Slightly Biased Manga

like any good manga fan, even with all the licenses flooding the market, I want more, more, MORE. there are several that have been picked up that I thought would never see the light of day for one reason or another (Phoenix, Full Moon wo Sagashite, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Hikaru no Go), and there’s a bunch of series that suddenly appeared in English that I had never heard of before and wound up really liking (Paradise Kiss, Othello). and then there’s my wish list. it’s gone through several changes over the years, with some series falling out of favor, while most got licensed. at this point, most of the series on here aren’t good candidates for licenses, but a girl can always hope, right? basically this is just some summaries for the series and why I like them… and also what I think the odds of them getting licensed are.

1. Hameln no Violin Hiki (The Violinist of Hameln) - Michiaki Watanabe 37 volumes
this has been at the top of my list pretty much since I started collecting manga. I stumbled across the series in 1998 while I was trying to look for winamp skins, and I instantly fell in love with the premise, the characters, and the whole thing. at first, I only read character profiles and sketchy volume outlines, then I was reading summaries from the monthly chapters in GanGan, and when the series finished in 2001, I read text translations of what was available (probably up to volume 24 at this point), and I’ve also read scanslations up to volume 6 or so. the gist is that the main character, Hamel, along with his traveling companions Oboe, Flute, Trombone, and Raiel, are on a quest to the northern capital Hameln to stop the great demon lord Chestra and his reign of terror. However, it goes off in so many directions, it involves so many characters with their own beautiful stories, there are so many different subplots and events that happen along the way… without giving out specifics of the plot, it doesn’t sound too original, but by doing absolutely everything well, it manages to be the best series I’ve ever and/or never read. Hamel himself is a riot as well as being the most complicated character in the series. he has the power to play his violin (which is the size of a double bass) and entrance the listener, putting them under his power. he doesn’t often do this to monsters… rather, he does it to hapless people he runs across, usually cheating them out of food or money. to fight monsters, he puts Flute under his spell and makes her battle the monsters so he doesn’t have to do it. Hamel’s a very funny guy. however, when things start to get serious, he’s a good fighter… and he has a physical transformation he goes through that’s a source of much conflict in the series. it’s so good. I really, really wish someone would pick it up and translate it, but I think the time for that has passed. oh, and if you’ve seen that horrible anime, don’t judge by that, because it really does a great injustice to the series. I’m afraid the window of opportunity for licensing the series has passed since it’s been over for quite some time, and there’s not any huge fanbase supporting it and clamoring for its appearance in America… at this point, I’m not too hopeful, but again, it’s been at the top of my list for years, and I do want to see an English language version more than anything else in the world.

2. Gokinjo Monogatari (Neighborhood Story) - Ai Yazawa 7 volumes
of all the series on the page, this is the one most likely to get picked up. Ai Yazawa’s hot stuff now, and if Nana takes off and becomes the legend here that it did in Japan, hopefully that will get someone moving on Parakiss’s prequel. I’ve only ever read volume/chapter summaries of parts of this along with character profiles, but I know the general idea of what’s going on, and I know it’s sort of similar to Paradise Kiss, just maybe a bit more highschooly-shoujoy. also, this is probably the one series here that most people are familiar with, so I’m not going to spend too much time on it. basically it follows Mikako Sakurada and some other students who attend the Yazawa Gakuen Arts Academy. Mikako and her friends are all fashion students, and on top of their school assignments and woes (which are awesome, seeing as how they’re fashion assignments at an art school), there’s romance-triangle stuff going on with all the characters. and let’s not start talking about Nice Body-ko. Ai Yazawa has a knack for making her characters more believably passionate about things than any other person I’ve read, and you really feel for them when they’re taking all the steps in whatever path they’re going down. in Nana, I don’t even like nice Nana all that much, but I still root for her every step of the way, hope she meets her goals, and cry when she gets her heart broken. Yazawa’s quite the gifted storyteller, and I’m really anticipating this manga.

3. Tokumu Sentai Shinesman - Kaim Tachibana 9 volumes
this is probably the one I know the least about actually, and I know of it only by virtue of the hilarious OVA series. but after seeing that and knowing there’s a manga version, and after eating up CLAMP’s Duklyon manga, I know this is bound to be an awesome series. the main character, Matsumoto, has just started his job at the Right Company as a Salaryman. before long, he is recruited onto the Shinesman project and becomes Shinesman Red. Shinesman Red fights alongside his crewmembers Shinesman Sepia, Shinesman Salmon Pink, Shinesman Gray, and Shinesman Moss Green. the foes they fight are rather afraid of damaging the Earth in some huge all-out war, so they are slowly taking the planet down from the inside. that is, they work as salarymen too and are trying to take over the economy. it takes a crack at both the sentai genre and office politics/goings-on, and the anime was hilarious. It may suffer from being a bit old (the artwork looks a bit 80s despite having been written in the mid-90s), and it probably doesn’t have much of a target audience here, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing for it that much harder.

4. Sakuran - Moyoco Anno 1 volume
I have to tell you, even though it is only one volume, and even though the translation I read was somewhat incoherent, Sakuran trumps almost every other manga series I’ve yet run across. The story is of a young girl forced to become an Oiran, a sort of proto-Geisha, by being enslaved as a child in Yoshiwara, a brothel of sorts in Edo. It starts off as the Tayu, or head Oiran (I may have reversed the two terms, I thought Oiran were the head Tayu, but an article I’m currently looking at suggests otherwise) is murdered in Yoshiwara and the main character, a grown woman, is promoted to the position against her will. Then the rest of the volume is a flashback to her childhood as she grows up in Yoshiwara against her will, trying to escape several times and finding she was unable to each time. It is an extremely powerful and passionate story which has some of the most beautiful art I have ever seen. Not even Sugar Sugar Rune can hold a candle to Sakuran, and the single Japanese volume preserves all the color pages and is done in a weirdly gorgeous edition. The story is unfinished, and it looks unlikely that Anno will continue it, but the single volume is definitely worth reading, and I ache for a licensed version.

5. Versailles no Bara - Ryoko Ikeda 10 volumes
of all the manga here, this is probably the most notable and/or famous. I’m sort of surprised it doesn’t have more of a following than it does. from what I’ve read (it gets mentioned a lot of places when talking about significant shoujo works, and Animerica Extra would bring it up every now and again), it seems like a huge inspiration for Utena and the “girl power” genre in general. Oscar was raised a man by her father and becomes a bodyguard for Marie Antoinette in the years before the French Revolution. it is very much like Utena in that Oscar is the head of the palace guards and a figure admired for being a woman in a man’s role and being the best at what she does. she struggles to maintain this image of herself, but she also has a feminine side that also provides inner conflict. add to that the fact that she lives a life of luxury inside Versailles Palace while the rest of France is in a state of desperate poverty, and you have yourself the workings of one of the first historical fiction manga. the main problem with publishing it is probably that it’s old (it started running in 1972). The artwork, while lovely, is extremely dated and… well, old-looking. I haven’t read or seen any of it yet, but I’d probably venture a guess that some of the themes may be a bit dated at this point too. all the same, I’d love to see it in English. not only is it a great story, it’s also a rather important benchmark in manga history