Over the next few days, I’ll be offering three short (somewhat casual) reviews of manga I’ve picked up recently. They aren’t all new, but they’re new to me. Here’s the first!

Future Lovers, Vol. 1
By Saika Kunieda
Published by Deux Press

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Having been dumped by his girlfriend, schoolteacher Kento Kumagaya lets himself get picked up in a bar by an attractive guy, Akira Kazuki. After a fantastic night of drunken sex (and a fantastic, less drunk morning), Kento assumes he’ll never see Akira again. This assumption proves to be false, however, as Akira turns out to be the new art teacher at Kento’s school. After a few repeats of their initial encounter and a moment of true jealousy, Kento finally realizes that his interest in Akira runs much deeper than he ever expected, and he decides to pursue a serious relationship with him. Facing open hostility from his family and Akira’s distrust of his sexuality things don’t proceed easily, but help arrives in the unexpected form of a female student with a longtime crush.

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I am seriously sleepy today. I need to remember that two con weekends in a row might be more than I can really handle. I can’t imagine having missed either of them, though. Look for a full report of my weekend at Conbust later on this week.

Today I have one new review out there in the world, for volume four of the Yen Press’ Legend, included in today’s Manga Minis. I have mixed feelings about Legend at this point, but there’s some real promise there.

I have some things I’m pretty anxious to talk about, but I think they’ll have more context coming out of my ConBust report, so I’ll hold my tongue until then. Meanwhile, apologies for the short update. I’ll have much more to say when I’ve had some real rest.

Just a couple of quick notes! First of all, I have a new review up at Tokidoki Daylight, for xxxHolic volume 13 which I loved very much. Oh Watanuki and Doumeki, I die. I die. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Also, I’ll be spending some of the next few days at Smith College’s ConBust, a local sci fi, gaming, and anime convention with a special focus on female fans and creators. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they have to offer!

A question to fellow Wordpress users: Have any of you noticed a lot more spam making its way past Akismet lately? Is it just me?

That’s all for the moment!

I really should send myself notes during the day. I swear I thought of four or five things over the course of the day that I wanted to blog about, but I can’t remember a single one of them.

Human relations have been strained for me the last couple of weeks, and if I believed in things like astrology, I’d be looking for some kind of celestial reasoning for it all. I’ve managed to offend people at nearly every turn, and I’m only grateful to those who have had the kindness to allow me to learn and grow from the experience instead of just walking away. I’ll be glad when this tension eases, however, and I’m once again able to interact easily and peacefully with my fellow humans. Maybe I just need a really good nap.

Volume thirteen of xxxHolic was released yesterday, and I shockingly forgot to pick up a copy then. I finally managed this on the way home from work today, and I’ve had a really enjoyable evening with it. Expect coherent thoughts sometime in the next few days, when I can work my way past undignified squee. I also picked up volume 22 of Fruits Basket while I was there, since I’d intended to purchase it last week, so I have that to look forward to as well.

Hopefully I’ll be back tomorrow with all those ideas that fled from me today. See you then!

One quick link to start off with: I have a review in today’s Manga Minis, for volume four of Go!Comi’s Ultimate Venus. It’s a fun little manga that I’ve enjoyed so far, and I’d recommend it as light shojo fluff. Now on to the real topic of this post.

So, over this past weekend, I attended the first annual (yes, they said so!) New England Webcomics Weekend at the Eastworks building in Easthampton, MA, just a couple of towns over. I read a few webcomics regularly, but my husband is the real fan, so though many of the panels sounded interesting to me, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. It was, however, an exceptional weekend, and I came away a fan of many more webcomics than I’d been when I arrived.

