Unshelved

It was funny seeing all the manga bloggers explode into a twittergasm yesterday, and I was among them because when the news broke that Kodansha was going to bring back Sailor Moon into print I was absolutely delighted . I’m glad that I never tried to assemble a complete collection through the exorbitant prices the old Tokyopop editions go for on ebay – I bought a few used copies of Sailor Moon when I could find them reasonably priced, and ended up selling them in a more reasonably priced bundle on ebay myself.

I have an erratic history with manga. I started buying it in the first wave, when Mai the Psychic Girl, Area 88, and Nausicaa were coming out in small monthly editions instead of the larger books that are ubiquitous today. The entire comics market in the 90s really turned me off comics in any form, including manga. I was still interested in Japanese culture, and managed to study Japanese in college and go over there on a study abroad program, and I read absolutely no manga while I lived there. I stopped reading comics and manga regularly and only started again when I was in graduate school. I actually rediscovered manga when I was house sitting for a librarian who had a teenage daughter who was crazed for Sailor Moon and Rurouni Kenshin. There were volumes of manga scattered around the house, and when I picked up and read them I was reminded of why I enjoyed manga so much in the first place. Sailor Moon was so wonderfully goofy, with its magical girl incantations, Tuxedo Mask running around with a rose clenched between his teeth, and Usagi the ditsy yet powerful heroine.

Sailor Moon might have silly moments, but it combines them with a surprising number of fights. The story grows more complex as the series progresses. The cultural impact of Sailor Moon was huge in Japan and here, where it was a gateway manga for many girls. I’m not sure if those girls will pick up these new deluxe editions or if new readers will be picking up the series. I’m just selfishly happy that I’ll be able to read this series again.

Beast Master Volume 1 by Kyousuke Motomi

Motomi’s Dengeki Daisy is one of my favorite new shoujo series, so I thought I’d check out the earlier series Beast Master. I think often mangaka’s earlier series tend to suffer in comparison when compared with the manga that become hits. But while Beast Master doesn’t have the more stylish illustrations and emotional depth that Dengeki Daisy does, it does share the same quirky sensibility that makes it stand out from more run-of-the mill shoujo series.

Yuiko is a typical teen girl with a passion for animals. Unfortunately she has an uncontrollable tendency to smother any animal she meets with too much affection, causing them to flee from her. Leo is an animalistic boy whose demonic eyes and strange mannerisms cause him to be misunderstood by everybody he meets. Leo transfers into Yuiko’s school, and she is the first and only person to make friends with him. She treats him a little bit like a stray pet at first, but as they get to know each other a real friendship develops. Where Beast Master stands out is in its depiction of Leo. While he is handsome, his animal-like rage is contrasted with a playful mode where he’s drawn to look a little bit like a playful giant cat. It is unusual to see the male lead of the series being portrayed in an unhandsome way so many times. Although there’s a little bit of a Jane taming Tarzan dynamic in Yuiko and Leo’s relationship, seeing how she was gradually able to integrate him into school life was fun. Leo’s tendency to watch over Yuiko saves her from some sticky situations. I’m not feeling as invested in this story as I am with Dengeki Daisy, but since there’s only one more volume in this series, I’m going to finish reading Beast Master. After trying both of Motomi’s series that are available in English, I’m hoping that more from this creator gets released over here.

Just a quick link this morning, to Daniella Orihuela-Gruber’s All About Manga, where she’s set up links to donate to Doctors Without Borders and Shelterbox as part of a blogger initiative to help the people of Japan.

In Daniella’s words, “I certainly feel like I owe a meaningful chunk of good things in my life to Japan, so if you feel the same way, I would like to encourage you to donate any amount possible.”

You and me both, Daniella.

You too can give back to Japan by blogging or tweeting links to Daniella’s post or the donation pages, or simply by making a donation.

Thanks, Daniella, for organizing this effort!

Claymore Volume 1 by Norihiro Yagi

Claymore is one of those series that’s been on my radar for awhile because I remember reading several online reviews that pointed out it was a shonen manga series with some potentially interesting gender dynamics. So I was happy to spend .99 cents on the iPad version of Claymore volume one. This manga seems like a fairly standard fantasy action story, made much more interesting by the fact that the ultimate bad ass warriors in Yagi’s world are all women. Demons called yoma prey on hapless pseudo medieval villagers, and their only recourse is to hire claymores, women who have become part-demon themselves in order to be able to fight the yoma. The world of Claymore is introduced through the standard shonen set piece of having a young boy discover how claymores protect the world. Raki is orphaned, and he meets the claymore Clare when she is hired to protect his village. Clare is everything you might expect from a shonen action hero. She’s terse, business-like, and doesn’t hesitate to dismember a yoma by hacking off limbs before splitting it in half with her giant sword. Clare doesn’t even deal with the mercenary details of payment for her services. When the head of the town offers to give her money before she heads out on her killing mission, she tells him to wait and pay after she’s done with her job, “If I get killed…there’ll be no reason to pay.” Clare is followed from job to job by Rubel, a mysterious man who collects the money for her services.

