Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

MANGA REVIEWS

The Manga Revue, 8/13/18

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There are two kinds of people: those who like to camp, and those who don’t. I fall squarely in the second category — not because I hate the great outdoors, but because I’m fond of hot showers and comfy beds. Still, the prospect of reading a manga about camping intrigued me: is camping popular in Japan? Is the s’more a hit in Japan, too? And what about bears? Laid-Back Camp didn’t answer all of my questions, but it definitely earned a spot on my pull list. Read on for details.

Laid-Back Camp, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Afro
Translation by Amber Tamosaitis
Yen Press, 178 pp.
Rated T, for Teen

Laid-Back Camp may be the most quintessentially Japanese thing I’ve read this year: it features cute girls doing cute things while imparting information about camping gear. There’s no real plot to speak of, just a meet-cute in the first chapter that introduces seasoned camper Rin to enthusiastic newbie Nadeshiko. Through one of those only-in-manga coincidences, Rin and Nadeshiko attend the same school, where two other girls — Aoi and Chiaki — are struggling to recruit members for their Outdoor Exploration Club. You can guess what happens next: Nadeshiko joins the club and, by dint of her Golden Retriever personality, brings the skeptical Rin into the fold.

Each chapter is built around a skill, a piece of equipment, or a location. In “Mount Fuji and Cup Ramen,” for example, Rin explains how to build the perfect campfire, calling dried pine cones “nature’s premier fire starter,” while in “You Can Only Go Camping If You Have the Gear,” the Outdoor Exploration Club pores over catalogs, debating the merits of down and synthetic sleeping bags. These passages are deftly woven into the fabric of each story, playing a natural part of the girls’ conversations as they plan camping trips. Dashes of humor and breath-taking scenery add welcome nuance to the storytelling, preventing it from tipping into edu-manga dullness or yon-koma hijinks. Best of all, Rin is a genuinely interesting character, a small, self-sufficient kid who likes solo camping trips. Though volume one doesn’t explain how she caught the camping bug, author Afro has done such a good job of fleshing out Rin it doesn’t matter; we can see how someone so introspective and independent would welcome the opportunity to be alone in nature. Recommended, even for those who prefer the Great Indoors.

Must-Read Reviews

NerdSpan’s Keith Hendricks has quickly become one of my favorite manga critics, bringing the same enthusiasm and insight to comics as different as Master Keaton and Kakagurui: Compulsive Gambler. His recent review of Astra Lost in Space, for example, offers this thoughtful assessment of Kenta Shinohara’s draftsmanship:

Shinohara’s planets are such magnificent fictive ecospheres, and his examples of imaginary science so instantly credible, that one takes him not only for a mangaka, but an authority on exobiology and exogeology. Shinohara builds these planets from the ground up, so that one has an idea of not only their climate, and the evolution of their biosphere, but the physical and astronomical data of the planet; and even when these aren’t directly stated, one gets the idea that they’re under the surface somewhere. Moreover, these planets would only be slightly more believable if he had photographs, for he is an excellent line artist not only of teenagers and sci-fi hardware–common skills in comic book creators–but of alien lifeforms and alien worlds.

Also worth reading is Martin de la Iglesia‘s essay “Has AKIRA Always Been a Cyberpunk Comic?”, an in-depth look at the manga’s reception in the US and Germany.

New and Noteworthy

Ongoing Series

From the Vault

* Denotes a digital-first or digital-only release.

 

The Manga Revue: Back in the Saddle Edition

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Welcome back! It’s been almost six weeks since I posted the last Manga Revue, so I’m dedicating today’s column to reviews, essays, podcasts and videos from around the web. Though I’ll be focusing primarily on recent posts, I’ve also thrown in links to a few older articles that are worth a second look, like Hakutaku’s brief but thoughtful essay on the Magnificient 49ers and Katrina Jagleski’s “My trans experience with My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness.” Going forward, I hope to update the site more frequently with reviews and link posts, so stay tuned.

MUST-READ/MUST SEE MANGA REVIEWS

If you didn’t read all of this year’s Eisner-nominated manga, check out Brigid Alverson‘s capsule reviews of all five titles, from Golden Kamuy to Otherworld Barbara. Over at Good Comics for Kids, J. Caleb Mozzocco has the low-down on Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts while fellow critic Lori Henderson weighs in on Juana and the Dragonewt’s Seven Kingdoms. Also worth a look is The Cambridge Geek’s review of Shibuya Goldfish, which praises creator Hiroumi Aoi for adding a few fresh wrinkles to the zombie genre.

If you’re more of a YouTube consumer, check out The Black Manga Critic‘s thoughts on the latest chapters of The Promised Neverland, My Hero Academia, and One Piece, and be sure to congratulate him on two years of vlogging! And for folks who prefer listening to reviews, download the latest Comics Alternative podcast, which focuses on My Solo Exchange Diary and Grand Blue Dreaming, or the newest Manga in Your Ears episode, which focuses on Heart of Thomas and Go for It, Nakamura!

NEW AND NOTEWORTHY

ONGOING SERIES

FROM THE VAULT

The Manga Revue, 6/4/18

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Do you remember that moment in your manga-reading journey when you discovered that there was a manga about golf? Or pachinko? Or train station bento boxes? I do: I’d just read an entry in Shaenon Garrity’s Overlooked Manga Festival, and was astonished to discover that someone had written manga about Cup Noodle and 7-Eleven. I hadn’t been curious about the origins of either instant ramen or convenience stores, but the possibility of learning about them from manga was so irresistible that I tracked down copies. Neither manga were good, exactly, but I found them oddly compelling, both for their sincerity and their attention to small but interesting details.

I had a similar experience with Heaven’s Design Team, a new edu-manga that explains how different animal species are uniquely adapted to their environments. Its creative team has taken a bolder approach to their subject than Project X‘s, opting for humor over straightforward dramatization. The basic mode of storytelling, however, reminded me of Cup Noodle and 7-Eleven, relying heavily on talking heads to impart information.

