Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Manga Critic

Where to Buy Manga in a Pandemic: Comicopia

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One of my favorite places to shop for manga is Comicopia, a small but well-stocked comic shop in the heart of Boston’s Kenmore Square. I’ve been a loyal customer since 2008, the year I relocated from New York City to my hometown. As I noted back in 2009, Comicopia is a manga lover’s comic store:

Highbrow, lowbrow… and everything in between. That’s the slogan of Comicopia, a Mecca (mecha?) for Beantown manga lovers. For twenty years, this modest Kenmore Square storefront has been catering to discerning comic fans of all persuasions, stocking everything from Introducing Derrida to Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, as well as crowd-pleasers like Peanuts, Bone, Y: The Last Man, Justice Society of America, and, of course, Bleach, Naruto and Fruits Basket. Comicopia’s low-key, friendly vibe is more bookstore than comic store, making it a great place for former Barnes & Noble junkies to ween themselves off the chain store habit.

Owner Matt Lehman claims to have “New England’s largest selection of manga,” a claim substantiated by both the quantity and variety of titles on Comicopia’s shelves. On my most recent visit, for example, I found all nineteen volumes of Full Metal Alchemist alongside full runs of Dragon Head, Eden: It’s An Endless World, and Swan, as well as a generous assortment of older and more obscure titles: Junko Mizuno’s Cinderalla, Shirow Masamune’s Black Magic, Junjo Ito’s Museum of Terror, numerous volumes of Basara, and the first volume of The Monkey King. “We’re committed to carrying every manga in print,” Lehman explains. “We make an effort to stock the first two or three volumes of each new series as it comes out, and continue carrying what sells.” That commitment isn’t limited to seinen titles or certifiable hits; Comicopia has devoted entire walls to kid-friendly manga and yaoi as well. It’s the only place I’ve ever seen all eighteen volumes of Dr. Slump and all three volumes of Yakuza in Love in stock.

With the new stay-at-home advisory in place right now, however, Comicopia has been forced to close its doors to foot traffic. Manga lovers around the country can still show their support for this Boston mainstay by placing email orders for their favorite series. Right now, for example, Comicopia is offering special discounts for “binge” orders of four or more volumes of the same series:

  • Buy at least 4 books of the same series, get 10% off.
  • Buy at least 8 books of the same series, get 15% off.
  • Buy at least 12 books of the same series, get 20% off.

Books are sent by Priority Mail; buyers are charged the exact shipping costs for their order, with no additional mark-up for handling. To place an order, just email info@comicopia.com. (You can find more information about the store here.) I don’t usually plug stores or vendors on my site, but I would hate to see Comicopia go out of business, as it’s a progressive, welcoming alternative to the stereotypical LCS—or Amazon, for that matter. And in case you’re worried they don’t have “your” manga, owner Matt Lehman sent me this picture of the store’s current inventory:

Note that there are EVEN MORE SHELVES of manga; this is just a small portion of Comicopia’s total inventory.

Oh, and one last thing: I just put my money where my mouth is and ordered the latest volumes of all the series I’m currently following, from Blank Canvas to The Way of the Househusband. Hope you will, too.

A Man & His Cat, Vol. 1

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As someone who’s suffered a lifetime of embarrassment over my tendency to cry at movies and books about animals—even ones with happy outcomes—I realize that that my reaction to A Man and His Cat may not, in fact, be warranted by the quality of the storytelling or artwork. I should also disclose that I’m almost 50, so I’m hungry for stories about people old enough to have a few grey hairs and wrinkles. And I should probably mention that I live with two cats, one of whom is contentedly snoozing by my feet as I type.

Reader, I loved it.

There’s no real plot to speak of; the most dramatic event unfolds in the opening pages, when Fukumaru, a grumpy-faced cat, is adopted from the pet store where he’s spent a lonely year waiting for an owner. His knight in shining armor is Mr. Kanda, a middle-aged music teacher and empty nester who exudes an aura of sadness, despite his outward composure. Though Fukumaru frets that Kanda might suffer buyer’s remorse, Kanda is thoroughly smitten with Fukumaru, throwing himself into cat ownership with abandon, buying toys and collars, and taking selfies with Fukumaru. These scenes are engineered to elicit a strong, uncomplicated emotional response from the reader; Umi Sakurai doesn’t pluck or tug at the heartstrings so much as tear and rend them, giving Fukumaru a running interior monologue about his fears and hopes. And if seeing a cat worry about being returned to the pet store isn’t enough to make your lip tremble even a little, Fukumaru’s speech is peppered with feline-specific pronouns that underscore his plight in a shamelessly sentimental fashion: who but the most jaded reader could laugh at a chubby cat who worries that he might “go meowy whole life without a name?”

Fukumaru’s vulnerability is further amplified by Sakurai’s depiction of him as round and awkwardly proportioned, with an enormous face and stumpy legs. (One character helpfully describes him as “ugly-cute.”) Though Fukumaru’s penchant for tearing up is chalked up to his breed—the pet shop labels him a “short-haired exotic”—almost every kind gesture, separation, reunion, and potential setback makes Fukumaru’s eyes glisten with great, beady tears. Kanda, on the other hand, is drawn in a somewhat stiff, bland fashion with a few perfunctory laugh lines to suggest his age. The contrast between Fukumaru—who looks like the kind of off-brand stuffed animal you might win at a carnival—and his slim, be-suited owner is an interesting artistic choice, as it makes it easier for the reader to understand why Fukumaru initially feels such trepidation about Kanda. (It’s also a pretty amusing visual gag, too.)

By now, reader, you’re probably wondering, but would I like it? That’s a question I can’t really answer, since this manga’s wholesome sentimentality appealed to me against my better judgment. But if there’s a cat in your lap as you read this review, or you share your house with a pet you rescued from a shelter, I think you might appreciate the warm dynamic between Kanda and Fukumaru, as watching these two wounded souls revel in each other’s company is a genuinely heartwarming experience. Recommended.

Square Enix provided a review copy.

A MAN & HIS CAT, VOL. 1 • BY UMI SAKURAI • TRANSLATED BY TAYLOR ENGEL • SQUARE ENIX MANGA & BOOKS • 146 pp.

Saint Young Men, Vol. 1

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Saint Young Men sounds like the set-up for a George Carlin routine: Jesus and Buddha spend a “gap year” on Earth, sharing an apartment in present-day Tokyo while wrestling with the temptations and banalities of modern life. The manga’s prevailing tone, however, is more silly than satirical, focusing not on big theological or philosophical questions, but mundane ones: how to stretch a monthly budget, where to find the best souvenirs, how to fend off drunken commuters.