Raki ends up following Clare and she agrees that he can tag along as her cook, telling him that he can stay with her until he finds another town he would like to live in. Clare isn’t one to sit around and talk about her feelings, but it is heavily implied that she’s taking on Raki as a sidekick because his companionship might be a way to help her regain some of her humanity. When the claymores transform themselves into human/yoma hybrids, they’ve started a process where they will eventually lose their human qualities and become yoma. A claymore who senses that she’s about to transform sends a black card to the next member of the organization requesting that she be killed.

Overall, I found this manga very intriguing. It is unusual to find a shonen manga that features a female main character that doesn’t feel exploitative. There were a couple scenes of Clare changing clothes taking a bath to wash the blood off of her self after battle, but these didn’t feel very gratuitous to me. Clare’s characterization is strong and forceful, and I’m curious to see what happens in the rest of her journey. I really liked the bleak tone of Claymore as well. It has been some time since I’ve read a grim fighting manga, so I actually found it a bit refreshing. Yagi’s art falls into the category of serviceable but not spectacular. I can see how it will probably improve over time, but Claymore doesn’t display the insane composition of something like Bleach that would prompt me to pick up several volumes for the action scenes alone. I’m very interested to see what’s going to happen with Claymore’s group of hybrid women/demon yoma hunters.

One of the things I like about reading manga on the iPad is that when reading it in the portrait or single page orientation, the art is automatically blown up to omnibus edition size. Also, being able to magnify individual panels is fun. The only thing that is making me a little hesitant about picking up this series is that it is so long! I will try to at least check out the second volume to see if I’m still interested. Can anyone whose read more Claymore let me know what they think about it? Does it get stronger as it goes along?

When it comes to my iPad and buying digital content, I tend to spend the most money buying ebooks. While it is great that Viz is one of the few companies to put multiple manga series on the iPad, the initial offerings were either series that I wasn’t that interested in or manga that I’d already collected in print format like Death Note or Kenshin. But the month of March is Manga Madness Month and ALL VOLUME ONES ARE .99 cents in the VIZ MANGA APP(picture me saying that in the voice of a crazy car salesman). Viz has also added a few series that I haven’t already read, and at .99 cents it is very cheap to sample the first volume of a manga I might find interesting.

Captive Hearts Volume 1 by Matsuri Hino

Captive Hearts is the first series by Vampire Knight powerhouse Matsuri Hino. I’ve read the first few volumes of Vampire Knights, traded them away, regretted it, and am slowly building up my print collection again. I’ve also read Hino’s frothy fantasy MeruPuri. Captive Hearts is very cute, but the first volume shows very little traces of Hino’s detailed art style and the story is fairly predictable. Megumi is the son of the butler to a rich family. He grows up in an empty mansion because the Kogami family went missing on a trip to China, and the late master’s will (written before the birth of his daughter) left his fortune split between his wife and his butler. Megumi’s lesiurly life as a student is interrupted when his father announces that the Kogami family has been found. The long-lost daughter Suzuka has been found. Megumi’s father makes dark pronouncements about Megumi finding out about his fate and a family curse, and when Megumi meets Suzuka the curse takes effect.

As soon as Megumi sees the new mistress of the house something is triggered in his brain, and he becomes the perfect servant. He finds himself saying “Welcome home, Princess” and kissing her hand while on the inside his thoughts are protesting. It turns out that one of Megumi’s ancestors tried to steal from the Kogami family and a guardian god appeared to place a hundred generation curse on Megumi’s family, forcing them to become the perfect servants. Megumi spends his time helping Suzuka adjust to life in Japan, and his tendency to have random attacks of subservience hinders their relationship. Does he care about her because of the curse? What would happen if the curse was broken? Suzuka seems to like Megumi, but she’s extremely distressed about the effect she has on him and just wants to spend time with him normally the way they did as children.

There are faint suggestions of Hino’s eventual drawing style, which features plenty of detail and characters that all seem to be wearing a healthy coating of eyeliner, but Captive Hearts isn’t nearly that refined. As a first volume, I would expect that the art gets a lot better as the series progresses. Hino’s later facility with extreme angst isn’t really on display here either. Instead there are plenty of sweet and humorous moments between Megumi and Suzuka as they strike up a friendship in between his uncontrollable servant attacks. For .99 cents, I was happy to have the chance to try out this series. Even though there were quite a few cute moments it didn’t really draw me in, partially because I think that while Hino’s other series might be less funny they are executed much more competently. Although after seeing the sense of humor on display in Captive Hearts, I am tempted to reread Vampire Knight again as paranormal romance parody.

I had no problems downloading and reading this manga on the iPad, and the pages looked very clean and crisp. Even though I wasn’t hooked by this first volume, I wouldn’t hesitate recommending it for anyone who wants to sample some insanely cheap shoujo manga during this March promotion.