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.
Laon 1
Posted: August 14, 2010 Filed under: Laon Leave a comment »YoungBin Kim / Hyun You – Yen Press – 2010 – 6+ volumes
For some reason, I felt guilty about not starting a new Yen Press series this year, and I love folktale-inspired series, so here I am with the first couple volumes of Laon.
Honestly, the most interesting thing so far has been the art. The art is pretty fantastic, with lots of thick, heavy outlines, lots of black, and lots of crazy angles and facial expressions. The flow of the story is helped immensely by the art, and I think this would have fizzled and died about halfway through if not for that.
The story is decent though, a good first volume that could develop into a fantastic action series. Laon is a young and confused supernatural being that butts heads with Tae-Ha, a man working at a National Enquirer-like newspaper in a dead-end reporter position. Laon is determined to find the Gumiho that stole his ears and tail, and Tae-Ha wants to help him. Sort of. Tae-Ha doesn’t like Laon, or much of anything, and Laon tends to beat him up and embarrass him a lot. It looks like the formula will follow the two as they go out on reporter investigations that Laon solves with his powers.
The investigation in this volume was pretty twisted, with a 16-year-old girl being held captive by her religious and very insane father, thinking that her pregnancy was immaculate and divine, the girl begging for help when Tae-Ha comes by dressed as a priest. Of course there’s some supernatural and parasitic bad stuff at work, and Laon helps settle things. It’s all very creepy and dramatic, and the art helps immensely.
Laon isn’t very likable at this point, one of those confused and forceful characters dropped from what seems to be the far past into modern times. The jokes about how he doesn’t know what anything is, and doesn’t know when the right time to use his powers, are already wearing thin. His severe case of bouncing from one thing to the next is also aggravating. Tae-Ha also has a sad lost lover and case of amnesia that isn’t very interesting right now… honestly the nine-tailed fox folklore and the art are what is making this worth reading. The folklore parts are very interesting, and it’s already dipped farther into the fox legends than anything that I’ve ever seen. The prospect of Laon gaining his powers little by little does make me want to read more. As does Laon’s gender ambiguity. That is, so far, really bizarre stuff.
Honestly, the bland flavor of everything else does seem like the kind of thing that will get better as the characters and story develop, so I’ve got no problem reading on into the second volume. The first volume is funky and unusual, and it did grab my attention, so it did its job well.
Hoshin Engi 17
Posted: August 14, 2010 Filed under: Hoshin Engi Leave a comment »Ryu Fujisaki – Viz – 2010 – 23 volumes
And here’s the other adaptation of a Chinese novel. This is… an extremely loose adaptation, moreso than the Romance of the Three Kingdoms retelling in One Thousand and One Nights.
Hm. This series has slowed down significantly in the recent volumes. I can’t figure out why I’m enjoying it less. The problem I have with there being too many characters seems to solve itself with each passing volume (this one included… we lost a few people that I was quite fond of), and the epic war that brings about the downfall of the entire supernatural world is, to say the least, very interesting. But I think it’s all the vague paope fights, the power versus power, that’s wearing on me these last several volumes. Rather than Taikobo outsmarting people, we’re just seeing who’s made-up weapon is the best, and it’s far less interesting. Not even Genshi Tenson’s battle with Bunchu was that great, and I was really looking forward to seeing the great Genshi Tenson fight. The Bunchu versus Hiko Ko fight was marginally more interesting, but again, it was a bunch of speedlines followed by some sadness on both sides. It could have been so much more.
The end of the Sennin war is pretty epic. Lots of dramatic and sad trips to the Hoshindai, and seeing both sides come out at a loss was also pretty fantastic. Best of all, we can move on to something else now.
Taikobo puts Yozen in charge of King Bu’s march to the city and goes off in search of one of the greatest Sennin alive, one who sides with neither Mount Kongrong or Kingo Island and is on the same level as the leaders of both, or even Shinkohyo or Dakki. Taikobo’s already run into the strange Shinkohyo once on his search, and has arrived at a bizarre town, and already it’s far better than the war we just finished.
This series is always better in chunks, and I’ve got two more volumes to read before I’m caught up to the current release. I’m pretty excited to move forward in this new storyline, honestly. I haven’t liked it as much since the defeat of Chokomei in volume 12. I like it, I like it a lot, and I’m still impressed by how good the art is and how tightly plotted it’s been all along. But it’s never been quite as good since then. I have high hopes that some of the silliness I like will come back and brighten things up again.
