Otomen 6
Posted: September 15, 2010 Filed under: Otomen Leave a comment »Aya Kanno – Viz – 2010 – 11+ volumes
This volume does different things and focuses on side characters, which is good, because after the conclusion to the “Beauty Samurai” story… not that I didn’t like it, but there’s only so long the story can be about Asuka worrying about not being manly enough. I know that’s the joke, more or less, but there’s so much potential for bizarre parody, and this volume is a great example.
Of the four chapters, the first finishes up the Beauty Samurai story (and it doesn’t go where it promises, annoyingly… at least this series has the shoujo tendency to drag things out perfected), the second is about Yamato trying to figure out how to be more appealing on a date, the third features Kitora, and the fourth introduces an Otomen-ish Visual Kei band where the lead singer apparently hates Visual Kei and loves super girly music.
And yeah, the amazing side characters are a big part of what keeps this episodic comedy rolling and so incredibly good volume after volume. The Yamato chapter was pretty funny, since Yamato had a really strange idea of what girls liked and how to be “manly” on a date, and also because he kept unintentionally saying things that made him and Asuka seem like a couple.
But the clear winner in this volume was the Kitora story. Kitora really is a great character. He loves flowers, and he doesn’t care who knows. He loves flowers more than girls. It’s a shame that he crosses paths with Juta’s sister, since she’s afraid of flowers because of bees and they both wind up attracted to one another. It’s sweet, and also a little messed up, in true Otomen style. Kitora, Juta, and Asuka try desperately to get her over her fear of flowers, everything from goofy stuff to good ideas, all the while both she and Kitora looking genuinely disappointed that the obstacle can’t be overcome. Hopefully Juta’s sister is here to stay, both for Kitora’s sake and because she seems to be Juta’s primary assistant on Love Chick. The fear of flowers also means she fits right in with the crazy cast of characters, all of whom are very unique.
I’m intrigued by the rock star in the last chapter. The volume ends on a cliffhanger, so we don’t quite learn as much as I’d like about him, but it’ll be interesting to see if he goes forward with his Visual Kei personality, all the while secretly confiding in his doppelganger Asuka about the girliest of girly music. I did like his split personality, though. As comfortable as he was hamming it up for his lady fans, he was hilariously meek and submissive when in his regular personality. Even Asuka seemed taken aback.
So, six volumes in, and the jokes are still good. Ai Morinaga good, maybe, but slightly less crude. And I think this series has the edge over an Ai Morinaga series since the characters are far better. I’m interested to see how many ideas and twists Otomen can throw at its characters before all is said and done. It’s formulaic for sure, but it’s not old yet, and it’s still one of my favorite current shoujo series.
Love Control 1
Posted: September 15, 2010 Filed under: Love Control | Tags: BL 2 Comments »Ai Hasukawa – June – 2008 – 2 volumes
I read the second volume of this series a year or so ago, and I liked it well enough to pick up the first. It’s the type of BL that I enjoy: a relationship between two professional men with no non-con in sight.
Unfortunately, it also sticks very strictly to the most basic yaoi plot, and I wound up enjoying it far less than I thought I might. Okumura is an entrepreneur and something of a playboy who hires Yamashiro to remodel his Italian restaurant. He teases Yamashiro, who resists at first, then decides to tease right back. Okumura is obviously the forward one, where Yamashiro is a prickly tsundere. There is resistance, Yamashiro asks him not to mix work and pleasure, then they get together, only to have doubts again. Nothing you haven’t seen before.
One interesting thing about it is that, despite the fact Okumura is more forward, the two seem to share the same level in the relationship. Yamashiro isn’t shy and submissive, and doesn’t allow himself to be pushed around by Okumura. It’s something you rarely see in light reading like this, and it’s a shame it wasn’t developed further.
The bed scenes are few and relatively chaste. They do sleep together, and there’s no secret about what’s going on, but they don’t last as long, nor are they anywhere near as graphic, as the usual yaoi story. Mostly you’re reading for the romance. The characters are interesting… but unfortunately they aren’t really developed that well, and they lack chemistry. It’s not bad, just a little bland.
