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Sat Sep 6, 2008 — by Matt Raub
Early Review: True Blood
Does HBO's new bloodsucking drama....suck?
For too long, paranormal dramas have been restricted to basic cable where they become weighed down with melodrama and morals that everyday teens can take away from each episode. I’d like to say that True Blood breaks that trend, but, sadly, it does not and with the exception of a few expletives and some exposed body parts, this show could certainly be made for ABC or the oh-so-hip CW.
From the Alan Ball, the creator of the acclaimed HBO series Six Feet Under comes the TV series based on The Southern Vampire Mysteries book series by Charlaine Harris about a southern telepathic waitress named Sookie Stackhouse who solves mysteries involving vampires, werewolves, and other such creatures. Keep in mind, this series was written four years before the nation’s newfound interest in vampires was peaked with Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series. That said, this still isn’t safe from being called a watered down version of Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
There were only a few scenes that were of interest to any fan of the vampire mythos, the rest establishing the faux racism storyline that seems to be the backbone of the show. In a world where vampires have “come out of the coffin” (not my turn of phrase) and are now publicly known, they become the new racial scapegoat for the scared and angry citizens of Southern America to abuse. This storyline borders didacticism by using “vampire” as a replacement for words like “black” or “gay” or even “cylon”. In a world where these immortal creatures walk the earth, why should they care what the clerk at the Quik-N-Stop has to say to them? Unanswered questions like these makes one realize why this series needs to be looked at like a Vampire Romance novel, instead of a replacement for something like Buffy or Angel, much like watching The New Adventures of Lois & Clark.
Outside of plot holes like that, the other two issues with the pilot were the pacing and acting. The pacing seems to be almost at a torturous level, leaving entire chunks of time where nothing more than a lot of pensive staring goes on. We understand that there is a lot of animosity between the vampires and the “mortals”, but they can rip your throats out, so stop looking like a pissed off toddler. The acting (I won’t go into how bad the southern accents are) and motivation of characters just came across as inconsistent, as many of them were either set as “angry girl” or “delusional grandmother”. There was hardly any reasoning behind these emotions, and they felt unnecessary and distracting.
The ending left for a good cliffhanger and a want to pursue the next episode, which I encourage. This series will hopefully improve and become slightly more watchable, but this doesn’t seem like another Buffy the Vampire Slayer or even a Twilight, instead just a watered down amalgam of the two. Rating 6/10
True Blood debuts on HBO Sunday evening at 9 p.m. and has a twelve episode season.
Thu Sep 4, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'American Widow' by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi
A 9/11 widow's story in comics form
American Widow
By Alissa Torres; Illustrated by Sungyoon Choi
Villard, September 2008, $22.00
Luis Eduardo (“Eddie”) Torres started a new job as a foreign exchange trader at Cantor Fitzgerald on September 10th, 2001. He was thrilled to get it – he’d been out of work for a few months, his wife, Alissa, was then seven months pregnant, and he was a Columbian national, so his immigration status could have been compromised by staying out of work too long.
Seven years later, we all remember what happened on September 11th, but perhaps only New Yorkers remember Cantor Fitzgerald as clearly. Their headquarters was at the very top of One World Trade Center: floors 101 to 105. That was directly above the impact site of the first plane; no one in Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices survived. Of the dead at the World Trade Center, nearly a quarter were Cantor Fitzgerald. Eddie Torres was one of them.
Alissa Torres quickly found herself a widow: one of the smallest of mercies was that her husband jumped, and so was identified quickly. And then she found herself a “9/11 widow” – alternately helped and hindered by charities, sought by the media, torn completely from her previous life. The fact that her husband had just started work – at a site whose records were utterly destroyed – only made things more difficult.
American Widow is Alissa Torres’s story, in her own words and presumably her own comics-panel layouts. The art is by Sungyoon Choi, a very young graduate of the School of Visual Arts; this appears to be her first major work. It’s also Torres’s first work in comics; before 9/11 she was an instructional designer for the New York City Department for the Aging and afterward she seems to have only written about herself and her late husband, with several essays on Salon and one in Redbook. (A search at Salon didn’t bring up those essays; nor does the Redbook essay seem to be online.)
Continue reading Review: 'American Widow' by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi ›
Wed Sep 3, 2008 — by Karl Cramer
Review: Invincible the Series
Does animating the Invincible comic itself work?