Heaven’s Design Team, Vol. 1
Written by Hebi-Zou and Tsuta Suzuki, Art by Tarako
Translated by
Kodansha Comics, 142 pp.
Rated E, for Everyone

Heaven’s Design Team has a faintly blasphemous premise: God is so busy running the world that He’s outsourced the creation of new animal and plant species to a crack team of designers. God still has a hand in deciding whether unicorns go into production or not, but He’s largely an invisible presence in the story, while the motley crew of consultants take center stage. Each designer has a signature animal — a horse, a cow, a snake, a bird — that he or she is trying to improve, and one well-defined personality trait — say, a fondness for lethal predators — that puts him or her into conflict with other team members.

That’s an imaginative strategy for teaching readers about the quirks of animal anatomy, but Heaven’s Design Team never quite finds its groove. Part of the problem lies with the authors’ dogged adherence to formula; at the beginning of every story, the design team fields an order from the Big Guy for an “adorably uncute animal” or “an animal that can eat tall plants,” then bickers their way to creating an actual species like the common egg snake, the giraffe, the armadillo, or the narwhal. Their design process yields nuggets of information about the creatures they’re envisioning that, at chapter’s end, turn out to be real attributes of real animals. So many of these factual tidbits are related through talking-head panels, however, that the manga often feels more like a PowerPoint presentation than a story, despite the authors’ attempts to make these info-dump conversations more animated with facial close-ups and dramatic poses.

From time to time, however, Heaven’s Design Team drops a joke that’s so weird or so well executed it earns a real laugh. In one scene, for example, two unicorns accidentally bump into one another, prompting a terse exchange straight out of Goodfellas. In another sight gag, Shimoda, the team’s most straight-laced member, visits the Insect Department, a division populated entirely by drones young men with identical haircuts and glasses. These moments last only a panel or two, but they hint at what the series might have been if the authors hadn’t suffered the same repetition compulsion as their characters. Your milage may vary. 

What to Read in June

The review team at Adventures in Poor Taste (AiPT!) shares their favorite long-running manga, from Hunter x Hunter to Vinland Saga, while Anime News Network‘s critics compile a Spring 2018 Manga Guide. Over at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Brigid Alverson offers her picks for June’s best new manga.

New and Noteworthy

Ongoing Series

From the Vault

* Denotes a digital-first or digital-only release

The Manga Revue, 5/28/18

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The phenomenal success of Yuri!!! On ICE turned out to be a boon for manga fans, too, as American publishers snapped up two of Mitsurou Kubo’s better-known comics: Moteki: Love Strikes!, a seinen romance about a thirty-something loser who reconnects with women from his past, and Again!!, a time-travel comedy about two teenagers who get a second chance at high school. I won’t lie: Again!! was my hands-down favorite of the two, both for its raw honesty and its sharply observed characters. This week, I’m checking in on Again!! again to see how the series is progressing.

Again!!, Vol. 2
By Mitsurou Kobu
Translated by Rose Padgett
Rated OT, for Older Teens (16+)

Again!! avoids the sophomore slump by briskly advancing the plot without sacrificing the humor or heart that made the first chapters so appealing. Kinichiro and Fujieda both get a turn in the spotlight, with Kinichiro discovering the pleasures of cheering, and Fujieda experiencing loneliness for the first time. Volume two also introduces three new characters, all of whom used to belong to the ouendan: Okuma, the drummer; Masaki, the vice-captain; and Suga, the cheer sergeant. Although the trio’s ostensible role is comic relief, their real function is helping us understand why the ouendan failed, revealing the degree to which their unwanted advances, passivity, and flagrant sexism undermined Usami’s authority as captain and poisoned group morale.

While this information is crucial to the story, it also points to Again!!‘s biggest problem: Usami. Mitsurou Kubo is frank about why Usami resorts to shouting, scolding, and shaming to prove that she’s “man” enough to lead the ouendan — a compassionate insight into a character who often seems more harridan than human. Yet Usami’s actual personality remains a mystery. Everything we learn about her is revealed through other characters, whether they’re discussing her beef with Abe, the head cheerleader, or describing the flurry of media interest in Usami when she first joined the ouendan. We don’t know how Usami feels about her teammates, or why she’s so passionately interested in cheering — two questions that need to be addressed if she’s to become a full-fledged character.

Despite these flaws, Again!! manages to wring fresh laughs from its time-travel premise while depicting high school in all its unpleasantness. Fujieda, for example, vacillates between trying to profit from her knowledge of the future and lamenting her lack of friends. Kinichiro also is caught between past and present: he’s angry that his first kiss didn’t go as planned, and deeply self-conscious after a loud, public declaration of how miserable he feels — an exquisitely awful scene that acknowledges the depth of his pain while recognizing that his brusque behavior directly contributes to his sense of isolation and victimhood. It’s this kind of insight that makes Again!! such a compelling story, reminding us that our memories of being shunned, wronged, or ridiculed can be so one-sided that we’d make the same mistakes if given the opportunity to relive our teenage years. Recommended.

Must-Read Manga Reviews

Over at Coherent Cats, Karleen offers a brief but thoughtful assessment of 2018’s best new LBGTQ-friendly manga, from The Bride Was a Boy! to I Hear the Sunspot: Theory of Happiness. 

New and Noteworthy

Continuing Series

From the Vault

* Denotes a digital-first or digital-only title

The Manga Revue, 5/21/18

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Remember the good ol’ days when a new Star Wars movie took three years to make, and no one was certain that George Lucas was going to get around to Episodes I, II, and III? I miss those days; new installments felt like a cause for celebration and not a dutiful obligation, and the films were an irresistible mixture of bad acting, thrilling space battles, and earnest conversations about the Force. When I’ve felt a twinge of nostalgia for my childhood Star Wars experience, I’ve found the manga adaptations of the original trilogy much more satisfying than the current batch of Disneyfied films. So I was curious to see what an original Star Wars manga might look like: would it explore new territory, or simply recycle the same plot points, a la The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and The Last Jedi? Read on for the scoop!

