Beerus.

Rewind to where the property sat before he arrived. Toriyama had handed us planets, proud Saiyans, Namekians, King Kai, Supreme Kai and an afterlife with its own divine order. Frieza squeezed the galaxy in his fist. Cell absorbed his way toward pure nightmare fuel. Majin Buu melted folks into candy and swallowed them whole. Heavy hitters, no doubt, but every last one lived inside a single tidy shelf of existence. We had gods and Kais above the heroes already, and honestly that felt pretty close to the roof of the whole building.

Then the destroyer sauntered in and ripped that roof clean off.

Battle of Gods dropped in 2013 and quietly reset the table. Here was a being who treated Super Saiyan 3, the transformation that once looked like the mountaintop, as a light warmup before dessert. Beerus swatted our hero around like a kitten batting yarn. The scary part was not only the gap in muscle. It was the reveal that a whole tier of reality had been sitting above everyone the entire run, unbothered, asleep, waiting. All that blood the Z Fighters spilled suddenly read like the minor leagues.

That single idea cracked the franchise wide open.

Look at what came pouring through the door behind him. Whis, the attendant and martial arts master who casually outclasses Beerus himself, introduced angels into the mythology. God ki became an entirely new lane of power. Super Saiyan God arrived through the ritual, while training under Whis eventually pushed Goku and Vegeta toward Super Saiyan Blue, opening a fresh training path with real stakes instead of one more screaming glow up. The old rule was simple. Get mad, shine brighter, win. The purple deity flipped it. Steady your spirit, master divine energy, or stay stuck forever in the kiddie pool.

The cosmology kept unfolding from there. We learned there was not one lonely Kai running heaven. Twelve universes existed, each with its own destroyer and its own angel keeping the scales even. Above all of them sat Zeno, a tiny childlike ruler with the authority to erase whole realities on a whim. None of that framework existed before a certain feline decided he was hungry. Lifting the ceiling barely covers it. Truth is, there were floors and floors stacked above the one nobody knew was there.

Here is the part heads sleep on. The stakes turned personal without him ever needing the villain slot. Conquest was never the point. No hunt for immortality, no grab for the Dragon Balls, no revenge tour. Mostly he wanted good food, more sleep, and the occasional bout to keep his edge sharp. That relaxed menace hit different. You could not reason your way past him, could not out will him, could not friendship speech him into a redemption arc. Half the tension in early Super came from the crew tiptoeing around a landlord who might evict their entire existence if the pudding tasted mid.

Whis balanced that dread with comedy, and the pairing gave the show a texture it never had. Suddenly training arcs carried weight again because the target had moved. Goku and Vegeta were not grinding to top the next planet buster. They were reaching toward the divine, learning under an angel, trying to earn a nod from a creature who could yawn them out of the plot. That fresh ambition breathed life into a saga plenty of us assumed had already peaked back with Buu.

Then comes the payoff that settles the whole argument. The Tournament of Power grew out of the much larger cosmic playground Beerus helped open in the first place. Zeno, the survival gauntlet where eight universes gambled everything on a single ring, and the idea of entire realities competing for survival all depended on a multiverse that Dragon Ball had barely imagined before the Gods of Destruction entered the picture. Beerus did not personally create the tournament. Goku and Zeno pushed that event into motion. But the biggest, most ambitious event in the property’s history still traces back through the world that opened after one bored destroyer woke from a nap because of a prophecy about a legendary crimson form. Look at the calendar in 2026, better than a decade past that first yawn, and the ripple still has not slowed a step. Pull that thread and the whole modern run unravels in your hands.

Folks crown Ultra Instinct as the jewel of this era, and it is gorgeous, easily one of the coldest reveals anime has ever cooked up. Even that leans on scaffolding the cat helped build though. Ultra Instinct is a divine technique mastered naturally by the Angels. Kakarot only chases it because Whis put the idea in his ear, and Whis only walked into the picture as an escort to you know who. Trace any highlight of the last decade back far enough and the same purple silhouette is standing at the origin, arms folded, mildly annoyed you woke him.

That is the honest reason the cat matters more than any tier list ever could. He did not win a popularity contest. No loudest finish, no flashiest arc either. What he did was hand the writers a bigger canvas. Before him the roof was a Kai and a planet or three. After him it was twelve realities, a ladder of gods, angels, an omni king, and a tournament for survival across all creation. That is not a power spike. That is a brand new map.

So the next time somebody drags you into a could Goku beat thread, tap out with grace and drop the real take. The Saiyan is the face. The heart. The reason we tuned in as shorties and stuck around as grown folks with bills and back pain. Nobody is stealing that from him. Yet the architect of everything that made the sequel years feel enormous was never actually him. It was a hungry, sleepy, magnificently petty god who showed up expecting dinner and wound up redrawing the boundaries of the entire mythos.

Long may he nap.

Staff Writer; Carl Davis

This bro has always been into gaming, anime, manga, old-school sitcoms, and just about anything connected to nerd culture. A proud Black blerd for life, CD enjoys writing about the shows, games, and characters that have stayed with him over the years.

Feel free to drop him a message at CarlD@AfroGamers.com.

It didn’t.

Keep that in mind, because the newest one is nearly here. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World hits December 3, 2026, a hair under three months out, on PS5, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2, and PC. More than 500 creatures to round up this time. Synthesis returns as well. Fuse two of your creatures into one meaner beast, sometimes something you had no clue was even in there. Bianca and Nera, the famous brides from Dragon Quest V, headline the entire adventure as children this go-round, wandering a dying land named Witherwood and working to breathe green back into it. It also marks the first numbered Dragon Quest Monsters entry centered on two female co-protagonists, which counts as a quiet milestone.

Good hook. Strong art. But that launch is really just my excuse to say something bigger.

We need to retire the reflex.

Here is the timeline, plain as day. That fifth mainline chapter reached the Super Famicom in 1992, and it let certain defeated monsters join your party after battle. Recruit them. Build a squad out of some of the same beasts you had just been swinging swords at. Now check the calendar on the pocket phenomenon: Red and Green landed on Japanese shelves in 1996. More than three years separate the pair. Enix had folks assembling teams of recruited enemies before Satoshi Tajiri’s brainchild ever reached store shelves.