Most of the humor stems from Hikaru Nakamura’s portrayal of Jesus and Buddha as opposites, with Jesus as a cheerful spendthrift with a fondness for t-shirts and tschotkes, and Buddha as a frugal “big brother” who agonizes over every purchase. The two have a kind of Ernie-and-Bert dynamic in which Buddha frequently chastises Jesus for his impulsive behavior, whether Jesus has purchased a “shinsengumi set” or wants to wear a pair of Mickey Mouse ears in public. Though their bickering provides most of the series’ comic fodder, there are also jokes about walking on water and turning water into wine, as well as a few sly pokes at Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha.

Anyone hoping to be outraged by Saint Young Men will be sorely disappointed, since its most blasphemous idea is that even Jesus and Buddha can’t resist the temptations of social media and shopping for melon bread. Anyone hoping for more insight into the human condition will likewise be disappointed, as Nakamura settles for easy laughs in lieu of real insight or religious critique—a missed opportunity, I think, since her premise offers plenty of latitude to reflect on Buddhist and Christian teachings, or the perils of modern-day materialism. A few good sight gags land well, but the manga’s eagerness to please blunts the edge of its best ideas. Your mileage may vary.

SAINT YOUNG MEN, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY HIKARU NAKAMURA • TRANSLATION BY ALTHEA AND ATHENA NIBLEY • KODANSHA COMICS • 152 pp.

 

Chainsaw Man

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There comes a moment in every manga reader’s journey when they’re no longer dazzled by the sheer variety of genres, styles, or outrageous storylines that an issue of Weekly Shonen Jump or Big Comic Spirits offers—the moment when a manga about killer goldfish or a warrior with lethal nose hair sounds more exhausting than awesome. I reached that milestone around the time I read The Qwaser of Stigmata, a manga so lewdly preposterous I felt uncomfortable even summarizing the plot in my review. So when I heard about Chainsaw Man, a series whose premise is pretty much summed up in the title, I was pretty sure I wasn’t interested in reading it. Then I saw this image:

My first thought was whoa. And then: cool. And so began my Chainsaw Man read-a-thon, an attempt to understand the appeal of this blood-and-testosterone-soaked battle manga.

The character atop the shark is Denji, who begins the story as an ordinary young man struggling to pay off his father’s gambling debts. His only friend is the sweet-faced Pochita, a dog demon with a chainsaw blade where his snout should be. After local mobsters brutally attack Denji, Pochita transfers his demonic powers to Denji, thus enabling Denji to transform from scrawny teen to chainsaw-wielding menace with the pull of a cord. His remarkable abilities attract the interest of Makima, a professional Devil Hunter who recognizes Denji’s potential value as a weapon. Through a mixture of flirtation, cajoling, and threats, Makima recruits Denji for the Public Safety Council, dispatching him to kill monsters.

Going into Chainsaw Man, I was fully prepared for carnage and mayhem and three-eyed sharks. What I didn’t expect were moments of genuine pathos. The interactions between Denji and Pochita, however, are sniffle-inducing, underscoring the poignancy of Pochita’s decision to sacrifice himself for Denji. Later chapters set up an interesting parallel between Denji’s relationship with Pochita and his relationship with Makima, who refers to him as her “dog.” When Denji chafes against the conditions Makima has imposed on their partnership, it spurs a moment of self-reflection about his own treatment of Pochita, making him realize just how much he took Pochita’s companionship for granted.

Of course, no one is reading Chainsaw Man for these kind of emotional beats; they’re hoping for outrageous displays of gore and violence, and on that front, Tatsuki Fujimoto does his utmost to push the boundaries of good taste. Every time Denji reverts to his demonic form, chainsaw blades burst through his chest and head with great clouds of arterial spray, a preview of the even bloodier manner in which he kills his enemies. Though some of the demons are uninspired—how’s a giant bat grab you?—Fujimoto’s most memorable creations are clearly designed to elicit an appreciative “ewww”; the first monster Denji kills, for example, is an enormous tomato devil who looks like something that’s been moldering in the crisper drawer for weeks.

Between the action scenes, Fujimoto peppers the script with crude jokes to remind us that Denji is a teenage boy whose primary motivation for fighting demons is to impress Makima and earn enough money to eat junk food. In that respect, Denji is a more honest shonen hero than the typical Jump lead; he thinks and acts like a real teenage boy, right down to his self-absorption and total objectification of women. (There’s even a chapter called “A Way to Touch Some Boobs.” Yes, really.) I can’t say I ever warmed to Denji as a lead character, but I finished my read-a-thon with a grudging respect for Fujimoto’s excessive, ridiculous creation, which entertained and repelled me in equal measure. Your mileage will vary.

Chapters 1-53 of Chainsaw Man are available at the VIZ website. 

CHAINSAW MAN • STORY AND ART BY TATSUKI FUJIMOTO • VIZ MEDIA

 

The Wize Wize Beasts of the Wizarding Wizdoms

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“Whimsical tales of anthropomorphic beasts in love”—or so the dust jacket of The Wize Wize Beasts of the Wizarding Wizdoms promises. The eight stories in this collection do feature a race of half-animal, half-human creatures who behave like boys at a British boarding school, forming intense friendships that sometimes cross the line into romance. I’m a little reluctant to call these stories “whimsical,” however, as that word implies a certain degree of playfulness that was lacking in most of the stories, some of which were intensely sincere, and some of which raised legitimate questions about boundaries and consent.

Wize Wize Beasts unfolds at a special academy “dedicated to the study of wizardry,” where demi-humans of every imaginable type peacefully co-exist as they learn the arts of potion-making, spell-casting, and alchemy. Each story centers on a pair of opposites: prey and predator, teacher and student, mammal and reptile, smart and average. Most of their relationships fall under the general heading of “unrequited love,” in which one demi-human pines for his opposite, but can’t muster the courage to say how he feels.

In the most enjoyable chapters—”Marley & Collette,” “Cromwell & Benjamin”—Nagabe explores the healthier side of attraction, showing how strong feelings of admiration and concern can bring out the best in friends, allowing for moments of tenderness, warmth, and emotional honesty even when the friendship remains platonic. My favorite, “Mauchly & Charles,” read like an irresistible mash-up of Winnie the Pooh and The Girl from the Other Side, focusing on a bear (Mauchly) and the human he rescued (Charles) from a dark, rainy forest. After Charles returns to his own world, he and Mauchly hold an annual reunion, using this ritual as an opportunity to reflect on what’s changed in the ensuing year. The emotional vulnerability and candor of their interactions is genuinely astonishing—not because men don’t have close friendships, but because the kind of physical intimacy and gentleness that defines Mauchly and Charles’ friendship is seldom depicted in popular culture.

