Breaking Down Banana Fish, vols 7-8

We (meaning me, Melinda Beasi, Michelle Smith, Eva Volin, Khursten Santos, and Robin Brenner) had another Banana Fish roundtable over at the Manga Bookshelf, this time covering volumes 7-8. I do enjoy these, they’re a lot of fun to participate in. Please check it out over at the Manga Bookshelf.

These volumes covered a lot of the good Ash/Eiji parts, but the next set will get back into the action, if I’m not mistaken. I am looking forward to it!

Manga Village Picks 9/9/2010

And here’s another week’s worth of our choices for new manga releases over at the Manga Village.

I do hope that Udon finds some way to continue with their children’s series, because they really were wonderful. I also failed to mention my love for Tegami Bachi, which I just brushed up on. It’s a pretty stylish series, if a little melodramatic.

Manga Village Picks 8/25/2010

I always forget to link these over here, but I offered up my choices for new manga the week of 8/25 over at the Manga Village.

That was actually the first week in a long time I rushed out to a comic store to pick up a volume of manga. A Drunken Dream and Other Stories just has that power, you know?

Manga Village New Releases 8/4/10

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.

Manga Village New Releases 7/28/2010

The crew over at Manga Village shares weekly picks from among the new releases, and this week is no exception. Check it out over at Manga Village.

A big week, with lots of great stuff coming out. Several of my favorite series have new volumes, and usually that would mean a hard choice. But not this week. This week one book stands above the others. A world apart, you might say. A shining star, perhaps the color of platinum.

I could do this all night. I haven’t even resorted to song lyrics yet.

Manga Village New Releases 7/14/2010

As a head’s up, I contributed choices to the weekly new release recommendation list over at Manga Village. This is a link to last week’s releases that I’d failed to post this week, but the column normally goes up on Saturdays. Check this one out over there.

Again, in the spirit of recognizing publishers before it’s too late, Netcomics does good work. I notice they’ve been ailing lately, and I sincerely hope that it’s more of a slump than the end times. Their batch of BL books at the end of last year was amazing and a good sign things are okay, but they’ve published consistently good manhwa for years now. Let Dai, Click, Dokebi Bride… they’ve got a ton of classics, and I still manage to find new and awesome things in their back catalog that I missed the first time. Even their digital-only books are worth reading for kicks.

Breaking Down Banana Fish Roundtable, vol 5-6

Once again, Melinda Beasi has gotten a group of female manga bloggers together to discuss the story development in Banana Fish. Once again, I had a lot of fun this time around, and we changed the format a bit to make the discussion flow a little better too, something that I think worked out really well.

You can read it over at the Manga Bookshelf. One of my favorite parts, the big tuxedo melee, is included in these volumes, and it was really fun to take another look at that.

Manga Recon Farewell Roundtable

After ten years, the website Popcultureshock is closing its doors, and Manga Recon is shutting down with it. The staff discuss their thoughts and memories in this roundtable, which went up last week and you can read here.

I will miss it. It was the most fun site I’ve written for, and while I’m fond of rambling on my blog here, it’s not good for me since I don’t set any limitations on myself or even proofread. I try harder for other sites. Manga Recon was a fun site with a lot of great writers and great features, and I’ll miss it quite a bit.

Breaking Down Banana Fish, volumes 3-4

We convened once again to discuss the minutiae of Banana Fish, and the discussion was a lot of fun.  You can read the article over at the Manga Bookshelf.

I don’t have a lot to add here, other than I love looking at stories from the perspective of self-insertion and I also hadn’t heard of the Bechdel test before this discussion. Funny, since that came up at the same time I was reading Fun Home. I suspect much of what I read does not pass the Bechdel Test.

Breaking Down Banana Fish, Vols 1-2

Recently, Melinda Beasi has gotten a group of manga bloggers together for an indepth talk about Banana Fish, and I was quite happy to be invited to the discussion.  This month, we looked at the first two volumes of the series.  I invite you to check out the discussion over at The Manga Bookshelf.

I am shy, and I’ve never done anything like this before, so my contribution was minimal.  But there are a lot of interesting topics concerning the first two volumes and how the series fits into shoujo/BL genres, and also how things like homosexuality are portrayed in the relatively realistic setting of this series.