So the question of who copied who gets murky fast, and the honest answer sits closer to “nobody, exactly.” Pokémon itself had already been in development before Dragon Quest V arrived, so this is not a clean story of one studio stealing from another. A couple of studios were digging in similar soil around the same era. One struck gold worldwide. The other kept quietly refining an idea it had already planted.

By 1998 that concept got a dedicated home. Terry’s Wonderland arrived on Game Boy Color in Japan, then crossed to Western players in 2000 under the clunky label Dragon Warrior Monsters. The game drew heavily from Akira Toriyama’s established Dragon Quest character and monster designs. The blue slime, grinning with that little teardrop shape, became as recognizable to a certain kind of player as any yellow rodent. And underneath the cute surface sat something surprisingly deep: a breeding setup, later reshaped into synthesis, where pedigree and bloodline decided what your next fighter would become.

I’ll give the skeptics one inch. There is no denying that Enix launched that spin-off into a market Pokémon had already transformed. Chasing a hot market isn’t a crime, and pretending the timing meant nothing would be silly. But wanting a slice of the moment and being a hollow imitation are a pair of very different accusations. What arrived in 1998 was an expansion of a system the property already held, dressed up for a hungry market. Not a costume thrown over somebody else’s skeleton.

The differences run all the way through. In these titles you can scout the franchise’s legendary bosses and pull them onto your bench, final villains included. You are not filling a book with fresh designs invented to fuel a fad. You are digging through decades of established lore and drafting your favorites. Combat stays loyal to the mainline saga instead of reinventing the wheel. That fusion engine turns team-building into a genealogy project, where you plot two generations ahead to create the fighter you actually crave. Distinct flavor. Anybody who has sunk a weekend into Joker or The Dark Prince knows the itch it scratches lives in a different corner of the brain.

Why does the “clone” label keep sticking, then? Part of it is plain exposure. For a lot of us on this side of the ocean, the yellow-rat empire came first and came loudest. It shaped the very vocabulary we reach for, so anything shaped along similar lines reads as derivative by default. Understandable instinct. But it also shows how easily our first exposure to something can get mistaken for the place where the whole idea began. The West’s first taste of something gets treated as its birthplace, and everything predating our awareness gets shoved into a footnote.

The past doesn’t owe us that arrangement. The studio was crafting this stuff for a home audience long before most American kids knew the genre existed. Two traditions grew alongside each other. One learned to market itself as a global lifestyle. The other stayed a beloved institution back home while holding devoted cult status abroad. Neither owes the rival its origin story.

And this goes way past one game franchise. Slap the “clone” tag on every creature-catcher that isn’t Pokémon and you wipe out a chunk of real history in one lazy move. You lose the studios chasing the same idea from another direction. You lose the regional wrinkles that gave each series its flavor. What’s left is a flat story where a single name invented everything and the rest borrowed from it. Every debate collapses into who won, and that’s the most boring lens you can put on any art form. I’d rather sit with a game and work out what it was swinging for, then grade it against that instead of somebody else’s scoreboard.

Which loops me back to Witherwood. The Withered World isn’t showing up to challenge anybody’s throne. It is the fourth numbered Monsters entry in Japan, part of a bloodline that has been running this dance since the last century, built on Toriyama designs and a fusion engine sharpened across generations. Judge it by the standard that actually fits. Is the setting charming? Is the roster deep? Does that combining system still spark the “just one more synthesis” compulsion at 2 in the morning?

Bring your memories of Bianca and Nera. Bring your love of the little grinning slime. Leave the tired comparison at the door, because it was never accurate to begin with. This corner of gaming carries a past all its own, a distinct family line, and reasons for existing it never had to borrow. It’s earned the right to headline instead of playing support act.

December 3. Go build a beast you’ve never raised before. Just don’t call it a clone.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

But a giant reputation throws a long shadow. When one crown swallows the whole conversation, a gang of wild, ambitious work from the exact same stretch of years slips quietly into the dark. The 90s were hungry. Studios took swings that would make a modern executive break out in a cold sweat. So pour yourself something, get comfortable, and let me walk you past a few doors that reflex keeps bolted shut.

We can start with Macross Plus. Shoji Kawamori built this alongside a young Shinichiro Watanabe, and yeah, it landed years ahead of the classic that made his name. So what is it? A love triangle bolted onto two rival test pilots, with a virtual pop star named Sharon Apple crooning her way into the whole planet’s skull. She is an artificial idol, but the dazzling persona still depends on a human being supplying the emotional machinery underneath. The story keeps circling that, prodding at counterfeit feeling and where it leads, way back before a single one of us lost sleep over some algorithm nudging our mood. The dogfights land like hand drawn poetry. Yoko Kanno sits on the score, which alone should tell you the pedigree runs bone deep. Big questions about machines and the human heart, and the wild part is it argues them mid air, with fighter jets screaming across the sky.

Now flip the whole mood inside out. The Irresponsible Captain Tylor arrived earlier in the decade, and it moves like nothing else you will find in this lineup. Justy Ueki Tylor stumbles into command of a warship through a bizarre mixture of luck, nerve, and circumstances nobody around him can quite explain. Is he a complete fool? A hidden genius playing the long con? The series never actually says which, and that ducking is the whole gag. But sit with it and something craftier surfaces. It keeps needling the notion that maybe half of running anything comes down to luck wearing a steady face. Ridiculous on top. Sharper down below than it ever cares to admit. Funny stuff, but there is a brain humming behind the laughs.

Martian Successor Nadesico gambled on something most productions would dodge, then nailed the bet. Up front it looks like the standard toybox. Big mecha, laser scraps out in the void, a ship crammed with weirdos. One of them is a reluctant pilot whose real ambition is becoming a cook. Then the thing spins around and dissects the very genre it happily lives inside. Characters obsess over a fictional old mecha cartoon nested within the plot, and that extra layer of self awareness lets the whole ride swing from slapstick straight to gut punch with zero warning. Somebody dies and it wounds you precisely because you were cackling one minute prior. Bold architecture, that.