There’s a creepy, creepy older/younger story in the back to make up for all the normalcy in the regular volume. Not creepy in any particularly graphic way (not even close), but creepy in that those two are even a couple. Yikes.
Maybe my tastes in BL have matured since I read the other volume of this series. It is the type of story I like… but there are so many other things out there to read. I wouldn’t mind seeing a later series from the same author, though, in hopes she sticks with the same themes and just develops characters a little better.
Rasetsu 6
Posted: September 14, 2010 Filed under: Rasetsu Leave a comment »Chika Shiomi – Viz – 2010 – 9 volumes
Every volume makes me like this series a little more. It’s a romance, of course, but not the typical high school variety since Rasetsu doesn’t attend school and both Yako and Kuryu are older men. There is the usual shoujo vibe between Yako and Rasetsu, the latter wearing her heart on her sleeve and the former not knowing his own feelings, but that’s fine since things stay interesting with plenty of ghost slaying and the weirdness of Kuryu.
As I’ve said before, my preference for the romantic lead is Kuryu. He is explored in much more detail in this volume, and it’s easy to see that there’s a far more sinister cast to him than there is any of the others. He is completely devoted to Rasetsu, though, so his… “darker” energies are always channeled towards helping her. What we find out about him in the first half of the volume is important, but it only leads to more questions about his nature. After all that, too, I would almost guess that Kuryu is some sort of demon himself, or at least has the same energies as one, which would be interesting indeed. Even more so if he is the demon after Rasetsu, since falling in love with him would lead to its own set of interesting problems.
Rasetsu is trying the whole volume to give up on Yako, who has flat-out rejected her, but she doesn’t quite fall all the way for Kuryu quite yet. She never rejects him, and listens again and again to his feelings, and it looks like she may begin considering his feelings… but given the last chapter, which goes back to the series’ Yurara roots and makes Yako a more viable match, I think Kuryu’s not out of the woods yet.
It is interesting to see a story that gives the rival love interest a fair chance like this. Usually the love interest is set in stone, and not even the most convincing side story ever makes it seem like the heroine is wavering.
Plus, did I mention that they hunt ghosts? It’s become mostly secondary at this point, but the horrible ghosts after Yako in the second half make for a wonderful fight, and we see an excellent display of Kuryu’s awesome and apparently insanely strong power when he slays some demon centipedes in the first half of the book.
Rasetsu’s got a little bit of everything good in it, and it’s quickly becoming one of my favorite shoujo series. It’s a solid read everytime, and each passing volume means I like the characters more and become more involved in their struggles. I’d heard it ended recently too, so I’m very much looking forward to more of Kuryu’s secrets and seeing how Rasetsu escapes the demon.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Hoshin Engi 18
Posted: September 12, 2010 Filed under: Hoshin Engi Leave a comment »Ryu Fujisaki – Viz – 2010 – 23 volumes
YES. Much better now that the sendo war is over! Taikobo is sent after Taijo Rokun, who is the best character we’ve had in a long while. He’s not on any side, doesn’t have ties to any of the others or the worlds they belong to, and he’s lazy, so there’s nothing Taikobo can really say to convince him to come along. He’s also very funny. The first half of the volume is Taikobo tracking him down in the village he… I don’t know if he created it, or the environment in which it exists, but it’s extremely just, and Taikobo gets into a lot of trouble while he looks for Taijo Rokun.
When Taikobo finally locates Taijo Rokun, he has to speak to him in dreams, and they discuss human nature, Taikobo’s ultimate goal, and then train on super paope. It is absolutely cosmic, and one of the reasons I read this series through the boring parts. I know I will always be rewarded later. The best parts are these wonderful fantasy sequences, that take the Sennin world and show off just how different it is from reality. The worst parts are where we just see sennin versus sennin, with nothing to show us the scale of what’s going on. But since the themes of the series are the sennin pulling out of the human world, there’s more of the former than the latter.