The weakest stories in the collection, by contrast, often conflate possessive or coercive behavior with romantic attraction, justifying one character’s actions by suggesting his feelings were so intense that they compelled him to transgress social norms. In “Doug & Huey,” for example, a crow (Doug) carries a torch for his handsome friend Huey, who—natch—is a peacock. Though Huey spends most of his time chasing girls, Doug’s devotion to him is unwavering—so much so, in fact, that Doug sabotages Huey’s efforts to land a girlfriend so that Huey will “never be closer to someone else.” Huey, for his part, is so deeply narcissistic that he doesn’t recognize Doug’s controlling behavior, creating a deeply toxic bond between them that is presented as a simple case of unrequited love.

The issue of consent lingers over other chapters in Wize Wize Beasts as well. “Alan & Eddington,” for example, depicts the friendship between a brilliant Siamese (Alan) and a hardworking rabbit (Eddie) who’s dazzled by his classmate’s effortless mastery of complex subjects. Afraid that Alan will reject his advances, Eddie concocts and serves him a love potion. While under the influence of Alan’s spell, Eddie compels Alan to kiss him and profess his love for him—a scene that’s meant to be a little naughty, I think, but instead registers as squicky. Alan confronts Eddie about the incident, but then invites Eddie to “start over” without a magical aide, undercutting the power of his previous speech about Alan’s “cowardly” behavior.

If I was sometimes ambivalent about the content, I found Nagabe’s crisp illustrations thoroughly enchanting. His anthropomorphic character designs capture the essential animal natures of each character while retaining just enough human features for Nagabe to plausibly swathe them in flowing capes and tweedy trousers. Nagabe’s command of light, shadow, and line is superb, creating a strong sense of place without excessive reliance on screentone or tracing; his characters inhabit a well-defined world that has been vividly and imaginatively rendered on the page.

In the afterword to Wize Wize Beasts, Nagabe cheerfully jokes about “winning” readers over to his particular fandom. “I’d be deeply honored if this work exposes more people to non-human characters,” he notes. “And if you start to think, ‘Wow, non-human characters are awesome,’ go on. Get in there up to your neck.” I can’t say that Wize Wize Beasts made me a convert, but I did admire Nagabe’s creativity, sincerity, and honesty, as well as his willingness to take narrative risks that might not pay off with all readers. Your mileage may vary.

THE WIZE WIZE BEASTS OF WIZARDING WIZDOMS • STORY AND ART BY NAGABE • TRANSLATED BY ADRIENNE BECK • SEVEN SEAS • RATED TEEN • 228 pp.

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace

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As The Rise of Skywalker brings the Star Wars saga to its official close, now seems like the right time to revisit the very first chapter in the series, The Phantom Menace. Episode I debuted in 1999, making the leap from screen to print the following year with Kia Asamiya providing the illustrations. Readers familiar with Asamiya’s Silent Möbius will immediately understand why he was tapped for this project: he has a penchant for drawing detailed space ships and cityscapes, two important qualifications for translating George Lucas’ vision into a compelling comic.

Alas, Asamiya was also saddled with Lucas’ original script, leaving him little room to make the story more interesting on the page than it was on the screen. Asamiya faithfully preserves the film’s most frustrating elements—the tin-eared dialogue, the unfortunate minstrelsy of JarJar Binks—as well as its surfeit of plot points, secondary characters, and clumsy discussions of Federation trade policy. To his credit, Asamiya’s version is brisk and streamlined in contrast with Lucas’, marching from one scene to the next with a sense of urgency that’s often lacking from the film. Some of the film’s most tedious scenes—the blockade of Naboo, the first interactions between Padme and Anakin, the Imperial Senate’s deliberations—have been telescoped, giving Asamiya room for more detailed treatments of chases, light saber fights, and space battles.

The artwork, on the other hand, is a hit-or-miss affair. Asamiya’s skill at drawing aliens, robots, space craft, and futuristic cities is unquestionable; his evocation of Otoh Gunga and Coruscant do justice to the complexity and specificity of Lucas’ original designs, while Asamiya’s establishing shots of Naboo convincingly evoke the planet’s lush jungles and Greco-Roman palaces without the added benefit of color. His ability to compress lengthy action sequences is likewise impressive; in just a few artfully constructed pages, for example, he captures the excitement and danger of Anakin Skywalker’s pod race, using panels-within-panels to juxtapose the racers’ progress with the crowd’s ecstatic reaction to the event:

Asamiya’s human characters, by contrast, are as expressionless as their big-screen counterparts—a key failing, as the characters register as pawns, not people, dutifully shuttled from one scenario to the next with almost no sense of how the violence and chaos they’ve encountered has affected them. Only the two principle non-human characters—JarJar Binks and C3PO—are drawn in an animated fashion, providing the series’ few moments of genuine emotion and surprise.

And that, in a nutshell, is why Asamiya’s take on The Phantom Menace is so frustrating: it improves on certain aspects of the source material while emphasizing its fatal flaws, making for an efficient but affectless gloss on Lucas’ original story that reads a lot like Cliff Notes. Not recommended.

STAR WARS: EPISODE I – THE PHANTOM MENACE, VOLS. 1-2 • ART BY KIA ASAMIYA • MARVEL COMICS • NO RATING (SUITABLE FOR READERS 10 AND UP)

Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-san, Vol. 1

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If you’ve ever worked a thankless retail job, you’ll appreciate Skull-Face Bookseller Honda-san, a candid, fitfully funny series about working in the customer service industry. The titular character works in the manga section of a large Tokyo bookstore, helping buyers find the perfect series, taking inventory, and meeting with representatives from major publishers.

Some of her adventures are genuinely amusing, as when a handsome male customer requests explicit doujinshi for his daughter, or an American fujoshi explains her penchant for a particular seme-uke dynamic; other chapters are more matter-of-fact, conveying the difficulties of keeping popular titles in stock, or documenting the social and professional interactions among the staff members. Though none of its is laugh-out-loud funny, the artwork is terrific, capturing Honda-san’s sweaty anxiety every time a customer or colleague makes an uncomfortable request of her—no mean feat, given that the artist has depicted herself with a skeleton head and androgynous, apron-clad body. (Her colleagues’ identities have been camouflaged in a similar fashion: one has a paper bag for a head, and another wears a gas mask.) Amanda Haley’s thoughtful translation complements Honda’s crisp illustrations, offering useful context for understanding the unique challenges of selling manga to the general public, and plenty of footnotes to decode the insider shop-talk.