Star Wars: Lost Stars, Vol. 1
Original Story by Claudia Gray
Art and Adaptation by Yusaku Komiyuma
Yen Press, 192 pp.
Rated T, for teens

Lost Stars is to Star Wars what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet, a retelling of an iconic story from the perspective of two peripheral characters. Many of the most famous moments from George Lucas’ original trilogy appear in Lost Stars — the capture of Princess Leia, the annihilation of Alderaan, the ice battle on Hoth — though the framing of these events is new, seen through the eyes of two young Imperial pilots: Thane Kyrell and Ciena Ree, both of whom enrolled in the Imperial Academy hoping for adventure and a better way of life.

The inclusion of these famous scenes is a double-edged sword; they provide a handy point of reference for the Star Wars greenhorn while simultaneously pandering to the hardcore fan by faithfully recreating iconic images, characters, and dialogue from A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. There’s a dot-the-i quality to them that suggests that Yusaku Komiyuma was more concerned with nailing down the original details than imagining how Thane or Ciena would perceive — or participate — in these events. The other problem with these scenes is that they’re more dramatically interesting than Komiyuma’s brisk but flavorless adaptation of Claudia Gray’s novel. The most thoughtful elements of Gray’s work — particularly the class politics on Thane and Ciena’s home planet Jelucan — are presented in a bald fashion that reads more like CliffNotes than honest-to-goodness fiction, while important scenes of character development are too compressed to give us a sense of who these star-crossed lovers really are. The net result is a comic that successfully bridges the aesthetic worlds of Shonen Jump and Star Wars without achieving its own distinct identity as a manga or a Star Wars story. Your mileage may vary.

Must-See, Must-Hear Reviews

The Black Manga Critic takes a closer look at the latest chapters of The Promised Neverland and One Piece at his YouTube channel. Over at The Comics Alternative, Derek Royal and Shea Hennum discuss the final chapters of Otherworld Barbara and Monster.

New and Noteworthy

Ongoing Series

From the Vault

* Denotes a digital-first or digital-only release

The Manga Revue, 5/14/18

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Hey, y’all… apologies for the radio silence last week! I was knee-deep in term papers and final exams, but I submitted my course grades yesterday and am back in the manga-reviewing saddle. As penance for skipping a week, today’s column is super-sized, with review links galore and the low down on Cutie Honey a Go Go!, Seven Seas’ newest Go Nagai offering.

Cutie Honey a Go Go!
Original Story by Go Nagai; Story & Art by Shimpei Itoh; Planning Cooperation by Hideaki Anno
Translated by Zack Davisson an Adrienne Beck
Seven Seas, 400 pp.
Rated T, for Teen (Nudity and bloodless violence)

Cutie Honey a Go Go! is not a conventionally good manga: the plot is riddled with holes, the story lacks a proper conclusion, and the characters are paper-thin. Yet for all its obvious limitations, Cutie Honey a Go Go! is cheeky fun in the manner of an Austin Powers movie; it’s a cartoon of a cartoon, an irreverent send-up of the source material that simultaneously captures the original manga’s naughty tone while updating the plot and characters for contemporary readers.

Cutie Honey a Go Go! borrows liberally from Hideaki Anno’s 2004 film and Go Nagai’s original 1973 manga, mixing elements of both with a few new flourishes. In Cutie Honey a Go Go!, for example, Aki Natsuko is no longer a blushing school girl with a crush on her android sempai, but a hard-charging special agent who faces down danger with the brash confidence of a Harrison Ford character. Aki and Cutie’s arch nemesis Sister Jill has likewise gotten a makeover, from whip-wielding bad girl to wicked android intent on world domination. The signature elements of Nagai’s original story remain intact, however: Cutie Honey is still an impossibly innocent, cheerful android whose clothing dissolves to tatters every time she powers up, and her main opponents are the Panther Claw ladies, a group of monstrous beauties who work for Sister Jill.

Though manga-ka Shimpei Itoh’s action scenes are clumsy, his character designs are a playful nod to the era that begat Cutie Honey, straddling the fence between retro and modern. The Panther Claw gang look like Betty Paige cosplayers, busty gals in barely-there costumes that feature leopard spots and extra arms, while Cutie Honey rocks her signature pixie cut and a backless jumpsuit that David Lee Roth might have worn in 1984. It’s hard to be offended by the T&A, though, since Cutie Honey a Go Go! resembles a 1962 issue of Playboy more than a volume of Air Gear; there’s a pin-up coyness about Itoh’s cheesecake that renders these images benign. It’s also difficult to be offended by a manga that works so hard to entertain the reader with its anything-for-a-laugh jokes, over-the-top battle sequences, and campy dialogue. I found its unironic goofiness charming — costume failures and all — and think you might, too. Recommended.

Must-Read Reviews

Siddarth Gupta pores over last week’s Weekly Shonen Jump Bonus Issue. Over at Hakutaku, Alana posts a thoughtful introduction to Leiji Matsumoto’s Captain Harlock, tracing the character across the creator’s entire oeuvre. And while you’re there, take a minute to appreciate her review of Hello Baby, a one-shot title from Takeshi Obata (Death Note, Platinum End) and Masanori Morita (Rookies, Shiba Inu) that focuses on “wannabe gangster” who “plots to murder a high-ranking yakuza boss.” Further afield, Kelly Chiu explains why every serious manga fan should read Fullmetal Alchemist.

New and Noteworthy

Ongoing Series

From the Vault

* Denotes a digital-first or digital-only release

The Manga Revue, 4/23/18

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The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún was one of 2017’s surprise hits, an emotionally wrenching fantasy manga about a demon who rescues an orphan girl from a plague-ridden world. Nagabe’s art — with its graceful linework and unique character designs — was enough to distinguish Girl from the Other Side from virtually any other series licensed by a major American publisher. But it was the characters and the poignancy of their relationship that truly captivated readers, as the bond between Teacher (the demon) and Shiva (the girl) was tested by Shiva’s ties to the human world, particularly her attachment to the aunt who raised her — and then abandoned her in the woods. Four volumes in, Girl from the Other Side is still casting a powerful spell, even as the story takes another grim turn.

