Totally Captivated 2
Posted: December 16, 2009 Filed under: Totally Captivated | Tags: BL 4 Comments »Hajin Yoo – Netcomics – 2008 – 6 volumes
So, uh… I pretty much just read this whole thing in one sitting. It’s so rare when I can do that, and it’s even rarer that I feel like doing that. But I like pretty much everything about it. It’s like a BL story crossed with a manic, upbeat Korean girls’ comic with everything I hate most about BL stripped out and a great romance instead. It completely blew me away. I’m only going to talk about volume two tonight, but I’ll probably flood the rest of the reviews in tomorrow night.
Coincidental grade school meeting GO! It was well-advertised in the first volume, and I forgave it for being a common plot device since the story was so funny and Ewon sprung it at one of the most hilarious, inappropriate times possible. Ewon doesn’t remember the whole thing, and actually lies when Mookyul recognizes him and asks what elementary school he went to, but it’s a good story, funny with a sentimental ending, and we get Ewon’s recollection of the first half and Mookyul’s for the second, more sentimental half.
Mookyul begins his version of courtship after this. He’s aggressive, surly, and quick-tempered, and never tells Ewon what’s going on. Ewon puts up with it all with a fair bit of humor. And as aggressive as Mookyul is, I did like that he took no for an answer. He gets violent and fights with Ewon to say yes, but he doesn’t go any farther when Ewon flat-out refuses him. As they… er, do their version of opening up to each other (hilariously, the two are never overtly fond of one another until much later), they have small arguments and bicker back and forth in really funny ways, and the tough guy Mookyul gets his bits of humor in by being surprisingly petty about small things.
Mookyul and Ewon both carry the day through this series. Ewon continues to be a very funny, open character that says what he wants and never really finds a problem with being gay. His sexuality comes up every once in awhile (aside from the obvious romantic situations), and I love this series for not making any sort of issue out of it. It’s exactly like a shoujo romance with gay characters. It’s magical the way the subject is treated here, and if it’s not going to be a serious story, I would much rather read BL series like this. Mookyul is also in the free and open camp, but Ewon is a more open character than Mookyul, so it’s easier to relate to him. Both are quite good though, and I loved them both by the end of this volume, though I still wasn’t quite seeing how a relationship was going to work out between the two.
Another thing I like about this series is that it’s supposed to have this mob-ish storyline, with Mookyul working for a loan corporation with people that call him “boss” and rough measures for people within the company and serious threats (though no violence) to people who try to skip out on their loans. The story is told with a light touch though, mostly thanks to Ewon, and nothing ever gets too terribly serious. There are serious situations, but he has the power to offer hilarious commentary and diffuse them in amusing ways.
But yes. This series was an amazing read. More on it tomorrow.
Totally Captivated 1
Posted: December 15, 2009 Filed under: Totally Captivated | Tags: BL 2 Comments »Hajin Yoo – Netcomics – 2008 – 6 volumes
Honestly, I didn’t think I’d like this series. I don’t generally like mob-oriented stories (with the possible exception of Banana Fish, but the crime was less organized there), and multi-volume lukewarm BL series drive me crazy with their crappiness. Not being sure I’d like something has never stopped me from buying every volume of a series on sale before though, so I decided to go ahead and try it anyway.
It’s much, much different than what I imagined. This is due in large part to Ewon, the main character. He seems to live a pretty free and loose life. The reason he works for the mob is shaky at best, but he takes the terrifying boss Mookyul in stride and does his best to maybe make some money while he’s doing all this work. The fact that the characters are gay is just assumed and never discussed. Ewon is not shy about his preferences, and has no problems picking up guys and speaking freely about his feelings towards men, be it about his ex-lover Jiho or while describing to the reader why he had to break up with Jiho. His attitude is like a breath of fresh air compared to all these shy, blushing boys you usually get in these series. It’s also important to note he’s not the sleazy playboy type that is usually depicted in these series, either. He’s a normal person, which is almost unheard of in BL. He’s also a funny guy, and his reactions to being bullied are pretty entertaining.
Also entertaining is Mookyul. He’s also gay, and similarly, not much is made of his preferences. He just likes men, and has no problems getting what he wants. Not in the aggressive rape-fest way that is normal in this type of series, but he’s surly and has no problem asking, or demanding, when he wants something. He’s also pretty funny in that people are quite terrified of him, and seeing people jump to his sometimes bizarre whims is very amusing. He also has no problems keeping multiple lovers, and doesn’t think anyone else should either. This could go interesting places.
Also a plus is the fact that everyone is an adult (come to think of it, I can’t remember if they mention whether Mookyul is or not, but if he’s not, that’s totally bogus because he looks, acts, and functions like it), and while romance hasn’t kicked in yet, it looks like plot device #43: forgotten childhood friends/connection might kick in at any moment.