Yet for all the craft with which Skull-Face Bookseller is written, I never fully succumbed to its charms. I found the pacing uneven and the publishing-focused chapters long-winded, especially when contrasted with the snappy staging of Honda-san’s encounter with the international BL brigade. I’m still curious about the series, but would put Skull-Face Bookseller in the same category as Saint Young Men: a comedy that’s better in principle than in practice. Your mileage may vary.

SKULL-FACE BOOKSELLER HONDA-SAN, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY HONDA • TRANSLATION BY AMANDA HALEY • YEN PRESS • NO RATING • 166 pp.

Ms. Kozumi Loves Ramen Noodles, Vol. 1

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Ms. Kozumi Loves Ramen Noodles is pretty much what you’d expect from the title: a manga about a high school student whose interest in noodles crosses the line from simple enthusiasm into full-blown mania. While Kozumi’s peers go to the mall or the malt shop, she visits out-of-the-way restaurants to sample every conceivable type of ramen, from spicy to sour to sweet. Her passion is so extreme, in fact, that she ditches school for a 200-mile trip to Iwaki just to taste a local specialty: no-bake natto ramen. Though Kozumi is uninterested in socializing with her classmates, three girls—Yu, Misa, and Jun—find Kozumi’s reticence an irresistible challenge, and repeatedly seek her company outside of school. Yu, in particular, is one of those only-in-manga characters whose cheerfully inappropriate behavior would be considered creepy in almost any other context, as she follows Kozumi to ramen joints around Tokyo, copying Kozumi’s behavior and—more egregiously—her orders. When Yu’s pals befriend Kozumi before she does, she flies into a jealous tizzy, and doubles down on her efforts to show Kozumi that she, too, appreciates ramen.

These scenes are clearly intended to be funny, but the social dynamic among the four principal characters is too strained to elicit laughter, as it relies almost entirely on the characters behaving idiotically for effect. The artwork, too, leaves something to be desired, juxtaposing hyper-realistic drawings of food and condiments with ultra-cutesy character designs that seem ready-made for key chains and body pillows. The cuteness would be less off-putting if the characters weren’t frequently drawn in rapturous close-up, sucking down noodles while suggestive trickles of broth dangled from their lips—a potent reminder that Ms. Kozumi runs in a seinen magazine and not, say, Bessatsu Friend.

The shop talk, by contrast, is genuinely enlightening. If your primary experience with ramen has been limited to steaming bowls of noodles, scallions, and chicken broth, the sheer range of dishes will come as a revelation; in one sequence, for example, Kozumi describes a form of ice cream ramen, while in another, Jun discovers the savory pleasures of a salted pineapple ramen bowl. A solid translation by Ayumi Kato Blystone helps convey what’s distinctive about each dish, and offers good insight into how dishes are prepared—more so, in fact, than many ostensibly “serious” food manga. So on that front, at least, Ms. Kozumi succeeds in communicating why the title character likes ramen so much; too bad the reader has to soldier past so much resolutely unfunny slapstick to enjoy the tastiest bits. Your mileage may vary.

MS. KOZUMI LOVES RAMEN NOODLES, VOL. 1 • ART AND STORY BY NARU NARUMI • TRANSLATED BY AYUMI KATO BLYSTONE • DARK HORSE COMICS • 136 pp. • NO RATING

Junji Ito’s No Longer Human

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Of all the famous works of literature to get the Classics Illustrated treatment, Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human is an odd choice. Its protagonist is Oba Yozo, a tortured soul who never figures out how to be his authentic self in a society that places tremendous emphasis on hierarchy, self-restraint, and civility. Over the course of the novel, he binges, gambles, seduces a string of women, joins a Communist cell, attempts suicide, and succumbs to heroin addiction, all while donning the mask of “the farcical eccentric” to conceal his “melancholy” and “agitation” from the very people whose lives he ruins.

Though the novel is filled with incident, its unreliable narrator and relentless interiority make it difficult to effectively retell in a comic format, as Junji Ito’s adaptation demonstrates. Ito’s No Longer Human is largely faithful to the events of Dazai’s novel, but takes Dazai’s spare, haunting narrative and transforms it into a phantasmagoria of sex, drugs, and death. In his efforts to show us how Yozo feels, Ito leans so hard into nightmarish imagery that the true horror of Yozo’s story is overshadowed by Ito’s artwork—a mistake, I think, as Ito’s drawings are too literal to convey the nuance of what it means to exist, in Peter Selgin’s words, in a state of “complete dissociation… yet still capable of feeling.”

In Ito’s defense, it’s not hard to see what attracted him to Dazai’s text; Yozo’s narration is peppered with the kind of vivid analogies that, at first glance, seem ideally suited for a visual medium like comics. But a closer examination of the text reveals the extent to which these analogies are part of the narrator’s efforts to beguile the reader; Yozo is, in effect, trying to convince the reader that his mind is filled with such monstrous ideas that he cannot be expected to function like a normal person. There’s a tension between how Yozo describes his own reactions to the ordinary unpleasantness of interacting with other people, and how Yozo describes the impact of his behavior on other people—a point that Ito overlooks in choosing to flesh out some key events in the novel.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Yozo’s brief affair with Tsuneko, a destitute waitress. After hitting rock bottom financially and emotionally, Yozo persuades her to join him in a double suicide pact. Dazai’s summary of what happens is shocking in its brevity and matter-of-factness:

As I stood there hesitating, she got up and looked inside my wallet. ‘‘Is that all you have?” Her voice was innocent, but it cut me to the quick. It was painful as only the voice of the first woman I had ever loved could be painful. “Is that all?” No, even that suggested more money than I had — three copper coins don’t count as money at all. This was a humiliation more strange than any I had tasted before, a humiliation I could not live with. I suppose I had still not managed to extricate myself from the part of the rich man’s son. It was then I myself determined, this time as a reality, to kill myself.

We threw ourselves into the sea at Kamakura that night. She untied her sash, saying she had borrowed it from a friend at the cafe, and left it folded neatly on a rock. I removed my coat and put it in the same spot. We entered the water together.

She died. I was saved.

As Ito recounts this event, however, Tsuneko’s death is caused by a poison so painful to ingest that she collapses in a writhing heap, eyes bulging and tongue wagging as if she were in the throes of becoming a monster herself. Yozo’s reaction to the poison, by contrast, is to plunge into a hallucinatory state in which a parade of ghostly women mock and berate him, an artistic choice that suggests Yozo feels shame and guilt for his actions—and a reading of Dazai’s text that makes Yozo seem more deserving of sympathy than he does in Dazai’s novel:

Throughout this vignette, Yozo’s contempt for Tsuneko creeps into the narrative, even as he assures the reader that she was the first woman he truly loved. Yozo’s disdain is palpable, as is evident in the way he off-handedly introduces her to the reader:

I was waiting at a sushi stall back of the Ginza for Tsuneko (that, as I recall, was her name, but the memory is too blurred for me to be sure: I am the sort of person who can forget even the name of the woman with whom he attempted suicide) to get off from work.

