Shônen Jump manga/anime! Ranking favourites!

Although I would wish to extol the 1999 animated series, it is the manga of HxH that I rank here specifically. It feels very much like a series that was made custom for my own predilections--the retro character designs, the garrulous characters, the unorthodox settings, and the complexity of the story-design resonate so much with me. It's not perfect--there is the occasional sense of bathos, namely in the movement from the Yorkshin arc to Greed Island--but it's made all the right moves to get me invested. I only pray it can make good on that investment.

I'm a vegan, so I guess it was pretty inevitable that I wouldn't take to Toriko. I read two volumes, and it was rather decent reading--on the whole, I probably liked it more than D. Gray-Man--but, much like Whistle!, the subject-matter was at odds with my personal outlook on the world.

I've never taken to soccer. I cannot bear participating in the sport; I cannot suffer to watch it; and, even in my "home turf" of video-games, I cannot countenance those which are predicated on it. I determined that this antipathy vis-a-vis soccer was to squander a good thing--soccer's ceaselessly on TV; my friends love FIFA; and it seems to be the country's sport of choice, so growing to love it could be a boon to my quality of life. Cue Whistle!, Daisuke Higuchi's manga ode to football. Yu-Gi-Oh!, Hikaru no Go and Prince of Tennis had all used my beloved medium of manga to render an unknown game compelling in my eyes--so I hoped Whistle! could do the same for football. But it didn't: far from chipping away at my hatred for football, its exposition of the sport reinforced my awareness of the elements within it that I find abhorrent. It is with this in mind that I do not consider I shall ever read volume 2: a single volume of a manga does not always prove sufficient to discover if one will grow to love a series, but a single volume of Whistle! was ample indication that those prejudices I bear will only be kindled by a continued visit in Higuchi's world of soccer. It's a shame, too--when I first went hunting for manga in Forbidden planet, Higuchi's artwork for the cover of the first volume of Whistle! proved most in tune with my sense of aesthetics, out of all the manga I looked at.