members are transported outside of the dungeon, but without any of their provisions or other supplies, including their money. Laios is determined to go back in and revive his sister before she's fully digested by the dragon, but without food or money to buy more, he turns to a more unsavory (or maybe it is savory?) option - eating the monsters and plants foraged from inside the dungeon. Along the way, they meet a dwarf who has made a lot of progress in figuring out which monsters and plants are edible, but not so much headway in conquering the dungeon. Together, they eat their way through the dungeon, one floor - and monster - at a time.
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Gon is a pretty talented young man. He is sympathetic towards animals, doesn't get sea-sick through the worst of storms, and is naturally intuitive about situations he's in. His father was a Hunter, an esteemed person tasked with hunting dangerous animals, tracking down treasures, or even bringing criminals to justice. Gon's aunt wanted him to follow a different path, but the Hunter's blood runs strong, and Gon decides to attempt the trials in order to gain a Hunter's License. The license exam is extremely difficult - that is, after you finally get to the Exam Hall. There are plenty of trials along the way designed to weed out the folks who are in it for all the wrong reasons. Of the initial group who started out across the rough seas, only Gon and two others make it. They find the Exam Hall, where four hundred other hopefuls also wait for the real trials to start. But with only a few licenses to award, the exam promises to be even more challenging that what Gon has already experienced.
Illustrated by Nate Powell
In this second volume of the life of former Senator John Lewis, we see Lewis as a college student who is getting more and more involved in the racial protests in the South. Lewis was one of the first and longest members of the Freedom Riders group who bought tickets on buses going between several states and challenged bus company's rules that buses needed to be segregated. This was in direct violation of the Supreme Court ruling in Morgan v. Virginia where the court found segregated buses to be unconstitutional. Lewis narrowly missed being on one of the buses that was attacked and torched by KKK members. On several occasions, Lewis and other riders were jailed and refused to post bail, saying that paying it would then fund the racist policies they were fighting against. Lewis gets more involved with Dr. King, and is selected as one of the six representatives to meet with President Kennedy on the racial tensions in the south. Lewis is elected the president of SYNC, and later is the last speaker at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where King delivered his famous, "I Have a Dream Speech." Included in end notes is the full text of Lewis' speech, called "This is It". 
The second volume in this series sees an uptick in the amount of action (not that volume 1 lacked). Tetsuo recovers quickly from his gunshot wounds and demands answers from the doctor who seems to be running the experiments on gifted people. He finds out that there are more kids in the facility with powers and forces the doctor to take him to meet them. Meanwhile, Kei suddenly has powers she’s never had before and uses them to break out of her cell and evade capture, in the same facility . She gets Kaneda out as well and tries to stop Tetsuo. The other three gifted children are actually controlling Kei in an attempt to stop Tetsuo because they’ve seen what future he brings about, and they don’t like it. Tetsuo learns of the existence and location of Akira, and plans to free him.
Nasa‘s cousin, Ginga, who acts like a yakuza man but he’s really a normal high school student, has his “boys" bring in a feral kitten they found outside their high school. Nasa immediately takes it to the vet to get completely checked out. When the vet asks for his name, Tsukasa offers up "Toast" because the kitten has a lighter square of fur on its back and it’s mostly brown. Once Toast is back home settling in, he starts getting in the way of Nasa getting close to his wife because he's constantly demanding food. Ganga presents Nasa with a wedding present: two tickets to the Land of Dreams, a theme park. The young couple decided to go to the park as a date. Tsukasa has never been and is excited to try everything. They weren’t the only ones who had the idea to come as a date. Nasa's teacher is invited by a colleague who doesn’t know how to confessed his feelings for her.
Illustrated by David Namisato
Sandy is a young noy growing up in British Columbia who loves baseball. It’s one of the things he and his father enjoy together, that is when is father isn’t off providing medical treatments to folks. Sandy’s family and of Japanese decent, and they live in a thriving Japanese community in BC, who all root for the Asahi, the local baseball team who just lost the championship, but are hopeful to get it back next season. Then, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, and things start getting more complicated for Sandy and his family. They have to give up some of their possessions “for safekeeping”, knowing full well they will be sold off; they have to be in their homes by sundown, which makes the father’s job much harder; and there are certain areas of port cities they are no longer allowed to live in. Soon enough, the families are transported to camps that have been set up at abandoned mining facilities. 
This manga contains two different short stories: “Glass Syndrome” and “Similar Figures in Love”. In the first story, class president Nijou is asked to check up on a classmates, Toomi, who hasn’t been coming to school recently. Nijou finds Toomi alone in his house - his father abandoned him after he stole money from his company. Toomi has turned to posing as a girl online for money in order to have enough money to eat. Nijou finds peace in talking with Toomi, and his touch doesn’t repulse him like other people’s does. Toomi, for his part, sees through Nijou’s incessant people-pleasing traits, and encourages him to stand up for himself instead of do what everyone expects. Nijou starts visiting Toomi’s online chat (without Toomi knowing it’s him), and he starts to fall in love with Toomi. In the second, much shorter, story, a pair of life-long friends share a dorm in college, but Kasumi has had a crush on Chihiro for years. An upperclassman, Saiki, confesses he’s in love with Kasumi and agrees to tutor Kasumi on the piano if he tells him about his unrequited love. Chihiro starts dating a girl he has had a crush on for a while, and Kasumi turns to his tutor for comfort, and possibly for love.
Yatora Yaguchi is a second-year high school student who hangs out with the “delinquents,” but he works really hard to get good grades despite his appearance. Everyone in Yatora's class is starting to figure out what college and profession they want to go into, but Yatora isn’t sure what he wants to do once he graduates. None of his hard work makes him feel alive, and he has no particular passions or hobbies. After seeing a beautiful painting in his art class, he decides to actually put some effort into his art assignment to paint “your favorite scene”. He finds immense satisfaction in painting and the praise he receives even though he didn’t finish it. He starts to earnestly learn art in the hopes of making it into Tokyo University of the Arts, a highly competitive, but only public, university dedicated to Art.
Adapted by Ryan North, illustrated by Albert Monteys
This story starts out in World War II with a scrawny soldier, Billy Pilgrim, and three others, sneaking through Germany and trying to evade detection. There are some odd things about Billy, besides the fact that he's in the Army and has no muscle - Billy doesn't live his life entirely chronologically. He's become unstuck in time, and he periodically visits future points in his life, like after he's opened a successful optometry practice, or that one time he cheats on his wife, or when aliens from the planet Tralfamadore scoop him up in their flying saucer and place him in a zoo where they can view him like an exhibit. Billy learns much from his time amongst the aliens, like the saying "so it goes" after someone dies, or how they view time as if they are seeing a slice of the Rocky Mountains - kind of all at once. In between all of these moments, Billy is captured and center to a labor camp in Dresden - just before it is taken off the face of the map by the Allied Forces. |
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