Oath to Love and Passion 1
Posted: April 29, 2009 Filed under: Oath to Love and Passion 5 Comments »Why am I doing this to myself? Why do I buy volume 1 of an incomplete series that I know I’m going to like?
This one was an easy choice: It had the cutesy title with two sweet-looking girls on the cover, and the tagline on the back of the book was “Love is blind… it’s also bloodthirty and has one hell of a sense of humor.” It goes on to describe one of the girls on the front as a “manipulative harpy”, and then kind of insults all the other characters. It was honestly the most compelling summary I’ve ever read.
The plot is pretty standard girls’ stuff. Jung Yul (Passion) and Sa Rang (Love) are twins with opposite personalities. Jung Yul is a good, mild-mannered girl, whereas Sa Rang is a horrible person that comedically manipulates people to get what she wants. It happens that Jung Yul is in love with Yoo Shin, a boy in her class, and Yoo Shin’s best friend, Nan Soo, is head-over-heels for Jung Yul. After working up the courage to confess to her, Nan Soo is actually rejected… by Sa Rang, who he mistakes for Jung Yul, and then again that same morning by Jung Yul. Nan Soo isn’t one to give up though, and is determined to get Jung Yul to give him a chance. Sa Rang, meanwhile, has quite a lot of fun torturing and manipulating Yoo Shin, so now there’s a possibility that Sa Rang likes Yoo Shin, and Yoo Shin likes Sa Rang.
It’s very, very funny, mostly due to the efforts of Sa Rang and Nan Soo. So Rang is kind of annoying until she gets her chance to shine in a scene with Yoo Shin. She manages to get him to take a caning (?!) for her at school, and then proceeds to torment him while getting him to buy her dinner, give her his jacket, and then see her home. I wanted to hate her, but it’s hard not to smile at the lines she uses to get people to do things for her. Of course, you are kind of wondering why it is people are submitting to her, because she’s not that clever, but that’s just part of the story.
Nan Soo, in addition to being fairly amusing, also gets a lot of sympathy since he seems to be pretty serious about Jung Yul. He doesn’t give up after being rejected, and actually puts a lot of effort into trying to get himself a second chance.
Also, the best part of the book was probably that Nan Soo’s father was drawn as a gigantic bear, for no real reason. There are a couple lenghty scenes between Nan Soo and his father. There is one frame where he’s drawn like a real person, but other than that… yeah, the man’s a bear. I love it.
This is another one of those CPM books I got cheaply (and is still on sale until May 4th), and I couldn’t have been happier with the impulse buy. Like I said, the worst part of it is that there’s no volume two, but it’s still worth a read. Also worth noting, this is another one of those series that ran in Wink magazine, which really is the home to all sorts of the best girls’ comics.
D. Gray-Man 13
Posted: April 29, 2009 Filed under: D. Gray-Man 1 Comment »I kinda liked the last volume of this series, but unfortunately, having read none of the others, this volume sort of left me in the lurch. There are two extended fight scenes that take up the entire book.
The first deals with Lavi. Apparently Lavi is waging a psychological battle in his dreams with Road, and his body is being commanded to hurt/kill Allen and the other characters. So Allen takes a beating while trying to find some non-lethal way of stopping Lavi, and Lavi goes through some flashbacks and stuff in his head while he battles himself/Road. Now, I suspect these internal scenes are supposed to tell you a lot about Lavi becoming a Bookman, but without context and explanation, they unfortunately made no sense to me.
After this is dealt with, the characters try to flee the Ark before it disappears (?), but then are attacked by the enemy they defeated last volume. They all struggle against him until the very end of the volume, and then are saved by the random appearance of a fairly powerful character. I… think I liked what was going on in these fight scenes, but again, I know nothing about this series, so a lot of it is both visually confusing and just… there are a lot of fighting techniques that look cool, but… I just have no idea what was going on.
I think my time was more than made up for in the bonus pages. It was a fairly typical “what goes on in the studio”-type deal… except the segment was drawn in a non-cartoony style, and featured the author fully naked with a cowboy hat and stars for nipples. This was not commented on by anyone in the studio. I wasn’t sure what to think of this, other than that’s the most genius author portrait ever. EDIT: Even better, Katsura Hoshino is a woman. The bonus comic portrays her as a man.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Aria 4
Posted: April 29, 2009 Filed under: Aria 1 Comment »I’m glad I saved this for today. This series is all about atmosphere, and the nice summer-y stories in this volume made today’s miserable cold bearable.
