Tagged: Manga

Manga Friday: I’ve Got a Yen

News
March 7, 2008

This week I have three books from the fine folks at Yen Press. All of them are the second volume in their respective series, and I’ve only read the first book of one of them…which means it’s time for me to be confused yet again.

(Don’t worry – I’m well used to it by now.)

Black God, Vol. 2
Story by Dall-Young Lim; Art by Sung-Wao Park
Yen Press, 2008, $10.99

This is yet another series about a young man (Keita) bonded to a gorgeous supernatural girl (Kuro) who doesn’t have much knowledge of the modern world – apparently, he lost his arm in the first book, and she saved his life and bonded permanently with him to get his arm back. (She’s a “mototsumitama,” for those making notes at home. What does that mean? I dunno…)

In a startling reversal, Keita is not a nerdy high school student, but a mid-20s jerk of a videogame designer/programmer. (On the big two-page title spread of the very first story in this book, he’s strangling Kuro awake in the morning because she ruined his life – “ruined” apparently in the sense of “saved him from dying and gave him a connection to vast supernatural hoodoo.”) I think Keita is supposed to be at least mildly attractive to the reader, but I found him a complete ass.

In this book, some of the details of the human-mototsumitama relationship are explained, as Kuro meets another mototsumitama woman, who is bonded to an old man. (Keita’s boyhood friend, the equally cute Akane, also has something to do with the overall plot, but exactly what isn’t clear yet.) And what happens when two super-powered folks meet in a comic book, kids? That’s right – a big fight scene!

The art is clean and detailed, easy to follow for Americans while still being clearly in a manga style. The story is nothing terribly new – psychic battles, girls in their underwear, emotional turmoil – but it moves decently and the dialogue is pretty good. If Keita were anything like an acceptable human being, this could be a solid adventure story.

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Manga Friday: The Luck of the Draw

News
February 29, 2008

The stack of manga to be reviewed has been getting shorter, down to the point where trying to put together a theme is difficult. So, this week, it’ll have to be random reviews. It’s all from Japan, and… that’s probably all it has in common.

Andromeda Stories, Vol. 3
Keiko Takemiya; story by Ryu Mitsuse
Vertical, 2008, $11.95

The epic conclusion of the SF manga series from the early ‘80s ends with a scene familiar from many derivative tales of the Planet Stories era…but I won’t spoil it. As you may recall from my review of the previous volume, a race of intelligent machines, called "the Enemy," has been conquering an unnamed planet in the Andromeda galaxy, and Prince Jimsa of the Cosmoralian Empire, our hero, wants to stop them.

However, being as this is a manga for girls from the early ’80s, most of this book has to be taken up with the relationship between Jimsa and his long-lost twin "brother," Affle. The two share a psychic connection – they feel each other’s pain and their not terribly well defined psychic powers work much better when they’re in close proximity – and they also are strangely drawn to each other.

(Need I mention that the "brother" is not what he seems? This will be important for that very familiar ending.)

Other relationships are equally as central, such as those involving “the Elder,” who was an important advisor to the rules of Cosmoralia but turns out to be More Than He Appears. He was Jimsa’s mentor, but turns his attentions to Affle in this book, as part of his general megalomaniacal plans to utterly destroy the Enemy. Since this is a shojo manga, it’s much more about emotional scenes and relationships than about actually fighting against killer robots.

(And the Enemy’s function is to put whole populations into a kind of cold sleep – entirely willingly – so that they can live in a virtual world of peace and plenty. This, as is common in pulp SF, is seen as horrible and effete, a fate worse than death – so slaughtering the millions or billions the Enemy now warehouses and cares for is the only possibly option. It would have been nice to have seen a little thought given to that background, and a recognition that it might not be all that bad just because it’s different.)

I’m not the audience for Andromeda Stories: I’m too old, of the wrong gender, and I’ve read far too much science fiction. But, if you’re not me, you might like this.

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Review: Manga Sutra Volume One – Flirtation

Reviews
February 26, 2008

It used to be, if you wanted to reach for the comic art form for your sex education you had to send a couple bucks to those want ads in the back of the cheesy magazines for “Comics – the Kind Men Like!” That stuff was a bit distorted; well, in the case of the ones that featured [[[Popeye]]], I’d have to say they were quite a bit distorted.

