Slightly Biased Manga

There is definitely more plot in this volume than usual, mostly due to Masumi’s move to New York City and totally being uprooted from everything she’s known.  She met friendly faces when she got to Russia, if I remember right, but her reception in New York is much colder.  It’s nicely done, because this of course is played for MAXIMUM DRAMA.

I’m never sure of Masumi’s romantic interests.  I was all ready to pair her up with Aoi, and I don’t much like Leonard, but I can’t tell if things are moving more towards them just being dance partners or what.  Maybe both.  It’s hard to tell in this series, which is part of what I love about it.

It enters a new era, where modern dance is discussed and performed.  I was missing the well-coreographed dance sequences from the previous competition volumes, but there were still a handful of dancing sequences while the characters explained modern dance to Masumi.  Masumi can’t quite wrap her brain around it, and the American coreographer is of course harsh with her.  Drama drama drama, as you can imagine, and only in ways that Swan can pull it off.  What would a volume be without at least one character bursting into tears at least once?

I love it.  The art is still gorgeous, the characters are still passionate, and this series is just fantastic.

Sorry I haven’t posted in awhile. Sometimes you have to go to Michigan for several days and come back with festering spider bites all over your hand.

I liked this volume a lot, actually. It’s hard for me to tell whether or not I appreciate these stories because they’re good stories, or because they’re triggering nostalgia for me. Maybe a little of both, but they’re definitely the type of quiet stories that the series is good for.

In the first story, Keiichi et al have to exorcise a memory spirit of some kind from a dilapidated hotel that the Motorcycle Club is having a camp in. The setup is basically that the spirit wants him to fulfill a promise on behalf of his grandfather, who he looks just like. Mixed into the bargain is a super-rare motorcycle his grandfather left behind. It’s just sort of a nice story with not too much rocking the boat. I really liked it.

There’s a beach story that attempts to bring Belldandy and Keiichi closer together, with Urd and Skuld interfering. I’m not sorry to see this type of story go in later volumes in favor of Skuld and Urd antagonizing themselves and Peorth, but this one’s okay as far as it goes.

In the aftermath of that story, it appears that Skuld has some sort of crush on Keiichi. This one always struck me as weird, but I also liked it since it’s sorta rare that Skuld acts human, especially in these older stories. I also just like the end of this story, plus it’s one of the few stories with continuity, so hooray for that.

There are color pages and 4-panel comics too, which are still awesome. It’s a shame they don’t appear more frequently in the later volumes, but it does give me a reason to reread these older volumes.

I… dont’ know.  The master of Sanctuary was revealed in this volume.  It… was supposed to be a surprise.  I don’t know if I’m supposed to know who it is and just forgot, or it’s just Saint Seiya’s way to do everything as loud and in your face as possible.  Probably the latter, though everyone else seemed to know who he was.

The resurrections in this series just kills me every time.  There’s lots of that in this volume, and I laughed every time someone who was supposed to be dead came back.  I love this series for killing its characters off, and I love it even more for feeling like there’s no reason in the world why they shouldn’t be able to come back to life when its most convenient.

But yes.  Lots of fighting.  A few things are explained, but not much.  Mostly it’s just fighting.  Over-the-top, in-your-face, invented-on-the-spot fighting.  It… has limited appeal, but I love it well enough to space the volume out and keep reading.

Following up on the heels of Variante, a series I don’t like very much and isn’t terribly good, here’s a series which certainly fails all quality tests, but I have an inordinate fondness for.

Certainly it tries to get me to hate it.  It’s got plenty of ditzy girls who throw their large breasts around and have no problem using their bodies to get what they want.  They also congregate around the main character, making some sort of… harem.  The magical elements are played waaaay down, you have to look really hard to find them.

I hate myself a lot for it, but I can’t help but like the main plot.  The main character, though very shallow, is a sweet guy, and there are nice scenes that play out while the girls are shoving their breasts everywhere.  For example, I was immediately enamored with this volume when the first chapter was a story about one of the characters building a magical piano so that demons could hear human music.  The music that’s played by a little girl who needed the piano attracts little demons from all over who have come to hear her beautiful playing.  I’m just a sucker for that.