The Girl From the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún, Vol. 4
Art and Story by Nagabe
Translated by Adrienne Beck
Seven Seas, 180 pp.

As volume four opens, Teacher, Shiva, and Auntie have formed an uneasy family unit, with Shiva desperate to broker the peace between her adoptive parents. Nagabe does a fine job of dramatizing the conflict between Teacher and Auntie without spoiling the quiet mood of the story, using small gestures to convey how desperately each wants to protect Shiva from the human world. Nagabe also includes a handful of scenes that chart the progress of Auntie’s disease, showing us how quickly the curse erases a victim’s memory and personality — a development that raises the interesting question of who Teacher was before he assumed his demonic form.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of volume four is how much of the characters’ interior lives are revealed through the artwork. In the first chapter, for example, Teacher and Auntie slip into the woods for a nighttime conference about Shiva. Each carries a lantern as they walk and talk — two pinpoints of light against a scrim of trees — their conversation ending when Auntie’s lantern flickers out, leaving her and Teacher side by side in darkness. What makes this sequence so effective is the deliberate placement of the characters on the page and the meticulous attention to lighting; Nagabe has found an elegant — and wordless — way to demonstrate the characters’ shared resolve to protect Shiva, even though they remain suspicious of one another. Such carefully observed moments are a potent reminder that The Girl from the Other Side is an all-too-rare example of a manga whose story engages the heart and mind by suggesting, rather than saying, what the characters are feeling. Recommended.

Must-Read Reviews

The peerless Joe McCullouch reviews Inio Asano’s Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDeDestruction. And if his review isn’t enough to persuade you to read this blackest of satires, maybe this preview will.

New and Noteworthy

Ongoing Series

From the Vault

* Denotes a digital-first or digital-only release

The Manga Revue, 4/16/18

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Today’s super-sized Manga Revue comes to you courtesy of Patriot’s Day, my second favorite Massachusetts-only holiday. (The first is Evacuation Day, a thinly-disguised attempt to give Boston’s civil servants permission to skip work on St. Paddy’s.) In addition to a bumper crop of links, I have two reviews for you: volume four of D&D cooking extravaganza Delicious in Dungeon, and volumes three and four of everyone’s favorite backwoods culinary adventure Golden Kamuy. Looking back on food manga’s early history in the US, who could have predicted that readers would be feasting on such a wide array of titles in 2018, from Sweetness and Lightning and What Did You Eat Yesterday? to Giant Spider & Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale, Food Wars!! Shokugeki no Soma, and Toriko. Maybe the North American market is finally ready for an Iron Wok Jan renaissance…

Delicious in Dungeon, Vol. 4
Story and Art by Ryoko Kui
Translated by Taylor Engel
Yen Press, 192 pp.
Rated T, for Teens (13+)

If the first volume of Delicious in Dungeon was about assembling a posse, and the second and third about turning monsters into meals, then the fourth is about friendship — specifically, the strong emotional bond between Laois, Marcille, and Falin — and revenge, as the gang finally comes face-to-face with the Red Dragon. The showdown takes place inside a walled city whose narrow, maze-like streets give them a strategic advantage over their Godzilla-sized foe. And as exciting as the fight is, the real payoff is what follows, as Laois and Marcille discover that bringing Falin back from the dead isn’t a simple proposition. It’s in these moments that Ryoko Kui proves a more deft storyteller than we initially realized, effortlessly shifting gears from comedy to drama without mawkishness or cheap jokes. Instead, we’re allowed to contemplate the real horror of being eaten alive — as Falin was — and the real possibility of a character dying for good.

If I’ve made volume four sound like a bummer, rest assured it isn’t. Seshi gets his turn in the spotlight with a weaponized assortment of kitchen tools, while the rest of the gang endures its share of fumbles and miscommunications on the way to catching their dragon adversary. Though I suspect the next volume of Delicious in Dungeon will revert to a monster-of-the-week formula, that’s OK; Kui has firmly established her dramatic and culinary bonafides in volume four, leaving the door open for more character development in the future. Recommended.

Golden Kamuy, Vols. 3-4
Story and Art by Satoru Noda
Translated by Eiji Yasuda
VIZ Media
Rated M, for Mature (18+)

Midway through volume four of Golden Kamuy, Asirpa builds a fox trap in the woods. “Do foxes taste good?” Sugimoto inquires. “No, not really,” Asirpa replies. “Tanuki have more fat in them and taste a lot better.” With a twinkle in her eye, she then asks, “But Sugimoto, don’t you want to try eating a fox?” A mildly exasperated Sugimoto replies, “You know, I’m not out here to try all the delicacies in Hokkaido.”

There are two ways to read this exchange: as a tacit admission that the cooking elements of Golden Kamuy sometimes occupy more real estate than the battles, or a tacit admission that the series is more compelling as a study of Ainu culture than a bloody frontier adventure. I vote for the second interpretation, as the series’ frequent detours into the food, medicine, and mythology of the Ainu are fascinating, offering a window into a culture that has been largely hidden from Western view. Golden Kamuy is on weaker footing, however, when focusing on its secondary characters and subplots. None of the other gold-seekers are fleshed out as carefully as Asirpa and Sugimoto, despite Satoru Noda’s efforts to give each villain a unique motivation for wanting the treasure. The newest baddie — Kazuo Hemni — exemplifies this problem to a tee: though he’s been given a particularly grisly backstory to explain his murderous proclivities, he’s such a textbook sociopath that he barely rises above the preternaturally-calm-and-savage type.

The art, too, sometimes has a perfunctory quality; in several scenes, Noda’s use of a Photoshopped background doesn’t mesh well with the hand-drawn elements, resulting in an awkward collage. Noda’s use of perspective can also be a distraction. He has difficulty drawing bodies to scale, especially when he’s depicting Asirpa and her family, some of whom look more like Smurfs than people in their head-to-body ratio.