Then the road gets genuinely strange. Serial Experiments Lain refuses to hold your hand for even a second. A withdrawn schoolgirl gets pulled into the Wired, a networked realm that starts bleeding into ordinary daylight until her sense of self begins to dissolve. It landed in 1998 and somehow called our whole online life ahead of time. That dread of thinning out into a screen. The gap between the self that logs on and the self that logs off. All that loneliness buzzing right beneath the noise of staying endlessly plugged in. Rough sit, I won’t front. The rhythm runs crooked on purpose, the audio gets in your teeth, and the pictures lodge behind your eyes and refuse to leave. Cannot name much else that hits the same bruise.

Craving a bit more swagger and swashbuckle? Outlaw Star has you fully covered. Gene Starwind, his young partner Jim, a mysterious bio-android navigator named Melfina, and a vessel that brawls using actual grappler arms bolted to the hull. It wears its pulp soul out loud and proud. Treasure hunts, ray guns, a certain bathhouse detour that folks online still argue about, all of it stitched together with real warmth. If Bebop plays the melancholy cousin sipping whiskey alone, this joint is the rowdy relative who wants to raid a cursed tomb and crack jokes the whole way through.

Key the Metal Idol never got the flowers it plainly earned. Tokiko, Key for short, is dead certain she is a robot, and her one escape hatch is rounding up 30,000 friends so she can finally cross over into being a real girl. Sweet little hook, sure. Then you press play and the whole thing just aches. It goes hard at the idol machine, at how people get chewed up and tossed aside, at plain grief, at that slippery riddle of what even makes somebody human. One lonely kid sits dead center, reaching for a single true bond. It runs longer and odder than any level headed producer would sign off on, and it repays every squirmy minute it drags out of you.

Land the whole tour with Infinite Ryvius. Think Lord of the Flies, except the deserted island is a beat up spaceship and every kid trapped on it is barely grown. The adult crew is gone, and nobody is around to steady things. Resources tighten. Trust evaporates. The panic creeps in fast and never really clears out. The kids have to govern themselves while dread quietly tightens around every corridor. The story watches how fast order rots, how power corrupts the young as easily as anybody older, how raw fear rewrites who a person always assumed they were. Grim, patient, and a whole lot sharper than that premise has any right to be.

Here is the notion I keep circling back around to. Not a single one of these titles has to defeat Watanabe’s crown jewel to hold value. That framing misses the plot entirely. What the decade proved, over and over, is that one giant winner can quietly bury a whole room of scrappy, swing for the fences work. Creators were wrestling with war, machinery, selfhood, isolation, and dystopia from a dozen wildly different angles, some through comedy, some through horror, some through pure spectacle you could feel in your chest.

The knee jerk recommendation is not wrong, understand. It is just lonely up there. It stands hogging the spotlight while a green room packed with brilliant, thorny, gorgeous work waits in the wings, praying somebody finally cracks the door. So the next time a homie asks you for a pick from that golden stretch, resist the easy layup. Send them toward Sharon Apple’s uncanny performance, or Lain’s collapsing reality, or Tokiko counting endlessly toward her impossible number. Hand the underdogs a turn under the lights.

These titles earned their spotlight back then, and it still belongs to them now. Track each one down and give it the evening it deserves..

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Then I loaded up Reissad Studio’s little photorealism experiment and my whole body changed posture.

Something about that first person lens does not sit right, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can offer. The screen breathes. When you jog down a hallway, the picture bobs and stutters like real footage jerks when a person is actually sprinting with a rig strapped to their chest. Your eyes keep hunting for the crisp, floaty steadiness that triple A shooters trained us to expect, and it simply is not there. Instead you get grain, lens flare bleeding across a doorway, that sick greenish tint living in every leaked clip you ever watched on the news and immediately wished you had not.

Here is what nobody warned me about. There is no comforting little dashboard. No minimap glowing in the corner, no ammo counter, no red arrow announcing where death is about to arrive from. All those numbers and icons we lean on, that heads up display we treat like a security blanket, gone. The absence rattled me harder than any jump scare. Without a readout babysitting my attention, I actually had to listen. Had to peek. Had to move like somebody who could genuinely lose something.

And the lighting. Lord, the lighting.

Most military shooters illuminate a room so you can win. Everything readable, every corner legible, the whole space arranged for your success. This build does the opposite. Shadows pool in ways that feel uncooperative, almost hostile toward you. A single bulb swinging over a stairwell throws enough glare to swallow a full squad. Fog eats the far end of a warehouse. You round into pure white overexposure and for half a second you are blind, truly blind, thumb hovering because you cannot tell friend from threat. That hesitation is the entire point. That hesitation is precisely the thing Activision’s machine simply refused to ask of me.

I kept noticing myself doing something I had not done in a shooter. Holding my breath.

Think about why the footage look works on us at all. These clips are things we associate with consequence. Real consequence. When one autoplays in your feed, the brain flinches before your eyes even parse it, because history says whatever follows is probably nobody’s finest hour. Reissad took that specific dread, bottled it, and handed it back as a multiplayer round. So even though I logically understood the spraying red was just shaders, some older animal part of me refused to power down. My palms did their little routine. You know the routine.

Contrast that against the polished franchise and it becomes almost comedic. The big series knows exactly how to make dying weightless. The frame flushes crimson, a slick “you were eliminated” card slides up, maybe a killcam replays the guy who got you pulling off something flashy. Everything is engineered to keep you cozy enough to click again instantly. The whole loop exists so the panic never sticks.

This other creature lets the panic stick.

I want to be fair to the veteran, because it does what it does beautifully. Cinematic momentum, buttery gunplay, that pop rush of a hot streak. Nothing wrong with popcorn. I still throw on a match when I want to feel like the star of an action reel that asks nothing from me beyond reflexes. Comfort food earns its spot on the shelf.

But there is a gulf between watching an explosion and feeling like you accidentally opened a file somebody meant to keep buried. That is the nearest I can get to naming it. Booting a round of the newer thing feels less like entering a level and more like inheriting evidence. The frame is too honest. The motion is too human. You are not the protagonist of a story in here. You are a set of eyes attached to a torso, drifting through a space that does not care whether you walk out.

Which drags me toward the messy question. Is this fear the healthy kind or the too much kind? Some nights I honestly cannot tell. A few sessions ended with me logging off after twenty minutes, not bored, just wrung out, nerves fried in a manner no killstreak ever managed. Other nights that exact tension had me locked in tighter than any objective marker could dream of.