Only a few episodes capture the spirit of Dazai’s original novel, as when Yozo’s father gives an inept speech to a gathering of businessmen and community leaders. Ito skillfully cross-cuts between three separate conversations, allowing us to step into Yozo’s shoes as he eavesdrops on the attendees, servants, and family members, all of whom speak disparagingly about each other, and the speech. By pulling back the curtain on these conversations, Ito helps the reader appreciate the class and power differences among these groups, as well as revealing that this episode was a turning point for Yozo: the moment when he first realized that adults maintain certain masks in public that they discard in private. Though such a moment would undoubtedly trouble a more observant child—one need only think of Holden Caulfield’s obsession with adult “phoniness”—this discovery plunges Yozo into a state of despair, as he cannot imagine how anyone reconciles their public and private selves in a truthful way.

Ito also wisely restores material from Dazai’s novel that other adaptors—most notably Usamaru Furuya—trimmed from their versions. In particular, Ito does an excellent job of exploring the dynamic between Yozo and his classmate Takeichi, the first person who sees through Yozo’s carefully orchestrated buffoonery:

Just when I had begun to relax my guard a bit, fairly confident that I had succeeded by now in concealing completely my true identity, I was stabbed in the back, quite unexpectedly. The assailant, like most people who stab in the back, bordered on being a simpleton — the puniest boy in the class, whose scrofulous face and floppy jacket with sleeves too long  for him was complemented by a total lack of proficiency in his studies and by such clumsiness in military drill and physical training that he was perpetually designated as an ‘‘onlooker.” Not surprisingly, I failed to recognize the need to be on my guard against him.

As one might guess from this passage, Yozo’s terror at being discovered is another critical juncture in the novel. “I felt as if I had seen the world before me burst in an instant into the raging flames of hell,” he reports, before embarking on a campaign to win Takeichi’s trust by “cloth[ing his] face in the gentle beguiling smile of the false Christian.” Though Ito can’t resist the temptation to draw an image of Yozo engulfed in hell fire, most of Yozo’s fear is conveyed in subtler ways: a wary glance at Takeichi, an extreme close-up of Yozo’s face, an awkwardly placed arm around Takeichi’s shoulder:

What happens next in Ito’s version of No Longer Human, however, is indicative of another problem with his adaptation: his decision to add new material. In Dazai’s novel, Takeichi simply disappears from the narrative when Yozo moves to Tokyo for college, but in Ito’s version, Yozo cruelly manipulates Takeichi into thinking that Yozo’s cousin Setchan is in love with him—a manipulation that ultimately leads to Takeichi’s humiliation and suicide. That violent death is followed by a gruesome murder, this time prompted by a love triangle involving Yozo, his “auntie,” and Setchan, who becomes pregnant with Yozo’s child. Neither of these episodes deepen our understanding of who Yozo really is; they simply add more examples of how manipulative and callous he can be, thus blunting the impact of the real tragedy that unfolds in the late stages of his story.

Ito’s most problematic addition, however, is Osamu Dazai himself. Ito replaces the novel’s original framing device with the events leading up to Dazai’s 1948 suicide, encouraging us to view No Longer Human as pure autobiography through reinforcing the parallels between Dazai’s life and Yozo’s. And while those parallels are striking, the juxtaposition of the author and his fictional alter ego ultimately distorts the meaning of the novel by suggesting that the story documents Dazai’s own unravelling. That’s certainly one way to interpret No Longer Human, but such an autobiographical reading misses Dazai’s broader themes about the burden of consciousness, the nature of self, and the difficulty of being a full, authentic, feeling person in modern society.

VIZ Media provided a review copy. You can read a brief preview at the VIZ website by clicking here. For additional perspectives on Junji Ito’s adaptation, see Serdar Yegulalp‘s excellent, in-depth review at Ganriki.org, Reuben Barron‘s review at CBR.com, and MinovskyArticle’s review at the VIZ Media website.

JUNJI ITO’S NO LONGER HUMAN • ORIGINAL NOVEL BY OSAMU DAZAI • BASED ON THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY DONALD KEENE • TRANSLATED AND ADAPTED BY JOCELYNE ALLEN • VIZ MEDIA • RATED M, FOR MATURE AUDIENCES • 616 pp.

Short Takes: No Guns Life and Ryuko

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This month’s Short Takes column checks in with two previously-reviewed series: No Guns Life, a sci-fi thriller whose principled hero sounds like Sam Spade and looks like a Remington; and Ryuko, a thriller starring a yakuza assassin who’s hell-bent on avenging her mother’s kidnapping.

No Guns Life, Vol. 2
Story and Art by Tasuku Karasuma
Translation by Joe Yamazaki; Adaptation by Stan!
VIZ Media, 224 pp.
Rated T+ (Older Teens)

After a decent, if predictable, first volume, Tasuku Karasuma finds his groove in volume two of No Guns Life, maintaining a brisk pace while allowing his characters’ personalities to emerge more fully. Though the action occasionally pauses for the characters to expound on important plot developments, these dialogues are less of a drag on the story than they were in volume one; here, they add badly needed layers of  complexity to a familiar noir plot line. Better still, Karasuma introduces several new characters who push the narrative in a more interesting direction, hinting at the power and secrecy of the Berühen Corporation, as well as the general public’s mixed feelings about living alongside cyborgs. If Karasuma engages in a little too much fanservice, or relies too heavily on speedlines and sound effects to enliven his fight scenes, No Guns Life is still entertaining enough to make all but the most discriminating reader root for Juzo to succeed. Recommended.

VIZ Media provided a review copy. Click here to read my review of volume one.

Ryuko, Vol. 2
Story and Art by Eldo Yoshimizu
Translation by Motoko Tamamuro and Jonathan Clements
Titan Comics, 226 pp.
No rating (Best suited for older teen and adult readers)

Paging the exposition police! The second volume of Ryuko has all the swagger of the first, but leans more heavily into Talking Points Conversation to help expedite its resolution. In some respects, these exchanges are a welcome development, as they clearly—one might say baldly—delineate the various factions’ interest in the Golden Seal, an object whose significance was glossed over in volume one. These passages also help the reader untangle the complex web of relationships among the characters, making it easier to grasp why Ryuko forges an alliance with an avowed enemy and why US military forces are trying to manipulate the outcome of her feud with the Sheqing-Ban. These conversations would feel less forced if the pacing were more even, but the two-volume format is too compressed for such an ambitious, labyrinthine plot to unfold at a reader-friendly pace.