During the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, MTV New Media debuted their new animated series based on Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker’s Invincible comic. Published by Image Comics, Invincible tells the story of Mark Grayson, a young man who inherits his father’s superpowers. It’s been released through various outlets: iTunes, Xbox, Amazon, MTV2, MTV.com, and MTV Mobile.
Instead of creating brand new animation, the series has decided to use the latest editing techniques to “animate” Cory Walker’s actual comic book art. Just use existing comic art and let the camera to give the illusion of movement. To younger viewers this may seem innovative, but it’s been done as far back as the Marvel Comics based cartoons from the 1960’s. It was used again, very artistically by MTV, when they brought The Maxx to television. Even more recently The Watchmen has been done in this style.
While the story and art deserve all the critical praise that the Invincible comic has received over the years, Invincible the Series’ biggest stumbling block is its editing. The MTV produced show has the same pacing as MTV’s promo spots, wildly kinetic with lots of flashing graphics and texts. Never let the eye settle for minute. This is fine for 15-second ad, but watching a full show like that is taxing.
In a one step forward, two steps back move, the show decided to include the actual word balloons from the comic. But instead of letting people read it, the text has a subtle shake to it. To emphasize energy, I guess. While nothing sits still on the screen, you would expect the parts you want people to read to be motionless.
A good way to judge an animated show’s sound is to close your eyes and listen. Does the soundtrack still create images of the action? In Invincible’s case, the answer is yes, but barely. The voice acting and sound effects are serviceable. They don’t do anything cringe worthy, but neither do they stand out. No Kevin Conroy or John Di Maggio here.
If the production calmed down, this could’ve been a great show that brought quality comic books to video formats. But as it is, I couldn’t stand watching this for more than a few episodes. And like I said, I’m a fan. Imagine the effect to someone who’s browsing MTV2 late at night.
Watch the first episode for yourself below. Let me know if you think I’m right or wrong in the comments section.
Tue Sep 2, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!'
The classic '80s SF comic in a classy (and expensive) new package
Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!
By Howard Chaykin
Dynamic Forces, July 2008, $49.99
Science Fiction has never been quite as successful in comics form as it seemed it should have been. Oh, sure, there have been plenty of vaguely SFnal ideas and premises – from Superman to Kamandi to the X-Men to the Ex-Mutants – but they were rarely anything deeper than an end to the sentence “There’s this guy, see? and he’s….” One of the few counterexamples was Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!, starting in 1983 – that series had many of the usual flaws and unlikelihoods of near-future dystopias, but it also had a depth and texture to its world that was rare in comics SF (and never to be expected in even purely prose works, either).
American Flagg! suffered from Chaykin’s waning attention for a while, and then crashed and burned almost immediately after he finally left the series, with a cringe-making overly “sexy” storyline utterly overwritten by Alan Moore. American Flagg! limped from muddled storyline to confused characterization for a couple of years afterward – but the beginning, when Chaykin was fully energized by his new creation and the stories he was telling, is one of the best SF stories in American comics.
The series has never been collected well, though a few slim album-sized reprints were once available, and may be findable through used-book channels. This Dynamic Forces edition, reprinting the first fourteen issues of the series, is quite pricey. (Especially for a book with no page numbers, and one in which the pages are precisely the size of the original comics – not oversized, as those previous album reprints had been.) This book has a strong, thoughtful introduction by Michael Chabon – which has already appeared in his Maps and Legends collection, presumably due to the delay in the American Flagg! book – a gushing afterword by Jim Lee, and a new short story written and drawn by Chaykin.
Continue reading Review: 'Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!' ›
Fri Aug 29, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: As Different As Possible
Three books with nothing at all in common
I’ve generally tried to organize the weekly columns around some sort of theme, but sometimes themes just serve to hide the variety and depth of the comics world (whatever country it might be from). So, this week, I picked three books with nothing at all in common (except a Japanese origin), just because:
Nightmares for Sale, Vol. 1
By Kaoru Ohashi
Aurora, November 2007, $10.95
Nightmares for Sale is an old-fashioned kind of horror story, with two enigmatic characters – they appear to be a grown man (Shadow) and a young girl (Maria), but she’s older than he is – who run a store that’s usually a pawnshop. Nothing at all good can happen when they enter your life, though they usually don’t seem to be directly responsible.