So let me toss it over to you, since we are all sorting this out together. Are you actually firing up the experiment right now, here in September, or did you bounce off once the novelty thinned? Because the population has gone bananas lately. That Locked & Loaded update dropped and the count blew straight through its old record, eventually peaking above 38,000 concurrent players on Steam, more than double anything from the launch window two years back. Reissad stuffed in drones, RC cars, actual melee, a rebuilt audio pass, and a fresh map named Trenches that leans all the way into grimy, claustrophobic warfare. Third-party estimates now put the game somewhere around the two million owner mark. The appetite is clearly out there, at least this week.

Hype is a slippery companion, though. Plenty of tactical shooters have spiked on a giant patch and then quietly bled their crowd back into the void by the next season. Realism is a punishing standard to keep fresh. The very discomfort that makes this grim ride unforgettable is also the exact quality liable to exhaust a person across the long haul. Coziness scales forever. Dread might not.

My honest guess? It survives, but as a particular mood rather than a daily ritual. Somewhere you crawl back to when you want your pulse to mean anything real, not a thing you grind before dinner. A haunting instead of a habit.

Either way, one truth holds firm for me. The safe, shiny veteran handed me a thousand power fantasies and never once left my hands sweating. This grainy upstart pulled it off in roughly ninety seconds. And I still cannot decide whether to thank the developers or uninstall on the spot.

So which camp are you in tonight? Locked in, or letting it quietly fade?

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Finding a good one took actual legwork. You dug through the back shelf at the video store, you set the VCR to grab something strange off late night cable, you begged a homie to record you his copy. That scavenger hunt was the whole thing. So keep Akira and the usual names off the table for a minute. These six survived on raggedy cassettes and word of mouth, and the veterans never did let them go.

Start with Megazone 23 from 1985, because a big chunk of what came after owes it a debt. This became one of the early landmarks of the home video anime boom, reshaped into an OVA after plans for a television series fell apart, and it wrapped its cyberpunk mystery around the pop idol culture of the day. Shogo is your standard hothead, works a burger gig, lives for his motorcycle. A friend slips him a prototype bike called the Garland and his life goes sideways in a hurry. Come to find out the thing is secretly a war machine, men in dark suits want it back by any means necessary, and the deeper he digs the nastier the truth gets. His city, his entire reality, none of it is what he was raised to believe. If that setup rings familiar, well, The Matrix would play with a remarkably similar idea more than a decade later: reality is not what you think it is. Megazone 23 was already swimming in those waters back in 1985.

One year on, everything flipped silly with Project A-ko. This joint began life as an adult project before the crew wised up and shaped it into a real theatrical release in 1986. The premise is dumb in the best possible way. A-ko is a normal schoolgirl who just happens to be strong enough to chuck a tank, B-ko is a spoiled rich kid who builds robots to fight her, and the pair feud without end over a girl named C-ko while an alien fleet hovers over town like it is nobody’s business. Here is the trick though. Underneath, the film reads as one long valentine to other cartoons. Its title jacks a Jackie Chan movie. B-ko’s classmate Mari looks like she wandered in from Fist of the North Star. Superman and Macross bits go flying past in the background. Spotting them all was half the joy back then.

Then 1987 rolled up with Bubblegum Crisis, and a certain type of fan flat out lost it. Eight installments, straight to video, cool dripping off every frame. Mega-Tokyo got rebuilt after a bad quake, and now a company called Genom runs near about everything while pumping out android workers named Boomers. Trouble is the Boomers keep turning dangerous, getting weaponized, or ending up at the center of crimes the ordinary cops cannot keep up with. Enter the Knight Sabers, four women in sleek powered suits who take the gigs no other crew will touch. Sylia runs the operation while maintaining a lingerie boutique as her civilian business, Priss sings lead in a band when she is not armored up, and the score still slaps generations later. Blade Runner was clearly in the water, sure, but that big hair and those hardsuits and that music turned it into its own beast.

Come 1988 we landed Dominion Tank Police, the pick you reach for when you want your dystopia with a laugh attached. Masamune Shirow drew the comic, same man responsible for Ghost in the Shell, but leave the deep philosophy at the door for this go. Newport City is so choked with pollution that people strap on gas masks to step outside, crime jumps off constantly, and the law responds with literal tanks that flatten more of the block than the criminals ever do. Leona is the rookie, green and reckless, who wrecks her boss ride and cobbles a scrappy little tank named Bonaparte out of the leftovers. She loves that hunk of metal more than any human. What stuck with everybody were the Puma Sisters, the cyborg cat girls rolling with the villain, who spawned a devoted following all their own. It later turned up on the Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday Anime block, where plenty of American fans stumbled across it during the 1990s.

Early 1989 brought Riding Bean, a jolt of pure American action from a Japanese team that clearly loved our high speed chase flicks a little too much. Kenichi Sonoda planted the story in Chicago. Bean Bandit is a mountain of a dude who drives a monster machine called the Roadbuster and hauls anybody or anything for the right stack of cash. His partner Rally handles the shooting. A gig goes bad, the pair get pinned for a kidnapping, and the back half is basically one long screaming pursuit that refuses to quit. The producers even hired top Los Angeles studio players, with keyboardist David Garfield handling the music, so the thing came loaded with slick American style jazz, fusion and road movie swagger. The plan was a whole run of these, but the money folks and the creator fell out cold, so we ended up with a grand total of one. That leftover fire later became Gunsmith Cats. Anybody who rides for Rally owes this little relic a real debt.

The Guyver closes us out, arriving later that same year and running clear into 1992. If you were young when it hit, odds are it left a mark. Sho is a plain high schooler right up until he stumbles onto a slab of alien armor that fuses to him whether he wants it or not, and from that point the show curdles into straight body horror wearing a superhero mask. A shady outfit named Chronos keeps cooking up monster men, the Zoanoids, and every time Sho suits up the change looks like it hurts something fierce. Blood all over the place. Your mama getting up to leave the room. Twelve episodes got sliced across a pile of cassettes when it crossed over here, and scoring a copy felt like holding contraband. They cranked out live action films afterward and a tidier remake in 2005, yet none of it landed like that filthy original, the armor creeping over the kid like it planned to swallow him whole.

