Two boys broke the rules of their own science and paid for it in flesh. Edward and Alphonse Elric tried to bring their mother back through alchemy, the attempt went wrong, and both came away damaged in ways ordinary medicine cannot touch. They set out after the philosopher's stone, the one substance said to settle a debt that size. Alchemy here is a working science, practiced widely and taught openly, so every transmutation carries a price someone has to pay.

Hiromu Arakawa wrote and drew all of it herself, nine years of monthly chapters in Square Enix's Shonen Gangan from July 2001 to June 2010, collected into 27 volumes. The monthly schedule gave her room, and the pages show it. Her linework stays clean through crowded action, her character acting carries the emotional load, and she swings from a brutal set piece to broad comedy and back without the tone snapping.

The world runs on coal and steel, styled on Europe during the Industrial Revolution: rail lines, smokestacks, factory towns. That grounding keeps the fantasy honest, since the alchemy answers to rules as strict as engineering. Shonen adventure runs underneath it all, with training, rivals and opponents who keep getting harder, but Arakawa never lets the cost of the brothers' choice drift out of view. Read it if you want a long serialized fantasy that was planned to an ending and reaches one.