Tagged: Manga

This week, Manga Friday applies its lazer-like eye to one and only one book – luckily, this one is weird and confusing enough for any five regular volumes…

Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro, Vol. 1
By Satoko Kiyuduki
Yen Press, May 2008, $10.99

Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro is one of the few manga series I’ve seen with extensive color: about a half-dozen times in the first half of this book, a story begins with at least two pages in full color. That slows down as the book goes on, so I suspect this is done in Japan to launch “big” new series with a splash.

(I should also note that this probably hasn’t quite hit stores yet — the publication date is officially "May," which means it’s probably on trucks whizzing across North America right now. And "May" covers quite a bit of time, too.)

And, for those of us who have managed to train our eyes to read manga “backwards,” and have gotten moderately adept at that, Kuro throws us another curveball: it’s in 4-koma (four panel) style, so each page reads straight down the right-hand column and then straight down the left-hand column…unless one of the top tiers has a panel stretching across the page, in which case I have to read all the panels several different ways before I’m sure how it’s meant to go. Your mileage may vary, but do expect at least a few pages for your eyeballs to reboot on the new operating system.

And then, once I’d figured out how to physically read Kuro, I still had to work out what was going on. And that wasn’t easy, either. Kuro is the girl on the cover – she’s dressed up like a boy, and talks like a boy — so says the explanation; this may be clearer in Japanese — and thus people tend to assume she’s male. She’s also carrying a coffin, and refuses to explain exactly why. (It’s more likely to be for her than for whatever she’s looking for, though — that much is clear.)

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Here’s the manga I read this week (no, seriously, that’s the only thing they have in common) –

Kaze no Hana, Vol. 1
By Ushio Mizta and Akitoski Ohta
Yen Press, 2008, $10.99

Momoka Futami is just your normal teenaged manga heroine – an amnesiac orphan who’s coming to live with her unknown family four years after the mysterious death of her parents. Oh, and she learns that she’s the rightful wielder of one of eight ancient magical swords that are need to keep back various monsters that regularly pop into existence in this town.

Kaze no Hana has a lot of characters, and they’re all related to each other somehow, and most of them have magical swords, and…it just turned into a Russian novel in my head, with the added problem that I couldn’t even keep some of them straight visually. (This is mostly my problem; they don’t look identical, but they’re different in manga ways rather than Western ways, which means I can’t tell people apart unless they’re in the same panel and I can compare them directly.)

So, um, Kaze no Hana is complex and interesting, but it made my head hurt, OK? And I really don’t need that from a comic about the secret family of people that kill monsters – I can get secret families killing monsters in a dozen places without any headaches.

Your mileage may vary…

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This week’s manga delivery brought two more books from mighty Yen Press, and they are…

Kieli, Vol. 1
Story by Yukako Kabei; Art by Shiori Teshirogi
Yen Press, 2008, $10.99

Some books, like this one, just have too much backstory for their own good, but let me roll up my sleeves and see if I can get it all clear: sometime in the future, mankind expanded to at least one other world, the planet Kieli is set on. (According to at least one character in this book, though, God decided not to travel, and so this unnamed world is godless.)

Anyway, about 80 years ago, there was a big war on this planet over fossil fuels – the two sides aren’t named, by the way – which seems to have gone global and gotten particularly nasty. Towards the end of the war, one side (or maybe both) created nearly indestructible warriors, called “the undying” from dead soldiers. The Undying had their hearts replaced with stones, and so stopped aging, could take ridiculous amounts of damage, and healed nearly any hurt in time.

After the war – we don’t know who won, or any real information about the politics or government of this world – the Undying were hunted down, mostly by “the Church,” and are now considered a legend.

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Dororo, Vol. 1
by Osamu Tezuka
Vertical, 2008, $13.95

Vertical continues to reprint some of Tezuka’s most interesting and idiosyncratic manga with this first volume of his 1967-68 serial Dororo – the other two volumes will follow a little later this year.

Dororo is, I guess, Tezuka’s take on a samurai manga – it’s set in pre-modern Japan and the main character runs around cutting people with a sword.

But let me back up a bit. Dororo opens with Lord Daigo, the typical nasty, ambitious nobleman so beloved in genre fiction around the world. He spends the night in the “Hall of Hell” – a shrine or pavilion filled with statues of forty-eight evil gods. Daigo wants to rule all of Japan, and wants to make a deal with the demons, so he offers up his about-to-be-born son. For the power he wants, he asks each of the evil gods to take one thing from that child…

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 This week finds me in near Old-Mother-Hubbard mode, with just a few random old things. But let’s run through them, just because they’re here, and maybe the Manga Gods will smile on us for next week…

Priest, Vol. 1
Min-Woo Hyung
Tokyopop, 2003, $9.99

From the evidence – the creator’s name, and the fact that this reads left-to-right – I deduce that this series is manwha rather than manga, and comes from Korea. (If I’m wrong, someone will let me know.)

In a time and place that’s supposed to be the late 19th century American West – but contains guns from at least fifty years later – the half-doomed ex-priest Ivan Isaacs battles the undead servants of the fallen Archangel Temozarela, with the fate of the whole world at stake.

(Yes, Temozarela. He must be in one of the footnotes to the Bible, since he’s not one of the “Big Three” Archangels. Question for discussion: Is what Eastern comics creators have done to Christianity in their stories equal to, less than, or greater than what Westerners have done to Buddhism and Shintoism? And does the Western infestation of ninjas have any part in this discussion?)

Oh, and our priest hero does this, in this first volume at least, on a train. Badass only begins to cover it. Ivan sold half of his soul to Belial for the power to battle Temozarela’s forces – there might be some political war in hell going on in the background, but that’s not explained in this volume.

What Ivan does is 1) to pump several metric tons of silver bullets into marauding hordes of zombie-like creatures, though, sadly, usually not until they’ve already killed most of the other people in the vicinity and 2) to bemoan his fate and to proclaim loudly that he is still alive and so Belial hasn’t captured him yet.

The odd thing about Priest is that, with its scratchy, blocky art style, overarching gloom, and marauding undead, it feels and looks very much like an independent comic of the mid-’90s; Hyung’s style only looks manga now and then, generally with his female characters. Sure, the big sound effects in Korean characters are a tip-off, but otherwise this looks a lot like a book Slave Labor would have at least thought about publishing in 1996.

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