Still, the camaraderie between Asirpa and Sugimoto, and the well-staged action scenes more than compensate for the occasional roughness of the execution or flatness of the characterizations. Golden Kamuy continues to entertain, horrify, and educate in equal measure — something I can’t say for any other manly-man manga that’s currently being published in English. Recommended.

Must-Read Reviews

Sean Gaffney offers a thoughtful appraisal of My Boy, pronouncing it “a good, meaningful work, told with a deft hand,” while Chris Galaver declares Seiichi Hayashi’s Red-Colored Elegy a classic. Over at NerdSpan, Keith Hendricks checks in with Delicious in Dungeon and One-Punch Man.

New and Noteworthy

Ongoing Series

From the Vault

* Denotes a digital-first or digital-only release

The Manga Revue, 4/2/18

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CITY, Keiichi Arawi’s latest series, charts the misadventures of Midori, a feckless undergrad who’s behind on the rent, in debt to her roommate, and surrounded by “not-quite-ordinary people.” In a last-ditch effort to stay in her apartment, she hatches several get-rich schemes — betting on horses, entering a photography contest — all of which backfire in spectacular fashion. That premise sounded ripe with comic potential, so I decided to pick up a copy of volume one. Here’s what I found.

CITY, Vol. 1
Art & Story by Keiichi Arawa
Translated by Jenny McKeon
Vertical, Inc., 166 pp.
No rating

I’ll be honest: I had a hard time reviewing CITY, a manga that seems to be tickling everyone else’s funny bone but mine. Though I could appreciate the skill and imagination behind Keiichi Arawi’s work, I found CITY too frantic to be amusing, thought-provoking, or interesting. My frustration boiled down to two basic observations about Arawi’s methods — first, his unwavering belief that repeating gags is a surefire strategy for laughs, and second, his unwavering belief that certain types of jokes subvert convention when, in fact, they’re just as cliche as the conventions they’re spoofing. Nowhere are those two tendencies more pronounced than in his depiction of Midori’s landlady, a feisty old broad who goes to violent lengths to collect the rent. A karate-chopping grandma sounds hilarious in the abstract, but you’ve seen this gag done better elsewhere, most spectacularly in Kung Fu Hustle, where the regal and ridiculous Yuen Qi steals the show from under Stephen Chow’s nose  — something that can’t be said of Midori’s landlady, whose shouting and punching barely distinguishes her from her equally batshit neighbors.

It’s only in the quieter interludes, when the focus shifts from Midori to her neighbors that Arawi’s flair for the absurd manifests itself. In “Officer,” for example, a neighborhood patrolman finds himself under citizen’s arrest for a theft he was asked to investigate. The officer’s placid expression and deadpan delivery contrast sharply with the physical and emotional indignities of his job, his beatific expression unbroken by the ordeal of being hog-tied by an overzealous mob. Another modestly amusing interlude — “Wako Izumi” — focuses on a control freak who’s distraught by the loss of a restaurant point card. Like the officer, Wako proves an unreliable narrator, her impulsive, weird behavior contradicting the Sgt. Friday-esque tone of her internal monologue. These moments of surrealism aren’t funny, exactly, but they at least feel original, something that can’t be said of the tired slapstick jokes and strenuously unpleasant main characters.

Verdict: Your mileage will vary. See my colleague Sean Gaffney’s review for a different perspective on CITY.

Must-Read Reviews

Anime Feminist contributor Caitlin just posted a brief list of anime and manga recommendations that runs the gamut from Shojo Beat classics like Beauty Is the Beast to more recent titles like In This Corner of the World and Pink. Over at Otaku USA, Shaenon Garrity praises Kenka Bancho Otome‘s irrepressible heroine Hinako, “who starts out flustered but soon comes to enjoy a life of punching guys and bonding with her bros,” and Inio Asano’s Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDeDestruction, which she characterizes as a “sly sci-fi parable.”

New and Noteworthy

Ongoing Series

From the Vault

* Denotes a digital-only or digital-first release

 

The Manga Revue, 3/26/18

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Have you been checking out Kodansha Comics’ digital-only and digital-first releases? I have, and I love this initiative: it lets me sample dozens of series that might otherwise never see the light of day in North America. Rugby manga. Karuta manga. Really weird horror manga. Medical drama. Josei. As you might expect, there’s a good reason why no one was clamoring to bring out print editions of, say, Deathtopia, but lurking among the pedestrian, the awful, and the amateurish are gems such as Dragon Head, PTSD Radio, Shojo FIGHT! and Tokyo Tarareba Girls. This week, I previewed one of Kodansha’s most recent digital offerings, Starving Anonymous, which, according to Kodansha’s editorial staff, is “an intense dystopian horror thriller in the apocalyptic vein of Dragon Head and Attack on Titan, from the team that brought you zombie actioner Fort of Apocalypse.” Translation: violence ahoy!

Starving Anonymous, Chapter 1
Story by Yuu Kuraishi, Art by Kazu Inabe, Original Concept by Kengo Mizutani
Kodansha Comics
Rating: OT (Older teen)

Imagine an Eli Roth remake of Soylent Green in all its gory, sadistic intensity, and you have some idea of what it’s like to read Starving Anonymous, a manga that strives for topicality but settles for cheap thrills. Like the 1973 Charlton Heston film, Starving Anonymous takes place in a heat-ravaged future where supplies are scarce, birth rates are plummeting, and people are crowded into fewer and fewer cities. The series’ protagonist is I’e, a normal high school student whose life is violently upended when he’s snatched off a bus and deposited at an enormous industrial facility where the main product is — you guessed it — people.