Honestly, I had a hard time not picking up volume two as soon as I finished this one. It’s not the serious yaoi drama I expected, but so far has a pretty light touch to its serious story and likable characters. I could see myself falling in love before all is said and done.
We Were There 8
Posted: December 15, 2009 Filed under: We Were There Leave a comment »Yuki Obata – Viz – 2010 – 13+ volumes
Hm. The series takes a turn at the end of this volume and sets itself on another track. This happens on the last two pages, so I’m not sure what that means for future volumes. I am both happy and sad. It definitely needed a change of pace so that it didn’t fall into the same sort of rut I dislike about Sand Chronicles, but I think I will miss the happy times that began in this volume.
The plot twist here was a little disappointing, only because it’s the sort of thing serious romances use as a major dramatic twist all the time. This twist always goes the same way, except there was a definite… er, well, they told you that this one doesn’t have a happy ending like they normally do, which is We Were There to a T. There’s not much happy about this series. It takes all the usual romance plot devices and makes them ten times sadder by making them far more subtle and easy to relate to.
But again, this volume is a happy one. Motoharu and Nana work their way out of a rut, and with college hanging over their heads and a major decision for Motoharu to make, they get to act all lovey-dovey and go on a nice trip together for the first time… ever. When they play nice together, it is very sweet, and I am no longer wondering about the sincerity of what they say, because they both seem to genuinely love each other, without a doubt. Removing the doubt from the series is good, but it’ll make it hurt that much worse when something terrible happens down the line. I predict blindness or something, though that’s obviously not the case on that last page.
But there’s still nothing quite as touching and sincere as the drama in We Were There. It can be a serious downer, even when we get a happy volume like this, but it really is a wonderful read, and it looks like it’ll be keeping itself interesting for at least a few more volumes.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
One Piece 28
Posted: December 13, 2009 Filed under: One Piece 1 Comment »Eiichiro Oda – Viz – 2010 – 56+ volumes
Here’s the grand tournament I remember liking the Skypiea arc for. It’s set up like a survival tournament, with 81 or so contestants, including Eneru, his vassals, his soldiers, the Shandian army, and the Straw Hats. The elimination goes pretty quickly, including parts where Eneru takes out 20 of his own men, so with a few matchups between Shandians and Straw Hats, along with a few general skirmishes to give us an idea of how the battles go in the Sky Islands with the combat dials they use (they do things like absorb an impact and throw it back, throw fire, mimic an axe hit, et cetera). By the end of the book, we’re down to 25 people, including a couple hits to the Straw Hat force. One hit is unaccounted for, unless they count the obligatory Luffy incapacitation, sidelining him until it’s time for he and Eneru to face off.
The scope of Eneru’s power is unveiled here, and I recognized immediately why the battle between he and Luffy was going to be something special. That’s not until much later, though.
What else… there are a couple amusing battles this time around. The Nami and Chopper fights are also taken care of early. Nami’s fights almost always feel like accidental and/or quick victories, but Chopper’s are usually much more hilarious. He gets the privilege of fighting Gedatsu, which is both good and bad since he’s one of the more amusing enemies.
Lots of fighting, and a bit of a minor theme about driving the native population out of their homeland at the beginning of the volume, too. Not too much in the way of story progression, but the battles are pretty awesome.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Eyeshield 21 29
Posted: December 13, 2009 Filed under: Eyeshield 21 1 Comment »Riichiro Inagaki / Yusuke Murata – Viz – 2009 – 37 volumes
The sinister feeling I got from Gao last volume pretty much carries through all the way here. Things look a little up as of, like, the last page, but Gao is a pretty horrible threat. He’s fair, in that he plays by the rules and everyone recognizes that getting injured is part of playing football, but serious bodily injury is a terrible thing to threaten in situations like this.
This game will probably last at least three volumes, so this chunk of story was spent with both teams just matching preliminary strategies. Touchdowns are had, and plans are developed and foiled on both sides. Surprisingly, Gao isn’t really much of a threat save for two instances, but terrible things do happen right at the end.
I’m a big fan of the correct use of solid black pages, and we get a good use of them here. My heart broke, which says a lot considering who the character was it happened to.
There’s still touches of humor, but with the beginning of the game, we get down to some pretty serious business right away. It’s mostly football, but it’s always fun to see the wacky strategies and fake-outs all the characters pull on one another. So yeah, still a great volume.
The character popularity polls in this series are always fascinating. It’s true that Hiruma steals the show, but it’s almost unheard of for the main character of a Shounen Jump series to not come out first in these things. Not only that, after Sena came in second, most of the other members of the Devil Bats don’t even rank in the top ten, it’s mostly side characters. That just goes to show you the power of goofy gimmick characters, I suppose.