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Thanks to Brigid Alverson’s recent interview with Matt Thorn, I got inspired to read some Moto Hagio, beginning with her short science fiction manga from 1975, They Were Eleven. Last night I wrote up a review, which you can find today at Tokidoki Daylight! I’m afraid my lack of background in manga shows terribly in this review, despite my ongoing quest to become more knowledgeable, so for further reading, I’d recommend going through Matt Thorn’s website, where he has many articles and resources chronicling the history of shojo manga, all of which are much smarter than anything I could write. My review, however, does include some nice images I scanned in from my copies of the manga so it’s worth checking out if you’ve never read it! They Were Eleven is unfortunately out of print here, but the Viz pamphlets can be picked up very reasonably on ebay, which is how I got them. Don’t even think about trying to get Four Shojo Stories, though, unless you’re a lot richer than I!

Over the next couple of days, I’ll be pretty much occupied at the New England Web Comics Weekend, which is conveniently located just a couple small towns over! My husband is a huge fan of webcomics, and I keep up on a number of them myself, so it should be an enjoyable event all around. There are quite a few interesting panels being presented, and you know I’ll be at the print vs. web discussion, right? :D I’ll try to report in at some point with any interesting news.

A million thanks to those who have chimed in with recommendations over at my Let’s Talk About Manhwa post! I’m so excited to find new things to read! Please stop by if you have anything further to add!

So, I’m starting this entry with the full awareness that I know very little about Korean comics, and the truth is, I’m hoping it will lead to a flood of recommendations and information so that I can remedy that. Everything I say here will be based on the very small amount of manhwa I have read, almost all of which was provided by publishers and given to me to review at Manga Recon. I hadn’t really formed an opinion about manhwa as a whole, but as I was thinking about it recently, I realized that out of the five or so titles I’ve reviewed (most of them multiple volumes), I’ve liked all of them. This makes me want to know and read more.

Soyoung Jung, VP of NETCOMICS, has been quoted as saying that she considers manhwa to be more “poetic” than Japanese manga. I don’t have enough background to necessarily say the same, but I can speak to one genre and the titles I’ve read in it, and that would be boys’ love. Most of the manhwa I’ve reviewed so far has been BL manhwa (and by “most” I mean “three”): Let Dai and Totally Captivated, both from NETCOMICS, and One Thousand and One Nights from Yen Press. All of these are good-sized series (two of them complete at this time), and they definitely have some things in common.

First of all, they all tend to be pretty violent and somewhat melodramatic. This is obviously not the draw, though, as these are the two things (aside from bizarre female fantasy versions of gay men) I’m most likely to complain about in a BL review. So what is the draw? You know, they are all freakin’ epic. They are epic, plotty, multi-volume stories with complicated characters, and that’s the thing I want from comics in general that seems so hard to find in BL. I mean, even while these three Korean series are busy being melodramatic and violent, they are also getting really deep into the characters’ minds and hearts–all their strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions–great, small, ugly, beautiful–and that’s what makes these stories so compelling. It’s also what I’ve been missing in most of the Japanese BL I’ve read. Again, these observations are based on a pretty small sample of books, so there is no way I can claim any of it as Certifiably True, just true to my experience. And judging from my experience only, it wouldn’t be ridiculous to conclude that I like Korean BL more than Japanese BL, which I think I might, and indeed I might describe it as “more poetic.”

Of the other manhwa titles I’ve read so far, only one includes multiple volumes, and that is Yen Press’ series, Comic, which I talked about here. So far it has grabbed me a little less than the other manhwa series I’ve reviewed, but enough to happily anticipate the next volume.

So, what fantastic titles am I missing? There must be loads! What should I know about Korean comics that I’m not going to find out from wikipedia? Talk to me, friends! Teach me about manhwa!

Still feel like I’m kind of running on empty over here, and it looks like my website is feeling the same way, considering how slow it’s loading this morning.

