Golgo 13: Into the Wolves’ Lair
Posted: May 3, 2012 Filed under: Golgo 13 Leave a comment »Takao Saito – Leed Publishing – 1986 – 163+ volumes
this is actually volume 1 in a 4-volume series published by Leed in the mid-80s
Ridiculous. This was absolute lunacy. But I loved every page.
Most of the volume is taken up by the title story, as opposed to the usual split. Golgo 13 is hired by Mossad to penetrate a Nazi compound with absolutely airtight security. Again and again, it is reiterated that it is impossible to get into this place. Monitors, armed guards, locked doors, the whole works.
How does Golgo 13 do it? It may or may not involve building a complete replica on a movie lot and doing timed runs through it.
He’s actually hired to recover a hostage. When the hostage, towards the end of the story, hears a commotion, he and the Nazi officers assume that there’s a team of men infiltrating the compound. Actually, it’s just Duke Togo, and he singlehandedly wipes out the entire Nazi army.
But the better question may be… what is this compound guarding? I was really hoping for one crazy extreme, and the story heavily hints at it, but the mastermind is still kind of interesting.
The second, very short story takes place in Afghanistan, and may or may not involve cornering Golgo 13 and finding out what he does. Most of the pleasure in this story is, again, knowing who Golgo 13 is and catching all the hints that the army drops while they try to track him down. It’s stories like this that are just so Golgo 13. He’s a great character, and it’s stories like this, ones that lean on his very unique and specific characteristics, that make this series such a pleasure to read. Well, that and the fact his unique and specific characteristics lend themselves well to completely insane storylines, like the Fall of the Fourth Reich story in this volume.
I’m almost through all my old Golgo 13 stories! Just one more of this volume, and the 3-issue Viz series to go. So sad. Hopefully JManga will have hooked us up with some new content before I polish this off. I keep watching the site, seeing all those Takao Saito releases, and hoping that Golgo 13 is coming soon. I really should buy some of the other titles to support the chances of that happening. I’m sure they’re just a crazy-awesome.
Arata: The Legend 9
Posted: May 3, 2012 Filed under: Arata: The Legend Leave a comment »Yuu Watase – Viz – 2011 – 13+ volumes
Hmm… still really on the fence about this one. It just feels like it’s going through the motions of a shounen manga. I no longer really care about any of the characters, and Arata is more or less a faceless good guy at this point. I’m also still having trouble with the series’ terminology, but that could be more of a personal problem, made worse by the fact I’m not really able to get into it enough to bother to remember the special words.
Arata and company are still dressed as women, and still trying to woo the shinsho Kagura, who can fly. Arata quite literally woos him when his female disguise works too well and Kagura falls in love with him, but before Arata can break the bad news about him being male, Kadowaki shows up and wants to rumble. Something tragic happens, and a decision is made there and now about which one Kagura will submit to, since he’s being forced to. Later, we learn more about the royalty of the land Arata is trying to save, and learn that there are only Queens and Princesses because a worthy King successor has never appeared. Guess who’s currently in the running?
And… yeah. There’s a lot of generic fighting, a lot of generic bonding, and a lot of generic exposition and place development. The latter was actually my favorite part, and Watase does still have a knack for making detailed worlds. The special tribe of female healers, and their history of the land, was the most interesting thing in this volume. But even that… we find out there is a “destined partner” for Arata, which of course throws a wrinkle in the romantic development. He also seems to take all this new information rather well, and… yeah. I don’t really have that much else to say, because it was just so middle-of-the-road.
The index in the back makes me wonder if perhaps he’s captured most of the 12 shinsho, save for his traveling companion? If so, maybe the story will move on to something more interesting next volume. I have volume 10, but I may just give up after that if nothing more interesting happens. I really liked this series at first, and I thought it had an interesting premise, but it’s not really doing anything with the “swapped worlds” element, and fantasy-Arata is all but forgotten in reality. Here’s hoping something exciting will occur next volume.
This was a review copy provided by Viz.
Ze 6
Posted: May 3, 2012 Filed under: Ze | Tags: BL 2 Comments »Yuki Shimizu – DMP / 801 Media – 2010 – 12 volumes
801 recently announced they’d be publishing the second half of this series. I’m going to do it. I’m a little scared, but I’m going to do it. A little fear is a healthy way to approach any 801 book, and I’ve heard… uh, scary things about the second half of this series. I hated a lot of stuff in the first half, but I really liked volumes 5-6.
