Human Club 9
Posted: November 10, 2011 Filed under: Human Club Leave a comment »Kazuko Teradate – Netcomics – 2008 – 17 volumes
Netcomics announced that they would be taking Kazuko Teradate’s work off their site today, so I thought I would squeeze one more volume of Human Club in for the road. Human Club is… okay. A little inconsistent, but a reasonably entertaining BL-tinged mystery/horror series. I should have read it before today, because I’ve always wondered if it developed an ongoing plot before the end of the series. Interestingly, Kazuko Teradate went on to draw Harlequin manga.
Anyway. This volume has two stories in it. The first is a plot where Shinobu gets kidnapped by a mysterious man that holds him hostage in a mansion for a mysterious future purpose. The man doesn’t take advantage of Shinobu sexually, which is unlike previous stories in the series. Turns out that he wants Shinobu for some sort of Nazi rally. Not even Neo-Nazis. These men are the real deal. For some reason, they want a young Asian man to torture at their rally. It goes even stranger places after that.
The second story is more interesting, and is about a character who is something of a second coming of Ludwig II finding Shinobu and Ron in the woods after a snowstorm outside the Swiss border. Shinobu and Ron have been in a car accident, and Ron has lost his memory. Shinobu is devastated. While they are waiting for Ron’s memory to return, Shinobu has to endure the creepy Ludwig character, who eventually conflates Shinobu with his dead sister. The two briefly have sex.
Human Club is a weird, weird series. These stories don’t really develop Shinobu or Ron’s character at all, and are mostly about the bizarre situations the side characters are in. Except these situations are so far out of left field I’m not sure what to make of them. Why am I reading a story where Shinobu is, for whatever reason, entrapping a Nazi? Why is Shinobu and Ron’s rescuer a crazy man who thinks he’s Ludwig II? They’re not really romances (though again, there’s definitely BL themes to the story, even when there’s no romance or attraction), nor are they really horror (there’s a few moments of terror, but they pass, and they aren’t for real since you know Ron will save the day). They’re… atmospheric, I suppose, except I’ve never read any other story that goes to such lengths simply to set the mood.
I have a feeling most readers probably wouldn’t have a taste for it. But it is unusual, and Teradate has really nice art. Plus, it’s cheap. Again, I’m a little sad I couldn’t finish it up.
Black Jack 14
Posted: November 10, 2011 Filed under: Black Jack Leave a comment »Osamu Tezuka – Vertical – 2011 – 17 volumes
I am behind on my Black Jack reviews! And my Tezuka reviews in general. I’ve got two more volumes of Black Jack to talk about, plus the new Book of Human Insects. And I should probably talk about the last of the bilingual volumes of Princess Knight before I get my Vertical volume one in the mail, so that I can pretend for just a little longer that the one I’m getting is one of the other two versions of Princess Knight and not the one I already own.
But admittedly, what can I say about Black Jack that I haven’t already? It’s pretty consistent all the way through. Then again, it’s consistently awesome, so every volume is worth reading.
Why is this volume worth your time? Well, Black Jack gets married, he saves Dr. Honma’s daughter from a really weird swelling disease, and he delivers a baby on a raft that has run aground on some rocks in the middle of a river during a flash flood. That story’s almost as great as the one where he operated on himself with dingoes bearing down on him. One of the stories ends with a bad man getting sucked into a jet engine.
Sometimes, Black Jack morality still bothers me, though. There’s a Kiriko story. At the beginning, Black Jack is brought in to operate on a patient who has been vegetative for 55 years. He says he can do it, but he only has a 3%-5% chance of success, and he would have to charge the hospital. The hospital can’t afford to pay him, and he says he doesn’t want to do a useless operation, so he leaves. On the way out, he runs into Dr. Kiriko, who has been called in for euthanasia on the same patient. The hospital can’t afford to keep the man alive anymore, since it costs them $6,000 a month and the man has no living relatives. For some reason, Black Jack decides to do an operation, one that lasts 18 hours and gives this man a 95% chance of dying, gratis when he learns that Kiriko has been called in. Maybe he wasn’t told the hospital couldn’t afford to keep the man alive anymore? Is euthanizing him via Dr. Kiriko less humane than shutting off his life support? And at the end of the story, the man wakes up for a second, cries, ages rapidly while asking why they even woke him up, and then dies.
Uh.