I love that Cat Sith is a reoccurring character in this series. One of the strangest chapters this time around featured Akari suffering from the heat in the hottest part of summer. She’s got an uncharacteristic miserable look on her face, and is having problem dealing with the mirages such heat brings. And then… time stops and she gets a glass of cold milk. It’s pretty magical.
Akari, Aika, and Alice hang out in pretty much every chapter. They’re training together all summer, so they do pretty much everything together, including vacations to the beach, trips to see the retired great Undine, and throw parties for public holidays.
Actually, the only other chapter where Akari was by herself introduced the Sylphs, the airbike couriers of Neo-Venezia. So now we’ve got the Undines, the Salamanders, the Gnomes, and the Sylphs. Very nice.
But let me stress again how wonderful this series is simply for taking time to stop and smell the roses. Twice in this volume Akari learns the important life lesson of keeping her happy outlook and finding pleasure in everything she does. Much of the events are along the lines of finding beautiful views of the city, locating pretty beaches, and enjoying the company of others. Swimming, bug catching, eating corn-on-the-cob, and choosing wine are some of the simple pleasures the characters savor. It is definitely a unique reading experience.
Banana Fish 7
Posted: April 29, 2009 Filed under: Banana Fish 6 Comments »Wow. Everything here is just… extremely well-orchestrated. As one character puts it, Ash finally gets off defense and goes on offense. Using a computer (and this was a lot more plausible when the manga first came out) he hacks into a bunch of companies and basically bankrupts and ruins Dino. This has repercussions, some of which are threatening, most of which are kind of amusing and in Ash’s favor.
A gang war gets underway here, too. Dino “buys” Ash off the NYPD when he funds a prominent politician, and the entire police department goes out and starts picking up random blond boys off the street in order to catch Ash. Arthur also has clearance to do whatever he wants, so all the various gangs in New York City are also in motion. Ash takes a number of countermeasures that are varying degrees of funny and terrifying.
Really, nothing is quite as funny as the father/son pair of Max and Ash, though. Ash’s one-upmanship is just not to be believed.
Man, everything about this series is just… well played. It’s fantastic.
Honey and Clover 5
Posted: April 28, 2009 Filed under: Honey and Clover 1 Comment »It’s been so long since I read this series that volume 6 has already come out. That’s a real shame, because this probably is one of the best shoujo series I’m reading right now, and I shouldn’t put off reading it.
The second half of this book really got to me. Morita comes back, graduation rolls around again, Takemoto has some inner struggles… all of it was so well-written and so very of the moment that parts brought tears to my eyes. One of them was the annual Christmas party without Morita or Mayama, where Takemoto considers the previous year’s party, and who he thought would be absent from the current party.
A lot of the volume focuses on Takemoto, actually, which is nice considering he’s the main character and is sometimes relegated to the background in favor of Mayama or Yamada. I can sympathize with Yamada and Mayama and their romantic problems, but Takemoto seems to have some of the more troubling issues in the group at the moment, which is why I loved/teared up through a big chunk of the story here.
Morita coming back sort of cancels out a lot of the sadness, though. It’s hard not to laugh at everything having to do with Morita. His re-apparance was absolute GOLD, and I really wish the two-page spread had been reproduced in color. There are a number of really touching, serious moments between him and other characters, and I couldn’t believe some of them had been worked in, but he’s just so goofy it’s hard not to laugh at him. I like all the other characters a lot, but Morita is a big part of what makes this series fun.
Mayama and Yamada do get a little story time, Mayama in the form of his continued vigil and Yamada… well, she gets to put herself in Mayama’s shoes, and doesn’t really like it. Their part of the story is the least interesting at the moment, honestly, only because so little has changed since the beginning of the series. They’ve both realized some things about themselves, but they are also both going around in circles. Things could change soon though, and I admit I am interested in that.
Banana Fish 6
Posted: April 28, 2009 Filed under: Banana Fish 7 Comments »Now that I’ve sufficiently recovered from my Basara marathon, it’s time to take on the rest of Banana Fish, another great shoujo series courtesy of the early 90s (and late 80s, I suppose).