That is the lineup. Six joints that lived on video before the web made every title a quick search away. The magic was in the hunt, the plain fact that landing one meant something because you sweated for it. No algorithm was handing you the good stuff. You had a tip from a friend, a beat up rental card, and a whole lot of faith that the blurry cover art was not lying. Chase one of these down this weekend if the names lit something up. And if you never heard of a single title before now, lucky you, because you get to trace a big piece of what you love back to where it started.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

Rap does the exact same trick. You can ride for Kendrick all day long and never once press play on a Rakim tape, and your whole life is fine. Dig into the roots, though, and suddenly every clever bar in the present starts landing with a different kind of weight. Old ink operates on the same principle. Five books in particular carry the DNA of so much filling your queue right now, and once you meet them properly, you simply cannot unsee their fingerprints smeared across the new stuff.

Start with Akira. Katsuhiro Otomo handed over years of his life to these panels, and you can feel it in each square inch. His Neo Tokyo doesn’t sit still behind the characters. It hums, it rots, busted concrete and tangled cable and neon leaking into the gutters. The man drew each rivet like it personally owed him rent. And under all the biker gangs and psychic meltdowns, the book is really two friends falling apart. Kaneda and Tetsuo came up together, then one of them tastes real power and the whole thing sours from the inside. Anybody who watched a tight bond rot over jealousy already knows how this hurts. The scope here is enormous, yet Otomo never loses the small human beats underneath the wreckage. Its fingerprints can still be spotted across cyberpunk cities in manga, anime, film, and games decades later. The movie gets most of the glory, sure, but the printed version goes much deeper and considerably farther, and it earns its brutal ending panel by panel.

Next, slow all the way down for Lone Wolf and Cub. Two names run this one, Kazuo Koike on the writing and Goseki Kojima on the art. What they made hardly acts like a comic at all. The premise is dead simple. A ruined executioner drags a wooden cart across feudal Japan, and his baby son rides along inside it. Wherever the pair stops, blood tends to follow. So does grief. Whole chapters roll by without a single word spoken. Just wind. Boots grinding dirt. A sword doing what a sword does. Kojima’s brushwork moves the way a scroll unrolls in real time, unhurried and sure. You feel the weight of each step in your chest. Modern creators who understand that silence can hit harder than shouting have been walking ground this series helped clear for decades. Frank Miller openly championed the series and acknowledged its influence on his own comics. The lineage runs bone deep.

Now bring the noise for Fist of the North Star. Buronson and Tetsuo Hara cooked up a fried, lawless future where every dude is packed with impossible muscle and the bad guys have a nasty tendency to pop from the inside. Kenshiro treks a scorched earth, jabbing secret pressure points, murmuring his famous line right before his foes burst apart. First glance, it’s nothing but spectacle, cartoonish and ridiculous in the finest possible way. Sit with it a spell, and you catch on that the book actually cares. Ken keeps throwing hands for folks who cannot throw them back, in a place that quit protecting its own ages ago. That template helped shape the language of battle manga that followed, the stoic hero, outrageous rivals, escalating threats, and bodies pushed beyond anything remotely human. Plenty of fighters who came later walked at least part of a road Ken helped pave with his knuckles.

Then comes Devilman, and honestly, buckle your seatbelt. Go Nagai wrote the thing back in the early seventies, and it remains among the most unhinged, tragic, gut punching stories the form has ever produced. Akira Fudo bonds with a demon to fight demons, believing he can rescue humanity, only to watch humanity reveal itself as the true monster in the room. What begins as a creature brawl curdles into an apocalyptic gut check about mob violence and fear. Nagai had zero interest in comfort. He wanted to grab you by the collar and ask what people become when panic grips the wheel. Evangelion openly carries his fingerprints in its DNA, while later demon soaked works such as Chainsaw Man echo some of the same mixture of grotesque violence, humanity, and apocalypse. His willingness to burn the entire world down for a single point helped make that kind of scorched earth storytelling part of manga’s vocabulary.

Finally, meet Battle Angel Alita. Yukito Kishiro started rolling this cyberpunk run out in the early nineties, and somehow it reads fresher than half the stuff hitting shelves today. A doctor digs Alita out of a scrap heap, a cyborg with no memory of her past, and rebuilds her piece by piece. She spends the rest of the saga swinging her fists toward some idea of who she used to be. The fights go hard in ways only drawn panels can manage, limbs smearing, bodies moving how no flesh ever could. But the brawling was never really the point. Alita is scrambling to work out who she even is while wearing hardware some stranger bolted onto her, and chasing that answer is what keeps you flipping ahead. Kishiro took those classic cyberpunk questions about identity, memory, flesh, machinery, and the soul and made them painfully personal. Alita became one of manga’s most memorable vehicles for asking what remains of a person when memory, flesh, and even the body itself can be replaced. James Cameron spent roughly two decades developing an adaptation before Alita finally reached theaters in 2019. The source material clearly gave him plenty to chase.

So what stitches these five together across such wildly different moods? Ambition, mostly. Not a single title on this list ever once played it safe. Each reached for a payoff bigger than a quick thrill, and the reaching is exactly why they endured while flashier peers faded. Together they showed just how far manga could stretch, carrying horror, philosophy, tenderness, and absolute chaos at once, occasionally within the same breathless page.

Here’s the notion I want you to sit with a minute. Loving the new wave requires no homework at all. You never have to eat your vegetables before dessert, and anyone telling you otherwise is a gatekeeping bore. But when you finally trace a favorite trope back to where it was born, the whole hobby cracks wide open. You begin noticing echoes everywhere you look. A silent standoff, a warrior pushing past total collapse, a metropolis eating itself alive, a machine quietly asking what it means to feel anything. All of it got planted decades ago by artists working with brushes, endless patience, and a flat refusal to think small.