After all that is taken care of, the characters confront Chokei, the master of Menchi castle and Bunchu’s disciple. This is a sennin fight, and it’s punched up a little bit by the fact Taikobo debuts his new paope, but the fight quickly (very quickly) ends, and Taikobo and Chokei go to the Hoshindai. This is… strange to say the least, since I’m not sure we’ve ever really seen the Hoshindai as a real place. Not one to let the opportunity go to waste, Fujisaki makes the trip fun with a turtle guide and a Galaxy Express 999 angry train taking them to their destination. We learn what it really is, and that Taikobo’s known all along. And best of all, we get to see Chokomei again, which is never a bad thing.
And now we are at a human war, and a crossroads. This is clearly the beginning of the end, and I’m pretty excited to see where things go from here. Certainly this war won’t last five volumes?
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Case Closed 34
Posted: September 12, 2010 Filed under: Case Closed Leave a comment »Gosho Aoyama – Viz – 2010 – 69 volumes
Another couple years, and this series will pass Naruto and One Piece as the longest manga in English, even without a sped-up release schedule. On another tangential note, I always thought it was interesting that the photos on the front cover, behind the illustration, are different between the English and Japanese editions. Always the same subject matter, but for every volume I’ve checked, a different photo. It’s kind of cool that the work goes in to change that, but I’ve always wondered why.
But yes, this is still one of my favorites, and it pleases me to no end that it’s kept its 6-volumes-a-year schedule since… yikes, 2004? It must be more popular than I realize. It’s a little gory, but otherwise I always thought this would be good for kids who are advanced readers (like, in the 10-12 range, there is some pretty scary stuff). It’s always rated older, but I’m also one of the last people that should ever decide what to give to an actual kid. I wish I’d thought of this last week, because I could have written it up for the kid-friendly Manga Moveable Feast. Oh well.
What? The actual volume? All right. There is some work on the plot of the series in this volume, with Conan and Harley moving closer and closer to discovering the truth about Miss Jodie, and Miss Jodie suspecting Conan a little more every time they talk and are accidentally involved in cases where her neighbor plummets out of a window (see what I mean about being a bad judge of comics for kids?). The last chapter begins a flashback to a trip that Rachael and Jimmy took to New York with Jimmy’s mom, and Aoyama refers to it as the “New York chapters,” so I assume this will be a major story. Any story with grown-up Jimmy is okay by me, even if it is just a flashback. It calls attention to his situation a little more when that happens, something that’s pretty easy to gloss over otherwise.
The cases are pretty standard stuff. We see the end of the word-game escalator case from last volume (which, ultimately, did involve ways kanji were abbreviated by hand, but still had the neat English XXX puzzle), the aforementioned Conan/Harley/Jodie case where her neighbor falls from a high rise window, a case where a rowdy soccer fan was killed on a packed train (complete with asides about Anita feeling lonely as a traitor to the Black Organization), and a strange case where a man is poisoned in a Chinese restaurant while trying to hire Rachael for an action movie.
I did like the apartment case a lot, even if I do think Miss Jodie is a little creepy. It was the type of case where there wasn’t any elaborate setup or even any evidence, it turned out to be more of a mind game than anything. Also, Harley is easy to like, even when his appearance is too convenient, and he called Miss Jodie out on being creepy, so that’s all right.
The Chinese restaurant murder was, on the other hand, a pretty elaborate mystery involving false evidence and some pretty elaborate tricks. I was sure that at least one person would privately catch on to the fact that Conan was being a little too enthusiastic for his own good, but that didn’t happen, of course. Rachael hints at the New York chapters throughout this case, so we do get to see big Jimmy in little snippets before the New York stuff starts.
And yes, the New York story is one of the most exciting things to happen in awhile. I love reading these volumes, but I rarely actually look forward to the story, it’s more of a sitcom-type enjoyment. I am this time. It looks like it’ll be great, and maybe we’ll get to find out who Miss Jodie is.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Black Lagoon 1
Posted: September 10, 2010 Filed under: Black Lagoon 4 Comments »Rei Hiroe – Viz – 2008 – 9+ volumes
So, at this point, I’ve read more than half the series, including the beginning. I still prefer Dogs, but reading the first volume of this did help me appreciate it more.
