Eroicaverse: Plus Ultra
Posted: May 26, 2012 Filed under: Eroicaverse Leave a comment »This is yet another article looking at From Eroica With Love supplemental material. For the index, go here.
Since I made it through all of the From Eroica With Love spinoffs and the series still hasn’t been license rescued, I’m going to move on to the artbooks and supplementary volumes. I could do this for years. Someone had better step in and stop me.
Plus Ultra is more or less the Yasuko Aoike artbook. As you will find out, there are dozens of others, but this is the coffee table book, the largest one with the most pages, covering the largest number of series and the longest time period. Two editions of this book exist. The earlier one features a cover image of a rainy BMW hood, and comes with a CD-ROM with the images on it. The one here is a later edition issued a little less than 10 years later, and as far as I know the only difference is the cover and CD-ROM.
Kamisama Kiss 9
Posted: May 24, 2012 Filed under: Kamisama Kiss Leave a comment »Julietta Suzuki – Viz – 2012 – 12+ volumes
Hooray! I’m always happy to read a new volume of Kamisama Kiss. It’s one of my current favorites, and features a mix of folkloric plot and great characters with an adorable romance that I am absolutely weak to.
The kamisama meeting wraps up in this volume, and the revival of Ashura-Oh is put off for a later date. At the beginning of this volume, Nanami (literally) stumbles across a tiny child tengu who is searching for a lost member of his village. He describes a late bloomer like himself that left to become someone great, a very heroic character. Neither I nor you should be surprised to find out that the one he’s looking for is Kurama, the rock star that attends Nanami’s school and periodically hits on her. This leads in to massive backstory about Kurama and the culture of the tengu village, which is currently in danger due to the failing health of their leader.
I was a bit disappointed by this, because the last volume teased another Tomoe story, and the beginning of this volume hinted that their romance might be going somewhere. Neither of these issues are touched on, really, though Tomoe is now 100% more adorable when it comes to guarding Nanami. But the tengu story is a good one. It feels strange to be getting so much depth for Kurama, who has been such a minor character up to now, but fleshing out characters like Kurama is what Suzuki does best. If this were any other shoujo manga, he would have stayed a boring, celebrity stereotype romantic rival that never did anything. But I love that about both Kamisama Kiss and Karakuri Odette. There’s a little something for all the characters here.
And again, I’m a sucker for folklore-themed stories like this. All the details of the tengu village, the child-rearing techniques, and their secession rituals were utterly fascinating. Usually I like a little variety among my demons, but there’s so much detail here that I had a good time reading it. Plus, it made me reach for the next volume of Natsume’s Book of Friends, which is never a bad thing.
So, yeah. It’s still a unique mixture of funny and sweet, with lots of details about Japanese mythology and a very interesting and in-depth cast of characters. It’s one of my three favorite shoujo manga right now, along with Skip Beat and Dengeki Daisy. Highly recommended!
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Natsume’s Book of Friends 10
Posted: May 24, 2012 Filed under: Natsume's Book of Friends Leave a comment »Yuki Midorikawa – Viz – 2012 – 13+ volumes
I had to follow up Kamisama Kiss with a volume of this. Both of them are quite good, though admittedly this one is the better series. I like Kamisama Kiss because I’m a romance junkie, but Natsume’s Book of Friends is an engaging story about lonely outsider Natsume connecting with those around him, both yokai and people, and making his world a bigger and better place. Sometimes there’s commentary about which of the two is actually more monstrous, but most of the time, it’s about Natsume slowly learning to rely on others and not be such an outsider. Seeing yokai caused him to be ostracized all his life, but he’s slowly embracing his gift, and making friends with both yokai and humans. It’s a sweet story, and I love the episodic nature.
This volume has two stories in it. The first is about an old classmate of Natsume’s who comes back and threatens to tell his new friends he’s an oddball unless he helps him with a problem. He wants to know if the girl he’s fallen in love with at the park is a yokai. Natsume thinks she’s human at first, but soon realizes she’s a hungry yokai that plans on eating his former classmate. The problem is, since he’s already pronounced judgement, his classmate calls him a liar, as he did in elementary school when Natsume could see yokai. Plus, the former classmate is in love. Natsume now has to think of a way to stop him from getting eaten by the yokai.