I forgot how absolutely awesome this series is. The volume starts off with an amazing scene between Shorter, Eiji, and Ash, where Shorter has been brainwashed with Banana Fish to kill Eiji, and something has to happen. Something does. Not many shoujo manga (or manga in general, for that matter) have the courage to pull something like this off, so I always appreciate outcomes like we see in this scene.
Later, the youngest Lee brother decides he would like to have some fun at the expense of Dino Golzine, so he frees Ash in a rather roundabout way. Ash proceeds to singlehandedly storm Dino Golzine’s mansion full of henchman, do what he has to do (save people, take out key targets, revenge et cetera), then completely destroy the place. While this is going on, Lee is working his way out of the building, Max and Ibe are working their way out with guns blazing, and two different street gangs are trying to work their way in, one to rescue Ash and one to rescue Shorter. It’s an incredibly well-orchestrated action scene.
The climax occurrs when Ash makes his way into the Banana Fish research facility and finds… well, someone he didn’t want to see, and someone he didn’t want to see in a particular condition. Ash unloads an entire clip of machine gun ammo into one person, then sets the other person on fire and cries. It’s quite a powerful moment, and I have to say, I’m looking forward to what can top it in the volumes to come.
Enchanter 8
Posted: April 28, 2009 Filed under: Enchanter 3 Comments »Now… this is one of those cheesecake shounen series with magic. The cheese factor in this one isn’t nearly as high as in, say, Pastel, but this is slightly more shameless. Possibly because Eukanaria, the one at the center of most of the fanservice, doesn’t really care one way or another what you think of her. And that’s fine. As long as she doesn’t change behind the front door of the house, then beat up Haruhiko for “peeking” when he happens to walk in.
Actually, this series takes a step in the other direction. Haruhiko wakes up with Eukanaria in his bed, and rather than her getting mad and beating him up, Haruhiko points out that, if their genders were reversed, it would have been a crime. It was a proud moment in manga.
I still feel like there’s something missing from this series whenever the inventions/demon magic stuff isn’t talked about. That hasn’t been the focus of the series for quite some time, which is a shame, because I liked that Haruhiko was good at building demon weapons. Plus, there was a real variety in the types of inventions. There’s a lot of potential there, but… that’s just not what the series is about.
The Mercurio storyline continues, and she begins to have problems concealing her split personality from Haruhiko. It turns out that the balance in her body is similar to the problem that Haruhiko would face in letting Fulcanelli inhabit his body, so some questions are raised towards the end about who should get to keep a body in the case of two souls inhabiting it.
The other conflict in this volume is about the invention that Haruhiko is trying to make in order to communicate with Fulcanelli inside his demon stone. Complications arise, and Haruhiko takes a lot of time to consider how Eukanaria will feel about what’s going on. The amount of attention paid to Eukanaria’s actual feelings (rather than just the over-the-top jokes about her having sex with Haruhiko) was almost touching. It’s been a long time since Eukanaria has been treated like a real person with feelings, and it’s interesting to see her taken seriously.
There are actually a handful of funny moments in here, which was unexpected since this type of humor (vague sex and gender jokes, over-the-top misunderstandings, occasional physical gags) isn’t my thing.
This isn’t a really great series, but it’s got a lot of interesting stuff going on, and the humor and character relationships aren’t so far over-the-top to make it an annoying read. I always think of Sorcerer Hunters when I read it, even though Sorcerer Hunters had a lot more to do with magic and this is more about high school romance (of a sort, I guess a lot of the characters are demons, but still). I’ve got a couple more volumes of it here, but I’m pretty sure my opinion of it really isn’t going to change reading the volumes back-to-back. It’s been maintaining status quo for the past several volumes.
Crazy Star
Posted: April 28, 2009 Filed under: Crazy Star | Tags: BL Leave a comment »I reviewed this for this week’s Manga Minis column, so you can check it out over at the Manga Recon.
Mmm… yeah. This book comes after Love Code, the book I reviewed last week. It’s marginally better but still kind of terrible.
Lovely Complex 12
Posted: April 28, 2009 Filed under: Lovely Complex 5 Comments »I like this series quite a bit, but I can’t help comparing it to High School Debut, another no-frills high school romance with a steady main couple. High School Debut is the one I prefer between the two, only because that one has slightly less comedy to break up its serious moments. Not that the comedy in this one is bad. It’s actually kind of cute, but I think I just prefer slightly less comedic series.