The first half of this book is the second half of Ryuusei and Moriya’s story. I like the casual-yet-intense vibe of their present-day relationship, and I really enjoyed the first half of their lengthy flashback, where they lived together as roommates before their relationship developed. While this sounds only polite, the relationships in Ze are master/servant-based, and with the kami-sama existing only to… heal their masters through mucus membrane contact, the romance is mostly in the dominance, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not, mostly because normally BL takes this to a scary extreme (Genma and Himi are a good example), but if there’s no non-con, it can be fun.
Ryuusei and Moriya’s story follows a crime-ish plot here, where a young boy gets attacked when Ryuusei doesn’t walk him all the way home, and a guilty Ryuusei tries everything he can to find the killer. The solution involves Ryuusei and Moriya growing closer, kotodama, and lots of injuries. I liked Ryuusei and Moriya a lot more than the cookie-cutter characters in the other couples featured, so I was a lot more into this story than the others. And again, I really enjoyed the way their relationship developed slowly, and that the two seem to respect each others boundaries. There’s no non-con, and the master-servant dynamic is handled strangely in their case. It really was good.
The second half of the book is short chapters about the other couples in the series. Raizou and Kon, mostly, but there’s also a Konoe and Kotoha story. The problem with these stories… hm. My taste runs to older couples, which Ryuusei and Moriya are, so it was hard to switch back to the younger ones. Especially Konoe and Kotoha. I like that couple, in theory, since the kami-sama is the one in power in that relationship. I think. But damn is Kotoha drawn to look young. I don’t think he actually is, I think he’s in his early 20s. Extra creep points since Konoe is drawn to look like a slightly scruffy 20-year-old… but technically isn’t, since he isn’t actually a real person? I don’t know? You see some of my problems with this series. I’d like to not have to think about it, but again, Kotoha and Kon are both drawn… yeah. But other than that, they’re cute short stories, heavy on the smut and light on some of the creepier things in this series, character designs aside.
Again, I’m a little shocked I liked the Ryuusei/Moriya story as much as I did. Dark, melancholy, reluctant, no non-con, older couple… all the stuff for me is in there. I’m… hoping some of the couples introduced in the second half of the series are like this. Maybe this is a trend. I’m going to tell myself that.
English, Please!: Gunjo
Posted: April 27, 2012 Filed under: English, Please! 1 Comment »I was a bit torn this week on which series to license request. But then I remembered suddenly that this was the week of the Manga Moveable Feast, Viz Signature edition, hosted by Kate over at the Manga Critic. This doesn’t really count, since it hasn’t been translated into English. But it did run in Ikki magazine in Japan, so the SigIkki line is the most likely place for it were it to be licensed. And it’s an excuse to talk about it, too. It’s very good.
I’ve said before that I enjoy melodramatic romance titles. This… falls under that umbrella, but honestly, it’s better than that. It transcends that, and is almost uncomfortable to read because of it. The relationship is extremely desperate. The melodrama is completely serious in the context of the series, too. Unlike countless car accidents the characters simply recover from whenever the plot needs some spice, Gunjo starts out with a murder, and both the main characters flee, and constantly waver back and forth about whether to deal with the real-world consequences of their actions. They’re really, really no good for each other. It’s not a romance in the sense that the two will end up together. Because they probably won’t. But the story is about their relationship anyway.
Skip Beat 27
Posted: April 25, 2012 Filed under: Skip Beat 1 Comment »Yoshiki Nakamura – Viz – 2012 – 30+ volumes
Seriously, Skip Beat. If you get any more awesome, my heart will stop in the middle of the next volume. I don’t even know how it does it. Ren and Kyoko still aren’t a couple, and it’s been twenty-seven damn volumes. But I don’t care. I’ve read almost thirty volumes of this shoujo manga, and the main characters still haven’t hooked up, and I don’t care. Because every single volume of this series is better than the last. I mean it. There is nothing like the pure, unadulterated awesome that is a new volume of Skip Beat. I can’t convey the depths of girly joy that every page brings to my heart.