One Thousand and One Nights 10
Posted: August 14, 2010 Filed under: One Thousand and One Nights | Tags: BL 2 Comments »Han SeungHee / Jeon JinSeok – Yen Press – 2010 – 11 volumes
I’m just going to toss this review off super fast, because I just got the last volume and wanna read it RIGHT NOW. This has been one of my consistent favorites from Yen Press, and I couldn’t be more happy that they picked up Ice Kunion’s back category, both for this and Goong.
Reading two volumes together is bad, because then I can’t remember what was special about each, so I have to write about this one before I start the last. Thus the haste.
We get the end of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms story. As many adaptations as I’ve read of that novel (strangely, I read two adaptations of Chinese novels this afternoon), I’m still not very clear on what actually happens, and this is a more literal adaptation than the others I’ve read. I was a little lost, and it was my least favorite of Sehara’s stories. But the parallel with his own situation came as a nice surprise at the very end, as did the recall at the end of the volume.
The main plot of the series is what I’m most interested in at this point. Shahryar makes his way to the invader’s camp to rescue Sehara, who’s gone back to Baghdad for Shahryar. When Shahryar makes his way back to Baghdad, he finds out Sehara has left upon hearing news of his death. So there’s a lot of frustrating missed opportunities.
Both characters display emotion that are new to them, though. Shahryar looks much more happy and at peace than he did… well, before he died, and Sehara hits the depths of despair when he receives the bad news. Seeing the happiness and melancholy swapped between the two is strange, but it’s even stranger to see the gruff Shahryar so at peace. He has no guarantee that he will ever find Sehara, and yet he is positive he will. And that it will make him very happy when he does.
Somehow, that makes me want to read the final volume that much more.
That, and the fact that Shahryar picked up some… romantic reading on the road to Sehara. Not that I think that will go anywhere, but it could be funny.
I do feel bad for not liking the Romance of the Three Kingdoms story, because the writer cites a Korean adaptation of it as their inspiration for writing manga. Clearly it’s a story close to the person’s heart, and yet it just didn’t come across since I wasn’t familiar with the original. That’s a shame.
Manga Village New Releases 8/4/10
Posted: August 14, 2010 Filed under: Articles on Other Sites 2 Comments »I’m a week late on this one, but here’s the Manga Village crew’s picks from last week’s new releases. Mine included. It was a pretty solid week, and there’s a few things I need to pick up (Genju no Seiza, once I read Pet Shop of Horrors and New Pet Shop of Horrors…).
In retrospect, I probably should have offered a shout out to V.B. Rose as well. That’s a pretty good series, and it’s always nice to see a new volume. Especially since Banri Hidaka’s other series were… uh, unceremoniously dropped.
Gloom Party 1
Posted: August 13, 2010 Filed under: Gloom Party 1 Comment »Yoshio Kawashima – Digital Manga Publishing – 2006 – 5 volumes
only one volume was published in English
It is bad manga week in a few places around the web, and I thought I’d top my day off by getting a few things I was absolutely dreading off my pile.
This is first. Absolutely. I’ve been trying to read this book for a year, a few pages at a time, and failing. I read the last 100 pages tonight, using Bad Manga Week as an excuse to get it off my nightstand. It’s not the worst manga I’ve ever read, but it was boring and infuriating to read.
The premise is solid, and interesting. Take a 4-panel seinen gag manga and footnote it with everything you can think of about Japanese culture. Gloom Party is pretty heavy on Japanese culture, and there are movie, television, commercial, and other references that even otaku would miss in the majority of the strips (in fact, a few Doraemon jokes and a bizarre Kamui-den gender swap are probably as close as it gets to manga-style humor). The strips are also printed untranslated, with a translation on the side, and a lot of notes about puns and specific meanings for words and explanations on phrases and expressions, so you can use it as a kind of aid for learning Japanese, too.