Volume two’s chief attraction is the same as volume one’s: the artwork. Eldo Yoshimizu has a flair for staging car chases, fist fights, gun battles, and dramatic escapes, immersing the reader in the action with his creative use of perspective and fastidious attention to detail; Ryuko’s leopard-print catsuit is practically a character in its own right. In less capable hands, this maximalist approach might be overwhelming, but Yoshimizu’s layouts have a strong narrative pull that leads the eye across the page at the speed of the action, creating an almost cinematic experience. The final confrontation between Ryuko and evil American operatives is a show-stopper involving a motorcycle stunt so outrageous that even Jackie Chan would be impressed with its audacity. None of the story makes much sense, but Yoshimizu’s energetic, bold, and—yes—sexy artwork is cool enough to carry the day. Recommended.

Click here to read my review of volume one. 

A Few Thoughts About Stranger Things

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Over the course of three seasons, Stranger Things has devolved from an engaging period piece to a Potemkin village whose neon surfaces, vintage movie posters, garish fashions, and spiral perms have displaced the heart, humor, and horror that made the first two seasons so compelling. The proof lies in the media’s response to the current season, as the New York Times and Vulture have breathlessly cataloged every cereal box and song cue that link Stranger Things to The Goonies and The Neverending Story. In choosing to fetishize the material and pop culture of 1980s, however, the Duffer brothers have neglected the capable team of actors who’ve been selling audiences on the idea that Hawkins is the epicenter of an inter-dimensional catastrophe, lavishing their creative energies instead on recreating that most 80s of artifacts: the mall.

Don’t get me wrong: the idea of a shopping mall concealing a portal to the Upside Down has subversive potential, but the Duffers are too invested in making sure that everything looks right to care whether their story has anything new or meaningful to say about Reagan-era consumer culture. We’re treated to numerous tracking shots of the mall itself, with the camera lovingly documenting the stores, food court, and movie theater as teenagers shop to the sounds of Madonna’s “Material Girl.” Perhaps most tellingly, the characters never really look like they’re at the mall; these scenes look like an 80s sitcom’s idea of what hanging out at the mall was like, right down to the cartoonish portrayal of teenage mating rituals and clique behavior.

Adding insult to injury is the poor writing. Most of the problems lie with the scriptwriters’ decision to lean into the angrier, more compulsive side of Hopper’s personality, with little thought of how his behavior might appear to audiences. Hopper bullies Mike, for example, rather than examining his own feelings about Mike and Eleven dating. These scenes are played for laughs—dads always want to “kill” their daughters’ boyfriends, right?—but the intensity of Hopper’s anger makes these scenes uncomfortable to watch. If anything, his anger is a potent reminder of season two’s biggest flaw: the unexamined way in which Hopper’s desperate, violent attempts to keep Eleven safe crossed a line between loving concern and possessiveness. (Yes, Hopper and Eleven’s relationship was even more egregious than the much-maligned Punk Rockers episode.)

The once poignant dynamic between Joyce and Hopper has also curdled into something sourly antagonistic. Though their first heart-to-heart conversation in Melvald’s is moving, conveying both Hopper’s insecurities and Joyce’s ambivalence towards Hopper as a romantic prospect, the relationship goes downhill from there. Hopper behaves like a boor when Joyce stands him up for a dinner date, even though Hopper had repeatedly stressed that he wasn’t asking her out. That scene might have played better if we were encouraged to see Hopper as entitled or insensitive, but instead Joyce becomes the villain in this scenario, a scatterbrain who’s so obsessed with proving that something awful is happening in Hawkins that she’d rather chat about magnets with a high school science teacher than split a bottle of Chianti with Hopper. The script then puts Hopper and Joyce in a strenuously unfunny holding pattern as they bicker in a manner that’s supposed to show how much they’re secretly attracted to one another. Ryder, whose fierce intensity was an asset in seasons one and two, is particularly unsuited to this kind of banter, overselling every comeback with too much mugging. Worse still, the dialogue is so flat that it barely registers as amusing, let alone flirtatious.

Perhaps the biggest failing of season three, however, are the monsters. Though there’s a genuine ick factor to the Mind Flayer’s new form, it looks too much like raspberry Jello-O to be the stuff of nightmares; only a gruesome scene in which hordes of rats spontaneously explode registers as horrific. Other potentially scary moments–Nancy confronting the Mind Flayer in a hospital ward, Billy being dragged into the Flayer’s den–are too self-consciously derivative of Alien to make much of impression on viewers familiar with the Duffers’ favorite pop-cultural touchstones. As a result, season three lacks a single scene that’s as unnerving as Barb’s disappearance, or as harrowing as Eleven’s visits to the astral plane, two of the defining moments of season one.

There are a few bright spots, thanks to the Duffers’ generous treatment of the supporting characters. Steve and Robin’s friendship, forged through insults and amateur sleuthing, adds some screwball zest to the proceedings, demonstrating Joe Keery and Maya Hawkins’ potential as romantic comedy leads; their scenes crackle with the kind of wit and energy that’s sorely missing from Hopper and Joyce’s ill-fated courtship. Noah Schapp continues to impress as Will, bringing soulful presence to a character who’s often pushed to the margins of his own story. As his friends pair off in season three, Schapp makes us feel Will’s contempt for Mike, Dustin, and Lucas, who’ve traded Dungeons & Dragons for trips to the mall and awkward dates; Schapp’s facial and body language capture his frustration and shame at being relegated to the status of uncool friend.

Alas, little else in season three of Stranger Things feels as honest or scary as Will’s dilemma. Most of season three registers as 80s fanservice with its on-the-nose needle drops and acid-washed fashion, with little sense of what it was actually like to be alive in the Reagan years. Unless the writing team figures out how to bring back the suspense and humor that made seasons one and two so irresistible, Stranger Things will continue to feel more like Goonies cosplay than a horror story that just happens to take place in the 1980s. Not recommended.

Seasons one through three of Stranger Things can be streamed on Netflix.

Cats of the Louvre

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Weird. Uncanny. Melancholy. Beautiful. Those were just a few of the adjectives I jotted down while reading Taiyo Matsumoto’s Cats of the Louvre, the latest volume in the museum’s ongoing graphic novel series. Like Nicholas De Crécy’s Glacial Period and Jiro Taniguchi’s Guardians of the Louvre, Cats of the Louvre is less an illustrated guide to the museum than a story that happens to take place within its walls—in this case, the attic, where a colony of cats have taken up residence. Through a series of eighteen vignettes, Matsumoto gradually reveals that the cats’ primary caretaker—an elderly night watchman—has dedicated his life to searching the museum for his missing sister, who disappeared into one of the paintings when she was a child.

