general disclaimer: i am an annoying feminist killjoy about everything.
everything i recommend i will also hate on relentlessly.
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general favs

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I'm a somewhat reluctant Tatsuki Fujimoto stan. I have many criticisms for his portayal of women and girls, but Chainsaw Man and Fire Punch just hit so hard and so good. Goodbye Eri, Look Back and Nayuta of the Prophecy are my other favourites of his.
Other stuff: Dungeon Meshi and Witch Hat Atelier are possibly the best quality manga ever created; Dorohedoro's visuals are pretty unmatched; I had a big Tokyo Ghoul phase but my feelings are complicated (I do own the second artbook though); I find Touhou manga very calming and charming; and I read a lot of yuri.

Some of my favourite more niche manga are
✩ Otoyomegatari by Mori Kaoru
✩ Usotsuki Satsuki wa Shi ga Mieru by Ryouko
✩ Stigmata by Takahashi Hidebu
✩ Tsubame Tip off! by Watanuki Hiroya

recently reading

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Run Away With Me Girl
waaaugghgh ｡ﾟ(ﾟ´Д`ﾟ)ﾟ｡
it's so good at flawed characters, like the way midori keeps hurting makimura by hurting herself... the cage of heteronormativity... good shit.

Girls' Last Tour
i loved loved loved this. beautiful love letter to humanity from the end of the world.

Emma
Mori Kaoru is probably my second favourite mangaka, i love her art and i love how she's unabashedly a pervert about maids and bunny girls, but also has a very obvious deep respect for the labour of housework. Like Otoyomegatari, Emma is a lavishly rendered historical fiction--the bonus chapter on the Great Exhibition of 1851 was exactly as detailed as the professor's slides were in my class on victorian literary and visual culture, like it was 1:1 from the source illustrations. But unlike my professor, Mori doesn't at all unpack the massively imperial purpose of the Great Exhibition. For as much as i love it, Otoyomegatari has an issue with cultural voyeurism, and it rides the line between research and appreciation and just being orientalist. Emma is much clearer which side of the line it falls on, given its use of three Indian women as literal silent props there to imply sexual decadence. i hope Otoyomegatari could be interpreted as a reflection on how Mori's portrayal's of racialized women have changed, but i'm in no position to make that claim definitively. The art and attention to detail is gobsmacking though, for all the reasons this article mentions.

various vintage yuri
Medusa (1982) - Yamagishi Ryouko
really interesting and kind of surreal tragedy with such a callous and authentic love interest
Oniisama E... (1975) - Ikeda Ryoko
ryoko is the queen of fashionable melodramatic butches. a masterpiece of school psychodrama up until the last two chapters
Couple of the White Room (1971) - Yamagishi Ryouko
a lot in common with Oniisama E, great melodrama, another tragic school romance
Maya's Funeral Procession (1972) - Ichijo Yukari
another tragedy, this one with soap opera twists
Moonlight Flowers (1989) - Tsukumo Mutsumi
another heavy tragedy, but this story has so much palable feminist anger that it radiates off the page; it shouts at you how unfair this is.
all of these stories revolve around the same societal constraints, they all end in the tragedy of dying or marrying a man you hate, and it fascinates me how different it is from post-y2k cutesy wish fulfillment. but the wish fulfillment is important too--going through all these tragedies, realistic though they may be, reminded me of how seeing a happy lesbian ending for the first time rocked my world and made me imagine happier futures for myself. its good to have a whole ecosystem of gay stories, yknow?

Fire Punch
I read all of Fire Punch between 1 and 4am last night. its absolutely unrelenting. it has so much in it that would instantly put me off any other manga (constant sexual assault attempts, incest) but my god. my fuckin god. fujimoto is cemented as my favourite mangaka. i'll just put some of the liveblogs from my tumblr:

fire punch chapter 8: this manga fucking sucks
fire punch chapter 49: my life is changed forever i think

sorry i just got fucking brain-blasted by ur-fujimoto. fire punch has all of it its about cannibalism and consumption as love and eating and being eaten its about movies its about incest its about cults and the malleability of personas its about the horrible emptiness when you look inside and find the thing that drove you to live isnt there anymore its about what if there was a pain that lasted forever. and its about star wars. and incest.

Fire Punch is unrelenting. its pure conentrated fujimotoisms, i cannot recommend it in any conventional sense but if Chainsaw Man means a lot to you, you should read it. i genuinely aspire to one day create something half as raw as this.

Touhou Suzunaan: Forbidden Scrollery
i like it, very nice art and good writing. fun intro to gensokyo.