Each story in this volume has a different set of characters – usually teenage girls, or the kind of adults that teenage girls want to become – who meet the pawnshop owners, and then come to nasty ends. A bullied girl triggers a curse on the friendship rings her tormentors made her buy for all of them, and nastiness follows. A model wants to appear beautiful in photographs, and gets exactly what she asked for…but no more and no less. A young woman meets an abused boy in the street, and learns that their connection is much deeper than she imagined. A young boy tries to pawn his baby sister. And so on.
Wed Aug 27, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Zot! 1987-1991' by Scott McCloud
A boy superhero of two worlds returns, in all his complex glory
Zot! The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991
By Scott McCloud
HarperCollins, July 2008, $24.95
There are those of us – only a few now, I bet – who keep hoping that Scott McCloud will finally get the comics-about-comics thing out of his system and go back to fictional comics. (1998’s The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln is generally skipped over in these laments, as it is in all other discussions of McCloud’s career, including the one in this book.) Oh, sure, Understanding Comics was one of the great graphic novels of the early ‘90s, and a major roadmark towards the modern comics field, and Reinventing Comics and Making Comics have their strong points as well, but, we keep wondering, what about Zot!?
We were heartened when Kitchen Sink Press reprinted three-quarters of McCloud’s Zot! run in three nice trade paperbacks in 1997-98, and then disheartened again when KSP went under before finishing up with the fourth volume to collect “Earth Stories,” generally considered McCloud’s best stories. And since then, we’ve mostly just been waiting and hoping, living on crumbs like “Hearts and Minds” and McCloud’s other webcomics.
But now Zot! is back, in something like a definitive form, from one of those real big-time bookstore publishers that the comics field is so in awe of. HarperCollins has been McCloud’s trade publisher as far back as Understanding Comics, so their imprint on this book implies a lot about their commitment to comics, and to McCloud.
But maybe I need to back up a bit, for those of you who weren’t around for the days of Eclipse in the late ‘80s. Zot! was McCloud’s comics debut, starting with a ten-issue storyline in full color in 1984-85 and continuing with twenty-six more issues in black and white starting in 1987. Those color comics are now only available in the first, long-out-of-print, Kitchen Sink trade paperback collection of Zot! from ten years ago, though this book hints that they may be reprinted if Zot! 1987-1991 is successful enough. (And maybe then we’ll get Chuck Austen’s art from two “fill-in” issues from the time of McCloud’s wedding, plus all of Matt Feazell’s “Dimension 10½ “ back-up strips.)
Continue reading Review: 'Zot! 1987-1991' by Scott McCloud ›
Wed Aug 27, 2008 — by Van Jensen
Review: 'Gentleman Jim' by Raymond Briggs
Early graphic novel balances melancholy and humor
Like so many of the great cartoonists, Raymond Briggs operates almost in disguise, using his innocuous-appearing drawings and simpleton characters as a front while he delivers thoughtful commentary and a piercing wit.
The British pioneer of the graphic novel field (he was, at the very least, a contemporary of Will Eisner's, though Briggs is too generally labeled a children's book creator) offers up this sneaky blend of the adult and childish in the reprinting of Gentleman Jim (Drawn & Quarterly, $14.95).
The eponymous Jim is a bathroom cleaner with fantastic ambitions -- in his mind. For years he's been content to only dream of trying on a new career, and one day he finally decides to make those dreams real.
What follows is a seemingly childish series of adventures, as Jim attempts to enter unrealistic careers (a cowboy, a painter, a soldier) but is stymied at every stop.
Eventually he becomes dedicated on being a highwayman, stealing from the rich to benefit the poor. He buys fake weapons, creates a preposterous costume and brings home a pathetic donkey, then embarks on his misadventures.
Of course, this enterprise fails as well, which makes a simple enough little story. But what makes it so appreciable to a more mature audience -- beyond Briggs' delicate and beautifully composed art -- is how he uses Jim as a foil to poke at the bureaucracies, laws and stuffiness of modern society that tamp down anyone daring to be odd.
Much as Charles Schulz and Richard Thompson instill children with adult sensibilities to great effect, Briggs does the reverse, making Jim both adult and childish, even giving him a baby's broad face.
Like so many of Briggs' characters, this allows Jim to be foolish and stupid but still endearing, a loveable bumbler who is deeply wise in his simplicity.