This is the continuation of the Cain and Setsuka Heel story from last volume. Kyoko and Ren have to pretend to be a pair of creepy siblings in order to keep Ren’s new role top secret. Not only does this provide a lot of situations where it seems like the two aren’t even acting anymore (Ren is particularly guilty of this, and his line “spending money on you is the one pleasure I have besides acting” was superb), but there are also wonderfully embarrassing domestic scenes, like when Kyoko walks in on a naked Ren in a shower. I mean, all shoujo manga do it. But it’s usually a throwaway joke where, for whatever reason, it’s the guy’s fault for being naked. Here, Kyoko is so embarrassed she wants to die, but she also has to hide it since Setsuka wouldn’t be embarrassed about walking in on Cain. After having an extremely scream-y internal monologue for awhile, she then begins to berate herself for not taking a good look at Ren Tsuruga during the only chance she would have. This is very funny, but also a little out-of-character, since Kyoko doesn’t really think of Ren that way. But this is all inside her head, and she stays true to Setsuka and doesn’t let anything show in front of Ren. Ren gets extremely depressed about this, thinking that Kyoko’s lack of interest just proves that she doesn’t see him as a man.
There’s a great scene later, too, when Ren imagines having to take a bunch of grief from an excited Yashiro, who would want to know all the details about living and sleeping in the same room with Kyoko, even as a role. This doesn’t happen, and later, Yashiro simply pities him, which makes Ren even more depressed than Kyoko’s lack of reaction to seeing him naked.
But it’s the end of the book… it has one of those scenes that only Skip Beat can do, and it’s the real magic of the series. Kyoko is walking through a crowd of people with a coworker, who is a more established celebrity. After some discussion, Kyoko admits that she can still walk through a big crowd by herself, despite being a little famous, because she’s so plain, and that dressed in her role for the drama nobody would recognize her. Her coworker stares for a minute, and mutters “fairy” out loud. Later, the monologue goes on to explain that the coworker is genuinely impressed with Kyoko’s talent for looking and acting completely different, to the point of being unrecognizable, with each role. But in the heat of the moment, Kyoko gets excited and thinks that there might be a fairy over her shoulder, because she believes in them and that’s what she does. She gets excited for a minute, then spots a crowd of people and assumes they are looking at the fairy. But as she gathers to gawk, Ren Tsuruga steps out of a car in the distance, on the set of something he’s filming. As her coworker looks up to Kyoko as a magic, face-changing being, so Kyoko looks up to Ren, except she really believes in magic. This is made even better by the fact that, unbeknownst to Kyoko, Ren is the fairy prince from her childhood, the one that told her that he was a fairy and caused her to believe in them to the present day.
I don’t know if I’m adequately describing it. The whole thing is just all sorts of awesome. And really, it is what makes Skip Beat so fantastic. It’s absolutely the best shoujo series coming out right now.
Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service 12
Posted: April 25, 2012 Filed under: Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service 2 Comments »Eiji Otsuka / Housui Yamazaki – Dark Horse – 2012 – 15+ volumes
I am absolutely thrilled this came out. I almost gave up hope. I really didn’t want to, but it’s been so long since the last volume. It’s hard for me to believe this isn’t doing well, because it’s just so quirky and has the dry sense of humor and extreme violence that I could see appealing to an audience outside manga. I love it unconditionally.
There’s a very strange Second Life story to start the volume off. I had no idea how popular that simulation was. Sadly, I recognized the situation without even having to check the end notes. The gang does their investigating in the virtual world before tracking the killer down and confronting her with the body of a dead, broke, angry nerd whose face she peeled off. I missed Karatsu’s skill so much! The motive has to do with identity theft on a couple different levels, and was all kinds of creepy. I’m not sure if it’s because the story was genuinely creepy, or if it’s because I haven’t read the series in awhile and the inherent creep factor is registering more than it usually does. Also, bonus points to this story for having a panel where one of the characters walks in on two people having sex, and there’s an image, graduate-like, through the legs of the couple, with the silouhette bottom of the woman’s butt and the man’s penis framing the character’s face who walked in. Now that’s poetry.
Also, it was awesome when Sasaki makes accounts for everyone in Second Life, and Karatsu and the guys show up wearing jeans and a t-shirt and expressionless faces, while she looks like she does in real life, but better. Parts of the story take place in the game, which is… well, really interesting. Especially since most people are wearing rabbit masks.
The second story is about a girl who can astral project. She uses her powers to recruit customers to the host club she works at. One day, she meets a young man who shares her interest in making it as a comedy duo, so she quits her job, and the two of them get set up in a posh apartment where the previous tenant has died. Unfortunately, the boy’s old boss winds up needing the apartment, and the boy is murdered by an old co-worker. Sasayama (I missed him, too!) gets the Kurosagi group together to investigate the body, which has the girl’s astral projecting form hanging around it. There’s an elaborate revenge scenario.