The problem is that all the strips are panty jokes. Over and over and over again. High school boys, office workers, old men, everyone loves looking at panties. I was pretty sure I was missing the joke most of the time, but then I realized it really was the same punchline repeated twice on every page. I could only read a few pages at a time because the jokes weren’t funny, and the notations and explanations as to what’s going on and why it’s supposed to be funny are both tedious (yes, I know that schoolboys apparently like to look at panties, but this is explained every time it happens) and bizarrely inadequate (I was looking for an explanation as to why there was only one type of joke here, but of course there wasn’t any). And after reading a hundred solid pages tonight, I don’t think I ever want to see another sudden gust of wind or See-Through Teacher or Flower of the Construction Site gag again.
It does get marginally better later in the book, though. It’s interesting that Kawashima was a fishmonger before (and possibly while) he drew manga, and strange out-of-context factoids show up on diary pages from time to time. And panty jokes give way to Sachiko strips later on, which is a series that starts off with an old man who has a “child bride” (that is actually a child) and develops into jokes about the young girl, who devolves into a baby, taking care of her sister-in-law and stepdaughter after the husband runs off. These were pretty cute.
There are also a lot of strips that rely on jokes about movies and TV shows that I have never seen or heard of. Explain all you like, but those will never be funny unless you’re familiar with the source material, which isn’t really the fault of this collection or the translator. For the double whammy, frequently these strips also include a panty flash joke.
To be fair, I liked a series of strips later in the volume featured schoolgirls idolizing a boy who suffered from… well, every panel he was in had his scrotum hanging out the leg of his shorts. This is completely ignored in favor of whatever cool-guy activity he is participating in. I thought those were pretty funny. Then again, there was only two or three of them, so the joke wasn’t driven into the ground.
The fact that this was the first volume in a “How to Read Manga” series makes the footnotes questionable. They are thorough, and very informative, and this is one of the best adaptations I’ve ever seen… but is this really meant for someone who knows nothing about Japanese culture? Really? Is there any irony in it at all? I thought there was some at first, but then I realized that Gloom Party was not drawn specifically for this purpose. It… it’s not the best reflection of Japanese culture. Not even the naughtier side.
Honestly, I think this is why we don’t see more four-panel gag collections in English. I wonder if something like Utsurun Desu would be this tedious if translated into English, and it makes me sad. I thought Short Cuts was pretty funny, and that makes jokes about schoolgirls for two straight volumes, but then again, that was Usamaru Furuya, and took the joke into many different contexts. This really only has a few contexts, and makes the same joke in all of them. Then again, Gloom Party appeared in… Weekly Shounen Champion, I think, which is the only magazine I would forgive for this behavior since I still have yet to figure out what the editors are thinking when okaying things for print there.
Digital Manga Publishing cranked out some truly weird things before June took over, and this is another feather for their cap early on. I like that they gave this a try, as much as I hated the panty gags after the first few pages. It’s a shame that none of it was successful, but maybe I can blame Gloom Party. If I knew nothing about manga or Japanese culture and picked this up as a “How to Read” guide, I certainly would never go back.
Sand Chronicles 9
Posted: August 13, 2010 Filed under: Sand Chronicles 1 Comment »Hinako Ashihara – Viz – 2010 – 10 volumes
The main story ended last volume, so what we have here are three short stories related to the characters. The first and best, taking up more than half of the volume, looks at the friendship between Daigo and Ann’s mothers when both were growing up in Shimane. There’s lots of commentary on caring too much about what those around you think versus being happy with who and where you are, the latter is something I love to see come up in manga. Ultimately it doesn’t make a judgement call on either, since the story ended how it did it’s left to the reader to decide, but there are good and ugly things about both outlooks in this short story.
Daigo’s mother is a great character, though. It’s set up so that she’s the one telling the story, and she’s very nearly the main character, but it’s Ann’s mother that is the subject. It’s also way less sad than I thought it was going to be, and I loved that it didn’t dwell on the more dramatic points of their lives. Actually, it showed more happy things than sad, and did a really good job of giving us just enough of what might be considered the problems that led to her eventual suicide.
The second story catches up with Ann’s former fiancee, Sakura, the gruff businessman who moved to New York. He’s not happy right now, either, but we see what makes him tick, and see him soften up, courtesy of an accidental encounter with Fuji’s sister Shika and Ann’s little sister Chi. Chi’s a fun little girl, and I’m glad she’s around to lighten the mood, both here and in the main story. She’s one of the best things for Ann, I think.