Baby & Me 1
Posted: December 13, 2009 Filed under: Baby & Me 1 Comment »Marimo Ragawa – Viz – 2006 – 18 volumes
I liked the random volume I read of this so much I decided to start from the beginning. It was one of the original Shoujo Beat series, but I have absolutely no recollection of reading it in the issues I have. Had I not sampled the series beforehand, I would have never picked it up. As my roommate pointed out, it lacks romance, a key ingredient in shoujo manga, and quite frankly, a plot about a little boy taking care of his baby brother doesn’t automatically appeal to me.
Baby & Me succeeds as a shoujo manga because of its sensitivity, though. There’s no romance, but it does tug at one’s heart to read about poor Takuya, ten years old, taking care of his baby brother after their mother’s recent death. It goes into surprising detail about how taking care of Minoru would affect every aspect of Takuya’s life, and it also does a good job of pulling Takuya out of his bouts of depression when he starts wondering about why he can’t have a normal family. Things like writing an essay on his family, playing with other kids, or learning how to respond to both Minoru’s mysterious mood swings and his father’s good intentions are all parts of the chapters in this first volume.
The last chapter was so bittersweet I nearly teared up at the end, something that’s hard to do with only a single volume of manga, but the author really does a good job of showing you how Takuya feels. She also points out that he’s just a regular kid. There’s nothing particularly extraordinary about him, he has no special talents, and he doesn’t seem to have any particular goals or aspirations. He just has to look after his brother. It gets bleak sometimes, but he always manages to find a good moment to pull himself up. The first and last chapters were the hardest to take for me, since both reflected rather strongly about Takuya’s lost mother and just how different his life is from that of his classmates.
Wonderful stuff, and this is only the first volume. I’ve got two more here, so let’s see how the plot develops.
Nana 20
Posted: December 12, 2009 Filed under: Nana 1 Comment »Ai Yazawa – Viz – 2010 – 21+ volumes
This volume ends… badly. Very badly. I suspect it’s not nearly as bad as it looks, cause this is a manga, but I’m guessing since the manga is Nana, it will be devastating/debilitating all the same.
That last scene wiped pretty much everything else that happened from my memory. Lots of see-sawing back and forth between Nana and Ren about getting back together without either speaking to one another. There was also talk about the lineup of Trapnest, and Reira took a bold, unadvisable action to cover for Ren while he got his stuff sorted out. I liked where everything was going finally, but then that last scene. I nearly cried because of the implications, but again, things don’t usually work out that badly.
I still like Takumi an awful lot. I like his devotion to both women in his life, in both the wife capacity and the younger sister capacity, though it’s disturbing to label Reira as such considering what is going on. He finally has the talk he needed to have with Ren, but that confirmed my suspicions that he’s just giving Reira what she wants, rather than… actually cheating on Nana, though most would probably still call it that. I still say he’s the best character in the series. Even the “present” story segments paint him as fairly devoted to his family, but a workaholic. Hachi and he are separated, but it sounds like it’s half that he’s never home and half that Hachi wants Nana to come back to Japan and won’t leave for wherever Takumi is.
There’s only one volume of the series left before it went on hiatus at the beginning of last summer. I suspect that there aren’t too many volumes left in it anyway, because it feels like the “present” pieces of the story are slowly starting to fall into place. It just occurred to me that something at the beginning of this volume hints at the worst, but I’ll hold onto my hopes.
Needless to say, Nana is still fantastic. It really is made out of the best stuff. The plot, art, characters, setting, emotions, situations, music, and everything about it is just superior. I don’t think there will ever be anything quite like Nana, which is another reason I think it will probably end soon. I’d hate for it to drag out too long.
But at present, it is on hiatus. I sincerely hope Ai Yazawa will be well enough to finish it soon. Perhaps she and Moyoco Anno will return to being professional mangaka simultaneously, in a fit of wellness, unleashing all sorts of girly awesomeness onto the world once again.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Madness 1
Posted: December 12, 2009 Filed under: Madness | Tags: BL Leave a comment »Kairi Shimotsuki – Blu – 2009 – 2 volumes
I reviewed this volume over at Manga Recon, so you can check out my thoughts over there.
I’ve got no love for Madness. I can usually find something to like about even the worst series, or things I don’t personally enjoy, but Madness was just boring, had awful characters, and wasn’t even a BL book like I thought it was. Or, it was, but it was a BL book with no romance, sex, or even chemistry between the main characters save for a scene towards the end.
It… uh, is super-long though (261 pages), and I’ve heard other people say they enjoyed it. But I really hated it, and I don’t say that often. It may just be because of the total lack of romance, though. Well, that and the whiny main character. Even bad BL books have romance, and that makes them at least tolerable reads. Madness was more action-oriented than it was romantic, so… maybe if you like action, and love figuring out confusing fight scenes.
edit: WHAT?! The author also wrote Sengoku Basara?! I couldn’t make heads or tails of the action scenes here, seriously, and I know Sengoku Basara is an action-heavy series. Maybe her art’s gotten better since this one?