Trust the Japanese to get real. After all, they’ve been using the comic art form to foster all kinds of truly educational venues: business, economics, history, language, and so on. You’d figure sex ed would be a no-brainer.

Be that as it may, doing sex ed comics in the form of a genuine story with a plot and character development is uniquely Manga. And TokyoPop brought the first volume of this series, Katsu Aki’s (Futari H) [[[Manga Sutra]]], to American shores.

Manga Sutra is a sweet and sensitive series that focuses on the psychological aspects of sex as much as – actually, more than – the mechanics. The story is about a young couple, Makoto and Yura, who met through an arranged “marriage meeting.” This is sort of a counseled dating service, but one where the ultimate intent of marriage is upfront. The two 25 year olds dated, liked each other, got married, and only then discovered they were both virgins with a lot of understandable insecurities and a lack of any clue.

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Manga Friday: More from Del Rey

News
February 22, 2008

Del Rey is about the only manga publisher sending me review copies on a regular basis, so they get an extra-large helping of Manga Friday’s love. And this week is no exception; we have no theme, but we do have these three new books from Del Rey…

Minima!, Vol. 1
Machiko Sakurai
Del Rey Manga, 2007, $10.95

There will not be a test this week, so you can relax – Minima! does not refer to the mathematical concept of minima. It’s not entirely clear what it does refer to, though I’d guess it’s a vague reference to small, cute, furry things.

Ame Oikawa is a quiet middle-school girl who’s vaguely dissatisfied about something – exactly what is not clear, because she’s so quiet – when she goes with her class to an amusement park. (Her problems are probably related to having a crush on some boy or other, but I couldn’t keep the other characters straight, so that part flew past me.)

But then a cute little stuffed animal that she just bought starts talking and walking around – its name is Nicori, and it’s standing up for her. Whatever the previous problem was – and did I mention that I’m still not sure about that at all? – disappears into the background, as there’s a media frenzy about this talking toy.

The plot lurches forward almost randomly from there, focusing mostly on the relationship between Ame and Nicori, with side-trips into the price of fame, the terrors of junior high, and the dangers of kidnappers before this volume is over. There’s a whole lot of big emotional scenes, mostly because Nicori is embarrassing Ame by misunderstanding things or blurting out her secret crushes.

This was very much not for me – it’s a story for and about tween girls; the kind who go “ohmiGOD” at the slightest thing and who make and break BFFs five times before lunch. For that audience, it’s harmless, but I doubt many (if any) ComicMix readers fit that demographic. However, if you have daughters or nieces, they might love this more than life itself.

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Manga Friday: Slight Return

News
February 15, 2008

This week the theme is “stuff I liked the first time around,” as I review the second volumes of four series that I enjoyed in volume one. For those who came in late, the reviews of the first volumes are here and here.

Mu Shi Shi, Vol. 2
Yuki Urushibara
Del Rey Manga, 2007, $12.95

Mu Shi Shi is still a quiet, atmospheric comic that feels steeped in folklore, even if most of its stories are completely invented. Since the background was explained in Volume 1, this time around we get five separate, freestanding stories.

Ginko wanders through the countryside of a Japan neither in this century nor any other, finding various mushi – tiny, primitive creatures that come in a bewildering array of forms and which often parasitize or otherwise harm humans – and helping the nearby humans to live with them, or just to survive.

In this volume, he meets another mushishi, who had made himself master of a mountain’s mushi, but is about to be overthrown. Then there’s a young woman cursed with hereditary mushi that she controls by writing them on scrolls, and a younger girl who dies and comes back to life every day to heal her local villagers. Ginko also helps a man searching for a rainbow, and a family with a cuckoo-ish mushi child.

Some of the stories here are as powerful as in Volume 1, especially the first and last. But I do wonder how long this series can be just about Ginko wandering around, with each story being discrete and separate. I hope Urushibara is building up to something – several characters look like they’re being set up for a return in a later story – because Mu Shi Shi is quite good as a series of individual stories, but could be great if there’s something to tie it all together.

