Diamond Girl 1
Posted: August 14, 2010 Filed under: Diamond Girl 4 Comments »Takanori Yamazaki – CMX – 2010 – 4+ volumes
volume 1 is the only one that was translated into English
Reading CMX series depresses me now. At the rate I’ve been buying up their older series, though, I’ll have everything they ever published before too long. Incoming: more Cipher, Venus in Love, Dokkoida, and Seimaden, all the volumes of Emma, Solen Hearts, and Lizard Prince.
Much like every CMX series I’ve picked up, this was a lot of fun. Not immediately gripping, but endearing and something I would certainly keep reading, especially since there are a grand total of, like, two baseball manga available in English (did it seriously take twenty years to see an Adachi baseball manga over here?). Tsubura is a new transfer student. She hates baseball. REALLY hates baseball. But her classmates find out she’s good at it, and because of some bad luck, she winds up on the baseball team. But she won’t play. That doesn’t stop said classmates from hounding her ceaselessly, following her home, staying over, and bugging her about why she hates baseball so much. She also has no problems telling them, in no uncertain terms, that she hates them. They are not the least bit concerned, and take her put-downs in cheery stride.
It’s an understated story, with Tsubura’s wild pitches being the most unusual thing about it. Tsubura really doesn’t want to play baseball, but her would-be friends really want her to, and the way they go about needling each other in this first volume is quite charming and vaguely slice-of-life, not something I thought I’d see in what appears to be a shounen manga. The chapter where Tsubura tries to get her grandmother on her side in order to get the classmates off her back, only to find out her grandmother has possibly known the classmates longer since they grew up in the same town, was one of my favorites. The intro to the book starts off pretty stereotypical, but when they aren’t at baseball practice immediately, or even by the end of the book, and when technical baseball terms haven’t started to fly yet, I can see the focus is going to be more on the characters than the game. That’s really nice.
It’s a promising start, but we aren’t ever going to see the rest of it. Man, someone really needs to pull a Yen Press or a DrMaster and step in to save CMX’s catalog. That would just be the nicest thing any company could ever do.
Another terrible thing about CMX deal is getting screwed when it comes to filling gaps in series. I have Name of the Flower 2,3,4 but 1 has been out of print since 3 came out and used copies on Amazon are in the triple digits. I’m almost about to give up on finding it anytime son.
As for DG, I thought it was a pretty fun, light-hearted book. It does seem like the type of series where if the main character doesn’t get off the baseball hating mode by the 2nd volume to become really grating though. Then again, I’ll never have to worry about finding it that happens.
I really enjoyed the first volume of Stolen Hearts, just a really under the radar nice series, which describes the great majority of CMX’s manga.
Yeah, I’m having trouble finding Emma 7 right now. I can usually wait out high prices, but it’s annoying that 7 is the only one I haven’t been able to find. It’s not too high (“only” $70), but I know I can get a cheaper copy if I wait long enough. I was secretly hoping that DC would continue to print the back catalog and just not publish new stuff, but I don’t think that’s going to be the case. So many of the books are already out of stock everywhere.
I’m also having trouble, as the listings are disappearing from sites, trying to figure out how far they got in certain series, and determining if listings were cancelled volumes or stuff that actually came out.
I just picked up Stolen Hearts, I’m really looking forward to it. Can’t believe I passed over it when it came out.
Not surprised to hear that about Emma. I had a hard time finding a copy of some middle volumes not long after they came out. Just a heads up, but Emma ends at 7 and the last 3 volumes are a collection of side stories, with volume 10 returning to the main story to wrap things up.
CMX also released Shirley by same author, worth looking into if you like Emma. Also pretty sure Mori just finished a continuation of Shirley that she just concluded after having it on hiatus for at least a couple of years.
Her art gets really nice by the end of Emma and I’m really looking forward to Otoyomegatari whenever YP starts to release it. It would be the perfect type of manga for a company to serialize in a magazine since there’s only a volume or two of it out and it runs in a bimonthly magazine. Otherwise YP is going to run into year long gaps in release dates with it.
Aww. I would probably just go ahead and read Emma if volume 7 was just side stories, but I’m sad it’s part of the main story. I haven’t had much luck tracking it down. I’m hoping I can find a copy at work eventually, or just keep an eye on the prices until I find a cheap copy.
I was wondering about Shirley. I noticed the volume was numbered, but I was under the impression it was just side stories. It’s a shame that we’ll never see the conclusion here, but at least we got all of Emma.
I am very much looking forward to Otoyomegatari. I’m going to start that one when it comes out to avoid this problem.