Sugarholic, Vol. 1
By Gong GooGoo
Published by Yen Press

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After the house she lives in with her mother and grandmother is destroyed in a landslide, twenty-year-old slacker Jae-Gyu is sent away from her rural hometown to live with her older brother in Seoul. With little money and even less optimism, she gets off the bus in the big city, only to lose her money and make an enemy (a good-looking but arrogant guy whose shirt she accidentally tears) right off the bat. Things get no better once she finds her brother, who is obviously engaged in shady business and really doesn’t want her around. She does find some refuge in her best friend, Hyun-Ah, whose family moved to the city a few years back, but even that is marred by the re-emergence of Hee-do, a childhood playmate Jae-Gyu bullied repeatedly, who is now an up-and-coming pop star harboring a long-held crush on her. Then to top things off, she gets embroiled in the middle of some kind of dangerous family trouble involving the torn-shirt guy (a martial artist named Whie-Hwan) who insists they pretend they are in love with each other in order to save himself from being sent out of the country.

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So, I picked up volume four of Pluto earlier this evening, anxious to dig in to the latest volume of my favorite manga series this year. My plans were dashed less than a chapter in, however, when I became so emotional that I actually had to put it down. Since this volume is new, I’ll avoid any details. Suffice it to say this was a fairly small incident (relative to the scope of the work as a whole) that just happened to hit me unusually hard. This isn’t a fatal issue, of course. I’ll pick it up again once I feel I’ve recovered, perhaps in a less vulnerable moment. Nor is it a criticism of Pluto, by any means. I want to be moved deeply by fiction. That’s why I read it. It’s a powerful testament to the craft of both Tezuka and Urasawa that the series is able to affect me so strongly.

What this experience brings to mind now as I remain here uselessly in my chair, not quite ready to pick up anything else, is other moments in manga that have brought me to tears.
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Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit, Vol. 2
By Motoro Mase
Published by Viz Media

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Fujimoto is becoming accustomed to his job as the harbinger of people’s doom, but he’s not sure if that’s a good thing. The volume opens as his girlfriend tells him she’s leaving him because she feels crushed by the weight of his work. Meanwhile, the work goes on and this volume introduces two new victims of the government’s Social Welfare Act. Both stories are tragic, of course, perhaps even more so than those told in the first volume, though both victims also end up changing other people’s lives for the better, one through the work he’s able to during his short life, and the other, sadly, through her death.

Despite whatever “good” has been done by these individuals, however, there is still no evidence that the government’s systematic murder of its citizens is actually a positive thing at all. One emerges from this volume hoping against hope that Fujimoto might find the stomach to start a rebellion of some kind, not that he’s yet demonstrated anything approaching that kind of fortitude. His deepest conflict right now is whether to let himself grow colder still toward the unfortunate souls he must visit (on the way to one last-minute Ikigami delivery, he asks his driver to make a stop at the video store so that he can avoid paying a late fee) or whether he should try to discover some philosophy of life and death that he can use to help heal their pain. This is the extent of what he can manage emotionally at this point.

I found the individual stories in this volume even more compelling than those in the last, which is certainly something that will keep me reading. I do hope the story will find a new direction to explore before the manga’s current formula becomes tedious, as it undoubtedly will should it continue on like this much longer. For the moment, however, what is offered here is more than enough to keep readers engaged. Ikigami continues to be a fascinating and well-told story with fantastic art to match.

Volume two of Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit will be available on August 11th, 2009. Review copy provided by the publisher. Click here to read my review of volume one.

Unsophisticated and Rude
By Momoko Tenzen
Published by DMP

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When Hiroto’s best friend, Satoshi, confesses that he’s fallen for another guy (popular upperclassman, Nao) it’s a bit of a shock, but not for the reasons Satoshi might have expected. It’s not the fact that Satoshi is crushing on a boy that bothers Hiroto but rather which boy. Hiroto, too, has always harbored feelings for Nao and in fact still struggles to deal with the memory of a drunken night they once shared, something he’s sure Nao wants to forget. Torn between friendship and love, Hiroto mainly tries to avoid being around Satoshi as he watches him getting closer and closer to Nao, but it is Nao’s true feelings that are the real surprise.

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Toxic Planet
By David Ratte
Published by Yen Press

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Sam’s world is one created by industry and global warming, where vegetation is ancient legend and gas masks are a daily necessity. Both the earth and its atmosphere are irrevocably poisoned, ecologists are considered enemies of the state, and trees are seen only in museum exhibits. Yet somehow, all this is funny. Really, really funny. Released by Yen Press first as a webcomic and now in print, French cartoonist David Ratte’s satirical comic transforms environmentalism into the sublime by mixing harshly real messages with sharp, occasionally whimsical humor.

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Just now I’ve posted a review for the first volume of Setona Mizushiro’s After School Nightmare over at Comics Should Be Good! This is a series I keep hearing good things about, and my experience with the first volume certainly backs that up. I’ve always been fascinated by dreams, so just the premise was enough to get me hooked, but the story’s rich characters and fantastic art make it even more compelling. This review gets special mention over here, because I’m keen to add this volume to my “Recently Recommended” sidebar widget, that’s how much I enjoyed it. Please head on over and check out my review!

On a somewhat related note, congratulations, also, to everyone over at CSBG’s parent site, Comic Book Resources for its Eisner win last night!