A concept this potentially repulsive lives or dies by the thoughtfulness of the execution, and it’s here where Yuu Kuraishi and Kazu Inabe stumble. The writing is efficient but artless, establishing the direness of the world’s condition through news flashes and pointed conversations but revealing little about I’e; he’s more a placeholder than a character, a collection of reaction shots in search of a personality. The artwork, by contrast, varies from slickly generic — Tokyo apparently looks the same 50 years from now — to willfully ugly; once inside the factory, Inabe draws rooms and conveyor belts filled with distended bodies, rendering every roll of fat and bulging eye in fetishistic detail. If Kuraishi and Inabe were trying to make a point about the ethics of factory farming, or the evils of overconsumption, that message is quickly shoved aside in favor of a more conventional escape-from-prison plot in which I’e and a group of young, healthy rebels fight their way to the outside. Nothing in the first chapter suggested that Starving Anonymous has anything on its mind other than characters doing and seeing horrible stuff, so I’ll be passing on this one.

Must-Read Manga Review

Don’t miss this review! Erica Friedman offers a sharp, funny take on Junko Mizuno’s Ravina the Witch?!, which was released by Titan Comics last year. In what may be my favorite opening gambit of all time, she compares the experience of reading Ravina to that of looking at a cute animal picture on Twitter:

Imagine if you will, an image of two goats looking at each other. Maybe a younger animal looking up at an older one. “The younger, cuter one is looking up at the older and wiser one,” your brain immediately fills in for you. You then tell yourself a story about how the older goat is teaching the younger one, or scolding it, or… And in the end, you have created meaning in what is a picture of two animals who are literally just looking at one another for one brief moment… Ravina The Witch? by Junko Mizuno is the fairytale equivalent of two animals looking at one another. We can be moved deeply by the story and we can find all sorts of meaning in it – whether it is truly there or not.

Also worth a look is Helen‘s review of Astra Lost in Space, “a fun adventure series with a great cast and a surprisingly well-thought out plot holding everything together.”

New and Noteworthy

Ongoing Series

From the Vault

* Denotes a digital-first or digital-only release

The Manga Revue, 3/19/18

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When Tokyopop filed for bankruptcy in 2011, one of the many titles left in licensing purgatory was Voices of a Distant Star, Mizu Sahara’s adaptation of the 2002 Makoto Shinkai film. I had a dim but fond memory of reading Voices — maybe in 2007? — so I was delighted to hear that Vertical Comics would be re-issuing it, given the company’s stellar track record with Shinkai’s The Garden of Words, 5 Centimeters Per Second, and She and Her Cat. Voices is, in essence, a two-hander about young lovers who bridge space and time by means of text messages. (Even in the future, it seems, we’re all tethered to our smartphones.) But would it be as moving this time around? Read on for my second thoughts.

Voices of a Distant Star
Story by Makoto Shinkai, Art by Mizu Sahara
Translated by Melissa Tanaka
Vertical Comics, 238 pp.

What would it be like to embark on a deep space voyage, knowing that when you returned, nothing on Earth would be as you remembered it? That’s the question at the heart of Makoto Shinkai and Mizu Sahara’s Voices of a Distant Star, a thoughtful — if sometimes clumsy — rumination on the human toll of interstellar travel.

The story begins in 2046, as sixteen-year-old Noboru Terao anxiously awaits text messages from his childhood friend Mikako Nagamine, who’s enlisted in the military. As we learn through snippets of conversation and text, Nagamine isn’t at a conventional boot camp: she’s been deployed to Mars, where humanity is preparing for a lengthy campaign against an alien race known as the Tharsians. Her early exchanges with Noboru arrive in a matter of days or weeks, but when she’s transferred to the front lines, she realizes that it may be years before Noboru receives her next text; as she ruefully observes, “By the time this message reaches you, everyone will be growing up into people I don’t know.”

The emotional honesty of their epistolary romance is the best reason to read Voices of a Distant Star. Through their brief exchanges, we grasp that Noboru and Nagamine are torn between the desire for a normal relationship and the dawning realization that they may be better off pursuing their own destinies — a realization made more poignant by the sharp contrast between Noboru’s ordinary school life and Nagamine’s extraterrestrial mission. Their dilemma would be more moving, however, if the artwork wasn’t executed in such a desultory fashion. The characters are utterly generic, lacking any semblance of individuality, while the space combat lacks any sense of place; the story could just as easily be unfolding in Phoenix, AZ as on a planet eight light years from Earth. I know — the story is supposed to give me the feels, not the chills — but a little more attention to the dangerous aspects Nagamine’s mission would have raised the emotional temperature of Voices of a Distant Star from mild to muy caliente. In spite of these artistic shortcomings, Noboru and Nagamine’s plight remains powerful, reminding us that our greatest obstacle to space travel isn’t distance — it’s time. Recommended.

Must-Read Manga Reviews

OASG contributor Krystallina looks at the first ten chapters of Farewell, My Dear Cramer, a soccer manga by the creator of Your Lie in April, and “unboxes” the Fist of the North star eOneBook, a digital reader that collects the entire 27-volume run of the original series.  At Otaku USA, Che Gilson looks at the first volume of Juana and the Dragonewts’ Seven Kingdoms, arguing that the series “gets off to a promising start, but staggers a little in the execution.”

New and Noteworthy

Ongoing Series

From the Vault

* Denotes a digital-first or digital-only release

The Manga Revue, 2/19/18

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One of my resolutions for 2018 — besides eating more kale, of course — was to update The Manga Critic on a more frequent, predictable schedule. To that end, I’ll be instituting a new Monday feature called The Manga Revue. This column will include one or two short reviews of recent manga, as well as links to noteworthy reviews around the web. In addition to The Manga Revue, I’ll be doing a short Wednesday link post that will highlight breaking news stories — sales figures, licensing announcements, awards — as well as industry job opportunities, interesting essays about anime and manga, and interviews with artists, editors, and translators. Look for in-depth features and reviews on Fridays.

Takane & Hana, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Yuki Shiwasu
Adaptation by Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane
VIZ Media, 200 pp.
Rated T, for Teens

The opening pages of Takane & Hana offer a uniquely Japanese twist on the meet cute: the couple in question are set up by a marriage broker who thinks she’s introducing a twenty-three year old beauty to a twenty-six-year-old bachelor. The bride-to-be, however, is a sixteen-year-old high school student who’s posing as her older sister — don’t ask — while the potential groom is an impossibly handsome jerk who’s angry that his family is pressuring him to settle down. Guess what happens next? If you said, “Opposites attract!”, you wouldn’t be wrong, though the course of true love hits a few potholes along the way.