I have two reviews out in the world today, both at Manga Recon’s On the Shojo Beat column. The first is for volume fifteen of NANA, and the second for volume six of Wild Ones. The difference in quality between these two series is so great, it would be unfair to compare them, so for the moment let’s just say I really love NANA. Reading volume fifteen gave me the urge to do a re-read of the series so far. I haven’t started yet, but I think I probably will do this. Volume fifteen also provids one of those sporadic moments in which I identify strongly with Nana Osaki. Most of the time I identify really heavily with Nana Komatsu, but when it comes to career drive, it’s all Nana O. I suppose I’m three parts Hachi, and one part Nana, if you think of it like that. This particular instance was very rare, because it actually had nothing at all to do with career. I have (more than once) had the experience of watching everyone around me drifting away, or worse, the sudden realization that everyone is already gone (hello NYC in the couple of years before I left), and I was feeling that hard while reading this volume.

In other news, I have had a headache since Saturday evening, and it won’t really go away. Ugh. Oh, and the guy who draws xkcd has obviously been visiting my dreams. I’m almost forty and I still have these, including just last night. I also still have theater dreams. You know, where it’s time for your entrance, and you realize you never learned the lines/song/dance/etc., and in fact are not sure what the play is. Oh, and you’re going to miss the entrance anyway, because you aren’t in the right costume/shoes/wig, etc. Even after all these years. Wow, my head hurts.

I can’t believe I haven’t made a post here in almost a week! Oh, life. So, those who follow me on Twitter will know that I spent last evening hurriedly writing a review, which is not something I was certain I could do. Usually I read a book, think about it for three days, and only then can I even begin to put down any kind of words about it. Last night I attempted to read and review in the same evening. And here is the result! Volume six of Totally Captivated, reviewed at Manga Recon. This is a Korean boys’ love manhwa (published by NETCOMICS) which I enjoyed quite a bit, particularly in its final volume. It’s got a somewhat ridiculous premise, but the characters are extremely well-written and it provides the kind of emotional complexity I love best.

It’s worth noting, too, that I experienced almost none of the readability issues with Totally Captivated at NETCOMICS that I had with Let Dai, which leads me to believe that Let Dai was a victim of particularly poor scanning or reproduction that may even reflect issues with the print volumes.

Speaking of BL manhwa, I also recently read NETCOMIC’s U Don’t Know Me which, despite its weird netspeak title, is actually a really nice BL one-shot. Michelle reviewed it in yesterday’s Manga Minis, and I don’t have much to say that she didn’t, though I am slightly disappointed that it falls into the same old habit of basically ignoring the characters’ sexuality aside from their feelings for each other. I know that it plays into a lot of women’s fantasies to make a couple of guys gay only for each other (rather than gay in general), but it’s also offensive on a lot of levels, and I wish BL authors would stop pandering to that. That said, it’s a very nice story with fantastic characters and a warm, delicate feel, so I’d second Michelle’s recommendation.

Speaking of recommendations, one more link before I go, to Ed Sizemore’s detailed, thoughtful, and all-around awesome write-up of the first twenty volumes of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles at Comics Worth Reading. I love this series, and he writes beautifully about it. Go read!

First of all, my review of Sayonara, Zetsubuo-Sensei, Vol. 1 is finally done and posted at Manga Recon. I really enjoyed this book, and though I haven’t read any other full reviews of it yet, I get the feeling most people will either be pretty delighted with it or be completely baffled that anyone could be. Its humor just happens to hit my funny bone just so, which is a pretty great thing!

Secondly, I’ve been waiting until I was finished with the review to talk about my anniversary, so it is finally time! Besides a lovely dinner and so on and so forth, the main feature of the day was that we both got Blackberry Storms! Yes, we spent our wedding anniversary geeking out over new phones, do you have a problem with that? We geeked out at home, we geeked out at the restaurant. All in all, the “Geekiversary” (as we named it early on) was pretty fantastic, and now that I’m finally done with that review, I am finally allowed to really play around with my new toy! I’ll begin with two photos I took this morning of my office. The camera on the Blackberry blows away the one on my old phone (though my skills are sadly the same).
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