Finally a great week for manga and manhwa! Check out this week’s Picks from the Manga Bookshelf bloggers and special guest Michelle Smith!
DAVID: It’s a good week for Yen Press at Midtown Comics, with several appealing titles on the way, but I have to cast my lot with the third volume of Yumi Unita’s Bunny Drop. It’s about a single guy who takes in his grandfather’s young, orphan daughter, and it’s got a wonderful, smart, slice-of-life approach to the subject matter. Unita really finds the emotional core of everyday moments, and the characters are great. This was one of the great debuts of 2010, and new volumes seem to arrive painfully slowly, so it’s always a joyous occasion.
KATE: I second David’s recommendation! One of the things I like best about Bunny Drop is that Unita doesn’t go for the obvious laughs that are characteristic of the single-guy-becomes-instant-dad genre. Not that the series isn’t humorous; there’s some exquisitely funny material in volume one, for example, as Daichi questions Rin about a favorite stuffed animal. (He thinks it’s a dog, Rin insists it’s a rabbit.) But Unita is more interested in tracking Daichi’s development as a parent than in setting him up to be the straight man for a little kid, a decision that goes a long way to making the story believable.
MICHELLE: It is indeed a good week for Yen Press. While I have no doubt that Bunny Drop is thoroughly awesome, I am going to have to cast my vote for the fifth volume of Time and Again. Though this manhwa is full of intriguing supernatural stories, the most compelling thing about it is the bond between its main characters. Exorcist Baek-On and his bodyguard Ho-Yeon are both attempting to atone for something in their past, and recent volumes have begun exploring those painful memories as well as showing how the men are helping each other to heal. It’s wonderful stuff, and I can’t wait to read more!
MELNDA: This is a really tough choice for me, and though it’s not quite as tough as it might be if I didn’t know that Midtown’s listing of Hikaru no Go 22 is a lie (I bought it myself when it came out in January!), I’m still faced with quite an array of fantastic manga and manhwa. In the end, I’m going to have to be a wimp and agree with all my cohorts above. I simply can’t choose between Bunny Drop and Time and Again. Like Hikaru no Go, actually, both are examples of series I think are richer, quirkier, and more elegantly written than their respective genres necessarily command. In the spirit of Robot 6’s Food or Comics? this week I have to go with comics.
Readers, what are your Picks this week?
CJ says
March 21, 2011 at 5:43 pmMy pick for this week is Cirque du Freak vol 8, I quite enjoyed the novel series that they were based on and it actually follows it pretty closely while still being its own thing well enough. That poor attempt at a movie though? Now that was just embarassing, and after Yen Press even got the first 3 manga out in time for the movie (Hopefully everyone went for the manga or the books and ignored the movie, I don’t think it did well in theaters). Not sure why Yen Press took a 6 month break after volume 7, only to return it with an extra dollar on the price tag, but oh well, I want it anyway!
Grant says
March 21, 2011 at 7:29 pmDavid: I agree, it’s always frustrating when a really great series has such a slow release schedule. At the same time, I’d imagine that slice of life manga tend to sell at a slower pace. Maybe, if sales of Bunny Drop spike, we might get a few more volumes per year.
Aaron says
March 22, 2011 at 9:38 amMy pick is K-ON! volume two my local B&N is allready holding it for me and I pick it just for the fact that I love the sereis that and this is the volume where they introduce Azusa so yeah for me that’s my pick of the week.
Ahavah says
March 24, 2011 at 11:21 amMy local library seems to have stopped collecting the Cirque du Freak manga, which is extremely disappointing. I’ve read through about volume 5, and while I haven’t read the original books, the manga is a charming, if sometimes shockingly violent, shonen take on vampire lore.
Since my manga budget (read: budget. Period) is limited, and I recently splurged on titles like “With the Light” 7, “Bunny Drop” 2 and “Genkaku Picasso” at a Border’s sale, I think it’s interlibrary loan time for Cirque…plot’s too compelling to give it up, but it would be strange to start collecting at volume 6, even if I could justify it to my wallet.
G-d bless the American library system!