Genshiken, by Shimoku Kio

So if Lucky Star is in the upper echelons of Japanese culture-based manga and requires leveling up to fully enjoy, Genshiken would be the final boss battle.

Genshiken is a comedy-with-some-romance series set in early 2000s Tokyo. It's the story of a college club composed of otaku. (The word "otaku" is mainly used by U.S. speakers to refer to anime/manga fans, for obvious reasons; but in Japan it's more of a catch-all for anyone really really into something, and it has more of a negative tone--like calling someone who's really big into history and does reenactments of the Civil War a nerd. For Genshiken, the club members are otaku of multiple things: manga, anime, cosplay, doujinshi, and computer and video games. It's a plot point, in fact: "Genshiken" is an abbreviation of the club's full name, Gendai Shikaku Bunka Kenkyūkai, a.k.a. [in English]: The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture. This sort of well-rounded geekery makes them outcasts even among the other clubs that have a more 'nerdy' bent, like the Manga or the Anime clubs. Okay, this parenthesis has taken over the paragraph.)

Genshiken follows the lives of its club members over the course of four years, using the arrival and graduation of the main character, Kanji Sasahara, as the jumping off and ending point, and delving into the friendships, enemy-ships, relationships, and unrequited-love-ships [I'll stop, I'll stop] that develop between the individual members over the course of those years. This summary really doesn't do it justice, though: Genshiken is incredibly enjoyable if you're a big geek of any part of Japanese visual culture, whether you like anime or Japanese video games or cosplay, because it's clear that Shimoku Kio is too. This isn't moe jokes like Lucky Star--this is a slow-developing, deeply compelling story that's full of love for its source material: all the good and bad that the otaku world contains.

And it's often hilarious, to boot.

Genshiken is complete in 9 volumes, which were published from 2002-2006 and translated into English by Del Ray. There's also a new series, Genshiken II, which began in 2010 and is currently ongoing; but so far no one's officially translating it. There's also--of course--an anime: two seasons at 12 episodes each, and a 3 episode OVA, which ran intermittently from 2004 to 2007 and all of which were licensed for English by AnimeWorks. There's also--if this post hasn't been meta enough for you yet--an OVA, 12 episode anime series, and two volume manga for Kujibiki Unbalance, a (once-)fictional manga and anime series within Genshiken. Kio-sensei, creator of this fictional series, created a fictional series within it and then brought that series out into the real world.

Yeah.

When you read Genshiken, never doubt that you're holding something of great metatextual power in your hands.

Lucky Star, by Kagami Yoshimizu

Lucky Star is another 4koma--4-panel comic strip--slice-of-life series revolving around the lives of a group of contemporary Japanese high school girls. (When Japan hits on a theme that sells, it stays the course.) It's also one of those series that plays heavily to its moe aspects, though not to the level of Strike Witches (as that would be impossible). Lucky Star's approach to moe is more meta, partly because it contains characters--otaku, a doujinshi artist--who recognize their own types and those around them, and who discuss them in a pretty fourth-wall bending manner.

(If that last sentence was incomprehensible to you, just wait until I get to Genshiken. All will [hopefully] be clearer then!)

If I were ranking manga on a scale of approachability, I'd definitely put Lucky Star in the upper echelons. It's based very heavily in certain subsets of Japanese culture, and has a definite current events feel to it. If you're just getting into this whole "backwards Japanese comic books" thing, you may want to level up some more before looking into it. (In the meantime, if you want to give the 4koma format or slice-of-life genre a try, I highly recommend Azumanga Daioh, Sunshine Sketch, or Yotsuba&! respectively! We've got the first and the last of these available here at the Mooresville Public Library.)

Lucky Star has been running since 2004, and has 9 volumes so far, 8 of which are available in English. There's also a 24 episode anime from 2007 that was licensed for English by Madmen Entertainment (the people who dubbed Noir and El Cazador de la Bruja! Their praises, let me sing them), as well as an OVA from 2008 that, so far as I know, has not been dubbed in English.

Le Portrait de Petit Cossette

I think the main flaw of Le Portrait de Petit Cossette is that it was trying to be like Evangelion. The problem with this is that there can only be one Evangelion, as evidenced by the fact that I'm using Eva as an example of what Petit Cossette tried to do. But that aside!

Petit Cossette is a sort of time-traveling contemporary occult horror story with a dash of romance (or more, depending on your definition of the word) thrown in. Eiri is an artist working in his uncle's antique store when one day, while handling a Venetian glass, he begins to see visions of a young woman through it. As the visions increase, Eiri withdraws further and further from his friends, until one midnight the girl, Cossette, finally makes contact with him. As his friends grow more concerned about his heath and sanity, Cossette lures Eiri into a nasty world of revenge against her murderer--a man who, she claims, has been reborn in Eiri.

Le Portrait de Petit Cossette is a 3 episode OVA that came out in 2004. It was licensed by Sentai Filmworks, who released the English dub in that same year. There was also a 2 volume manga from 2004 that was translated by Tokyopop; but I haven't read it, so I can't say whether it's similar or not!