I’m of two minds about Takane & Hana. My fifteen-year-old self adores Hana for being so smart and sassy, the kind of girl who says devastatingly true things and still manages to stay in other people’s good graces. My forty-five-year-old self, however, feels uncomfortable with the ten-year age gap between its lead characters. While Yuki Shiwasu cheerfully acknowledges the troubling power dynamic between Takane and Hana, she wants to eat her cake and have it, too: Hana’s incisive comments are supposed to level the playing field with the older, more experienced Takane, making it OK for the two to flirt, date, and kiss. At the end of the day, however, the economic and educational gulf between Hana and Takane still seems vast, making Takane seem like a predatory creep for preferring the company of a mature sixteen-year-old over a woman his age.

I know, I know: I’m humorless. A killjoy. A big ol’ capital-F feminist. But in a moment when we’re having serious conversations about power and consent, I’m having difficulty getting caught up in Takane and Hana’s romantic shenanigans, however much Hana sounds like a teenaged Rosalind Russell, or how wonderfully elastic Takane and Hana’s faces may be. Takane & Hana is unquestionably someone’s guilty pleasure — just not mine.

Must-Read Reviews

The peerless Shaenon Garrity demonstrates that she’s still the sharpest, funniest manga critic on the interwebs with her brief review of Gabriel Dropout, a manga about an angel who discovers the joys of eating instant ramen and playing video games. Over at The Manga Test Drive, Megan R. jumps in the WABAC machine for a fond look at Legal Drug, “the slashiest thing that CLAMP has ever written,” while Martin de la Iglesia, host of The 650-Cent Plague, argues that volume 13 of Yotsuba&! and volumes 24 and 25 of Kimi ni Todoke were three of 2016’s best manga.

New and Noteworthy Manga

Baccano!, Vol. 1 (Sean Gaffney, A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Baccano!, Vol. 1 (Kate O’Neil, The Fandom Post)
Baccano!, Vol. 1 (Alisha Taran, Reality’s a Bore)
Devilman Grimoire, Vol. 1 (Eric Cline, AiPT!)
Elegant Yokai Apartment Life, Vol. 1 (Eric Cline, AiPT!)*
Fire Punch, Vol. 1 (Dustin Cabeal, Comic Bastards)
Fire Punch, Vol. 1 (Leroy Douresseaux, Comic Book Bin)
Fire Punch, Vol. 1 (Nick Smith, Icv2)
Giant Spider & Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale, Vol. 1 (Sean Gaffney, A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Her Impact!, Issue #0 (Chris Meharg, Anime Science)
Her Impact!, Issue #0 (Valerie Complex, Black Girl Nerds)
Her Impact!, Issue #0 (Mitch Jay, Digital Rice)
Her Impact!, Issue #0 (Tony Sin, Geeks & Gamers)
Hunter x Hunter, Vol. 1 (SKJAM, SKJAM! Reviews)
Hybrid x Heart, Vol. 1 (Brittany Vincent, Otaku USA)
I Am a Hero, Vol. 1 (Kathleen Townsend, Looking Glass Reviews)
Iceland (D.W., The Comics Journal)
Infini-T Force 01, Vol. 1 (SKJAM, SKJAM! Reviews)
Ma Ma Ma: Magical Director Mako-chan’s Magical Guidance (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network)
Oh! My Sweet Alien (Keith Hendricks, NerdSpan)
Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: Eternal Edition, Vol. 1 (Brittany Vincent, Otaku USA)
Queen’s Quality, Vol. 1 (Che Gilson, Otaku USA)
RWBY (Dustin Cabeal, Comic Bastards)
RWBY (Leroy Douresseaux, Comic Book Bin)
The Saga of Tanya the Evil, Vol. 1 (Alisha Taran, Reality’s a Bore)
A Strange and Mystifying Story (Che Gilson, Otaku USA)
Takane & Hana, Vol. 1 (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network)
Takane & Hana, Vol. 1 (Johanna Draper Carlson, Comics Worth Reading)
Takane & Hana, Vol. 1 (Aaron, Manga Energy)
Takane & Hana, Vol. 1 (Anna N., The Manga Report)
Takane & Hana, Vol. 1 (Che Gilson, Otaku USA)
Unmagical Girl, Vol. 1 (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network)
Val x Love, Vol. 1 (Sean Gaffney, A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Yokai Girls, Vol. 1 (Justin, The OASG)

Ongoing Series

Alice & Zoroku, Vol. 3 (Aaron, Manga Energy)
Arakawa Under the Bridge, Vol. 2 (Evan Bourgault, Boston Bastard Brigade)
Delicious in Dungeon, Vol. 3 (Helen, The OASG)
Erased, Vol. 3 (Helen, The OASG)
Food Wars!! Shokugeki no Soma, Vol. 20 (Dustin Cabeal, Comic Bastards)
Frau Faust, Vol. 3 (Alisha Taran, Reality’s a Bore)
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Part 3: Stardust Crusaders, Vols. 4-5 (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network)
Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages (Lindsay Schubert, BentoByte)
Love & Lies, Vol. 4 (Aaron, Manga Energy)
My Hero Academia, Vol. 3 (Eric Cline, AiPT!)
My Hero Academia, Vol. 11 (Kathleen Townsend, Looking Glass Reads)
Nisekoi: False Love, Vol. 24 (Leroy Douresseaux, Comic Book Bin)
orange: future (Demelza, Anime UK News)
orange: future (Manjiorin, The OASG)
The Promised Neverland, Vol. 2 (Sean Gaffney, A Case Suitable for Treatment)
PTSD Radio, Vol. 2 (David Brooke, AiPT!)*
PTSD Radio, Vol. 3 (David Brooke, AiPT!)*
Requiem of the Rose King, Vol. 7 (Kate O’Neil, The Fandom Post)
Say I Love You, Vol. 18 (Johanna Draper Carlson, Comics Worth Reading)
Waiting for Spring, Vol. 4 (Alisha Taran, Reality’s a Bore)