The last story in the volume is another interesting one, where Black Jack runs into another doctor just like himself. He champions the cause of a young girl who attempts suicide over her grandmother’s care, but finds out the treatment is being handled by a doctor who deals with the reality of their situation: the grandmother is terminal, and the family can’t afford any treatment. Black Jack is devastated to hear his own lines from another mouth. I was a little puzzled by this. He is frequently compassionate, of course, but just as often he does deny treatment to normal people, or charge an outrageous fee to people who can’t afford it, but agree to it anyway. Often the money has a moral price tag as well, but just as often it does not. So why is he so shocked that someone else is acting this way?
But the puzzles are part of the fun of Black Jack. Every single one of the stories is worth reading, and every volume of this series is an absolute pleasure when it arrives. It’s interesting, bizarre, and educational, and I can’t recommend it enough to those looking for an interesting, somewhat literary read.
Bakuman 6
Posted: November 6, 2011 Filed under: Bakuman 1 Comment »Tsugumi Ohba / Takeshi Obata – Viz – 2011 – 15+ volumes
This series is infuriating! It has a lot of good elements in every book. The plot is super-interesting, and the side characters can be really funny. My favorite in this volume is Hiramaru. Hiramaru is a fellow Jump artist. He hates being a manga artist. Sort of. He is constantly running away from his work, and is hounded twenty-four hours a day by his bitter, angry editor. The editor has every right to berate Hiramaru the way he does, because Hiramaru is like a big child. His editor also occasionally has elaborate schemes that get Hiramaru to keep working for 1-2 weeks at a time before the next scheme has to go into effect. At the beginning of the volume, he randomly shows up at Mashiro’s studio. He sticks around even when questioned about his intentions, then proceeds to tell a long story about how he peed blood and had to go to the doctor. Later, his editor tricks him into buying a Porsche and a fancy apartment so that he has to keep working in order to pay for the tax on his stuff.
And he’s only on a few pages. There’s also a widespread Jump artist boycott, and lots of info about what happens when an artist of a series falls very ill. There’s lots of stuff to like in this volume.
But the characters. The main characters. They’re awful. There’s lots of Miho and Mashiro scenes in this book, and I keep hoping that these two will grow up and reading their interactions won’t be painful. But there’s a good portion of the middle of the book dedicated to advancing their relationship. At least they’re going somewhere, but man… it’s hard to read that stuff. There’s also a Big Issue in this volume that Mashiro basically stands up for. I don’t agree with his viewpoint, and neither do any of the other characters, but for some reason, they let him have his way. They admire his guts. This is a very poor lesson, in my opinion.
It’s really hard to read a series where I hate the characters so much, but love everything else about it. This volume leaves off on an awful cliffhanger, and it makes me want to go to the next volume. I have a feeling all will not be well, but I’m looking forward to the next big thing from Muto Ashirogi.
I also freely admit to liking some of the weird meta-plots this has going on. When the Jump artists go on strike, it’s all newcomers on their first series that refuse to hand in new work. Part of me really wanted them to just say, “You know what? Oda-sensei agreed to join us, too” just to see how that would shake things up. Or failing that, have Ohba and Obata show up in their own series as a popular writer/artist, and join the boycott. That would blow my mind.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Itazura na Kiss 6
Posted: November 6, 2011 Filed under: Itazura na Kiss Leave a comment »Kaoru Tada – Digital Manga Publishing – 2011 – 23 volumes
this is an omnibus containing vols. 11-12
I don’t know what it is about this series. The beginning of this book was the ultimate in shoujo manga despair, making it look like the characters were moving in a rather disappointing direction. Part of me knew it was a shoujo manga, and that there was no way that Kotoko and Naoki wouldn’t wind up together. But part of me was worried. Maybe they stay as friends for awhile? There is some worth to that. Maybe the sudden death of a spouse takes place? I mean… it was going through with two different marriages, after all. And Naoki was still being a huge jerk.
And then Naoki pulled off one of the most un-romantic, asshole-ish love confessions I’ve ever seen. It was totally not satisfying, and he isn’t kinder to Kotoko at all. Seriously, what kind of shoujo manga does that?
But Kotoko was so happy. Mrs. Irie was thrilled. There was a cute wedding (which is on the cover of the book, so I feel like that’s not a spoiler), and a very funny honeymoon. And Naoki’s angry nature was turned against him when he was humiliated in grand style by Mrs. Irie. Sadly, Mrs. Irie’s role in the story becomes less and less now that the two are together, and the second half of the volume doesn’t have very much of her at all in it. It’s a shame, since she’s one of my favorites.
