Manga Friday: High School All Over Again
A lot of manga take place in high schools – and that’s natural, since the original audience for most of the popular manga series were Japanese teenagers, and it’s hard to find someone more self-obsessed than a teenager. So ignoring high school would almost mean ignoring manga all together, and I wouldn’t want to do that – but I do try to quarantine the very teenager-y books into their own little cliques (they’re used to that, anyway). It’s time for another one of those, so join me for a look at three new series set in the best and worst time of all of our lives:
Papillon, Vol. 1
By Miwa Ueda
Del Rey, October 2008, $10.95
Papillion builds its foundation upon a plotline much beloved in song, story, and Olson twin movies: there are these two identical twin sisters, and they’re completely different! The viewpoint character is Ageha – and, by the way, does that name sound as frumpy and old-ladyish to the Japanese as it does to me? – who grew up in the countryside, and, because of that, is shy, socially inept, unfashionable, and wears glasses. (The equivalent cliché in an America story would have her be a rough, woodsy, outdoorsy kind of girl, great at riding horses and starting fires, but Japanese heroines apparently must always be pretty and decorative, with slim wrists and no obvious skills.)
Ageha’s twin sister Hana – who grew up in the city, because their parents separated them very young (possibly on a whim; this isn’t explained) – is gorgeous and poised and the most popular girl in the school they both attend.
(Oh, and there’s also a nasty fat girl, who seemingly exists in this story only to be Ageha’s only friend – a very, very bad friend at that – and to show that unattractive people are necessarily cruel, vindictive, and rude.)
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:
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.)
This time around I have a volume two, a volume three, and a volume four – all in series that I’ve read at least some of the earlier books. Let’s see if I can still remember what went before – since manga often don’t have “who the heck are these people and what are they doing” pages – and whether they’re getting more or less interesting.