It was inevitable, I suppose. As long as a Weekly Shonen Jump title continues doing well, it is probably going to be picked up by Viz eventually. Still, I can’t deny that my heart leapt with joy over the news today from Comic-Con that Viz is licensing Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s Bakuman for serialization in Shonen Jump here in the US.

In general, I am a bigger fan of Obata than Obata/Ohba, and I had very mixed feelings about their earlier collaboration, Death Note. What is fantastic about Bakuman, however, is that it retains some of the best aspects of Death Note and chucks most of the rest.
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Broken Blade, Vol. 1
By Yunosuke Yoshinaga
Published by CMX

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Rygart Arrow has grown up in a world where all devices and machines are powered by quartz, controlled by his people’s inborn ability to infuse the quartz with energy using nothing but a thought. Unfortunately, Rygart is one of the very rare few born without this ability, otherwise known as an “unsorcerer.” As the story begins, Rygart is abruptly summoned to his country’s capital to meet with the King and Queen, who also happen to be his best friends from boarding school, Hodr and Sigyn. Confused and completely in the dark about the reason behind his sudden visit, Rygart arrives cracking jokes, but the hilarity fades quickly as his friends share with him the fact that their country is under attack. Worse still, the invading army is being led by the fourth in their old school gang, a budding military genius named Zess. Baffled by the news, Rygart encourages Hodr to surrender to the enemy’s obviously superior forces, until Hodr reveals that one of the conditions of surrender proposed by the invaders is that the royal family (including his wife) be executed.

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Time for a little link-blogging!

First of all, it’s probably obvious that I enjoyed the Girls and fandom roundtable with the Good Comics for Kids folks over at the Robot 6 blog, considering that I’ve been commenting up a storm. I wanted to be sure to pass on the link, though, because it’s important and exciting discussion. Sparked by the recent spate of fanboy hostility towards teen girl fans of Twilight, the discussion continues and expands in comments to adult perception of the novels and more. Many thanks to everyone at Good Comics for Kids for speaking out on behalf of young female fans.

Speaking of girls and women in comics fandom, thanks to Deb Aoki’s efforts, the Women Make Comics t-shirt is available now (in many shapes and sizes!) at Cafe Press. Profits go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the Cartoon Art Museum, and Friends of Lulu. Buy them for all your friends!

Deb has also posted her 20 Manga Must-Sees / Must-Do’s at San Diego Comic-Con 2009 at about.com, which I am linking to mainly out of envy. What a great lineup of events! Special mention must be made of item #3, the Women in Manga panel with JuYoun Lee (Yen Press), Lillian Diaz-Pryzbyl (TokyoPop), Leyla Acker (VIZ), Becky Cloonan, Robin Brenner, and Deb herself. Oh how I wish I could attend!

While I’m making impossible wishes, I’ll also add (in the category of Jobs I Wish I Was Qualified For) Viz Media’s advertisement for a Brand Manager. Check it out for yourselves, especially if you live in the San Francisco area.

As a little post-script here, I’d just like to mention how much I enjoy and appreciate the manga blogosphere as a whole. The bloggers are seriously fantastic and discussion is almost uniformly thoughtful and invigorating. I’m constantly impressed by this community and immensely grateful to be a part of it. I think I’ve expressed things along these lines before, but it bears repeating. Thanks, manga bloggers!

High School Debut, Vol. 11
By Kazune Kawahara
Published by Viz Media

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As this volume begins, Miyabi, the girl in Yoh’s prep class who was very obviously developing a thing for him in the previous volume, starts pushing herself between Yoh and Haruna. Though it is unclear in the beginning how much is intentional, as the volume goes on, she moves into bona fide psycho territory–sending fake messages from Yoh’s phone, blocking Haruna’s calls, and so on. Fortunately, just as this arc is becoming a bit too much to bear, things lighten up with a story in which Haruna’s lack of understanding about the significance of an overnight trip with Yoh runs them both around in circles, bringing the series back into its comfort zone (and me with it).

I won’t lie. I really disliked the first half of this volume. I have very little patience for the too-common portrayal of physically unattractive characters as obvious villains. I’ve long accepted that manga characters–especially shojo manga characters and always the romantic leads–are going to be uniformly beautiful people, even when they begin as ugly ducklings. The idea that people must be (or become) beautiful in order to be loved pervades all media, not just manga, and I’ve learned to clutch my Charlotte Brontë novels closely to my chest, deal with it, and move on.

It is really irksome, then, that in this rare instance in which a character with a plain face and unconventional body type is introduced, she is an angry, loathsome, seriously unbalanced stalker, threatening to steal the good-looking hero away from his cute, perky heroine. (Though even the heroine becomes overweight and unattractive while being kept away from her man–look what happens to a girl deprived of love!) I realize I’m ranting at this point, but I honestly found this story line to be pretty repugnant, especially in a series aimed at teen girls, many of whom may be seeing a young, female character who they can relate to physically for the first time ever in the manga they read, only to find her portrayed as a complete monster.

It is a real testament to the charm of this series, however, that by about ten pages into the next arc it had already won me back. Haruna is adorably innocent, Yoh is adorably devoted, and all is right with the world. I suspect most readers will not have the same extreme reaction to the beginning of volume as I had, but for those who might, take heart! Though the first half of this volume loses some of the fun inherent to this series, by the end it has returned to its usual, delightful self. High School Debut, I still love you.

Volume eleven of High School Debut will be available on September 1st, 2009. Review copy provided by the publisher.