This story was different for a couple reasons. The victim is alive most of the time, and the story was very character-driven, and more about the two comedians than the Kurosagi group and their investigation. It was a very strange story, even with a relatively normal plot like that, what with all the astral projection and the boy living in the apartments of dead people and whatnot. Plus, the ending wraps things up in a very Kereellis-like manner. I… liked it, despite its strangeness, but the Second Life story hit my creep buttons in a more pleasing way. Both were good, though.
The third story is pretty typical Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service fodder. Karatsu and Sasaki are away, which leaves Numata, Yata, and Makino to investigate a case involving a dollmaker, a murder, and his doll-ified sister. He is a maker of… uh, Dutch Wives, and apparently a very famous one. This story is also pretty great, but my favorite moment is a page at the beginning, when Makino gets upset that Numata has run off yelling about a corpse, and Kereellis asks her if she’s sure, because that doesn’t sound like Numata. On the same page, Yata suggests the three of them could have a case on their hands if he does find one, and Makino suggests she could embalm it and the three of them could stare at it for awhile.
Another thing I missed terribly were the end notes. So much knowledge, and I don’t care how relevant it is. The important thing this time around was that they explained how Dutch Wife came to be a slang term for a sex doll, which is something I’ve always wondered. So, mystery solved. Thank you, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. There’s also a footnote that explains QR codes, and Mr. Horn explains he doesn’t have a cellphone himself, going on to describe the unlikely scenario of the President in his war room demanding that the manga editor be reached. But the way the scene is described in the footnote, it’s easy to imagine that the part that came before that line might have had something to do with contracting Duke Togo. And really, there’s only a few ways to contact him. And there’s only a few people in the US that can rattle that kind of info off the top of their head. Just sayin’.
Seriously, read this series. Go out right now and start from the beginning. There really is no horror comic like it. The horrifying moments are grouped together, surrounded by interesting mystery plots and bountiful sarcasm and eccentricity. I keep hoping desperately that each volume will contain more about Yaichi, but no dice yet. Maybe volume 13 will. Dark Horse hasn’t solicited it yet, but… as long as it comes out!
Itsuwaribito 5
Posted: April 25, 2012 Filed under: Itsuwaribito Leave a comment »Yuuki Iinuma – Viz – 2012 – 13+ volumes
I think I’ve mentioned before, the absolute best thing about this series is the way that Utsuho fights. I’m still not bored of the way he tricks and lies his way through the trials presented. He’s a great character. But it’s a small part of each volume, and I’m growing increasingly impatient with the rest of what’s going on.
This volume continues the storyline from last time, where there is a band of murderers roaming through a town of fireworks makers. The murderers are captured, and claim they began their spree because the town hated them and burned their shop down. So then the problem is, who burned their shop down in the first place?
This story… was only okay. The problem with the fun part of this series, Utsuho’s lying, is that it takes a long time to gather the facts and set the stage for him. So there are a lot of in-between parts, and that’s a shame. Utsuho isn’t even really part of the solution for half of the problem here, the townspeople do that with fireworks.
The second half of the volume, a kind of legend about a man that built a utopia and was disillusioned by an Itsuwaribito, is much more interesting. Utsuho doubts the legend at first, but they find some pretty spectacular evidence in its favor. So spectacular, in fact, that we get to see Utsuho’s eyes. He is shocked. Once that’s out of the way, they trace the history of the story to a town with a large library, only to find out an eccentric millionaire might have the only records left. So they go to the town where the millionaire lives. His estate is guarded by spectacular killer dolls that are so powerful that it’s not worth it to engage them in combat. Utsuho hopes to gain access to the library in the main house, and gains another ally in the process that is looking to shut down whatever power source controls the terrible robots. That power source is all kinds of disturbing, but how they deal with that is a story for the next volume.
Okay, you know, when I was talking about being tired of the series, I was thinking of that fireworks town story. But the framing device of the legend in the second half has given Utsuho’s group purpose, and the fact that it led them to an estate of nightmarish killer dolls is a promising start to this portion of the story. I could go for more of this. Perhaps it was just purpose to the story I was missing. I hope that the number of allies that are now traveling has stabilized (I’m hoping that the fireworks town story was necessary to introduce the last), and I’m really looking forward to how this legend will affect the town that the main characters are looking to build. I’m interested again!
Our Everlasting 1
Posted: April 25, 2012 Filed under: Our Everlasting | Tags: BL Leave a comment »Toko Kawai – Digital Manga Publishing – 2005 – 2 volumes
Gah, so old! This even has the purple DMP logo at the bottom of the cover, instead of the pink June logo, because it predates the imprint. This may have been among the first wave of BL that DMP released. It’s hard to believe how much has changed since then.
