• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Privacy Policy
    • Comment Policy
    • Disclosures & Disclaimers
  • Resources
    • Links, Essays & Articles
    • Fandomology!
    • CLAMP Directory
    • BlogRoll
  • Features & Columns
    • 3 Things Thursday
    • Adventures in the Key of Shoujo
    • Bit & Blips (game reviews)
    • BL BOOKRACK
    • Bookshelf Briefs
    • Bringing the Drama
    • Comic Conversion
    • Fanservice Friday
    • Going Digital
    • It Came From the Sinosphere
    • License This!
    • Magazine no Mori
    • My Week in Manga
    • OFF THE SHELF
    • Not By Manga Alone
    • PICK OF THE WEEK
    • Subtitles & Sensibility
    • Weekly Shonen Jump Recaps
  • Manga Moveable Feast
    • MMF Full Archive
    • Yun Kouga
    • CLAMP
    • Shojo Beat
    • Osamu Tezuka
    • Sailor Moon
    • Fruits Basket
    • Takehiko Inoue
    • Wild Adapter
    • One Piece
    • After School Nightmare
    • Karakuri Odette
    • Paradise Kiss
    • The Color Trilogy
    • To Terra…
    • Sexy Voice & Robo
  • Browse by Author
    • Sean Gaffney
    • Anna Neatrour
    • Michelle Smith
    • Katherine Dacey
    • MJ
    • Brigid Alverson
    • Travis Anderson
    • Phillip Anthony
    • Derek Bown
    • Jaci Dahlvang
    • Angela Eastman
    • Erica Friedman
    • Sara K.
    • Megan Purdy
    • Emily Snodgrass
    • Nancy Thistlethwaite
    • Eva Volin
    • David Welsh
  • MB Blogs
    • A Case Suitable For Treatment
    • Experiments in Manga
    • MangaBlog
    • The Manga Critic
    • Manga Report
    • Soliloquy in Blue
    • Manga Curmudgeon (archive)

Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

January 2, 2012 by MJ, Katherine Dacey, Sean Gaffney and Michelle Smith 7 Comments

Pick of the Week: Manga & More

It’s a new year, and Midtown Comics gets things started with a hefty shipment of new manga. See what Michelle, Sean, Kate, and MJare looking forward to this week!


MICHELLE: It’s the first pick of the new year! There are actually several likely candidates on the list of manga due to arrive this week, including Kimi ni Todoke, One Piece, and Oresama Teacher. But I am going to have to award my pick to a shoujo manga that I continue to love even as it approaches its 30th volume: Skip Beat!. In practically any other series, the fact that the heroine, Kyoko, is still oblivious to the hero’s feelings for her would be series-droppingly annoying by this point, but somehow, Skip Beat! makes it work. It helps that Kyoko is spirited, determined, and focused on her career, and the funny moments (pretty much any time Kyoko wears a chicken costume) are also worth the price of admission.

KATE: I’m just getting up to speed with Skip Beat!, so my vote goes to Government Issue: Comics for the People, 1940s – 2000s. This anthology has actually been available for a couple of months, so it’s a little surprising to see it appear on the Midtown Comics list this week. But if you missed it when it was originally released in November, now’s your chance to see how the American government has harnessed the comics medium to educate its constituents about a range of topics, from nuclear war to AIDS. The book is divided into four sections: comics about the military; comics about employment and economics; comics about civil defense, safety, and health; and comics about landscapes and lifestyles. Though the contextual essays are a little too brief to be truly revelatory, the comics speak for themselves, offering readers a fascinating window into twentieth-century history.

SEAN: It’s getting so that every new volume of Oresama Teacher is making me even happier than the last. The author has a flair for writing very dumb characters in such a way that you not only like them but root for them, and yet at the same time your jaw drops every time they miss the blatantly obvious. It also manages to ride a very fine line, not quite being supportive of young teenagers being in gangs, but at the same time showing the deep bonds of friendship that exist within such structures. As for Mafuyu’s various relationships with the various males in the series, I can honestly say I have absolutely no idea who she’ll end up with, if anyone. Which is a rarity for most manga both shonen and shoujo, where the end pairing always seems set in stone from the very beginning. And she kicks everyone’s ass as well. Fantastic series.

MJ: Though this week is chock full of (mostly Viz) goodness, I find myself drifting to a book I picked up from last week’s list, volume two of Takako Shimura’s Wandering Son from Fantagraphics. I absolutely loved the first volume of this series, and I was thrilled to see this pop up a couple of weeks ahead of what I’d thought was its official release date. This is one of those highly-anticipated series that turned out to be even better than I expected, which is a pretty rare treat. Though its beautiful hardcover presentation puts it in a higher price bracket than most manga, it’s required reading as far as I’m concerned, deserving of a nice, long shelf life. Definitely worth saving up for.


Readers, what looks good to you this week?

Share this:

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest

Filed Under: PICK OF THE WEEK Tagged With: anthologies, oresama teacher, Skip Beat!, Wandering Son

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Angela says

    January 2, 2012 at 11:17 pm

    I wasn’t even aware that Wandering Son came out this week. I thought that was later in the month. I could not put the first one down, so I’ll have to get a copy of volume 2 soon.

    Reply
    • Melinda Beasi says

      January 3, 2012 at 4:56 pm

      I thought so too! But it was shipping from Amazon just before Christmas, and made it onto Midtown’s list last week. A great surprise!

      Reply
  2. Noura says

    January 3, 2012 at 12:00 am

    My pick of the week is volume 26 of Yoshiki Nakamura’s Skip Beat!. I wonder how long will it be before the whole thing is resolved but it is still quite entertaining. Kyoko is a great shoujo female lead, which we don’t see all that often but I gotta admit that the series has been dragging on.

    Other great releases: Kimi ni Todoke and Dengeki Daisy. Kimi ni Todoke is something I enjoy a lot and I always anticipate the new volumes.

    Reply
  3. Aaron says

    January 3, 2012 at 11:02 am

    I’m going with volume two of Psyren and volume 12 of Black Bird Wich I’m mostly reading now because of the new arc and focus on the side characters.

    Reply
  4. lovelyduckie says

    January 4, 2012 at 12:15 pm

    “But I am going to have to award my pick to a shoujo manga that I continue to love even as it approaches its 30th volume: Skip Beat!. In practically any other series, the fact that the heroine, Kyoko, is still oblivious to the hero’s feelings for her would be series-droppingly annoying by this point, but somehow, Skip Beat! makes it work.”

    Agreed, every time I get a new volume of Skip Beat! it’s my favorite volume of the month. Skip Beat! is probably the series I re-read the most.

    Reply
    • Michelle Smith says

      January 4, 2012 at 12:18 pm

      It’s always a lot of fun. I’ve also loaned the series out now to two different manga-curious coworkers with great success. :)

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Bandai cancels new anime and manga releases says:
    January 3, 2012 at 8:44 am

    […] Manga Bookshelf bloggers discuss their Pick of the Week—I haven’t joined this discussion yet, but hopefully I’ll be there next […]

    Reply


Before leaving a comment at Manga Bookshelf, please read our Comment Policy.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

 | Log in
Copyright © 2010 Manga Bookshelf | Powered by WordPress & the Genesis Framework
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.