This reminds me SO MUCH of another book (or movie? or show?) where the main character also has the power to bring drawings to life and I just CANNOT REMEMBER what it is... this is going to drive me crazy. Is it echoes of The Raven Cycle?? The Paper Menagerie?? Dorian Gray?? Ten Thousand Doors of January? Inkheart? Oh my god...

Satoshi Kon died way too early at the age of 46 in 2010, having directed some of the most amazing anime films ever: Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress and Paprika. Before his animation career, he was a manga artist, and Opus was his last manga work before getting entirely sucked into the world of film production. Like those three films, Opus operates at a meta level, playing with reality, illusion and identity, all underscored by a precise, imaginative art style. In Opus, a ruffled manga artist is...

Fuck. I'm speechless.Wasn't too much into it initially, but fuuuck, the unfinished pages(!!!!)

It was an alright book. I liked the metatext/metafiction aspect of the story, it's rather fitting that the character in Opus has his manga series canceled when in real life Opus wasn't finished because the magazine was canceled. The merge of reality and fiction and fiction and reality.Opus has a conclusive enough ending, thanks to drafts found by Satoshi Kon's family and that they allowed to publish them.One of the interesting aspect of the story is focus on pain, inflicted on women in fiction b...

When the writer falls through the pages of his own manga the characters have no choice but to believe that he is God. He did create them and knows everything about them after all. But this god is not all powerful, he has editors and publicists to answer to. He also needs assistants to create the world.He also completely loses control over his own creation. The characters were unaware before that they were not real so they have their own wills and continue on with their own plans despite the auth...

The story pulls you right in from the beginning and then keeps throwing unexpected twists at you.

Opus is a manga from the mind of Satoshi Kon. Sadly, the manga remains unfinished, and in the wake of Kon's death in 2010, it will never be completed. Death is always a tragedy, but in the case of Satoshi Kon, it is something even worse. He was a creative genius and Opus was a masterpiece - to lose two such blessings in one single moment truly is a great loss to this world.The story itself focuses on a manga artist who decides to kill off one of his main characters in the final scene of his comi...

Like being back with a good friend. Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue was one of my first anime experiences and it was great to read a manga of his.

Satoshi Kon was sort of like Japan's own Grant Morrison, only working primarily in anime rather than comics. He specialised in metafiction, and Opus, one of his few mangas, is as meta as you can get — it's about a manga author who ends up inside of his own manga, as reality and fiction start to intersect and bleed into one another. It's a pretty cool read, and quite a fun story in its own right. Unfortunately, life imitates art, and in mid-90's, just as the fictional story of Opus started to col...

Thanks to Stewart for the recommendation to read this great--but unfinished--manga volume of more than 350 pages. Kon, known also for doing anime, was first a manga-ka, whose only work I had read before this was the short Tropic of the Sea, which I thought was subtle, and just all right. But now for something completely different, THIS! Opus is the metafictional tale of Chikara Nagai, a manga-ka working on his latest graphic novel, Resonance, which actually opens Opus for us. In other words, we

I absolutely adored every moment of this but something doesn't feel right about giving it the full five stars. Maybe because, despite the publisher's reassurances, it's still not complete. Maybe because I feel like I don't quite understand the world, the powers or the villain well enough to say I fully understood the plot. But Satoshi Kon's busy work schedule aside, I'm not afraid to call this a masterpiece. It breaks the fourth wall from the inside and the outside, it breaks it again when you l...

Another master piece by satoshi kon.Really unique Manga it is.

My only real problem with this is that it doesn't have an ending. For various reasons, chief among them his untimely demise, poor Satoshi Kon never got around to finishing this. That's a shame, because this is one of the best metacomics I've ever read. We open, seemingly in the middle of a thriller involving psychics and a masked villain. It turns out to be the latest chapter of Chikara Nagai's manga, Resonance. But he soon finds himself literally drawn into his creation as the characters take i...

4.25 🌟If it was not abruptly ended it would truly be an opus. But still it is great metafiction with a ingenious idea. The artwork and story are top class . Satoshi Kon works truly messes up with mind whether it is through his manga or anime ( Perfect Blue etc.) He perfectly knew how to play with both the characters and the mind of audience.

This just blew my mind.

An artist’s need for control and power told in this really smart story of the artist coming in conversation with the characters he’s created. Gets into some fascinating art-specific ideas of why anyone creates, and of the responsibility of a creator to the world of their work. When the characters are interacting with past issues of the comic and the whole world is ripping apart, it felt like another cool layer on the control idea. It’s impossible to control the past - what’s happened has happene...

Good Story line. A manga writer lost his last page of a manga. And, then he got lost in his creation. When you create something and it comes to alive or if I elaborate more, if you create a world from your imagination and you realized that your imaginary world is real. Every character is real. Every struggle you made for them is real. They also have feelings, they eat, they sleep, they bleed. And, you are the one behind it. How would you feel? When they know you are the reason behind their suffe...

Actual rating: 3.5My first foray into the Manga world, and I was not entirely disappointed. The metafictional storyline is a great choice, and the additional meta-metafictional direction of the rough-released "last chapter" is intriguing, but seeing as how this story has no proper ending, it falls short of brilliance.Satoshi Kon's untimely demise was a loss to the Anime and Manga world (the brilliant ‘Paranoia Agent’ remains a personal favorite). It's strange to think what would have become of t...

The story is meta as hell, and I don’t think its meta for the sake of being meta so the author can just jerk himself off. The magazine in which the comic was originally published was cancelled before the story could finish so the ending is very unsatisfying. But luckily, after Kon’s death the rough sketches of the last chapter were found and they wrap everything up well enough.

This was so typically Kon! An absolute mindfcuk! Things are happening but you cannot really answer how or why - not even within the limited logic of the plot. Within its fast-paced chaotic turn of events, this unfinished story creates a unique thought experiment, likes of something we've seen before. Chikara Nagai, a manga artist, gets pulled into the manga he's writing and is brought face to face with his characters, and they aren't all thrilled to meet their creator. And you can't blame them e...