Pick any of these and gift it a weekend. Let it be strange. Let it drag when it drags. Let it get ugly when it gets ugly. Chances are the thing you figured was some brand new invention has been parked on a shelf for forty years, just waiting on you to catch up. And here comes the real payoff. After the classics sink in, everything you already love hits deeper, because you finally clock the artists tipping their caps to the ones who taught them the moves.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

First up, The Vision of Escaflowne. Try describing the plot out loud and you’ll sound unwell. A high school girl lands in another realm, giant armored war machines clank across battlefields, tarot cards decide fate, and a love triangle simmers under the whole thing. Somehow it all fuses into something graceful. Yoko Kanno and Hajime Mizoguchi scored it, so the music alone will rearrange your chest. Van and Hitomi’s relationship actually works because the writers give it room to grow instead of forcing the issue. Those mecha though. Big ornate slabs of armor with blades tucked in weird places, and I could stare at them all day. What grabs me is the mood swings. One episode a schoolgirl is sweating over some boy. The next, a whole kingdom turns to ash. Both land. Half the new shows chasing that kind of range just faceplant. If you came up on isekai, do yourself a solid and see where a lot of your favorite tropes first found their spine.

Record of Lodoss War is old-fashioned high fantasy, no apologies offered. It moves like a tabletop session somebody finally bothered to animate, every quest beat and party squabble left in. Parn the earnest young swordsman, Deedlit the elf who launched a thousand crushes, dwarves and dark sorcery and a continent soaked in old grudges. This 1990 saga laid tracks that every fantasy quest you love still rides. Every pointy-eared archer and stoic knight who came after owes a nod to this cast. Slow burn, sure, but the payoff lands with real weight. If your idea of the genre stops at flashy tournament arcs, sit with this one and feel the roots.

Gunsmith Cats drops you straight onto the cold streets of Chicago. Rally Vincent runs a gun shop by day and chases bounties for extra cash, her tiny partner Minnie May lobbing grenades like she’s handing out candy. Kenichi Sonoda knew his weapons cold, and the firearms are handled with a level of mechanical detail most anime never bothered with. Setting the entire thing on American soil handed it a flavor most of its peers never touched. Car chases tear through the Loop with a crunch modern action wishes it had. It stays lean and mean, proof that a tight thriller needs no glowing sword and no chosen savior, only raw skill and steady nerve behind the wheel. Three episodes, no filler, all momentum.

Cyberpunk heads keep sleeping on Bubblegum Crisis, and that’s a crime. Mega Tokyo after the quake, rogue androids, a shady corporation, and four women in powered hardsuits handling business the cops cannot touch. The Knight Sabers carry the swagger of a rock band, and Priss is literally the frontwoman of one. Rain-slicked neon, chrome, and a score drenched in that fat ’80s synth, all of it clearly staring straight at Blade Runner while carving its own lane. Each entry runs as its own tense little mission, easy to sample before you sink in deep. Half of today’s sleek sci-fi is still cribbing this rain and chrome, whether the artists cop to it or not.

Now for something that pokes fun at the whole space opera racket, meet Irresponsible Captain Tylor. Justy Ueki Tylor somehow ends up commanding a warship, and the running gag is that you never quite know if the man is a genius or the luckiest idiot alive. The humor plays it dead straight. It keeps jabbing at all that chest-thumping space-navy melodrama, and half the fun is arguing with yourself over whether Tylor planned his latest miracle or tripped face-first into it. His crew earns their keep too, a bunch of burnt-out officers and two troublemaking twins who milk every scene. Underneath the jokes sits a surprisingly warm meditation on leadership. Folks tired of grimdark posturing will find this goofy commander weirdly refreshing.

Blue Seed pulls from Japanese myth in a way few others bothered to try. Momiji, a regular teen, learns she belongs to the ancient Kushinada bloodline and becomes central to the fight against the Aragami, supernatural creatures rooted in Japanese mythology. Susano-o, mitama, the entire Shinto mythos gets pulled into a monster of the week groove that never loses its emotional core. Its ’90s production means the color palette pops with a hand-painted cel warmth phones cannot fake. It mashes horror and romance into old folklore without losing the thread, and the finish more than earns its payoff.

Golden Boy is the oddest pick on here, and I’m not backing down from it. Kintaro Oe travels town to town on a rickety bicycle, taking odd jobs and soaking up a new skill at each one. Fair warning, it gets crude. And I mean crude. But sit with it and you find a guy chasing knowledge like his life depends on it, tripping over his own feet, dusting off, going again. The art earns its own paragraph. When Kintaro flips out, his face contorts into these deranged, hyper-detailed expressions that still hold up as some of the best hand-drawn comedy around. Dude studies. Dude fails. Dude climbs back on the bike. There is a strange nobility to a knucklehead who keeps chasing knowledge for its own sake.

A lot of older anime got unlucky with the business side over the years. Licensing deals expired, smaller distributors disappeared, and plenty of titles became difficult to find during the long shift from physical media to streaming. Kids coming up in that gap sometimes had almost no honest way to watch certain shows, short of hunting down aging discs or hoping another distributor eventually rescued the rights. Some of these titles have since resurfaced through Blu-ray reissues and official streaming services, while others remain harder to track down. That silence was never a verdict on quality. The market simply lost the thread for a while, and a whole shelf of treasure went quiet with it.

So why does any of this matter for a crowd raised on simulcast and endless recommendation queues? Because taste gets shallow when the pool only goes back three years. These older anime were built by hand in an era with tighter budgets and zero safety nets, which forced true invention. Limits breed creativity, and those teams had them stacked to the ceiling, which is exactly why the swings read so bold. You can spot the seams, sure, but you can also spot the ambition. Nobody was optimizing for a thumbnail. They were trying to move you, and that effort still radiates off the screen decades later.

Passing this down feels less like homework and more like handing a cousin the good headphones. You want them to hear what you heard. Half the joy of loving a thing is watching fresh eyes light up over it years later. The catalog is out there on Blu-ray reissues, in a few streaming corners, and yeah, in the dustier reaches of the internet if you know where to dig.

Do the youngbloods a favor. Slide one of these into rotation next movie night. Kill the algorithm for one night. Put on something with a little age on it and let it catch you off guard. The classics did not fade because the calendar rolled over. The world just looked away for a minute. They went quiet, waiting on somebody to press play. You will not regret the detour. Trust me.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

I’m a big simulation game fan and the GM, Player Career, and MyLeague modes were what I went to if I played a sports title since I’ve never cared for competitive online. Recently, my brother just got the new ESPN Sports College Football 27 and recent controversy with the experience gains in the games Dynasty mode aside, the game improved on the mode heavily in part by implementing NIL.

