Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Katherine Dacey

Pick of the Week: Talking About Boys

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SEAN: Even though I have reservations, I admit My Boy is my Pick of the Week. I’m curious to see how it’s handled, and how good the writing is. I want to know why Vertical wanted to license it. It’s intriguing.

MICHELLE: I’m wary of My Boy, so I reckon I’ll just go the shoujo debut route and pick You Got Me, Sempai. I can’t say I’m super-excited about it, though.

KATE: Hmmmmm… I don’t see anything on this week’s list that feels like a must-buy, so I’m going to focus instead on my ever-growing pile of unread manga. That manga isn’t going to read itself, you know!

ASH: I’m going to follow Michelle’s lead this week and go the shoujo debut route. In my case, I’m curious about Mermaid Boys and its gender-reversed take on The Little Mermaid.

ANNA: I’m sort of half-Kate, half-Ash. I’m most likely to spend my time this week trying to get caught up on the unread stacks of manga in my house, but I am also curious about Mermaid Boys.

MJ: I’m in the same boat as everyone else here this week, in that I’m a little wary of everything. But I think I’ll join Ash and Anna and throw my vote behind Mermaid Boys. That’s a lot to live up to, Mermaid Boys. Good luck.

Kenka Bancho Otome: Love’s Battle Royale, Vol. 1

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For a manga based on a dating game, Kenka Bancho Otome is far better than it ought to be. It’s a fast-paced, loose-limbed story that’s both cheerfully stupid and mildly subversive, buoyed by its deliciously queer premise: a girl goes undercover in an all-boys’ high school where her androgynous beauty and lethal karate chops inflame her classmates’ hearts.

The plot is set in motion by an accidental encounter between Hinako Nakayama, an orphan, and her long-lost twin Hikaru, whom she rescues from the path of an oncoming car. In the aftermath of the accident, Hikaru cajoles his sister into impersonating him for a day, lending her his school uniform and dropping her at the campus gates. Hinako soon realizes the folly of her brother’s request, however; Shishiku Academy is more like Rock ’n’ Roll High School than prep school, as its entire curriculum—if one could call it that—centers on fighting. Making matters worse is that everyone wants to fight Hinako because they believe she’s the heir apparent to the Onigumo crime family. She isn’t, of course, but Hikaru is, a detail he conveniently omitted when roping her into his charade. 

If you’ve read more than one shojo comedy, you know what happens next: Hinako befriends and beguiles the best-looking delinquents at the school, from Totomaru, an earnest cutie who’s prone to nosebleeds and blushing, to Kira, a tousle-haired bishonen with a sensitive side. Author Chie Shimada has the good graces to keep the hot guys and fist-fights coming — the better to distract from the thinness of the plot —and the imagination to add small but delightful quirks to her main characters’ personalities. Her best running gag is Hikaru, who seems more at home impersonating his sister than inhabiting his own skin; though his temper suggests he’d be a ruthless crime boss, his obvious joy in looking pretty and flirting with Miraku, Shinsiku Academy’s resident idol, add a fresh dimension to the identity-swapping formula. 

As you might expect, the artwork is more serviceable than memorable. Shimada proves capable of drawing a variety of familiar bishonen types — lanky guys with ponytails, serious guys with glasses — though the pro forma nature of the character designs occasionally makes it difficult to parse the fight scenes. (All those artfully coiffed young men have the same lanky, spike-haired silhouette.) Then, too, there are riotously busy pages where Shimada’s screentone is so thick and smudgy it’s almost palpable; the phrase “applied with a trowel” comes to mind.

Still, the Shishiku gang’s bonhomie is hard to resist, carrying the reader past the story’s creakier moments. So, too, is Hinako’s sincerity; her journey towards self-actualization is both touching and amusing, as she discovers that she might, in fact, be a more natural bancho than her twin. That she wins her fellow delinquents’ admiration with a mean right hook and a roundhouse kick is less important than the fact they appreciate her for her pluck, kindness, and thirst for justice — a nuance that elevates Kenka Bancho Otome from otome rehash to actual story. Recommended.

KENKA BANCHO OTOME: LOVE’S BATTLE ROYALE, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY CHIE SHIMADA • ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY SPIKE CHUNSOFT • VIZ MEDIA • 194 pp. • RATED T, FOR TEENS (13+)

CITY, Vol. 1

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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.

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.

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

Pick of the Week: Manga Strikes!