My favorite moment in the entire series happens in this volume. While on their honeymoon in Hawaii, Kotoko wanders off, and Naoki bursts into his parents’ room to have them help look for her. They aren’t supposed to be there, and were carefully spying on the two of them in disguise. The look of shock on the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Irie, Yuki, and Mr. Aihara is absolutely priceless.
The latter half of the volume is mostly about the married life of Naoki and Kotoko. Sadly, Naoki is no kinder to Kotoko once they’re married, and the first major storyline is one about how he stays after work and makes Kotoko worry without telling her a thing. Turns out he’s doing something very sweet, but a simple word to Kotoko probably would’ve gone a long way. What’s worse, the story demonizes Kotoko, making her out to be the jealous wife when Naoki won’t speak to her for weeks.
There’s also some nice stories about what Kotoko wants to do with her life. She’s coming up on her last year of college, and is trying to decide if she simply wants to be Naoki’s wife, or would rather work for a living. She isn’t sure what she wants to be, and gives teaching a try. This is, of course, meant with shock by every member of her family (during an argument, when Kotoko tells Naoki that she’s not stupid and knows the meaning of the word “teacher,” he simply tells her that she is stupid, which made me laugh really hard). A really cute storyline about Kotoko student teaching finishes up the volume. She tries her hardest, which is what makes her so easy to root for, and though she’s not perfect, it seems like teaching does suit her, to some degree. Naoki helps in his way behind the scenes, and he even dotes a little. It’s adorable.
I’m a little disappointed that Naoki hasn’t really softened up after marriage, though. He’s not even one of those prickly characters with secret soft moments. I would like him a lot more if he was. He’s still mean to Kotoko about 90% of the time, and he often hides his secret moments of weakness from her. But it’s hard not to like Kotoko. She really does try very hard to win Naoki over all the time, even after marriage, and watching her try her best at teaching, even after being told by everyone she knows, and the teachers at the school, that she’ll be horrible at it, is a lot of fun.
And yes. I am a big girly girl at heart, and I can’t help but like stories with weddings in them. I’m curious where else the story will go in the second half of the series, but I am looking forward to it. While I have appreciated all the character development and time invested in getting Naoki and Kotoko together, this series also excels at portraying moments in everyday life, and I think there will be a lot more of that to come.
It’s wonderful, wonderful shoujo manga, and I do hope enough people are reading it to make it worth DMP’s while to publish it.
Junk
Posted: November 6, 2011 Filed under: Junk | Tags: BL Leave a comment »Shushushu Sakurai – DramaQueen – 2011 – 1 volume
Yay, DramaQueen released a new volume! It can be hard to find, but it will always be available direct from DramaQueen, so pick it up there if you are at all inclined. I’m buying all their releases to support them, in hopes that they can start putting book out on a regular schedule again. It looks like they’ve been producing one every six months lately. Hopefully Mandayuu and Me will be coming soon.
Honestly, I’m not the biggest fan of BL action books, and I disliked Missing Road by the same author, so this was a 100% support purchase on my part. Happily, I liked this much better than Missing Road, but even still, it was not really my flavor.
Junk is a government agent tasked with catching a criminal named “X.” During a sting operation, of sorts, Junk’s team corners X, but his team is double-crossed by the government, who swoops in to snatch X out of his hands. Not agreeing with the shake-up, and somehow taken with X, Junk offers aid to X, and the two, along with Junk’s team, go into hiding from the government. Turns out X’s real name is Cross, and he’s on a mission to kill a man named “Nagil.” Nagil has many body doubles, but Cross only wants to kill the one man. Junk offers to help him, and suggests sticking with him is the safest. The government can’t use lethal force against Junk due to a top secret he carries with him.
And, of course, because this is a BL book, the two have sex. There’s some running away melodrama, death melodrama, a little bit of everything for those with a taste for darker stories.
I’m more interested in the romance aspect of BL books, and action-oriented stories like this tend to forego romance and character development in favor of a slightly more complex plot. But the romance aspects are still there, because it’s BL, so I have to sit through not-sexy-at-all sex scenes where two dudes simply have sex while the government hunts them down. Not my idea of fun, but I’m sure it appeals to many out there.
I did like this better than Missing Road. The plot of this one at least makes sense, and it’s easy to follow along with. Missing Road was… a bit more out there, and harder for me to comprehend.
Again, I would encourage you to buy this, since every purchase helps support DramaQueen and their future projects. It’s not a bad book, and it makes me happy to see anything from them. Mandayuu and Me, the next book they’re putting out, is also by Shushushu Sakurai, and it sounds a little more promising. It’s a romance, and one of the partners is a hentai artist. That can only go good places.