Love For Amateur GMs and e-Head Coaches

It was interesting to see a mode that usually gets ignored in sports games (WWE 2K’s Universe mode could be deeper). Then again, as my brother explained, the Dynasty mode is actually the selling point for the game since it’s college football and the rise and fall of programs drive viewership and engagement of news for college sports.

It’s different from professional sports video games where the selling point is playing online, competing with your premium team, and unlocking legends.

Freshening Up Arcade Sports Games

There is a subgenres of sports games I always enjoyed and will play competitively and it’s the arcade-y sports games. Your titles NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, FIFA Street, NBA Street, Street Hoops, and NHL Hitz. In the 1990s and 2000s, these games were often advertised better than the games for the real world version of the sport.

Now, it makes sense. Games in a sports series are released annually with expected updates that come off more like tweaks if you read the list of improvements. Over the years, new modes have been added but I still maintain that a Blitz mode or Jam mode could just be added to Madden and NBA 2K games.

Bringing Back Blitz?

Even easier, make it a particular ruleset in options. Mind you, in Blitz’s case, it would require more work and a new controller map since Blitz had wrestling moves added in. Of course, I can see the Blitz mode not getting much love or play and being a possible issue for licensing.

That’s why another Blitz the League with a focus on a fictional roster in the core game and modes for player career and franchise would be a welcome addition. The thing with these games is that you tend to get a season or story mode.

Dusting Off Street Hoops

Street Hoops is a great example of something close to what would pique my interest as far as a career mode. Its World Tournament mode followed your player as they faced off against other teams featuring streetball veterans and legends of basketball.

Since it’s a story mode, it does have an ending but I say make it more a career mode within a competitive streetball league. Include a schedule, team popularity within the league, basically everything a Player or GM management mode would feature as far as league changes and balance.

Of course, streetball had a presentation that was similar to skateboarding with the skate videos from the same period of popularity. In the story mode for a revived Street Hoops, it would be best to lean into the arcade side of the game and take a Tony Hawk Underground approach to it, minus the stunts aspect.

Plus, drafting would be odd to have in a game about streetball. Ultimately, the features are to extend the gameplay past the story mode which has an end and little post-game. Also, with streetball not having the same popularity or hype as it did in the 2000s, it’s not like players would be getting with friends for hours on the blacktop…especially when The Park is right there.

Although, I have heard that players aren’t feeling The Park like they were because of sweaty players. Of course, they can ruin competitive in any game most of the time.

What are some arcade sports games or alternative sports titles that you enjoyed? Share them in the comments and let us know which ones you wouldn’t mind getting a modern remake or reboot.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

Look, I’ve been rocking with anime since the days of blurry fansubs and questionable download speeds, so trust me when I say I have sat through more chosen ones than I care to count. You know the type. Kid catches a bite from a creature, inherits a bloodline, absorbs a demon, or just wakes up one Tuesday able to level a city block. By episode 3 he’s already stronger than his teacher. Come the halfway mark, the writers are inventing new galaxies for him to punch. It’s fun for a minute. Then it gets old real quick, because nothing is ever hard for that dude again.

So when I sat down with Coco, I braced myself for the usual. Small town girl, big destiny, cue the explosion. That is not what I got.

Here’s the thing about her world. Sorcery isn’t a gift you’re born clutching. It’s a skill, and you access it by drawing. Actual line work. Sigils inked onto a page with a special pen, careful shapes that have to be precise or the whole spell flops. Coco is a dressmaker’s daughter with steady hands and zero pedigree, and for the bulk of her life she believed the enchanting arts belonged only to some blessed few. Then a traveling witch named Qifrey rolls through her village and she catches him sketching, and the truth cracks open. What she thought was a bloodline lottery turns out to be a discipline. Something you can study.

That reframe hit me harder than I expected.

Because think about how rare that is right now. Half the fantasy shelf hands the protagonist a cheat code in the first ten minutes and spends the rest of the runtime figuring out who’s dumb enough to fight him. We call it a power fantasy, but really it’s a shortcut. The audience gets to skip the boring part, the part where somebody actually has to get good at anything. And I get the appeal. After a long shift, watching a guy vaporize his enemies with a flick of the wrist scratches an itch. I’m not judging anybody’s comfort watch.

But Coco offers a different flavor entirely, and my grown self appreciates it.

She messes up. Early on she casts a spell she doesn’t understand and accidentally petrifies her own mother. That’s not a flex. It’s a catastrophe she caused herself, and the story makes her sit in it. There’s no reset button, no convenient mentor to wave it away. The stakes are personal and they shadow her every move. Everything she does afterward carries that weight.

And the mentorship, man. That is where the show quietly earned my respect. Qifrey doesn’t just point at Coco and unlock her potential like some anime Yoda. He teaches. Corrects her posture, watches her hands, breaks down why a shape didn’t hold. She trains alongside other apprentices who are also grinding away and failing right there next to her. Agott is prickly and gifted and clearly resents the new girl. Tetia is bright and energetic. Richeh does her own thing. These young witches feel like classmates in a demanding trade school, not a squad of prodigies waiting to unlock their true forms.

The animation from BUG FILMS deserves a shout too. Kamome Shirahama’s original manga is stacked with some of the most gorgeous art in the medium, all that ornate detail and crosshatching delicate as lace, and the studio had a mountain to climb bringing it to motion. They pull it off. When a spell forms on screen, you watch the pen move, you see the geometry take shape, and the payoff feels earned because you witnessed the effort behind it. That connection between labor and result sits at the heart of everything the story is trying to say, and the visuals honor it.

What gets me most, though, is the philosophy tucked underneath all that pretty artwork. Coco discovering that the craft can be studied means it also carries responsibility. Every drawn glyph is a choice. Draw the wrong shape and somebody gets hurt. Get careless and you don’t get to blame fate. There’s a moral spine here that the shows built on nonstop brawling tend to skip, and it makes her wins mean more. When she finally lands something, I’m actually rooting, because I saw her earn each step.