The second story is about a festival held between the god of the harvest and the god of pestilence every ten years in a particular region. But the god of the harvest hasn’t shown up, and the local yokai recruit Natsume to stand in and fool the god of pestilence and try to win the festival. If the god of pestilence wins, the region’s crops will fail for the next 10 years. The exorcist Natori is also hired to supervise the festival by interested parties, but his job is to exorcise the god of pestilence if the god of the harvest doesn’t win. He doesn’t want to exorcise a god, and tries his best to help Natsume win the festival so that the harvest god can prevail.
The art in this volume was quite good. I loved the costume designs on the gods of pestilence and harvest, and the front cover shows off Natsume in the harvest god costume. There were also some choice moments between Nyanko-sensei and Natsume, including one where Nyanko-sensei protects Natsume in the face of the god of pestilence, knowing that he won’t be able to win. Their friendship really is the best thing about this series, and Nyanko-sensei is my favorite character. And I love that the stories in this volume have soft edges. The first one starts out with the former classmate, who appears to be vicious and out to ruin Natsume’s new life, but by the end of the story the two have bonded, in a way. Same with the festival storyline. It turns dark for a second towards the end, but like many of the large-scale yokai stories, has a happy and very fanciful ending. In addition to capturing the spirit of friendship, Midorikawa is also great at capturing the spirit of the moment.
Basically, it’s still great. I’m not tired of the formula, and watching Natsume grow and change little by little is still a fun ride. I’m along for however many more volumes of these short stories Midorikawa sees fit to draw, but part of me is also curious about how this will end, too. Maybe it will just stop, and that would be fine. But in the meantime, I’m going to savor every single page.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Tyrant Falls in Love 6
Posted: May 24, 2012 Filed under: Tyrant Falls in Love | Tags: BL Leave a comment »Hinako Takanaga – DMP/June – 2012 – 8 volumes
So, yeah. Still one of my favorites. I literally can’t get enough of this series. Every new volume gets read immediately, and then I start over and read the whole series again. It just hits all the right buttons for me.
After the last volume, which was all about the physical relationship between Morinaga and Souichi, this one goes back to their living arrangement and romantic life. We also get to meet Souichii’s father, who proves that being a crazy scientist is in the Tatsumi genes. He’s really awesome, but his arrival means that Morinaga has to deal with the possibility that the Tatsumi house will be rebuilt and they will no longer be living together. And also, that Souichi may not care.
There’s lots of Morinaga getting depressed, since Souichi handles his return to Japan badly and Morinaga realizes that Souichi wasn’t looking forward to their reunion as much as he was. Plus, there’s the housing situation, and Morinaga is unsure about where Souichi considers his home and how he feels about living together. But there’s lots of comedy, too. With the elder Tatsumi’s return to Japan, Tomoe returns home, and he brings Kurokawa with him. And Kurokawa doesn’t feel safe around Souichi unless Isogai is with him, so there’s the delightful return of Isogai’s torment. There’s the problem of sleeping arrangements, jealousy, anger, and everything else that goes with having Tomoe, Kurokawa, Souichi, Morinaga, and Isogai under the same roof. The humor is one of the best things about this series, and I’m so happy we still get scenes like that.
There’s plenty of emotional stuff, too, since it’s still a series about the difficult relationship between Souichi and Morinaga. Morinaga tries to get Souichi to see his feelings throughout the volume, and we get lots of cute little half-admissions from Souichi. I don’t know if that’s any sort of progress, but I enjoyed them all the same. The end of the volume was another crowd pleaser, if you can consider me the crowd. I loved it.
I’m really excited, since the next two volumes make up the final storyline of the series. I can’t wait to read it! I almost want to wait and read both at once, but volume 8 isn’t scheduled until December, and I don’t think I can’t wait that long. It’s good. It’s really good. The right mix of romance, humor, characters with great personality, and… you know. Everything. It’s exactly what I want, and every volume makes me so happy.