Dengeki Daisy 6
Posted: November 6, 2011 Filed under: Dengeki Daisy Leave a comment »Kyousuke Motomi – Viz – 2011 – 9+ volumes
It’s been a while! I still think this series is a bit too dramatic considering its strength is in its humor, but it’s so adorable I forgive it all the melodrama.
The first half deals with the mystery of Mr. Arai and what he’s up to. Teru gets kidnapped, Kurosaki rushes in for a rescue… we know how this goes. The Mr. Arai situation winds up being much different than it seems, and I liked that he turned out the way he did. And admittedly… though Teru gets kidnapped a lot, I loved that this storyline played on the fact that Teru and Kurosaki knew what each other would do, and thus pulled off the rescue and recovery that way.
And in case that wasn’t exciting enough for you, someone threatens to blow up a building, too.
After this, the story goes over more well-trodden ground when Kurosaki tries to figure out whether he wants to tell Teru that he’s Daisy, while at the same time Teru is trying to figure out whether she wants to tell Kurosaki she knows he’s Daisy. This is starting to drive me a little crazy, but to Motomi’s credit, it’s pretty fresh in context. I dread these chapters when they come, but at the same time, I love reading them.
And Kurosaki and Teru are still hilarious together. Again, that’s what makes reading this series so fun. There’s less and less of the two of them interacting with no innuendo, but every bald joke is precious, and they’re still stuffed in there intermittently. The last chapter in the book is pure funny, when a former enemy shows up to dote on a puppy.
I do love this series. It’s starting to slip into its own formulas after six volumes, but at the same time, I still adore the characters and relationships. I just got another volume in the mail, and I’m hoping something new happens. It looks like there might be a new bad guy coming soon, so I’m hoping that’s what I get to see next time.
Please Save My Earth 17
Posted: November 6, 2011 Filed under: Please Save My Earth Leave a comment »Saki Hiwatari – Viz – 2005 – 1 volume
The opening to this volume as a very cosmic circle of life talk given to Mokuren by her father. In response to whether or not she can hear plants dying as she picks them, we find out that the plants ask that of her. And that plants, trees, and animals all accept their death, knowing that they are going to be fed back into the earth, or nurturing humans to become a part of them, only to become dust later themselves and be reincarnated later. It was pretty heavy stuff to be telling a little girl, but I loved trying to wrap my brain around it.
More flashbacks, although it hasn’t quite made it to the big Shion scene yet. Mokuren, Shusuran, and Enju all have a point, though. Shion does obsess over Gyokuran quite a lot. That was one of the other things that bothered me about the big moment in Shion’s flashback. He kept asking Mokuren about Gokuren. It was… a little terrible. And yes, it makes Mokuren think things, apparently.
And wow, things are really getting intense. Not only do we have several situations where Mokuren can have everything she wants in Gyokuran, she continues to pine after Shion after he makes it more than obvious he wants nothing to do with her. This type of drama is just my style, and watching Mokuren trying to parse the situations, especially in regard to Gyokuran, is really interesting.
But really. Gyokuran is a little bit too persistent. It’s unfortunate.
At the end of the book, we get some really sweet Shion memories. It’s completely out of character for him, honestly, and I almost don’t believe they happened, but they’re sweet all the same.
Once again, I’m going to cut this off a little short. I really, really want to read the rest of this Mokuren flashback, and I can’t read the next volume until I finish writing. I need to know about the crime!
English, Please and Thank You!: Sakuran
Posted: November 4, 2011 Filed under: English, Please! 4 Comments »Moyoco Anno – Evening Magazine (Kodansha) – Seinen – 1 volume
This book was my next license request, but Vertical beat me to the punch by announcing it at the New York Comic Con a few weeks ago. That doesn’t mean I can’t still talk about it, though. So instead of another round of wishful thinking on my part, I’ll just show off why this was an awesome choice on Vertical’s part. Vertical is also releasing a new English edition of Adolf, by Osamu Tezuka, another series I’ve discussed at length before, so look forward to that as well.
Toradora 3
Posted: November 2, 2011 Filed under: Toradora! Leave a comment »Yuyuko Takemiya / Zekkyo – Seven Seas Entertainment – 2011 – 4+ volumes
I love this series so much! Part of me knows it’s more-or-less a standard romantic comedy, but the other part loves the characters to death. I love seeing Ryuuji and Taiga interact. It’s all sorts of funny, and while it does use some of the oldest plot devices in the book, it more than makes up for it with humor and charm.