It doesn’t help the main character’s such a nice guy.  He spends a lot of time worrying about other people and doing little things to help them, which I can’t help but like.  He also has several stupid awkward scenes with his teacher which I should hate every time, but somehow play out in my mind as really cute coming-of-age stuff.  I don’t know how I allow it this, but I do.

I don’t know.  I still want more magic, and I may get some next volume, since it seems like we may see Haruhiko trying to help a girl who can’t help her split personality.  But yeah.  I enjoy this series more than I’m ever going to admit, and I would be destroyed if it ever stopped coming out.  Hopefully the T&A will keep it afloat so that I get whatever bizarre enjoyment I can from its other… charms.

Okay, things get much better in this volume.  We finally have plot, which seems like it will play out through this volume and wrap up next volume.

There’s less emphasis on fighting this time, mostly because we’re starting to figure out why the chimeras exist.  Because the main female character and the main male character are separated throughout the volume, and because both have now acquired this knowledge, they both sort of lose their will.  Much is made of this, but at this point, I’m more interested in the promise of the two of them escaping, which is fine by me.

What else… I approve of the use of a parallel character that mirrors the main character’s situation.  She sort of serves as a reminder as to what exactly will happen when the main character stops being useful.  It’s pretty horrible.

I still don’t think the series is that good, or very entertaining, but at least I like it a lot better now.

The Right Stuf just had a Dr Master sale recently, so I got the next five volumes of this series. I really should have ordered them from the Dr Master site (or whatever the shop linked from there is) some time ago, but I don’t want to tire myself out on this too quickly. I want to savor it.

I wouldn’t have believed it, but most of this entire volume is the conclusion of the contest between Jan and the Taoist.  I mean, last volume they were both done cooking, so all we’re getting here is the spectacle of the taste test.  I loved it.  Both of the characters fought dirty, but the Taoist had a particularly twisted plan for his meal, and also tried to play a dirty trick on Jan when he nearly killed the judges by having them follow his durian meal by drinking wine.

Let me tell you, I have a hard time believing ANYTHING can get rid of the smell of durian.  I don’t care what Iron Wok Jan says.  It seems I went on at length about this the last time I spoke of this series.  That’s cool, it bears repeating.

The last two chapters deal with a battle between Jan and an amateur chef who has hired Jan, Kiriko, and company to his house.  He hires them to cook a Gobancho meal, but of course he just wants to challenge Jan.  You can imagine how that goes.  I think the story breaks off pretty cleanly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if its continued next volume with Kiriko teaching them a lesson.

The formula here is pretty basic, but I can forgive the series this based on the fact that Jan is an awesome character.  I just found out that this is a Shonen Champion series, and based on the awesomeness of… I don’t know, Apocalypse Zero, I would hazard a guess that all Shonen Champion series are way over the top.  That’s fine with me, it just reinforces my fondness for anything Akita Shoten publishes.

I was reading a little bit about the third volume of this series coming out, and I realized I hadn’t read the second volume.  Somehow, this escaped my “to be read” pile and wound up on an open windowsill getting rained on.  Luckily none of the pages were damaged or moldy, just a little dusty from the soot blowing in.

I like this more and more every time I read a chapter.  I can’t help but compare it to One Piece since it’s sort of about these weird underdog/very famous guild of great eccentric magic users, and it’s drawn in exactly the same style.  This series worries me only because the author admits to not having a direction, whereas One Piece has the most sprawling, cohesive manga plot EVER.  It’s probably not fair to compare it to One Piece though, because OP is… well, one of the best series out there, plus the two are very different aside from their visual style and quirky characters.  This is still great, probably one of the best action series I’m reading right now, and I like it a lot without the OP connection.

Lucy and Natsu head out to take a job worth two million… jewels, or whatever their currency is there.  The catch is that they have to break into the heavily guarded mansion of a local mayor figure and destroy a book in his library.  The mansion is guarded by… maids, bodyguards from a rival guild, and the mayor himself.  There’s lots of funny stuff going on, including an attempt by Lucy to be hired on as a maid, and some awesome magic battles.  My favorite part of the series so far is seeing all the unique ways magic is used by the various characters.  It’s sort of an anything goes kind of thing at this point, which is something that can be ugly if used incorrectly, but so far it’s very cool.