Doukyusei 1
Posted: May 24, 2012 Filed under: Doukyusei | Tags: BL Leave a comment »Asumiko Nakamura – JManga – 2012 – 3 volumes
This was so good! I hope I’m right with the volume count. Classmate is only one volume, but it looks like there are two followup volumes called Sotsugyousei, and a spin-off volume about the teacher in this one. I want to read them all, along with anything else written by this author.
It reminded me a lot of the 2-volume Seven Days series, which was a very delicate story about two classmates falling in love almost on a bet. That makes it sound like it could be a comedy with boisterous characters, but that it’s completely serious is one of the best things about it. It explores the feelings of both boys, and takes its time to show them falling in love, rather than being a drama about one in love with the other, and will they/won’t they. Doukyusei is the same thing. Hikaru and Rihito fall in love very naturally in the first chapter, and the rest of the chapters are short stories about getting to know one another, pushing boundaries, finding limits, et cetera. There’s not a whole lot of action, but when character-centric stories like this get it right, it can be one of my absolute favorite things. And Doukyusei is very good.
The whole thing is rather innocent. It starts when Hikaru notices Rihito isn’t actually singing during music class, then catches him practicing diligently afterward. His effort makes Hikaru offer to give him music lessons, so the two meet after school until the choir concert. During the concert, Hikaru begins to get jealous and suspect that Rihito is only putting forth the effort for the music teacher. That’s when he realizes he’s fallen in love with Rihito. Rihito, meek and quiet, goes along with it, and the two begin dating.
Most of the stories are about quiet moments between them. Chances stolen at school, the two agonizing about their futures, basically just being two high school students in love. There’s a short chapter about the music teacher, who is also in love with Rihito (not being a fan of teacher/student relationships, I hate that this is such a staple of BL it even shows up in a story like this), but the teacher only serves to give Hikaru something to get worked up about. There are chapters about both of them having moments of jealousy, but the relationship is never in any danger.
It’s mostly sweet and thoughtful, but it is written so well that I’m desperate for more. The only implication that there might be more is that the physical side of their relationship isn’t really explored, though Hikaru hints in one story that he would like it to. But even if it never gets there, I really could go for three more volumes of this. If you like your BL super-romantic and character-centric, you’ll go nuts for this. It’s quite good, and I’m sad that we won’t see a print edition.
Fist of the North Star 2
Posted: May 24, 2012 Filed under: Fist of the North Star Leave a comment »Buronson / Tetsuo Hara – Gutsoon – 2003 – 27 volumes
So manly! I don’t have a lot to say about these volumes, unfortunately, because there’s only so much you can comment on when Kenshiro is simply fighting. You either like it or you don’t. But it is extreme. Very extreme. And that’s one of the things I look for in my action comics. The straighter the face, the better.
Strangely, what appears to be one of the major villains as of volume one, Kenshiro’s brother, is out of the picture after the first chapter here. But it is suitably sad and epic, so you don’t have to worry. There’s also a little more about Yuria, the woman they both loved. There are some manly tears involved, and scenes where a hand gets blown up when a fist punches through it. In case you’d forgotten what you came here for, at the beginning of the next chapter, Kenshiro hits the pressure points of a bully in order to rob him of his extraordinary bullying strength, leaving him with enough strength to do “honest work.”
Then Kenshiro goes to a place called God Land and beats up a bunch of dudes that are torturing children. That’s… literally what happens in the second half of this volume. I can’t summarize it any better than that. But the fights in God Land should be what you came here for. I am well satisfied. There are boomerangs, knives, and guerrillas involved. That’s all you need to know.
Well, that and the fact that the chapters are called things like “The Tears That Quench Ambition.”
I love you, Fist of the North Star.
Devil and Her Love Song 1
Posted: May 17, 2012 Filed under: Devil and Her Love Song Leave a comment »Miyoshi Tomori – Viz – 2012 – 13 volumes
This one really took me by surprise. I passed over it when it was solicited, because the summary makes it sound like just another shoujo romance about a stuck-up girl finding friends and love. But A Devil and Her Love Song is a bit different. Not extraordinary, but I really, really enjoyed the first volume.