This series covers pretty much all the bases when it comes to what I like in (non-dramatic) high school romance, though. The main couple is in a healthy relationship, neither one of the main characters lacks intelligence and/or common sense for plot and/or joke purposes, and the humor is more gag-style humor rather than comedic over-reaction (though it sometimes does fall into that trap).
Otani’s exam results are posted in this volume, and most of the first half is Risa stressing out about what Otani will do if he fails to get into the school he wants. There’s a big search mission on at one point when nobody can find Otani and they fear he’s run away in shame, et cetera. You know how that goes. Risa has a really weird dream about him becoming a kappa at the beginning of this section, and the kappa fear is sort of reiterated a lot throughout the rest of the volume.
The second half is about a character who didn’t pass the exams, and everyone tries to console this person while they sort of get down on themselves about their self-worth. The person’s family piles on the shame, too, and there’s a bit of a cliffhanger when their significant other gets angry about… well, this person’s self-esteem issues, basically.
And at the beginning of the volume, Risa and Otani go out on a date and discuss a little bit about Risa’s future. It’s all pretty straightforward stuff, and it’s nice to see both of them so positive about everything. Usually these types of stories have a lot more doom and gloom in them.
I also just like the way Risa and Otani work together as a couple. I know that the series has its start comparing the two as a comedy team, but they really do laugh and joke around well, and it’s really cute when one lets their feelings for the other slip through.
It seems like a really fun series, but again, I’ve only read two volumes of it. I’m still not entirely convinced I should go back and start at the beginning, but I think I’ll probably stick with it to the end.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Black Jack 3
Posted: April 27, 2009 Filed under: Black Jack 1 Comment »…Yeah. The thing about reading this series is that every story is so over-the-top in a different way that the entire experience is a “Wait, what? Wait… WHAT?!” kind of thing.
For example: The first story was literally one of the most depressing scenarios I could imagine. A 60-year-old woman is expecting her three sons to convene for her birthday from their successful businesses all over Japan. You know where this is going. Turns out she has a fourth son (one she disowned) that remembered it was her 60th birthday, and he shows up with a present and is all ready to celebrate. She won’t have anything to do with him. This story just broke my heart.
The next story is about a disease that makes everything, humans and animals, shrink down to tiny sizes before they die. Black Jack has to find a cure for Professor Togakushi before it’s too late. We get to see small Saruta, along with cannibalistic Zebras and tiny lions and rhinos, by the end of this story.
The next story is about Black Jack operating on his own intestines in the Australian Outback, hundreds of miles from help, while being attacked by dingoes.
Another story is about a robin who leaves money in Black Jack’s yard on a fairly regular basis. He investigates and finds that the robins are trying to pay him to help a really sick boy that had previously helped the birds. This story is very heartwarming until the end, which was really tragic and horrible.
Later, there is a story about the love between Black Jack and Pinoko. I still think Pinoko is freaky, so the heartwarming scene where she spies in on Black Jack’s anguish after losing a patient and then quietly says “Pinoko loves you” while she’s sneaking around in her naked little robot body is more disturbing to me than it is heartwarming.
I mean… what can I add to this? I didn’t even mention things like Black Jack surgically stitching a mother and son together to share the same set of lungs, or the story where a surgeon dies early on during a procedure and finishes his operation while clinically dead. I mean, I don’t need to elaborate on Black Jack. If you like awesome comics, you will like Black Jack. I have to say, one wonders about the mental processes behind some of these stories.
There’s also a really nice essay in the back of this volume about Tezuka’s Star System, the thematic contents of Black Jack, and what some of the stories that are excluded from the collected versions of Black Jack contain (apparently the estate of Tezuka still has stories that haven’t seen the light of day since they were published in Shounen Champion, we only got three from that set in the hardcover editions). The parts about the Star System were interesting, especially since it named a few of the characters from his early work that show up randomly without real names. Picking who’s who out of Black Jack is fun, and is also sometimes an exercise in frustration. For instance, the spiky-haired winking doctor that appears twice in this volume? I know he’s been in Astro Boy and maybe a couple other things. I just spent 40 minutes looking up his name online and totally failed. Notably, the essay excludes Shunsaku Ban, who is one of Tezuka’s oldest and most frequently-used characters. He’s only a bit player in Black Jack, but he does put in an appearance as the dead husband in the first chapter here.
Anyway. The reasons for the stories being excluded from collected editions are interesting and sometimes horrifying. It’s a really awesome essay.