After that mission, a new character, apparently the strongest member of the guild, takes Natsu and another strong wizard with her to stop a dangerous assassin.  The other strong wizard was someone introduced earlier with some sort of exhibitionist impulse (he frequently disrobes or forgets to put pants on in the morning), and so far it’s turning out great.  The strong guild member is entertaining since she rules with terror and an iron fist, and lots of humorous opportunities are exploited.

The humor, along with the awesome magic, also makes this series great.  Natsu and Happy are constantly bantering back and forth in weird ways, and most of the characters aside from Lucy have some truly bizarre traits.  It’s really great, I promise.

The one thing I don’t like about it is the fanservice.  It’s not nearly as frequent as it could be (I just read Enchanter, which makes this series look tame), but I hate that it feels it has to stoop to fanservice to be enjoyable.  It doesn’t.  I feel embarrassed for it whenever Lucy flashes a little cleavage and makes a joke.

Now I’m ready for volume 3.  I can’t say I could go on enjoying this series indefinitely, but at this point I know it’ll be many more volumes before I tire on it.  As long as fanservice is kept to a minimum, I’ll be a happy camper for a long time to come.

This is another ARC from CMX, this time the title looks to have an October 29th release date.  The title is kind of weird.  It seems to be a contraction based on the first four elements of the periodic table, except the Japanese word for hydrogen, “suiso,” is used, and then the roman forms of the rest, and an odd spelling for beryllium, but I don’t know if that’ll stick around for the final version (I would say it was likely if it was part of the Japanese logo, which it isn’t, but maybe it’s a logo that doesn’t appear on the cover or something in the original).  If nothing else, I learned something, because I had to look up the Japanese word for hydrogen when I started reading this so it wouldn’t drive me crazy.

Basically, a cute alien girl lands and causes a bit of mischief that only the main character sees.  He is somehow drafted into the Biology club as the only member, and in the position of club president and only member, he decides to stand up against student council to save the club.  He needs to get five members, and right away the cute alien girl joins as a new transfer student.  The girl’s mission on earth is to collect stray animal species from her planet.  Though these can be dangerous, they’re usually kind of goofy animals doing various weird things.  While doing this, the pair gradually finds new friends and recruits more members for the club.

It’s comparable to Kiichi and the Magic Books in that it’s a great title for kids.  There’s not much substance to the story, so it’s not likely something that adults will get hooked on, but I kind of like titles like this because I can sell them to kids at book fairs without guiltily thinking about all the breast jokes and panty shots the book may contain.  There aren’t very many titles I’ve read that I would feel good giving to little kids, but this and Kiichi are good because not only are they free of any objectionable content, the stories are also fairly engaging.  It’s shallow, but a fun read, so it’s something that wouldn’t be a chore for parents to go through with their kids.  While I don’t work with kids or have any children of my own, it’s still something I can appreciate.

For my own purposes… well, I liked Kiichi, because I like that kind of story, but light comedies like this are not so much my thing.  I got pretty excited because there’s a really weird, WEIRD joke on one of the first pages about one of the alien creatures (in this case, a bunny) growing to gigantic size and getting really funny/horrible expressions on its face, but the visual gags are kept to a minimum after that, unfortunately.  There’s a lot of random dialogue humor, which is okay (and sometimes pretty funny), but again, not really my thing, and more aimed at kids.  The plot is also sort of without direction at the moment.  The alien girl will continue to collect specimens, and the other characters have various slight goals, but nothing that really contributes to the direction of the series.  The characters are also very shallow, which isn’t a bad thing considering this isn’t meant to be a deep story, but there really wasn’t much for me to latch on to.

In short: light comedy, some funny jokes, great for kids, but kind of shallow and not really my thing.

This is another ARC from CMX.  I don’t actually like reading series unless I can start from the beginning, but for some reason I had it in my head that somehow this series started over at volume 7.  I’m not sure where, why, or how I came upon this impression, because this is the last volume of the series.

It wasn’t that hard to get into, and that was my backup plan - if it didn’t start the series over, I figured the plot wouldn’t be overly-complicated.  I read the character descriptions at the beginning of the volume and felt pretty comfortable the rest of the way through.  Gotta love those character descriptions.  Basically… there are boys who can turn into robots.  Some of the robots are going up against each other.  There are two scientists who are… at odds, I think.  The three most powerful robots are at least partially human.  There’s lots of fighting with other robots, and one guy gets his head torn off.  All this is pretty cool.