Mon Aug 25, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Wonder Woman: Love and Murder' by Jodi Picoult and others
Does it make any sense at all to a new reader?
DC Comics got a lot of press last year when they signed up bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult to write their monthly Wonder Woman series – gallons of ink about her being the first female “regular writer” on the series, and about how this would finally catapult WW into the position DC keeps insisting she already has: a central, iconic figure whose comics people actually buy and read.
Well, more than a year has passed year later, and Picoult’s run turned out to be only five issues long – so much for “regular,” huh? – and also served primarily as set-up for one of the log-jammed line-wide crossovers, Amazons Attack! Picoult’s five issues were gathered into a classy hardcover, suitable for libraries (where I found it, actually) and real bookstores, with her name given huge prominence.
Assuming that the point of making Picoult’s name so large is to draw in the many readers of her novels, or other casual bookstore browsers, it’s fair to ask whether Love and Murder makes sense as a book in its own right, and provides anything like a satisfying experience to those new readers.
I haven’t read any of Picoult’s novels, unfortunately, but I also haven’t ever read Wonder Woman, and I haven’t read a mainstream DC book regularly in a few years – so, with my ignorance wrapped around me like a cloak, I dove in…
Wonder Woman: Love and Murder
Written by Jodi Picoult
Art by Drew Johnson & Ray Snider with Rodney Ramos, Terry Dodson & Rachel Dodson, and Paco Diaz
DC Comics, November 2007, $19.99
Well, the first thing a seasoned comics reader notices is that the art team changes entirely twice during five issues, which is usually a bad, bad sign. Readers coming from the world of prose probably won’t notice that – the three art styles are all minor variations on today’s version of superhero-standard, and the transitions aren’t particularly jarring – but it is a danger sign, implying that something was going on behind the scenes.
And then, before the story actually starts, we get a one-page “Previously in Wonder Woman,” explaining how she killed Maxwell Lord in some other cross-over that we didn’t read and don’t care about, and now she’s pretending to be “Diana Prince” again, working at the Department of Metahuman Affairs with her face-changing partner Tom “Nemesis” Tresser under the literally iron-fisted Sarge Steel. (I’m not sure if we believe that, since Diana has some much trouble with ordinary life later that we doubt she could convincingly fake a history or paper trail to get such an impressive job.) OK, fine, that’s backstory, and we’ll get into a brand new adventure now, right?
Continue reading Review: 'Wonder Woman: Love and Murder' by Jodi Picoult and others ›
Sun Aug 24, 2008 — by Van Jensen
Review: 'The Dead Boy Detectives' by Bryan Talbot and Ed Brubaker
'Sandman' story illustrates Brubaker's skill
By my count, there are four good reasons to buy The Sandman Presents: The Dead Boy Detectives, now out from Vertigo.
First, it's cheap, at a slight $12.99 for some 100 pages of comics.
Second, it's a heckuva good mystery yarn with plenty of occult elements.
Third, it's part of The Sandman world, and there are plenty of readers who snap up anything associated with Neil Gaiman's creation.
But the last -- and, for me, best -- reason to pick up the book is that it further illustrates Ed Brubaker's dexterity as a writer. I've long said that the thing that makes him so talented is that if his name wasn't on the cover of his comics, you wouldn't be able to recognize him as the author (also, his books are all quite good).
Unlike a Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis or Brian Michael Bendis, Brubaker writes comics without stamping his voice all over them. And, in The Dead Boy Detectives, he shows off a wholly new voice, slipping seamlessly into the world of the ghostly boy sleuths and their London setting.
Like all great P.I. stories, this one begins with a girl, then gets all weird with shriveled dead bodies, witches and immortal creeps. It's not quite unpredictable yet manages to be surprising.
But, mostly, the great characterization of ghosts Charles and Edwin and their childish interplay is what makes this one a winner. Well, that and the other reasons listed above.
Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book journalist. Every Wednesday, he braves Atlanta traffic to visit Oxford Comics, where he reads a whole mess of books for his weekly Reviews. Van's blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.
Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Van Jensen directly at van (dot) jensen (at) comicmix (dot) com.