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Manga Friday: Something Old, Something New

News
February 8, 2008

Since last week was big swords, I’d hoped to do big guns this week – but I didn’t have enough books to make it work.

So, instead, we have two brand-new manga series (first volumes published at the end of November) and two older, pretty well-known series. (“Old” is a relative term here – one was first published in English in 2004 and the other in 2002…)

Aventura, Vol. 1
Shin Midorikawa
Del Rey Manga, 2007, $10.95

Our first new manga this week is an unabashed Harry Potter rip-off, set in the Gaius School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a flying magical school divided into two parts. On one side, the students study magic, and on the other, swordsmanship (which somehow also makes magic, or something like that). Lewin Randit is an orphan, a poor swordsmanship student, who has shows no magical aptitude so far. But, once he meets two elves (a boy and a girl) from the magic school, things start to look up for him.

Oh, and the back cover copy, unsubtly, mentions that he “could become the greatest of them all.” Of course he could…

The art is, to my eye, medium-high shojo, with big hair flying everywhere, large luminous eyes, and a fineness of drawing everywhere. I find it very hard to differentiate characters in a style like that, so I might not have gotten as much out of Aventura as I could. But let’s be honest: it’s pleasant but very derivative, for readers who are looking for yet another “magical school” story.

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Manga Friday: The Leopard Who Walked Like a Man

News
January 11, 2008

This is another complicated bit of backstory: in 1979, Kaoru Kurimoto started a series of epic fantasy novels about a warrior-type named Guin who woke up amnesiac with a leopard mask permanently affixed to his face. There are at least a hundred and eighteen novels in the main series, plus some unspecified number of “side stories.” (I don’t know what makes them “side stories,” either.) One of those “side stories” was adapted into a manga series, and collected into three volumes. Now Vertical is in the middle of publishing the manga based on the side story based on the main story of the leopard-headed warrior named Guin. (Who lies in the house of Bedlam, Elizabeth Bishop would add.)

The first two volumes are out in English already; the third is scheduled to follow in March. And I read those first two volumes today (Thursday), to let you, the manga-starved hordes of ComicMix, know what they’re like.

And they’re OK.

Hm. You probably want more than that, right? All right. Guin is your standard post-Conan mightily-thewed barbarian type, with impossibly bulging muscles and a big sword he whips out and swings around phallicly at the appropriate moments. In the manga, his leopard “mask” looks just like a head – the jaw moves, the eyes move, and the whole thing is disconcertingly too small for his overmuscled body. Also in Conan fashion, he’s hacked his way to being king of a civilized nation, marrying the beautiful princess along the way. (Unlike Conan, though, the princess is not exceptionally enamored of her husband.)

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Manga Friday: Monkeying Around

News
January 4, 2008

I’m often most interested in the decadent phase of an artistic movement, the point when it starts turning on itself. Snarky parody, convoluted derivative plots, art that’s clearly a rip-off of someone else’s style – this and more amuses me. So I’m happy that I finally gave in to temptation and picked up Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga.

I found it on the “how to draw” shelf, which sort-of makes sense: it’s a parody of books about how to draw manga. But I tend to doubt it’ll find many readers over there; I expect the people looking for drawing guides are serious, devoted, dour young folks who won’t be in the mood for zany humor. (The fact that this book was published in 2002, and one lonely copy was still poking around on the shelf, tends to support that idea.)

But, if you do manage to find it, Monkey is quite funny. In it, fictionalized versions of the creators (Koji Aihara, 19 years old and Kentaro Takekuma, 22 years old, as they’re billed in the book) talk about how they’re going to conquer the world of manga, in a very funny overwrought style, full of full-face close-ups. (Which are also essentially the same in every single episode; there’s some very obvious humor and some sly hidden humor in this as well.) Takekuma, the older, seasoned manga pro, then proceeds to teach Aihara the lessons of manga – this book contains the first nineteen of them. (There’s a second volume promised at the end; I don’t know how much more material appeared in Japan.)

