SEAN: (flat stare)
MJ: There’s quite a bit on the menu for this week, but honestly not too much for me, which makes it incredibly easy to go for an older series that’s one of my new favorites. That, of course, would be Yun Kouga’s cat-ear-sporting, battle-filled, BL-tinged fantasy Loveless, currently running in Ichijinsha’s Comic Zero Sum and recently licensed-rescued by Viz. I’m a Kouga junkie of a sort, and Loveless delivers on everything I crave most from her series—idiosyncratic characters, complicated morality, and messy, messy relationships. My reaction to the release of a new omnibus volume is pretty much, “Gimme.”
MICHELLE: Yeah, not much for me on this list, either. Still, Punch Up! really has grown on me of late, so there’s no way I’d miss its fourth and final volume!
ANNA: Not a lot for me on this list. I’m going to go with Crimson Empire 1: Circumstances to Serve a Noble though, just because I decided not to resist the siren song of yet another Quinrose manga and I ordered it! We’ll see if I regret this pick once I actually read it.
Readers, what looks good to you this week?
Gotta Go with Crimson Empire it’s so delightfully dark in some places and turns the whole “maid fetish” on it’s head a bit
Excel Saga is one-of-a-kind. I’m shocked it didn’t really take off stateside; is it because people associated it with the tv show from years back?
It’s partly that people wanted Pedro, Nabeshin, and plotless insanity, yes. Partly due to the textual density – let’s face it, each volume has at least 6 pages of endnotes. Partly due to the genre – this isn’t going to pick up the standard Naruto fan. And partly due to the length, and the fact that until recently some of the past volumes were very out of print. It’s hard to tell yourself to catch up on series over 20 volumes – it’s a money sink.
I’m still unsure about collecting Loveless for myself (thanks in no small part to the library not seeming to have it), but I did find a complete DVD set for $2.11 after tax, hopefully that will give me the answer I’m looking for! I just don’t yet know if it’ll be the type of thing that I find squick or not.
I got the Loveless 3rd omnibus volume instead of Excel Saga, since I really don’t want to start a series 20-something volumes into the story, no matter how good everyone tells me it is. I’m thinking of looking into getting some of it once i’m not in the middle of 20+ concurrent series. Well, that or Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service or Yakitate Japan. Would anyone recommend Excel Saga over the other two?