The thing that sets it apart is that the main character, Maria, really isn’t stuck-up. She just comes across that way. She’s good at observing people and nailing down personality traits, both good and bad. But she herself isn’t very good at talking and communicating with others. She’s very blunt, actually, and will often contradict people by pointing out that they are merely pretending to be nice to her face, when in fact their personalities are completely different. The fact that she’s tall, pretty, and constantly has a sneer on her face also doesn’t help.
It’s hard to make a character like that not seem mean, but Tomori does a good job at portraying Maria in this first volume. Maria is starting at a new school, and promises herself she’s going to try hard to make friends. But she starts her time off by announcing why she was expelled from her old school when she notices her classmates gossiping behind her back, then tells a boy that tries to be friendly that he shouldn’t try so hard to be friendly to everybody. She’s not wrong about any of it, and the latter example happens throughout the volume. It doesn’t make her any friends. But her narration throughout these scenes is about how she’s trying to change. She takes advice about putting a “lovely spin” on her words, basically lying to people’s faces about what she thinks, but the lovely spin makes her look really scary. She also goes through the motions when it comes to bullying, constantly walking into setups, sure that if she has faith that people really want to be her friend, she will be rewarded. It’s very bittersweet, and Maria is a great character to root for.
She has a beautiful singing voice too, and her rendition of Amazing Grace catches the attention of the class outcast, who doesn’t talk to anyone but the boy that tries to be friends with everyone. There’s a romance between the two by the end of the volume, just a little, but it so far is really sweet and awkward. I can’t wait to read more.
Basically, this takes the mean girl stereotype and uses it in a different way. It’s interesting to be in the head of a “mean girl” that isn’t really mean, and also seeing her call out all her other classmates on their individual personality flaws and things they try to hide from others. Her relationships with everyone in class seem almost doomed as of volume one, and it would be a shame if her very unique personality softened into something more normal by the end of the series, so I’m very curious to see where this goes. But as of volume one, it’s definitely worth picking up for any fan of shoujo romance.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Slam Dunk 18
Posted: May 17, 2012 Filed under: Slam Dunk Leave a comment »Takehiko Inoue – Viz – 2011 – 31 volumes
My reviews of this series are always really short, because I really am at a loss as to what to say every time. There’s only so many times I can reiterate that this is exciting even though it’s a basketball manga. That I love it even though I have no interest in the sport. That the action is really gripping and the characters entertaining. That it’s easy to root for Sakuragi and Shohoku. It’s just a great read. Not for everyone, but fantastic all the same.
The game between Shohoku and Ryonan is on in this volume. I predicted this would last for quite some time, because there is only one more game after this in the tournament, and we have more than ten volumes left. This covered more ground than I thought, and ends at the first quarter break.
Two things happen here. One is that Gori is thrown off his game, and it takes him a minute to get his head back in things. Shohoku gives up a lot of points during this time, and the teamwork suffers. Inoue depicts this mental struggle well, and it was one of the best portrayals of random interrupting thoughts I’ve ever seen in a comic. It doesn’t sound like much, but it happens to all of us, and this is a great visual representation of it.
The second is that Sakuragi is at war with the man he is guarding. It becomes clear that Ryonan has pegged Sakuragi as a weakness, and all the points are being scored by that player breaking through Sakuragi’s guard and humiliating him. This struggle was the more interesting to me, especially in the case of a hothead like Sakuragi. He’s learned a lot of control, temper-wise, but it’s still hard work for him.
One last thing I liked about this volume was all the trash talk on court. It was perfect. Not quite as hilarious as The Bus Driver from an earlier volume, but it was still fairly spot-on as far as trash talking goes, and of course a bunch of manly guys like the players of Shohoku and Ryonan would engage in it relentlessly, and in each other’s faces.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Thieves in Manga
Posted: May 12, 2012 Filed under: Miscellaney 2 Comments »Japan loves heroic thieves. This is one of the few cases I prefer the Japanese term, “kaitou,” as the English term “phantom thief” is a bit of a misnomer. I’m not actually certain what the genre encompasses in Japan, but for the purposes of this article, I’m going to go ahead and use the term “kaitou” to refer to any thief portrayed heroically.
