Beast Master 1
Posted: October 7, 2009 Filed under: Beast Master 7 Comments »Kyousuke Motomi – Viz – 2009 – 2 volumes
I think there’s an entire genre of shoujo manga that doesn’t come out in English that often that consists of a high school romance with something absurd thrown in that lasts for a volume or two. Light stuff. I can’t really think of a better way to explain it. I suspect we don’t often see them in English because they aren’t very good, but I think sometimes the gimmicks save them from oblivion. Reading this made me think of Kedamono Damono, another gimmick-y shoujo series without a plot that I enjoyed immensely despite the fact there wasn’t much to it.
Here’s the gimmick here: Yuiko loves animals, but they hate her since she tends to smother them with love when they let her close. A mysterious boy saves her cat from a tree during a lightning storm, and she finds the next day that he is a transfer student at her new school. He’s a really terrifying-looking boy, but Yuiko has no problems approaching him since he saved her cat. Turns out he’s nice. He was raised in the wild though (?), and will go feral when he gets scared and/or sees blood. Yuiko is the only one that can stop him when this happens.
That’s… well, that’s pretty much all there is to it. It’s not terribly deep. I really liked it, even though the shoujo plot devices were making me cringe. I think it helps a lot that both Yuiko and Leo are so goofy and have distinctive and likable personalities. They aren’t terribly deep, but both are pretty unique, and their relationship is one of friendship rather than a deep attraction, an approach I liked. Of course, by the end of the volume, more is hinted at, but I think the “taming of the beast” segments are more effective when Yuiko isn’t crying and screaming at her true love to stop. She just… tells him to stop. Very calmly. And he does.
One of the other things that I liked a lot was its sense of humor. At one point, while rumors are flying around the school that Leo is from L.A. and is involved with gangs, Yuiko catches three pretty stereotypical Japanese gang-types calling Leo out. She calls one of them “boss,” and then they very casually slip into a conversation where, apparently, these three stereotypical gang guys just wanted to meet Leo. They agree that he’s a nice guy, and then part amiacably. This joke is reused several times, and neither Yuiko or anyone else lets on that these guys really should be a gang, or scary, or something. They usually show up doing something that would be stereotypical of a gang, then turn out to be doing someone a favor. For instance, in one chapter they show up patrolling a neighborhood, but are, in fact, looking for someone’s lost dog. Later in the chapter, a stray, feral german shepard is adopted by the boss, who gets a really scary pose with it.
Yeah, the gang joke was the best, but there are a lot of other quirky things that are just passed off by the characters, which make lame jokes a lot funnier. It helped make reading the volume quite fun.
There’s a very short story at the end of the volume, and it cracked me up when the author admitted it was a debut work that finished in nearly last place in a reader survey. She said she wasn’t sure why it was being reprinted, other than it was hilariously bad. It wasn’t hilariously bad, but… yeah, it wasn’t good, either.
Beast Master… isn’t going to go down in shoujo hall of fame or anything. There’s no plot, and it’s pretty silly. But it’s good at what it does, and I wound up enjoying it far more than I should have. Since it’s only two volumes long, I’m definitely picking up the second.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
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Wah, the site is all different! It’s cool :D
Kyousuke Motomi got really really popular with scanlators a while back, which may be why this got licensed. He (I think it’s he) had mostly done oneshots and 1-2 volume works until starting a longer series recently. It’s true, there are a whole lot of one-shot shoujo works, but I think the unexpected sort of humour (goofy violence (compared to most shoujo), kindly yakuza/yanki types) and heroines who aren’t as frail and wimpy as most shoujo protagonists all help make Motomi-sensei’s work stand out from the rest. I find the art style pretty charming, too (when it’s not making scary faces at its readers… or maybe even then). It may not be anything deep, but it’s fun, cute shoujo and I know I’ll pick up and enjoy this short series!
Now, I don’t know anything about THIS Beast Master, but there’s this ridiculous movie out there also called “Beast Master” about some guy and his ability to call wild animals to his aid. Its either the funniest or the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.
em: Strangely, my roommate watched that movie a few days before I got this in the mail. It’s directed by Don Coscarelli, who I’m generally a big fan of, but not even I would go anywhere near Beast Master the movie.
lys: Yeah, I was wondering about Kyousuke Motomi’s gender, too. I thought the artist might be male, which is also interesting, since I think the male artists drawing shoujo nowadays are even rarer than the infrequent females that draw shounen/seinen. I didn’t realize he had made the rounds with the scanlators, either. What are his other series like? It sounds like they share the same quirky sense of humor.
And yeah, I agree 100% with pretty much everything you said about Beast Master. I had forgotten to mention the unusual backbone the heroine shows, especially in the way she deals with Leo. I did mention I like that she doesn’t just cry when he transforms, but I also like the fact she seems to be able to talk and interact with people, and is relatively popular and well-adjusted and keeps a good number of friends around. Most series tend to take the new student, no friends, needs a lot of help coping and adjusting route, so it’s always really nice to see those plot devices ditched in favor of a regular girl.
And I’m glad you like the change on the site! I love being able to switch things up for Halloween. Now all I need to do is cover more horror manga, I haven’t tried any yet this week!
I’m sort of assuming on the gender, but I haven’t been corrected yet… it is pretty unusual to see male shoujo-manga artists (outside of manga about fictional manga artists, in which they are the norm, ha ha ha) but I like the slightly different perspective it can give an otherwise “normal” shoujo manga.
Yeah, his other works are a lot like this in tone. I remember being happily surprised by some of the un-wimpy things the girl does/says in his most recent series (Dengeki Daisy, which I could definitely see getting licensed if this series does well)—things that actually help to resolve the problem, rather than making it worse/getting the girl deeper in trouble, as in many series (sigh). There’s usually a host of odd side characters in his work too, like the not-gang-members here. Oh, and that’s a good point about Yuiko having friends! (beyond the usual girl-friend-duo whose only purpose is to give bad relationship advice) It’s really nice to see that in shoujo manga—even if the friends don’t ever become major characters, I like knowing they exist.
Kyousuke Motomi is a woman writing under a male pen-name.
Her current series is Dengeki Daisy and the first volume is out by Viz, I highly recommend giving it a try since it’s slowly becoming one of my favorites. It’s about a mostly ordinary girl (in a school for rich kids of course) named Teru who was orphaned at a young age and raised by her doting, computer-genius brother. About a year or two before the story begins, her brother dies (it’s not stated what from, but presumably illness). The brother, realizing his death is going to leave his beloved younger sister without any family or support, gives her a cell phone through which she can email a mysterious benefactor called DAISY who will anonymously take care of her. (DAISY is the one who gets her into the school).
One day, after accidently breaking a school window which she can’t afford to pay for (she’s very against asking DAISY for help with stuff like that) she ends up being forced to work off the debt for the delinquent school janitor Kurosaki, a handsome 20-something with an awful personality.
The manga works as a romance and as a mystery as people connected to her brother and DAISY start to appear and Teru finds herself targeted by an unseen danger. Also, it’s incredibly girly. Not in the ribbons and lace and flowers sort of way, but in the romance sort of way that kind of reminds me of Skip Beat (but still being very very different from Skip Beat, and not as funny).
The thing I noticed about Kyousuke Motomi is that she works best with longer series or oneshots. One volume series act more as dragged out oneshots than short series, and Beast Master fell somewhere in between. But it greatly improved with the second volume, and it’s one of my better-liked series by her.