I liked it a lot, despite the fact I knew nothing about it and it seems to have a pretty basic story (though, to be fair, I’m pretty sure I’m just seeing the resolution to everything, for all I know there’s been some hard stuff going on in the past 6 volumes).  This could be because I’ve been reading a lot of superhero comics lately and this type of story is appealing to me at the moment, and it probably helps that I like sentai series a lot, though this is a much straighter take and seems more like a tokusatsu.  It helps that its got really attractive art and character designs.  The art is always the thing I have the hardest time figuring out in these ARCs because they’re sort of low-quality roughs, but the drawings in this series are pretty amazing, and that can sometimes make up for a lot of other things story-wise.  Not always.  I’m looking at you, Alichino.

The only two things I can think of to say against it are that sometimes I had a hard time figuring out the fight scenes and I suspect I wouldn’t have liked the ending had I read the series all the way through.  I liked it reading just this one volume though, because it does what it does and gets it over with, and I thought it was kind of funny the way it left everything… even though it wasn’t supposed to be.  The difficulty I had with some of the fight scenes may have had something to do with the ARC, again, since I was looking at two low-quality pages at once, so it may actually be a lot clearer what’s going on in the actual book.  Plus, uh… I didn’t actually know who the characters were, so I couldn’t tell which robots I was supposed to be rooting for, and it took me a long time to figure out one of the characters transformed into the brain-bot.  That likely didn’t help either.

I immediately felt the need to go back and read from the beginning when I heard that the inspiration for the story was Pinocchio, and that it was sort of hinged on the question of “was Pinocchio happy when he became a real boy?”  I’m… not really sure the question is answered in this series, but it’s awesome all the same.  I also just found out that this is pretty much a straight retelling of the older Shotaro Ishinomori series (he’s credited as the writer, and I was kind of wondering how that worked), so I know that it was probably heavily influenced by/ripped off from Astro Boy.  I liked Kikaider a lot better, but that could have a lot to do with the art and maybe some tweaks too, I’ll have to see when I go back and get the rest.

So yeah, I thought it was awesome, just judging from the last volume, but I can see how if you’re not interested in robots fighting and whatnot you may not be into it.

Speaking of last volumes, I totally forgot about the last volume of Dragon Head somehow. It was buried at the bottom of my pile, and while I was tossing aside Pastel and Boys Be and volumes of Bastard I didn’t want to read, I saw that one and remembered.

My roommate disagrees with my conclusion, but I still think my prediction as to the disaster from the beginning of the series was correct. I don’t think I included this in old posts, which is just as well, because I’m not going to spoil it now. But I found it to be interesting, it’s not something that people explore in stories very often, and it can be interesting if done right.

More than what happens, what things come down to is the nature of fear and how it drives people. At the end of the world, the biggest thing that humans fight is their own fear, which is a basic instinct that gets summoned when things go bad, basically. The bald guy from last volume goes on for a bit with the rescue squad who may or may not need rescuing themselves. I was a little confused as to how he and the fearless people fit in, other than he may have been either prepared or may have been behind what happened, at least partially, and his reaction was just something that happens at the end of the world, I suppose. You’ll have that.

The name of the series is explained as the last order of business. It was interesting.

There are about three pages of solid text, like a novel except with larger print. I’ve never seen this technique used in a manga before, but it fit quite nicely, since it was used for the radio broadcast that sort of cut in during a few tense scenes going on in different places.

The last image was particularly good. After everyone speaks of the end of the world, it’s kind of a reminder that… maybe “the world” is a relative term, maybe? Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. I don’t normally, but I really liked this series.

A few things are left up in the air, and the ending was a little anticlimactic (while everything is mostly explained, there is surprisingly little action), I still liked the ending a lot. The series was great all the way through, but probably best right in the beginning. Nothing ever quite compared to Teru’s fear of Nobu, and the claustrophobic subway setting was where the series shined best and the fear point was driven home best. Lots of other messed up things happened after that, but nothing that terrified me more than that.

Thank you, Dragon Head, for providing two years of solid entertainment. I’m glad it finished right before the Tokyopop business took place, I would have been devastated if we missed the ending.