Eyeshield 21 28
Posted: December 12, 2009 Filed under: Eyeshield 21 1 Comment »Riichiro Inagaki / Yusuke Murata – Viz – 2009 – 37 volumes
YES. This volume has a long flashback about Hiruma and how he and Kurita met. It’s been my favorite part of the series so far. I wasn’t really expecting it. I hadn’t thought about how the two met, since I assumed they were just classmates at their old school, and I wasn’t really expecting… an origin story for Hiruma, since he is just a high school student. I was rewarded hansomely for my non-curiousity.
We learn about how Hiruma and Kurita met, and also about how both developed an interest in football, and how the Devil Bats got started, and also how Hiruma’s gambling and coercing habits built on themselves over the years. It’s awesome. It also involves the line “Die, you jovial tub of lard,” which may make Hiruma the greatest character in all of manga. I’m not sure.
It’s awesome. It’s funny, and on topic, and builds up Hiruma and Kurita, and is just everything I love about Eyeshield 21. As I’ve said before, I’m still not tired of reading this series, even 28 volumes in, and it’s because of things like this. This may be one of the single most consistently entertaining series I’ve read, aside from all-time favorites like One Piece and Jojo and the like.
Other parts of the volume look at Gao and the Hakushu Dinosaurs. We’ve learned that Gao causes people serious bodily harm, but we see it first hand in the game with Seibu. The game begins and ends in this volume, which I wasn’t expecting. When a team is built up as much as Hakushu, I expect Deimon to play them, but in this case, I couldn’t imagine the rematch with Seibu would fail to happen. It was a tossup, and I was expecting it to draw out a little bit more. I was quite happy it didn’t, though, because I get tired of games with Deimon sometimes, and I couldn’t imagine how a game with side characters could last and still be entertaining. So… yeah, it’s good that that didn’t happen.
For anyone still reading and marvelling at my amazing writing skills, the one thing that makes me uncomfortable about these parts with Gao is that he’s such a brutal guy. They stress that he plays by the rules, but he is ruthless, and does seriously injure people in ways that football players get injured (broken bones, incapacitated, stuff like that). While Deimon has had plenty of opponents, all of them difficult/eccentric in their own ways, none of them have been truly malicious, which is part of the goofy charm of the series. A dark character like this just doesn’t fit.
Nana 19
Posted: December 11, 2009 Filed under: Nana 1 Comment »Ai Yazawa – Viz – 2009 – 21+ volumes
I never really have that much to say about Nana, since even dropping a little hint would spoil every volume, but it breaks my heart every time. Even volumes like this one, that aren’t particularly sad, are heartbreaking and excellent in a way that only Nana can be.
Several things happen, including a resolution to the Shin situation, a light at the end of the tunnel for the problems that Ren and Nana have (or at least a healthy view on Ren’s part), a proposal from Nana to Hachi, and a separate, but no less disturbing problem that Ren seems to be getting into. I would rather the series not take that path, but it should be interesting if it blows up and the other characters catch wind of it.
But I want to talk a little bit about Takumi. Takumi is the closest this series has to a bad guy. Not very many people like him, and he started the series off as a jerk. We were given hints he wasn’t all that serious about Hachi. But as the volumes progressed, any hints we were given about infidelity seemed like just teases, aside from the dangerous, but necessary and long-standing relationship between he and Reira. He seems to wave back and forth between pushing Reira away and encouraging her affection depending on her mood, and he does the same in this volume, but in a less veiled way than before since Reira is emotionally unstable without Shin. Takumi also comes home late to Hachi and always leaves her feeling lonely, something that it’s hard to forgive him for. But on the other hand, whenever he is home, we see that he and Hachi lead a somewhat cozy, affectionate domestic life, and he treats Hachi with a great deal of love and devotion.
This time around, we learn that Reira is more important to him than anybody else, but while he is a womanizer, Hachi is the only one he loves for real. The problem with Takumi is that he’s not very sincere. He may love Reira, his childhood friend, but he seems more devoted to Hachi, his wife. He may love both women, which puts him in a spot, but not a spot he would ever, ever seek advice for a way out of. He doesn’t really have any friends to talk to, anyway. From the way he carefully words things, I would guess that he loves Hachi and indulges and is very attached to Reira, who does need emotional support.
Basically, aside from all the weird craziness that came up in this volume, I took away the fact that Takumi is probably my favorite character, and one of the more interesting things about the series. And for all that stuff I mentioned up there, he and Yasu are probably the most centered, least emotional people in the main cast. They are the ones that call the shots and offer advice to the others, but Takumi is a bit more direct, demanding, and evil in what he does than Yasu. I like him a great deal for it.
