Ken Kaneki

Ken Kaneki is a quiet literature student when Rize takes an interest in him, and the evening ends with steel beams falling on both of them. Surgeons transplant her organs into him to save his life, and he wakes up half ghoul: human enough to want a normal life, ghoul enough that food tastes like rot and hunger will not stop. The white hair comes later, and everyone knows what it means.

The first stretch of Tokyo Ghoul is about eating. Kaneki starves himself, vomits normal food, and is slowly talked into survival by the staff of Anteiku, a coffee shop that quietly supports ghouls trying not to kill anyone. Touka does most of the talking, and most of it is angry. He is also the only person alive who can move between the two populations without either noticing.

Sui Ishida drew him as a reader first: shy, bookish, fond of a novelist whose work runs through the series as a thread. That reading habit is what makes the horror land, because Kaneki keeps trying to describe what is happening to him in borrowed literary terms and the terms keep failing. Tokyo Ghoul ran in Weekly Young Jump from 2011 to 2014 and sold in the tens of millions before its sequel.