The lessons start with the very obvious and basic – drawing borders, facial expressions, and then figures. (Takekuma recommends copying from other artists to do that last one, gleefully insisting that everyone does it.) Then Takekuma moves on to explaining where ideas and stories come from – everyone else’s stories and ideas, of course. After that, there are a series of lessons about particular manga genres, which are in turn shows to be completely cliché-ridden and obvious.

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Manga Friday: Look! A Mammoth!

News
December 28, 2007

I’ve long harbored a suspicion about the “Mammoth Books” – you’re familiar with them, right? Big fat reprint anthologies, on a wide range of subjects (fiction and nonfiction, photographic and comics) published by Constable and Robinson in the UK and imported to this side of the pond by the now-defunct Carroll & Graf? – were put together somewhat on the cheap. (This was based on my encounters with their historical reprints, which I kept thinking should be called things like The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories That Are Out of Copyright.)

But this book, I hasten to say, is made up of new material, as far as I can tell. All of the works are copyrighted 2007, though the book doesn’t say where, if anywhere, any of this appeared before. Come to think of it, that’s a bit of a problem – if this is the Best New Manga, surely that’s in comparison with other manga, and implies that this stuff was previously published?

These are the kind of problems I always have with the Mammoth Books — they’re generally nice anthologies, but aren’t quite what it says they are on the tin.

OK, so here’s what I think this book is: a collection of all-new stories, in a mostly manga manner, by creators primarily from the UK. It doesn’t actually say that – the introduction, by one-named editor “Ilya,” spends most of its time burbling about how cool manga is and how wonderful the world will be once we can all manage to sell more and more copies of more manga books – but it’s the most likely scenario. (If this really is an anthology of previously published works, and those works are “manga,” then the fact that they’re nearly all British and that none of them are, oh, Japanese, becomes much more puzzling.)

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Manga Friday: In Medias Res

News
December 21, 2007

We all want to get on the ground floor, but that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, we find ourselves walking into a movie two reels in, munching popcorn and whispering to each other “And who is that guy?” In honor of those confused moments in all of our lives, this week Manga Friday read Book Two in a short stack of manga series, and tried to figure out what the heck was going on.

First off is Spiral: The Bounds of Reasoning. The division into volumes is a bit odd here, since the first section of Vol. 2 is the third and final part of a locked-room mystery. So we get that old-fashioned mystery-plot staple: the detective explaining everything and talking at great length to all of the characters, who wonder why he’s gathered them all there. It’s very talky, of course – that’s the whole point of that kind of exercise – but it summarizes the first two parts of this particular story well enough for me to understand the ending.

After that are two one-part stories and then a two-parter, which explain a bit more about the premise, and expand out the cast a bit. The detective from the first story is a teenager named Ayumu Narumi, and he’s the other stereotyped manga teen boy: the uber-competent whiz kid (as opposed to the amiable slacker – no manga teens that I’ve seen are just pretty good at a couple of things). He’s both a deductive genius and a world-class pianist, but is tortured because he’s not as good at either of those things as his older brother, who disappeared mysteriously (swell ominous music).

The antagonists are a group called the Blade Children; we don’t learn all that much about them in this book, but they all are missing one rib (surgically removed in early childhood), are even more tormented than Ayumu (and linked to him and/or his brother somehow), and possibly have some kind of secret over-arching plan. Two major Blade Children are introduced in this book: Eyes Rutherford, the goth-y English teenage piano sensation (the world within a manga is a deeply silly place, sometimes, full of people named “Eyes”), and the sneaky, monologuing Kousuke Asazuki. I’m not entirely sure if they’re supposed to be villains, per se, which might explain why they’re not terribly frightening – or comprehensible. All in all, I could follow the main plot of Spiral, but the first volume might have explained the point of it all in a way that I really needed.

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Tagged: Manga

Manga Friday: I’ve Got a Yen

Manga Friday: The Luck of the Draw

Review: Manga Sutra Volume One – Flirtation

Manga Friday: More from Del Rey

Manga Friday: Slight Return

Manga Friday: Something Old, Something New

Manga Friday: The Leopard Who Walked Like a Man

Manga Friday: Monkeying Around

Manga Friday: Look! A Mammoth!

Manga Friday: In Medias Res

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