I think about the young folks coming up watching this stuff. What does it tell a kid to see hero after hero handed limitless might with no effort behind it? Feels like a lie, honestly. Real life doesn’t run on bloodlines and lucky bites. It runs on reps. You want to write? You’ll produce trash for years first. Cooking means burning a few dinners before anything comes out right. Building something worth having takes ugly, unglamorous nights where nobody is clapping. Coco embodies that truth, and she does it while wearing a cute pointed hat, which somehow makes the lesson land softer.

There’s a Blerd tradition of loving the underdog who grinds, and Coco slots right into it. She reminds me a little of the best sports arcs, the ones where the scrappy kid outlasts the naturals. I also see every artist I know who wasn’t the most talented in the room but simply refused to quit. That’s a hero I can recommend to my nephew without a second thought.

You can now catch all 13 episodes of the first season on Crunchyroll across much of the world outside Asia, while Netflix carries the series in selected Asian markets. Crunchyroll launched the subtitled and English dubbed versions together, and a second season is officially on the way, although no premiere date has been announced. So if you’re burnt out on invincible boys yawning their way through the apocalypse, give this one a real look. Witch Hat Atelier respects the grind. What it really tells you is that getting born gifted just puts you at the front door. You still have to open it and put the hours in, which is what Coco keeps doing, clumsy at first and a little sharper with every lesson. That slow climb is the part I keep coming back for. Give me a kid fumbling toward good over one who showed up already maxed out before the story even started.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

2026 has been generous on that front. Three titles in particular got me feeling some type of way, and not one of them leans on a screaming protagonist punching a mountain into gravel.

Start with Frieren. The second season premiered in January and ran through March, and it kept doing the thing that made the first run so quietly devastating. Here’s an elf mage who will outlive almost everybody around her. Her old party saved the world together, but her human companions grow old and die while she barely changes. That’s the whole engine of it. Our girl spends her long life realizing, too late, that she never really knew the humans she traveled with. Himmel the hero is gone before she thinks to ask him a single real question. And the grief in it never announces itself with big orchestral swells. It creeps in. A small memory, a flower she recognizes, some habit she picked up from a dead friend without ever noticing she picked it up.

I lost my grandfather a while back, and this series understands something about that kind of loss most media fumbles. You don’t grieve all at once. It comes in ambushes. Somebody laughs a certain way in a grocery store aisle and suddenly you’re gone for a minute, standing there holding a can of beans. Frieren gets that. For a fantasy cartoon about wizards, it has more honest things to say about mortality than most dramas built by adults for adults. Mallorie Rodak and the dub crew earned their flowers too, because none of it works without that restraint in the delivery. Say it too loud and the whole thing collapses.

Then there’s Akane-banashi, which snuck up on the whole culture this spring. It’s a Shonen Jump title, but the subject is rakugo. You know, that traditional Japanese art where somebody sits on a cushion and acts out a full story using only their voice, a folding fan and a small hand towel. Doesn’t sound like something that would survive the jump to animation, right? But the way ZEXCS staged it, the audience literally starts seeing the world the performer is describing, and the screen bends around the storyteller once the performance gets cooking.

The heart of it is Akane, a high schooler whose father was expelled from the Arakawa school during a promotion test for shin’uchi, rakugo’s highest rank. As a little girl she watched the whole thing come apart. Over the next six years, she quietly trained under his former master. By high school, she is ready to chase that rank herself, partly out of love and partly out of a slow-burning need to set it right. That’s where the personal responsibility runs deep. Power isn’t the prize here. What she wants is command of something ancient and unforgiving, and she has to figure out whether she’s doing it for her pops or for herself. Any Blerd who ever fell for a discipline nobody around them respected knows that feeling in his chest. Everybody who picked up an instrument, a pen, a controller, a mic, and got told it was a waste of time.

The artistry is what stuck with me longest. This is a show about how hard it is to be good at a thing. Not gifted. Good. It respects the grind, the failure, the nights you bomb in front of a half-empty room and drive home replaying every flat line in the dark. And it never pretends talent settles the matter. Akane may have inherited some of her father’s ability, but she still has to eat dirt to earn a spot at the table.

Now if you want something that scratches the political itch, Nippon Sangoku is the one nobody saw coming. It landed worldwide on Prime Video in April and turned a lot of heads, Hideo Kojima’s included, which tells you something about the quality. The premise is bleak. Near-future Japan buckles under the effects of nuclear war, a deadly virus, a devastating earthquake and a government too crooked and greedy to protect its people. Heavy taxes and famine squeeze the population until the people finally rise up. A hundred years later, the country is split into three warring states, and a young man named Aoteru Misumi is trying to stitch it back together using his mind and his command of language instead of brute force.

Watch that setup and tell me it doesn’t rhyme with the news. Leadership acting on its worst impulses because nobody can check it. Regular folks treated as disposable over who they are and where they come from. What the series does with the setting is wild. It takes the skeleton of the Chinese Three Kingdoms saga and drops it into a Japan where technology and society have fallen back to something resembling the Meiji era. Sepia washes over everything, with dust in the corners of every frame like an old period drama. Beautiful to look at. Also cruel, and in no hurry to let you off the hook. Aoteru climbs on knowledge and persuasion, which is its own argument about where real strength actually lives. Not always in the blade.

What ties these three together is that they trust you to be an adult in the room. Frieren asks you to sit in loss without a tidy bow slapped on top. With Akane-banashi the question becomes whether inheritance is a gift or a debt you signed for without reading. And Nippon Sangoku wants to know what you owe a broken society, whether one clear-eyed person can shift it at all.

That’s the stuff I need at this age. I came up on Toonami like a lot of us, mainlining action after school, and I’ll never quit that part of me. There’s still a place for a good scrap. But the older I get, the more I want a story that respects my hours and my losses. One that knows I’ve buried people. One that knows I’ve got responsibilities I never asked for and had to grow into anyway, ready or not.

Death, crooked politics, the loneliness of chasing something beautiful, the weight of family sitting on your shoulders. Turns out the form had room for all of it the whole time. We just had to age up enough to notice it was there.

So if you’re a grown Blerd staring at a bloated watchlist wondering why nothing’s landing, skip the flavor of the month. Sit with one of these instead. Give it space to get quiet on you. That’s exactly where all three do their real work.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

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