Lupin III is the earliest example I’ve seen of this character type, and Lupin III is, interestingly, massively western-influenced. Monkey Punch’s style is informed heavily by the work of Sergio Aragones, a Spanish artist who gained popularity in the pages of Mad Magazine. The character of Lupin, however, is the grandson of the French thief Arsene Lupin, from the pages of a French novel series by Maurice Leblanc. The western roots are a little strange in this case because this type of character seems to come up a lot in manga, and nowhere else that I’ve read. There are examples, of course (Robin Hood, or maybe Han Solo at a stretch) but it seems like Japan loves this character a whole lot more than the rest of the world.
The kaitou is interesting to me as an example of a heroic villain, or maybe rooting for the underdog. In the case of Lupin, he’s not terribly heroic. He acts on whims, does as he pleases, and is constantly jumping in bed with women. He outwits police and criminals alike. He’s charming and goofy, which is why he’s fun to read about, but the key is that he’s not greedy. That’s true of all these characters. They aren’t actually thieves who steal for profit. And that’s the catch in manga, where a shoujo or shounen heroine would never be allowed to steal if it was actually for nefarious intent. Lupin is different than the others, but you’ll notice that many of the kaitou I list below only steal things if they are haunted or demonically possessed.
In particular though, I’m fond of the “gentlemen thief” archetype. I’ve listed all the kaitou I could think of here, but really, my heart belongs to the flashy gentlemen like Noir from Gorgeous Carat and Eroica in From Eroica With Love. And Lupin, in his way. There’s a bit more trickery in those types of stories, so they tend to lend themselves well to both good action and excellent humor. Plus, with an emphasis on the “gentlemen,” those usually have a touch of romance to them without actually being a love story. Except for Lupin III, which is totally about sweeping women off their feet.
Bakuman 10
Posted: May 10, 2012 Filed under: Bakuman Leave a comment »Tsugumi Ohba / Takeshi Obata – Viz – 2012 – 20 volumes
This is quite a talky manga, but man, I can’t help but get completely drawn in.
So Shujin and Saiko have to come up with a new series for Jump in the next six months, or they’ll never work for Shueisha again. They have three serialization meetings. Basically, they have to pull off something that most artists get routinely rejected for again and again. The Muto Ashirogi duo are good, but they’ve had their share of rejections, and the pressure is on.
This volume cycles through all three serialization meetings. Hattori coaches Miura from the sidelines, and Muto Ashirogi is instructed to first try an improved version of their first short story success, “The World is All About Money and Power,” then a battle-fantasy-humor manga, then… something else. I really couldn’t see where Hattori was going with all this, so I was flying through the volume waiting for the method to his madness. There’s something to it all, and it’s a very clever way to show two very talented creators (who know they’re talented) what their shortcomings are, and how to improve them.
Their successful formula at the end… I won’t say anything, lest I spoil it, but I loved what Hattori came up with for their final serialization attempt, and I liked the direction Akito went with it. The one thing that bothered me was that Hattori was praised for coming up with a new “genre,” but as the other characters point out… it’s something that you can find in a handful of series already. Otter No. 11 is the example within the series, but I would say Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is a great real-life example. It’s strange they didn’t raise the specter of Jotaro Kujo in their deliberations.
The other thing that bugged me was the final serialization meeting. The condition for Muto Ashirogi’s continued employment at Shueisha was that they had to create a series that would be better than both of Eiji Nizuma’s current projects. There was… some disagreement at the meeting. A series that everyone at the meeting admits was far better than most Jump submissions, that they would have taken unconditionally any other time, was voted on and debated quite heavily because the editors weren’t sure if it would perform better than Nizuma’s series. A series that they all felt would be a sure hit was considered for rejection. In a magazine as super-commercial as Jump, this struck me as hilariously unlikely.
Basically, just more of the same thing, but I thought this volume was particularly good since Shujin and Saiko got to work on so many series to find what fit them best. And hearing the pros and cons of each debated was also pretty fascinating. Then again, I am a huge geek that has a blog with 3,000 reviews on it. I live for this stuff. I can easily imagine that this might not do it for a lot of people who normally enjoy Shounen Jump series. But if you’re as big a nerd as I am, it is utterly fascinating, even still.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