From the Vault

Black Jack, Vol. 2 (SKJAM, SKJAM! Reviews)
Hot Gimmick (Megan R., The Manga Rest Drive)
I Don’t Like You at All, Big Brother!! (Megan R., The Manga Test Drive)
Papillon, Vol. 1 (Kathleen Townsend, Looking Glass Reads)

* Denotes a digital-only or digital-first release

Monthly Manga Review Index: January 2018

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I had grand ambitions for January, but the start of a new academic semester put a damper on my plans for five or six reviews. By month’s end, I was able to squeak out three: Drifting Dragons, a new fantasy-adventure series that gives off strong Miyazaki vibes; RWBY, a manga adaptation of a popular American web series; and Children of the Whales, another new-ish fantasy series that’s one of the most downbeat titles in the VIZ Signature catalog. (It’s giving Goodnight, Punpun a run for the money in the Punishing-the-Reader Sweepstakes!) Elsewhere on the web, manga reviewers seemed most interested in VIZ’s two January debuts — Fire Punch and RWBY — as well as the thirteenth volume of Akame ga Kill!

In an effort to stay current with what the young people are doing, I’ve added a new feature to the Monthly Manga Review Index: podcasts and videos. My goal is not complete coverage — that would be a fool’s errand — but highlighting a few interesting programs each month. I freely admit that I spend much less time consuming manga-related content in either audio or video format, so I welcome your recommendations. Note that I am only linking to reviews of manga that have been licensed and translated for English-speaking audiences — no reviews of scanlated or untranslated content, please!

Last but not least, I added three sites to the blogroll: Comic Bastards, LRM, and Reality’s A Bore. Now on to the links and Review of the Month!

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Although my Manga Bookshelf colleague Sean Gaffney and I don’t always see eye-to-eye, I nodded my head in vigorous agreement as I read his assessment of Osamu Tezuka’s Under the Air, an anthology of “mature” stories that DMP published last year. One of the things I appreciated most about Sean’s review was its no-bullshit approach; in the opening sentences, he flatly acknowledged that Under the Air isn’t a masterpiece:

One of the difficulties in reading the so-called God of Manga is that there is a certain tendency to try to see everything as a masterwork. This can be quite difficult with Tezuka, who has written SO MUCH already. But just as there is good Tezuka, there is also bad Tezuka. And there is also Tezuka feeling things out, trying to grow and learn and make the manga industry grow and learn with him. Under the Air is one of those types.

At the same time, however, Sean resisted the temptation to knock Tezuka off his pedestal, recognizing that even at his laziest, weirdest, or most experimental, Tezuka always has something interesting to say.

MANGA PODCASTS AND VIDEO REVIEWS

FROM THE TOP: DEBUTS AND FIRST VOLUMES

ONGOING SERIES

FROM THE VAULT

* Denotes a digital-only release

Monthly Manga Review Index: December 2017

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‘Tis the season for best-of lists, and I’ve been dutifully compiling my fellow bloggers’ efforts to catalog 2017’s most memorable manga. Not surprisingly, titles like My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, My Brother’s Husband, and In This Corner of the World graced many lists — including those more focused on American comics — but almost every article contained a few pleasant surprises, from Domestic Girlfriend and Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler, two digital-only releases from Kodansha, to Murcielago, a raunchy series that Erica Friedman once described as a festival of “unrealistic lesbian sex, absurd car driving, extreme violence and psychopathic killers.” So, something for everyone.

Here at The Manga Critic, I reviewed A Polar Bear in Love, Kigurumi Guardians,  Star Wars: A New Hope, and Paul Gravett’s latest book Mangasia: The Definitive Guide to Asian Comics. (For other perspectives on Gravett’s book, see below; I’ve separated the “books about manga” from the manga reviews.) I also added a new site to the blogroll: Looking Glass Reads, where hosts Brittany and Kate post sci-fi, fantasy, light novel, and manga reviews.

REVIEW OF THE MONTH: A POLAR BEAR IN LOVE

Over at the School Library Journal’s Good Comics for Kids blog, writer J. Caleb Mozzocco posted a great review of A Polar Bear in Love, an oddball comedy about a predator who falls in love with his prey. Mozzocco offers a terrific explanation of why this story works so well:

The first volume of the ongoing series contains several short chapters that are remarkably full of action and content, given the fact that it stars two rather realistically drawn white creatures–they have “a couple’s look,” in Mr. Polar Bear’s words—in a stark environment of snow and ice. The artist gets a lot of mileage out of the simplicity of the design, actually, playing it for laughs—particularly in the case of the seal, who is basically a hardly mobile blob-shape with a face.

And while you’re at the SLJ site, check out Mozzocco’s thoughts on Plum Crazy! Tales of a Tiger-Striped Cat and Dragon Ball Super. His reviews are written primarily for librarians and educators, but any thoughtful reader will appreciate his insights into these titles. Now on to the index!

YEAR IN REVIEW: BEST AND WORST OF LISTS

And if you’re still looking for suggestions, I encourage you to visit the ANN Forums, where members have posted their own impromptu Best Manga lists.

FROM THE TOP: DEBUTS AND FIRST VOLUMES

ONGOING SERIES

FROM THE VAULT

BOOKS ABOUT MANGA

*denotes a digital-only release

Monthly Manga Review Index: Halloween 2017 Edition

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Looking for a spooky read? This month’s index is for you, with a special section dedicated to horror manga reviews and “best of” lists. Like many other bloggers, my October focus has been scary manga — H.P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories and Until Your Bones Rot — and adding new sites to the blogroll: Daiyamanga, Ganriki, Pop Matters, and The 650-Cent Plague.

On to the scary stuff!

THE HORROR! THE HORROR!: SPOOKY MANGA REVIEWS AND BEST-OF LISTS

FROM THE TOP: DEBUTS AND FIRST VOLUMES

ONGOING SERIES

FROM THE VAULT

* Denotes a digital-only release