I did like this volume a little less than the last two, but only because the spotlight was taken from Taiga and Ryuuji, and instead the story focused on Ami, the character introduced last volume. She should fit right in. She’s a model, and she pretends to be a ditzy princess in order to get everyone to like her. But underneath, she’s quite mean and vindictive. Taiga, Ryuuji, and Kitamura are the only ones that know, and Minori doesn’t fall for her act either. Taiga and Minori go out of their way to embarrass Ami in front of the class, in order to get her to shed her nice personality. Ami hits on Ryuuji, thinking that it will break Taiga’s heart to steal her boyfriend. Taiga gets mad, all right, but the two of them still aren’t going out, so her anger is… a mystery to Ryuuji and those around him. Taiga insists she’s not mad because she’s losing Ryuuji, though. There’s also a plot point about Ami trying to get away from a stalker. Ryuuji and Taiga help her with that too, of course.
Even with the story’s focus on Ami, there’s still plenty of adorable Taiga and Ryuuji moments, though. Again, the biggest draw for me is the way that Ryuuji compulsively dotes on Taiga. He loves to clean, and he can’t help but feed her breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. He also helps her out when she gets horribly depressed by one of Ami’s mean-spirited comments. He’s very good to her, though again, neither of them seem to be interested in a romantic relationship. They have crushes on each other’s friends. Still.
I love this series to pieces, and I look forward to every new volume. Unfortunately, it appears to come out at a rate of one volume a year in Japan. Volume five looks like it will come out soon in Japan, but after we get four and five in English… it’s going to be awhile before we see six. I suspect it will run through some more high school romance plot tropes before it starts to address the Ryuuji/Taiga situation, but I’ll be there every step of the way. Those characters are worth it, and I have a high tolerance and great love for really good romantic comedy manga.
This was a review copy provided by Seven Seas.
Grand Guignol Orchestra 5
Posted: November 2, 2011 Filed under: Grand Guignol Orchestra Leave a comment »Kaori Yuki – Viz – 2011 – 5 volumes
Uh… yeah. I do like Kaori Yuki, and this is probably my favorite of her series. But man… she really knows how to write a complicated and convoluted plot. And this was probably the simplest! It’s probably much better if you read all five volumes straight through. It has a lot of complicated things going on in its world that are difficult to remember from volume to volume, but not so many that it’s actually difficult to understand.
But here, we finally find out the truth of what happened when Lucille entered the chamber to become the new queen and Cordie wound up saddled with the responsibility instead. We find out Morion’s role in their childhood, and how all three were deceived. Well, two of them were deceived. Morion actually had a role in what happened. He loves Cordie though, which is the important part. There’s dolls, corpses, forged letters, evil servants, a chair made of heads, and a curse. All of it is good, and feels right at home in this story. It’s just as sad, dark, and gothic as you’d expect from Kaori Yuki, and this flashback was my favorite part of the series.
The actual resolution to the problems in the present was… problematic. I hated that Lucille forgave Eles her deception, and I hated that the solution was supposed to kill everyone, but didn’t. That’s unlike Yuki, actually. It was a little half-hearted. She mentions herself that a happy ending is unlike her, which makes me feel a little better. I wasn’t expecting something too far out in left field.
There’s an unrelated short story that fills the last third of the volume. Normally, I hate these space fillers, but this one was quite good. It was about a strange purgatory world full of students ranked by card number and suits (hearts, spades, et cetera). Among the students, there’s a White Card that is exempt from the laws and rules over all. He’s the only one that can heal wounds, and he’s generally worshiped by all the other students. The main character suddenly shows up, and is the only one that calls attention to all the strange customs, rituals, and laws in this world. He insists that he will save the White Card. The reality of the situation is a maddening puzzle throughout the whole thing, and I kept waiting for it to go all After School Nightmare on me. The truth of the thing is the usual slightly-too-complicated Kaori Yuki explanation, and I was disappointed by the ending, but it was still a really good story.
But yes. Grand Guignol Orchestra has been my favorite Yuki series so far. The art and atmosphere are first rate, and I loved the dark singing and infectious puppet zombies. Plus, Lucille was one of her best characters yet, and the series is worth reading for him alone. There’s lots of interesting details crammed into every chapter, and Yuki is quite good at fleshing out her own unique world here. I thought the ending was a little disappointing, but again, maybe I would have liked it better had I read all five volumes in a row. Yuki’s a great artist to check out, and this is definitely her best work in English.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