The key to finding Arrieta turns out to be Snowbébé, a kitten who frequently escapes from the attic to roam the galleries, hiding inside canvases to avoid detection. Snowbébé’s gift is both an essential plot point and an opportunity for Matsumoto to luxuriate in the smaller details of his favorite paintings, as is evident in a lovely, strange sequence that unfolds inside Henri Lerambert’s The Funeral Procession of Love (1580). From a modern viewer’s standpoint, Lerambert’s painting seems a little kitschy, with its parade of cherubs, poets, and philosophers strolling under the watchful eye of the goddess Diana:

Once Snowbébé steps into the painting, however, the landscape comes to life in unexpected ways: the flowers grin, the animals speak, and the laws of gravity disappear. In one brief but delightful sequence, for example, Snowbébé and Arrieta cavort across the ceilings and walls of a temple, while in another they board Diana’s chariot for a ride through the Milky Way. Yet for all the joyful (and weird) imagery, there’s a wistful quality to these two chapters, as Snowbébé slowly realizes that he cannot remain inside the Parade forever; his presence has disturbed the painting’s equilibrium, bringing storm clouds and disrupting the flow of time itself, forcing him to choose between staying with his new friend, or returning to the “cold and smelly and noisy” world of the Louvre.

What prevents Snowbébé’s odyssey from seeming twee or precious is Matsumoto’s studied primitivism; his characters’ mask-like faces, oddly proportioned bodies, and grotesque smiles are genuinely unnerving, creating a surreal atmosphere in which the boundaries between reality and imagination are blurred. Nowhere is this tendency more obvious than in the way he draws Snowbébé and his friends: the cats look like animals to their caretakers, but assume a humanoid form when interacting with each other. In Matsumoto’s hands, they look more like people in cat costumes than pussycats, with their essential feline features—ears, whiskers, tails, elongated limbs—rendered in an exaggerated fashion that gives them a faintly alien appearance.

Matsumoto’s depiction of the Louvre is more straightforward, recreating iconic works with fidelity to the originals, whether he’s drawing a lesser-known genre painting or a genuinely famous sculpture. His rendition of the physical environment—the claustrophobic, dusty garret where the cats live, the grand staircases and hallways that lead to the galleries—is similarly precise, helping the reader envision the sheer size and opulence of the museum. As a result, the Louvre transcends its basic function as a setting, taking on the qualities of a living, breathing organism whose vaulted ceilings and majestic columns invite comparisons with dinosaurs or whales:

And while all the comics in the Louvre Collection have done an admirable job of depicting the museum, Cats of the Louvre approaches its subject matter without didacticism or pedantry; though Matsumoto’s human characters express strong feelings about art, those conversations spring organically from the story. Equally important, Cats of the Louvre has its own personality; unlike Hirohiko Araki’s Rohan at the Louvre, which recycled ideas and characters from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Matsumoto’s story stands on its own, capturing his unique response to the museum and its collection. But the best reason to read Cats of the Louvre is its hero Snowbébé, whose quest to find his place in the world invites us to see the Louvre through fresh eyes, as a place of danger and sadness, but also of wonder, magic, and possibility. Recommended.

A review copy was provided by VIZ Media. To read a short preview, click here.

CATS OF THE LOUVRE • STORY AND ART BY TAIYO MATSUMOTO • TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL ARIAS • RATING: TEEN • 432 pp.

The Drifting Classroom Signature Edition, Vol. 1

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In a 2009 interview with Tokyo Scum Brigade, Kazuo Umezu acknowledged that his debt to Osamu Tezuka went beyond storyboarding and character designs. Tezuka “didn’t pull any punches for children or dumb down his works,” Umezu explained. “He dealt with complicated themes and let the readers work it out on their own.” The 1972 classic The Drifting Classroom reveals just how profoundly Umezu absorbed this lesson. Though it ran in Weekly Shonen Sunday, a magazine aimed at grade schoolers, Umezu’s work was bleak, subversive, and weirdly thrilling, depicting a nightmarish world where kids resorted to violence and deception to survive.

The Drifting Classroom begins with a freak accident in which a rift in the space-time continuum sends the Yamato Elementary School and its occupants into the distant future. Initially, the students and teachers believe that they are the sole survivors of a devastating nuclear attack, and the area immediately surrounding the school supports their hypothesis: it’s a barren wasteland with no water, plants, or signs of human habitation save a pile or two or non-degradable trash. As the school’s occupants realize the severity of the crisis, panic sets in. Teachers and students engage in a brutal competition for dwindling supplies while attempting to solve the mystery of what happened to them. And when I say “brutal,” I mean it: the body count in volume one is astonishing, with murders, mass suicides, fist fights, knife fights, and rampaging monsters culling the herd at a breathtaking rate.

It’s sorely tempting to compare The Drifting Classroom to The Lord of the Flies, as both stories depict school children creating their own societies in the absence of adult authority. But Kazuo Umezu’s series is more sinister than Golding’s novel, as Classroom‘s youthful survivors have been forced to band together to defend themselves against their former teachers, many of whom have become unhinged at the realization that they may never return to the present. Umezu creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable dread that conveys both the hopelessness of the children’s situation and their terror at being abandoned by the grown-ups, a point underscored by one student’s observation that adults “depend on logic and reason to deal with things.” He continues:

When something happens and they can’t use reason or logic to explain it, they can’t handle it. I don’t think they were able to accept that we’ve traveled to the future. You know how adults are always saying that kids are making things up? It’s because they only know things to be one way. Kids can imagine all kinds of possibilities. That’s why we’ve managed to survive here.

That speech is delivered by The Drifting Classroom‘s plucky protagonist Sho, a sixth grader who becomes the children’s de facto leader. When we first meet Sho, he’s behaving petulantly, pouting over his mother’s decision to throw away his marbles. The intensity of his anger is drawn in broad strokes, but it firmly establishes him as an honest-to-goodness ten year old, caught between his desire to play and his parents’ desire to mold him into a responsible teenager. Once transported to the future, Sho’s strategies for scavenging supplies or subduing a rampaging teacher are astute but not adult; there are flourishes of imagination and kid logic guiding his actions that remind us just how young and vulnerable he is. As a result, Sho’s pain at being separated from his parents, and of losing his comrades, is genuinely agonizing.