Anyway! I already talked about this volume a bit, when I did my Toko Kawai write-up a few weeks ago. It’s her first series, and it shows.
Shouin and Horyu are college classmates. Horyu is a popular and charismatic surfer, but he spends most of his time with his shy friend Shouin The story wastes no time getting to the romance parts. There’s a rather lengthy confession in the first chapter, made difficult by the fact that Horyu has a hard time convincing Shouin he’s being serious about loving him, and then Shouin rejecting him on the grounds that there’s no way popular Horyu could love him. The second chapter has the two growing closer, when Shouin pushes Horyu away after a previous negative experience with a boyfriend in high school scares him away from a serious relationship with Horyu. Other stories are simply cute. One is about how Shouin and Horyu consummate their relationship. One is about how badly Horyu spoils Shouin. Stuff like that.
The end of the book has a story about a couple where one of the men can’t have sex due to his weak heart. It will literally kill him. This explores how that affects the relationship, why he won’t get his problem treated, things like that. A good story, and it would be very welcome in any other BL volume, but it’s not one of Kawai’s better ones, and I wished the pages had been devoted to more about Shouin and Horyu.
It’s mostly a cute, happy romance. As I’ve said before, though, Kawai really knows how to write characters, so it’s fun watching Shouin and Horyu go through all the usual BL motions, and she takes her time to develop the relationship and really have the two feel each other out. I only say it reads like a rookie work because the plot points and the way the two talk everything out is very by-the-book. It’s still a very, very good book, though, and she handles everything expertly. Shouin and Horyu are both easy to like, and I also liked that there were details about their life, like the frequent looks at their classes and workload, and a lot of info about Horyu’s surfing hobby. Things like that make the characters more rounded, and stories like this much better since it’s not all about romance.
This is my least favorite of Kawai’s stories, but it’s still very, very much worth reading. I’m really very impressed with just how likeable all her books are, and that even her first volume is this romantic. It makes me want the next volumes of In the Walnut and The Scent of Apple Blossoms that much more. I am completely obsessed with her work, what can I say?
Inu-Yasha 9 (VizBig ed.)
Posted: April 25, 2012 Filed under: Inu-Yasha Leave a comment »Rumiko Takahashi – Viz – 2011 – 56 volumes
this is an omnibus containing vols. 25-27
This took me forever and a day to read. It’s long, sure, and three volumes of manga. But normally I fly through these omnibuses, and Inu-Yasha is paced very well. This time, all three volumes deal with a massive storyline about the Band of Seven.
It was especially hard slogging through this after reading a volume of Toriko. I mentioned that Toriko’s charm is in its one-off ideas, and that the series was paced incredibly well for a shounen manga, since nothing ever lasts for more than half a volume in the parts I read. Inu-Yasha is like that, too, with even major story arcs usually only lasting for a volume, maybe a volume and a half, and the fun creature battles that I like best usually only taking three chapters.
But this Band of Seven storyline. It started in the last omnibus volume I read, and it looks like it will last at least one more volume. We don’t even get the benefit of getting the enemies introduced in order. At the beginning of this omnibus, we meet the final two of the band, and they periodically attack Inu-Yasha, Koga, and Sesshoumaru. Unfortunately, they don’t even get defeated that frequently. They simply flee (sometimes because Naraku tells them to do so), and then come back for another fight later. It’s so tedious, and they aren’t that interesting.
What is intriguing is that every character in the series is stumped about where Naraku has fled. This is slowly uncovered through all three volumes, and the final volume deals more directly with the mystery. The solution is quite interesting, and I like that the one enabling the hiding is apparently a character that Inu-Yasha et al will speak to next time. Also, the place where Naraku is hiding forces Inu-Yasha into human form, and I’m always all about those stories. That didn’t happen at all in the last omnibus, and I missed it quite a bit.
I feel bad not talking a bit more about this, but really. It’s a lot of fighting. It’s more serious than usual, and there are a lot of good moments (Kagome loses it at one point when it appears that Inu-Yasha was blown up, and I still love that Sesshoumaru is so protective of Rin), but it’s mostly just the Band of Seven throwing themselves at the protagonists again and again. I’m hoping there will be a return to the shorter stories in the next volume. They don’t even have to be that short. I’d just prefer it if they didn’t take up six volumes or whatever. But I’m still enjoying the nuts and bolts of the series, such as the characters and action and whatnot, and as long as the storylines keep the context fresh, I won’t have any problem polishing off another thirty volumes of this.