I finally found out why Rock is on a boat with a bunch of smugglers, and it does make some sense, though I like to think that it would take more than one wild stunt to let someone as wussy as Rock into your party, splitting the pay with you. Mostly, this volume gave me new appreciation for Revy. I didn’t realize she was the reason I should read this series. She’s definitely the best part, though. There’s a segment where she singlehandedly wipes out a fleet of assassin boats by jumping onto them and opening fire with two guns, singing Rob Zombie songs all the while. And she loves it. I realize she’s a marketed badass, but she is good at what she does. She’s so jolly when she’s at work too, which is what makes her so great. She works with a smile on her face. Of sorts.
I still took issue with the action scenes. Rock’s big insanity debut was completely baffling, since I thought the torpedoes launched from the bottom of the boat until I finished and saw the editor’s note in the back about it. Even some dialogue from the characters, like that the torpedo tubes were on the deck, would have helped in that situation. I just could not figure that out. A lot of the action scenes are like that, actually (especially the scene where Revy is jumping around firing on the boats, I couldn’t tell if she really was jumping from boat to boat, or what), but that was the only one that baffled me as far as what was going on.
Roberta the maid, the subject of the 3-volume storyline later in the series, makes her first appearance when the Lovelace son is kidnapped and she seeks out the Black Lagoon, the group caught transporting him. She’s pretty terrifying, but better here than she is later, when she’s got a lot of sad political context surrounding her. It’s true that a badass maid storyline can only really be done one time, though, if you don’t have anything else to back it up.
But yes, I like it a lot more now that I’ve read the beginning. I still have to put my money where my mouth is, though, and follow this with a volume of Dogs to see if that series really is the better one in my mind. It’s been forever since I read Dogs.
It is a shame this seems to come out so slowly in Japan. I still have three or four volumes to track down, but it will be a long, long time until we see a new storyline here, I think.
20th Century Boys 8
Posted: September 10, 2010 Filed under: 20th Century Boys Leave a comment »Naoki Urasawa – Viz – 2010 – 22 volumes
I’ve saved up enough volumes of this. It’s time to marathon them and see how good the story works that way. I suspect it will be very, very amazing.
Unexpectedly, the story switches focus and we follow a student, Kyoko, as she goes through with her decision to study the Kenji Faction for a report at school and is subsequently whisked away by the Friends and brainwashed. Normally, I hate it when stories have several different main characters and settings for their narrative, but I found myself liking even this tangent. Kyoko isn’t at all likable, but she’s easy to sympathize with, and she also finds herself in an extremely terrifying situation. And even in this situation, unrelated to the other characters, we eventually re-join the main story with a fresh perspective and more flashbacks, particularly to the day of attack.
These flashbacks are FRUSTRATING. Really, really good, but still frustrating. We get a little taste of what we want to know, mostly about the robot that is terrorizing the city. And what we find out is completely unlike what is expected. I don’t even know what to make of the difference in expectation in that situation. But we still don’t get to see what actually happens to Kenji, nor do we get to see the face of the Friend. The last chapter leaves off in a place that seems to make the reveal inevitable in volume 9, but this story is good at dodging expectations.
There’s another way we might find out, too. There’s the direct face reveal of the Friend as an adult courtesy of the flashbacks to the fight, but Kyoko is experiencing a strange flashback herself at the hands of the Friends (they put her in a virtual reality machine that sends her back to the past with Kenji and company as kids, and she interacts with them… bizarre, but I found myself not questioning it too much). This flashback is an entertaining and very true-to-kid story of a haunted house exploration, but it leaves off in a place that promises we’ll get to see, if not the Friend’s face, at least something relatively disturbing.
Kenji, while not present, is still known. There are the flashbacks, of course, where we see him at all stages of his life, but there’s also a nice, sentimental scene where he records a song right before going off to fight the robot. I liked this part, because it’s an unexpected quiet interlude, but also because it had the guitar chords printed next to the lyrics, so you could play it if you wanted.