There’s also a short story about Fuji as a young boy and his relationship with Santa Claus. It’s very short, and I could take it or leave it, but it’s nice to see.
I was expecting not to like these last two volumes as much, since everything’s already over and done with, but I was surprised by how much that story about the Shimane of 30 years ago lent to the plot of the main series. It also helped you see Shimane as a place a little more too, and… well, it was wonderful to see everyone’s mothers the same age as the characters we just read about, and how what seemed to make them evil in the present was more of a strength in the past, or really just made them who they are. Fumi Yoshinaga plays with similar themes in “All My Darling Daughters,” and it’s something I love to see, alternate takes on people who are portrayed as disagreeable. Real alternate stories, I mean. It’s super-easy and super-lazy to spin something around to make a former foe into a sympathetic character. Bah. This isn’t that. This is something different and very touching.
But now that I know that these last two volumes of short stories aren’t just tacked-on (mostly… I liked the Shimane story well enough, but I’d feel differently if this book only had the Fuji and Sakura stories in it), I’m curious to see how much more insight volume 10 has to offer.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Lone Wolf and Cub 2
Posted: August 13, 2010 Filed under: Lone Wolf and Cub 2 Comments »Kazuo Koike / Goseki Kojima – Dark Horse – 2000 – 28 volumes
One of the things that strikes me about this series is that not only is it the absolute last word when it comes to samurai/ronin storylines (everything about it is absolutely, to a T, what I expect when reading this type of story)… it’s also really hard not to see Kazuo Koike in it. I mean… there’s a chapter where Daigoro, the baby, starts a knife fight. Not out of place in the context of what is likely the bible of samurai/ronin manga, but also something that only Koike could really pull off without looking ridiculous.
The story focusing on Daigoro was my favorite here. I don’t think he’s supposed to be aging, but he acts older in this chapter than I assumed he was. He pulls a sword on a group of grown men after he picks a fight with a rich boy, and stands up for a young servant girl after she’s beaten for feeding him. Ultimately, it’s Itto Ogami that defeats all the challengers. Strangely, Ogami doesn’t seem to want to turn it into a lesson for Daigoro, merely finishes the fight, lets Daigoro help the girl, and then walks away.
There’s less of the stories that use Daigoro as bait to lower the guard of the target, and more information about the targets themselves, which moves this more firmly into Golgo 13 territory. Two stories stick out, one about a woman who hires Lone Wolf and Cub to avenge the forced suicide of her father after a prison burns down and the inmates he was in charge of don’t return, and another about a woman who committed suicide and seeks revenge against the man who drove her samurai husband insane. Both stories go about the reveal of the intent of Ogami very slowly, and both also involve complex role-playing on the part of Ogami (the first as a prisoner, and the second as a dying man who shut himself up in a temple).
Like the Daigoro story, there’s also one that attempts to develop the character of Itto Ogami. He has to kill a “living Buddha,” but can only do so by achieving mu. This chapter would have made a lot more sense to me if I knew more about Buddhism, I think, but basically, he shuts himself into a temple and follows the advice of the very man he is attempting to kill. Lots of things play out in this time, and we are shown a flashback before Ogami boldly announces himself and kills the much-loved man.
Another story (probably the only other one in the volume) is a very Koike-like plot where Ogami has to penetrate a castle housing a tyrant that is dragging his entire domain down with his excesses. At the beginning, Daigoro is buried in a cave by an avalanche, and is saved at the end only because it has snowed so much in the meantime that Ogami can blast another, bigger avalanche to knock away the first. At the beginning of the story, Ogami gives a lecture to Daigoro on dying well should Ogami himself not return.
I liked this volume much better than the first, though it’s still a little slow and leans too heavily on Japanese history for my tastes. It’s a little less of both than the first volume, though, and I like the variety and direction of the stories. The slowness comes as a result of the chapters sitting on something for an extended period, be it a battle or a reaction to something, which is wonderful art-wise and pacing-wise, since it gives the reader time to ponder whatever it is. There’s a little too much sitting right now, but I can see it being a very good quality later on, especially since the artwork here is so unique.