Fri Aug 22, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: Lawless, Winged, and Unconfined
Three books about people with a little extra something on the shoulderblades
Poking through the stack of manga to be reviewed, earlier this week, I noticed several books featuring characters with wings of one kind or another. Quick to sense a theme, I dragged them together, and here they are:
Koi Cupid, Vol. 1
By Mia Ikumi
Broccoli, April 2008, $9.99
Koi Cupid is an all-ages series about cherubs-in-training – yes, cute little girls in white outfits, running around making people fall in love. It’s not quite as kawaii (cute, often cloyingly so) as it could be, though, so I came to think of Koi Cupid as actually fairly restrained.
(Of course, that’s by manga standards – recalibrate your cuteness detectors from American settings, or you’ll be instantly deafened by the alarm.)
Anyway, the story focuses on three cupids-in-training: Ai, the cheerful one; Koi, the shy one; and Ren, the way-ahead-of-the-others one. They’re taught by a full cupid named Rin, who is deferring her own promotion to Guardian Angel to continue to mentor them. Kou actually is a guardian angel who pops in for added firepower now and then; Sister Yuuri is a winged, talking cat who supervises the cupid training program, and Lizette is a sneaky demon who tries to foil their work, but whom Ai wants to be friends with.
Continue reading Manga Friday: Lawless, Winged, and Unconfined ›
Thu Aug 21, 2008 — by Van Jensen
Review: "Air" by G. Willow Wilson and M.K. Perker
New Vertigo series has its head in the clouds
There's something so unabashedly original about writer G. Willow Wilson that it's nearly impossible to not enjoy her comics projects, like last year's graphic novel Cairo and this week's new series Air.
Wilson brings an entirely new voice and outlook to comics, keeping relevant to contemporary culture while digging into issues like terrorism, nationalism and identity. In Air, the focus is on Blythe, a stewardess who has the unfortunate disposition of being afraid of heights.
While a lesser writer might use that gimmick as a crutch, Wilson allows it to simply exist as one aspect of a fully realized world. The focus from the first stunning page (M.K. Perker deserves a lot of credit here) is on the shadowy forces hijacking Blythe's airplane, and a world of intrigue opens up chaotically.
For such a structured writer (Wilson's end note on writing is worth a read), she lets the reins go slack a little too much in this issue, with its convoluted narrative and repetitive settings.
With nearly every scene being set in an airport or airplane, it's difficult to follow the issue's chronology, though that has the likely intended effect of establishing how confused Blythe is.
Vertigo allowed me to read the first arc of the story, and it takes about that long to gain a sturdy footing in this new world Wilson has created. But it's an endlessly fun and inventive ride, and by the sixth issue Air appears on the verge of becoming the next great Vertigo book.
If nothing else, it's deeply ambitious and delightfully new. Of course, I might be biased, as Wilson is a fellow journalist turned comics person.
Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book journalist. Every Wednesday, he braves Atlanta traffic to visit Oxford Comics, where he reads a whole mess of books for his weekly reviews. Van's blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.
Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Van Jensen directly at van (dot) jensen (at) comicmix (dot) com.
Thu Aug 21, 2008 — by Van Jensen
Watching the Train Wreck of "Final Crisis"
Grant Morrison event goes off the rails
I may as well just get this out of the way up front: in my opinion, Final Crisis #3 is one of the worst comic books I've ever read.
Coming into this event season, I had high hopes for DC to regain some of the Infinite Crisis magic, but after three issues (sorry for the delay, but I was away from comic shops and the Internet) the latest and likely not last Crisis has clearly entered the realm of train wreck.
And yet many comics critics posted some largely favorable reviews. "I can't wait to see what happens next!" said one not atypical reviewer.
Throughout many reviews, the critics looked at writer Grant Morrison's approach of stringing together flashes of disparate stories into making a larger narrative and praised how new and challenging it is. There didn't seem to be a single bizarre element he used that couldn't elicit a glowing remark.
When reading those comments, I immediately recalled this quite-good essay by B.R. Myers on The Atlantic Monthly Web site. Writing about contemporary literary fiction, Myers complains that today's writers have become obsessed with style at the expense of substance.
We are supposed to have entered a golden age for fiction, he writes, and yet readers don't pick up literary fiction en masse, or much at all. Myers offers a simple explanation: the books are all self-absorbed fluff, and the nuts and bolts of telling a story have been left by the wayside.
Which brings us back to Final Crisis.