Another thing I liked, that I assume will be important later, is that the Friend’s plans unexpectedly diverge from what Kenji had come up with as a kid. Kenji notices, but nothing has really come of it yet. I do wonder.
Fushigi Yugi 4 (VizBig ed.)
Posted: September 10, 2010 Filed under: Fushigi Yugi Leave a comment »Yu Watase – Viz – 2010 – 18 volumes
this omnibus contains volumes 10-12
My roommate is reading this at the same time I am for nostalgia reasons, since FY was one of his favorite anime series as it was being released on VHS. But even he has trouble with the manga, pointing out the flaw in Nakago’s rape-fest immediately. Why can’t they just kill her rather than passing her around to try and rape her? Why is rape attempted for almost two solid volumes? Putting aside how disturbing that is, I just got sick of hearing about it, too.
Maybe they can’t kill her, for the same reason they can’t rape her (“magic”). Or maybe they don’t kill her because they know it would make Yui angry. Even so, they could just… you know, accidentally do it.
Volumes ten and eleven are all about sex and rape (and nine, for that matter). Surprise, surprise, one of the characters isn’t actually dead, and they show up and offer a peaceful life to Miaka, who has decided that because she is “impure”, she can’t be the Priestess of Suzaku or Tamahome’s wife. But she can be someone else’s wife, and they almost consummate. Then she goes into a dream world and almost has sex with a Seiryu warrior, but in her defense, she was spelled into forgetting about Tamahome, and he was “dead” anyway. Meanwhile, Soi is trying to have sex with Tamahome. Later, Tamahome and Miaka almost have sex again, when “it doesn’t matter anymore.” In the in-between chapter parts, Tomo also has his way with Tamahome. As does Nakago.
This is why Sho-Comi can’t have nice things anymore. Of course, I haven’t read Sensual Phrase yet, so I may be in for more nonsensical sex later.
It’s not the sex that bothers me, or the rape, or the fact that this was written for girls in their younger teens (who I’m sure are fascinated by sex and ate this up with a spoon). It’s the fact that, even when sex is presented in a positive context, there is almost no romance. The romance in this series is just… really messed up. For instance, the mystery zombie in volume ten has apparently “always had a crush on Miaka.” And he’s right there, and convenient, so Miaka… gets caught up in the moment and decides, however briefly, that she can marry him because she’s had sex and can’t marry Tamahome? She also falls in love with a “mystery boy” quite fast, and decides to give it up equally quickly. Bah. It doesn’t help that Miaka and Tamahome, for how devoted they are to one another, break up about once per volume for some reason or other. In ten, it’s because Miaka has been raped. In eleven, it’s based on some random advice. In twelve… well, Tamahome runs off. It’s more of a fight, but even so. I am absolutely sick of hearing about how much those two love each other, then watching them mistrust and turn their backs all the time.
Putting that aside (which is difficult, because it’s a major part of the story), how is the rest of it? Pretty good. I forget that, putting all that emotional stuff aside, Fushigi Yugi is a pretty great story. Volume eleven did much to renew my faith in things, since much happens, and almost all of it runs contrary to what is expected. The Suzaku warrior’s role in things, the summoning, the reunion with Yui, the fate of several characters, all of it was different and wonderful, and I love that FY is good at going against expectations. The summoning in particular puts an interesting spin on things, and creates a far more interesting path for the story than the fact that Miaka and Tamahome may be separated by reality.
Volume twelve is just as interesting, with all the fallout from the summoning and an even more interesting twist… I knew that it would happen eventually, but the reason it happens, and the fact that other characters are involved, is pretty great. Not so great is that it is now something that apparently everyone can do, but I like the fact that some unlikely elements are leaking into other parts of the story.
Vague enough for you?
I do like the story. I like it a lot. I wish there were less plot conveniences (Oh no! The Shenso-Pao got stolen! Twice!), and I really wish the Miaka/Tamahome stupidity was toned way down, but overall there is a lot to like here.