Umezu’s artwork further emphasizes the precarity of Sho’s situation. Sho and his classmates have doll-like faces and awkwardly proportioned bodies that harken back to Umezu’s work for shojo magazines such as Sho-Comi and Shoujo Friend, yet their somewhat unnatural appearance serves a vital dramatic function, underscoring how small they are when contrasted with their adult guardians. The adults, on the other hand, initially appear normal, but descend into monstrous or feckless caricatures as their plight becomes more desperate. Only Sho’s mother—who is stuck in the present day—escapes such unflattering treatment, a testament to her devotion, courage, and imagination; while her husband and friends have accepted the official story about the school’s fate, Sho’s mother is open to the possibility that Sho may be reaching across time to communicate with her.

Like his character designs, Umezu’s landscapes are willfully ugly, evoking feelings of disgust, fear, and anxiety that are almost palpable, whether he’s drawing an abandoned building or a garden filled with grotesquely misshapen plants. The area just outside the school gates, for example, resembles the slopes of an active volcano, with sulfurous clouds wafting over a rocky expanse that seems both frozen and molten—an apt metaphor the characters’ state of mind as they first glimpse their new surroundings:

Though The Drifting Classroom‘s imagery still resonates in 2019, its gender politics do not, as an egregious subplot involving a sadistic girl gang demonstrates. When the gang attempts to seize control of the school, a classmate urges Sho to oppose them on the grounds that girls are fundamentally unsuited for leadership roles. (“Women are made to give birth and rear children so they can’t think long term,” Gamo helpfully opines.) Umezu’s goal here, I think, is to suggest that girls are as capable of violence and cruelty as boys, but the dialogue suggests the gang’s behavior is a symptom of innate irrationality instead of a genuine and logical response to a desperate situation. Making matters worse is that the few sympathetic female characters are consigned to stereotypically feminine roles that give them little to do besides scream, run, and comfort the younger children; even Sakiko, the smartest girl in the class, never gets a chance to solve a problem or offer a useful opinion.

Yet for all its obvious shortcomings, The Drifting Classroom is a thoughtful meditation on adult hypocrisy, exposing all the ways that adults manipulate and terrorize children for their own convenience. “Adults are humans, children are animals,” a cafeteria worker tells Sho and his friends. “That’s why adults have the power of life and death over kids.” That Sho and his followers cling to their humanity despite the adults’ selfish behavior reminds us that children are innocent but not naive; Sho and his friends are clear-eyed about their teachers’ failings, yet choose to persevere. Recommended.

This is a greatly expanded–and reconsidered–review of The Drifting Classroom that appeared at PopCultureShock in 2006. VIZ Media provided a review copy. Read a free preview here.

THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY KAZUO UMEZZ • TRANSLATED BY SHELDON DRZKA • ADAPTED BY MOLLY TANZER • RATED T+, FOR OLDER TEENS (VIOLENCE, HORROR, GORE) • 744 pp.

Short Takes: Museum and Phantom Tales of the Night

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I have a confession: I am a complete chicken when it comes to horror movies. I watched Alien through my fingers and made it to the end of Fright Night by staring at the ingredient list on a candy wrapper; even the hot vampires of The Lost Boys weren’t soulful or shirtless enough to fully hold my gaze. But horror manga is another story, as I count Mermaid Saga, Gyo, Tomie, The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, and PTSD Radio among my favorites series. I can’t explain why horror manga doesn’t affect me the same way that movies do–no soundtrack, perhaps?–but I’m glad that I’ve found the intestinal fortitude to read Junji Ito and Kazuo Umezu’s work. Alas, I had less patience with the two most recent horror series I read: Museum, a digital-only offering from Kodansha, and Phantom Tales of the Night, a cautionary tale about a mysterious innkeeper.

Museum, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Ryosuke Tomoe
Kodansha Comics
Rated M, for Mature (graphic violence)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a mask-wearing vigilante kidnaps and tortures his victims in grotesque fashion–feeding them to dogs, severing their ears, tying them to toilets–then leaves cryptic notes that characterize each act as a “punishment,” daring the authorities to catch him. The mystery of who the vigilante is and what motivates him is the main driving force behind Museum, but you might not want to soldier through the carnage for answers to those questions since Ryosuke Tomoe can’t decide if his vigilante is a hero or a monster. Tomoe depicts the violence with such fetishistic detail that the reader is invited to admire the killer’s technique rather than meditate on the true horror of what the character has done. The ugly, utilitarian artwork and  relentlessly dour tone are the nails in the proverbial coffin, underscoring just how unpleasantly banal Museum really is. Not recommended.

Phantom Tales of the Night, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Matsuri
Yen Press
Rated OT, for Older Teens (violence and sexual themes)

Phantom Tales of the Night is the kind of bad manga that’s difficult to review: it isn’t offensive or ineptly drawn, but it’s a chore to read thanks to its poor plotting, muddled characterizations, and maddeningly opaque dialogue. Ostensibly, the series focuses on the Murakamo Inn, where the demonic host cajoles his guests into revealing their secrets. The rules governing how the Murakamo Inn operates, however, are in a constant state of flux, making it hard to pin down what, exactly, Phantom Tales is about. In some chapters, characters share their secrets with the inn’s owner in exchange for having a wish fulfilled, while in others, characters learn a terrible secret about themselves. The later chapters hint at a potentially longer, more complex arc that will play out over several volumes, but the set-up is so abrupt and confusing that it robs the final pages of their full impact–a pity, since Matsuri has a flair for drawing genuinely creepy monsters. Perhaps the most damning thing about Phantom Tales of the Night is that the characters talk incessantly about “secrets” but lack a basic understanding of what a secret really is or why it holds such power—a key failing in a series that is predicated on the idea that secrets are a kind of supernatural currency. Not recommended.

Shojo & Tell: Moto Hagio Edition

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To celebrate the release of Moto Hagio’s The Poe Clan, Shojo & Tell host Ashley MacDonald invited me to join her for an in-depth conversation about three of my all-time favorite manga: A, A’, They Were Eleven, and A Drunken Dream and Other Stories. We mulled over plot developments, discussed problematic passages, and agreed that “Iguana Girl” may be the biggest tear-jerker in the Hagio canon. (Seriously–I can’t read it without getting the sniffles.) Ashley just posted the episode, which you can check out here:

For more insight into the manga that we discussed, I recommend the following essays and reviews from The Manga Critic vault:

I want to thank Ashley for the opportunity to chat about Hagio, and for doing such a terrific job of editing our conversation! If you’re not regularly following Shojo & Tell, I encourage you to check out the archive, as Ashley is a thoughtful host with a knack for choosing great manga and great guests. Recent contributors include Aisha Soleil and Rose Bridges discussing Bisco Hatori’s Ouran High School Host Club, Asher Sofman discussing CLAMP’s Tokyo Bablyon, and Manga Bookshelf’s own Anna Neatrour discussing Meca Tanaka’s The Young Master’s Revenge. Go, listen!