Continue reading Watching the Train Wreck of "Final Crisis" ›
Wed Aug 20, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Red Colored Elegy' by Seiichi Hayashi
A classic gekiga graphic novel from 1971
Red Colored Elegy
By Seiichi Hayashi
Drawn & Quarterly, July 2008, $24.95
Red Colored Elegy is like no other manga you’ve ever seen, a blast of pop art- and film-inspired storytelling from 1971 that was hugely influential to a generation of Japanese youth but has never been published in English until now. It’s like the American underground comics of the same era in being a break from the mainstream comics of its place and era, but unlike them – and unlike anything else I’ve seen before RAW in the ‘80s – in its style and visual language.
Sachiko Yamaguchi and Ichiro Nishimoto are a young couple, both connected to the manga/anime world, living together in Tokyo but unsure of what to do with their lives, in the way of all restless young people everywhere. Ichiro wants to be an artist of some kind: he abandoned painting when he couldn’t make a living at it, and quits an animation job to work on a graphic novel that he can’t sell. Sachiko is a tracer for another animation company; she has only the ambitions of a girl in a story by a man: to get married, to have kids, to run a house, to have a life.
Continue reading Review: 'Red Colored Elegy' by Seiichi Hayashi ›
Mon Aug 18, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Review: 'Flight, Vol. 5' edited by Kazu Kibuishi
More short comics stories from animators
Flight, Volume Five
Edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Villard/Random House, July 2008, $25.00
As always, the stories in the annual Flight volume are gorgeous and fun, created by a group of artists who worked on storyboards and other art for animated movies, and Flight is easily the most visually diverse of the new breed of mass-market comics anthologies.
But I can’t help but think that most of these stories are square watermelons – the products of creators trained and taught to run their imaginations down narrow channels to produce upbeat, kid-friendly stories with defined beats and clear morals. Nearly every story in Flight 5 could be seen as the treatment for a big-budget “family” animated movie, and many of them feel explicitly like the first scene or two of such a movie. Even once these guys – and all but two of them are guys, which some people may find notable – have been given the freedom of Flight, they continue to tell stories in that one, confined mode, like so many victims of Stockholm syndrome unwilling to leave their own prisons.
The stories are each well-told, but, as they pile up one after another, the number of naïf protagonists learning about the world (often under mortal peril) become just more variations on the same theme. There’s the fox-like world-saver of Michael Gagne’s “The Broken Path,” the anthropomorphic fox-man of Reagan Lodge’s “The Dragon,” the self-consciously ironic Bigdome of Paul Rivoche’s “Flowers for Mama,” Dave Roman’s series of folks who could all be “The Chosen One,” the probably-delusional child Princess of Pluto in Svetlana Chmakova’s “On the Importance of Space Travel,” and – the youngest and most obvious lesson-telling of all of these – boy hero of Richard Pose’s “Beisbol 2.”
Continue reading Review: 'Flight, Vol. 5' edited by Kazu Kibuishi ›
Fri Aug 15, 2008 — by Andrew Wheeler
Manga Friday: The Naughty Bits
Reviews of three books about sex
It’s another one of those weeks when I have to shoo the kids away; this time, Manga Friday looks at three books about sex. (This is all fairly mainstream stuff, not hentai and without any tentacles to be seen. But there are still naked body parts doing their thing, however tastefully.)
What we have this time is three views of sex – one a general guide (in fictional form) for the young and inexperience, and two romances of different genres.
Futari H: Manga Sutra, Vol. 1: Flirtation
By Katsu Aki
Tokyopop, January 2008, $19.99
I think of this as just Manga Sutra, but the title on the cover is Futari H Manga Sutra – and, on the first page, there’s the completely different title Step Up Love Story (which also seems to be the title of the related anime series). To avoid confusion, I’ll just call it Manga Sutra, since that’s what everyone has been and will call it.
This is the story of two very, very sheltered newlyweds – Makoto and Yura Onoda – who had a semi-arranged marriage somewhere in Japan at the age of twenty-five, and who seem to have not even seriously dated anyone before they met each other. Their families, though, are heavily populated with horndogs, and Makoto and Yura are the objects of much unwanted advice. They’re virgins – in the most extreme, literal sense of the word – when they marry, and it takes them about a week to manage to consummate their marriage. Even then, the sex isn’t all that good – Yuka is embarrassed by everything and Makoto has a major problem with premature ejaculation.