Skip Beat 21
Posted: August 13, 2010 Filed under: Skip Beat Leave a comment »Yoshiki Nakamura – Viz – 2010 – 25+ volumes
After the last volume, full of all sorts of fun and girly stuff, the momentum slows way down this time, and the plot switches over to a story where Kyoko has a lot of problems. She starts shooting her new drama, but things get off on the wrong foot when she shows up late for the first reading, then things go even more south when she can’t act the part of a normal high school girl and hates being told to act the bully parts like Mio, since the character Natsu isn’t anywhere near that evil. Plus, the other actresses on set bully Kyoko, but this doesn’t really seem to get to her as much as the acting stuff.
Ren is consulted at several points, and there’s a great scene where he elaborates in a fantastic way on the present he gave Kyoko last volume, but for the most part, this is all about Kyoko semi-failing, not a common theme in Skip Beat.
Well, it sort of is, because you have to have a lot of this sort of story in order for Kyoko to triumph and bounce back. Which I suspect will happen next volume. But she is brought pretty low in this volume, and I think that it’s nice that Kyoko doesn’t succeed immediately every time. She also has to sit on failure for the entire volume here, and while it makes for some depressing reading, it does do wonders to make Kyoko seem like less of an innately gifted princess, since she’s working hard to fix her problems here.
I also liked that Natsu wasn’t a role that Kyoko liked, or was even good at. Mio wasn’t what she wanted to do either, but she was good at Mio. Not so much Natsu. Again, I’m sure that’ll change next volume, but it was still nice to see here.
And as depressing as this was, Kyoko herself stayed strangely positive, not seeing failure, but only looking for a chance to improve. All the retakes and ill opinions make her seek out advice from Ren, and make her really think about how to fix things. I also like that she’s absolutely immune to bullying. It’s not so much that she doesn’t care about the opinions of those around her, it’s just that she seems to know that they’re wrong.
Still awesome stuff, and still one of the most addictive shoujo series I’m reading. Even at its most depressing, this is still high on my list of positive, pick-me-up reads.
Butterflies, Flowers 4
Posted: August 11, 2010 Filed under: Butterflies Flowers Leave a comment »Yuki Yoshihara – Viz – 2010 – 8 volumes
I have a gut-wrenching love for this series. It is a very mature, office-lady josei series with an older (20-something) woman in a relationship with her handsome and mature boss, set on a path in life and going places.
But then it is so, so immature in everything that it does romantically. Mostly just Masayuki, the love interest. He hits new lows in this volume when he magically appears in Kuze’s bed and offers to read her “Edward Penishands.”
The two flavors war for supremacy, and I find that it is always to my liking. Its sense of humor really is the best. Especially if you like low blow junior high jokes as much as I do. They always come when they are least expected.
Then again, there’s a little part of me that hates some of the more… humiliating and demeaning things that happen to Kuze. She is constantly a prize, which she seems to take in stride and even in good humor, since Masayuki will always save her. Masayuki does constantly sexually harass her, but part of me feels that Kuze would stop it if she didn’t secretly enjoy it from him, which is revealed as fact later in this volume. But… the contest between Masayuki and another suitor (who characters warn “not to get within seven feet of for fear of pregnancy”), where they are seeing who can get closer to Kuze’s “neither regions” over the course of three days, in order to determine Masayuki’s future, is a little much. Just a wee bit. Especially since the “suitor” is the president of the company both of them work for. That’s all sorts of ugly.
But the series’ sense of humor somehow makes it okay. Kuze isn’t exactly a weeping damsel in distress, though she does seem rather helpless in the face of all this. The war fought over her “neither regions” is done comically, with constant Gundam references flying all over the place and lots of elaborate traps and mecha saves. I think the thing that really makes it okay, though, is that Kuze never really tries to get either of them to stop, when she cries foul they do give up what they’re doing, and neither of them try to rape her or even get remotely sexual with her. It really is all for a laugh. That’s the difference between this being funny and uncomfortable.
At least, for me it was. I thought it was very, very funny.
Later, Masayuki does stop harassing Kuze, and she misses it very much. They settle a thing or two between them in the last two chapters (pretty typical romance stuff I’m glossing over here, but very important in any romance comic, especially one with a couple as cute as Masayuki and Choko), but I’m hoping that things return to normal next volume. Pervy Masayuki is who I’ve come to see, honestly, and he’s what makes this spectacular.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
