PAD Introduces New Guest Reviewer & Girls Only Week!

First off, I’d like to introduce our new guest reviewer, Megan M! To quote her bio, “Megan M. is a customer service representative for an evil credit card company who lives in Texas. She would be a single English major living alone with a cat if her apartment complex allowed pets, and has compensated for the lack of a cat with far too many books. She has read so much that it has turned her brain and her shelves are overflowing with romance novels, fantasy novels, mystery novels, american comics, and, of course, manga. If one looks closely, one may spot the rare volume of Serious Literature valiantly gasping for air, struggling to survive in the sea of popular fiction. Her fictional preferences for women with weapons and attractive, often roguish, male accessories were firmly established at a very young age due to early exposure to Star Wars and Willow.”

Megan starts things off with a fantastic mini review of CMX’s Genghis Khan: To the Ends of the Earth and Sea. Please give her a warm welcome!

Secondly, today marks the beginning of Girls Only Week, a week-long focus on female mangaka here at There it is, Plain as Daylight. Inspired by the recent controversy over SDCC, the creation of the Women Make Comics t-shirt, and the re-launching of Girlamatic, I’ve decided to spend the entire week featuring works solely by female writers and artists. Something I think is important to point out here, in terms of just how many “women make comics” is that I don’t have to reach to do this. I’m not going back to my shelves and digging through to find female-created manga. I’m just glancing at what’s in my review stack, throwing in a couple of features I’d already planned to do anyway, and there it is, a full week, easy.

Today begins with a review for the most recent volume of one of my favorite shojo series for young girls, Shugo Chara! by female mangaka duo, Peach-Pit. Please note that though the creators may be “girls only,” the manga definitely won’t be. I’ll be covering works in a range of styles and genres this week, so stay tuned!