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MICHELLE: I’m looking forward to so much this week! Ace of the Diamond, Chihayafuru, Promised Neverland, My Hero Academia, to name but a few. However, seinen romantic comedy from Mitsurou Kubo wins in my book. It’s gotta be Moteki. Plus, you get the first half of the series in one package. Nice!

SEAN: There is, frankly, an embarrassment of riches this week. including every single Shojo Beat title, as well as The Promised Neverland, which will be brilliant and make me suffer. But yes, I’m going with Moteki, a title we would never have seen here if not for Yuri on Ice taking off the way it did. I’m not complaining.

KATE: Moteki and The Promised Neverland are my must-read manga of the week. If I had to choose just one title, though, it would be the third volume of The Promised Neverland, since previous installment ended with a game-changing revelation.

ASH: I’m actively following so many of the series coming out this week! But when it comes to the pick of the week, debuts tend to get most of my attention, and so Moteki it is for me! (Although I’m also rather curious about Kenka Bancho Otome… )

ANNA: There’s a ton of great stuff coming out this week! It makes it so hard to pick! Like many others I have to give Moteki the edge though.

A First Look at Starving Anonymous

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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.”

That’s not a bad description of Starving Anonymous; if you can imagine an Eli Roth remake of Soylent Green in all its gory, sadistic intensity, you’ll have some idea of what it’s like to read Yuu Kuraishi and Kazu Inabe’s latest effort. 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 Kuraishi and 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.

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

Pick of the Week: Manga a Go Go!

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SEAN: I’m torn this week between Seven Seas’ release of Cutey Honey a Go Go!, an updated manga featuring the classic leads as adults instead of schoolgirls, and Vertical’s release of CITY, the new comedy manga from the creator of Nichijou. If pressed, I will pick Cutey Honey, but I’m going to be getting both.

MICHELLE: I’m not super excited about anything, but I do enjoy Waiting for Spring, so I’ll go with that.

KATE: If you drew a Venn diagram of my taste in manga and Sean’s, the overlapping region would include both of his picks for March 27th. The end is nigh?

ASH: Hahaha! It’s not nearly as uncommon for Sean and I to be interested in the same manga, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that Cutey Honey a Go Go! is the release that’s caught most of my attention this week.

ANNA: There aren’t many series coming out this week that really appeal to me, but I have to say I am most intrigued by Cutey Honey a Go Go!, so that’s my pick.

Silver Spoon, Vol. 1

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The title of Hiromu Arakwa’s latest series is a pointed reference to Kansuke Naka’s The Silver Spoon: Memoir of a Japanese Boyhood. First serialized in the pages of the Asahi Shimbun in 1913, The Silver Spoon traced Naka’s journey from childhood to adolescence through a series of vignettes that recalled turn-of-the-century Tokyo in vivid detail, describing both the bustle of its modern neighborhoods and the rustic isolation of its western regions, a contrast underscored by one of the book’s most important events: Naka’s move to rural Tokyo. “For me to be born in the midst of Kanda was as inappropriate as for a kāppa to be hatched in a desert,” he declares, viewing the country as a place of rebirth.

Yuugo Hachiken, the fictional protagonist of Arakawa’s Silver Spoon, undertakes a similar journey, moving from Sapporo to the Hokkaido countryside, where he enrolls at at Ooezo Agricultural High. Though his peers chose the school for its curriculum, Hachiken chose it to escape the college prep grind — cram schools and high-stakes tests — and his parents, who seem indifferent to his misery. His competitive streak remains intact, however; he assumes that he’ll be the top student at Ezo AG, sizing up his classmates’ mastery of English and geometry with all the condescension of a prep school boy in a backwoods schoolhouse.

Hachiken’s path to redemption predictably begins with a rude awakening: there’s no spring break and no sleeping in at Ezo AG, where students rise at 4:00 am to muck stalls and harvest eggs. Adding insult to injury, his cosmopolitan prejudices are challenged by his peers, who are more ambitious, motivated, and knowledgable than he is; in one of the volume’s best scenes, Hachiken’s elation turns to despair when he overhears his classmates discussing the transformative effect of somatic cell cloning on the Japanese beef market. “Are they speaking in tongues!!?” he fumes, rivers of sweat pouring down his ashen face. “Are you guys smart or stupid? Make up your minds!!”

After a series of humiliating trials, Hachiken makes tentative steps towards fitting into the community and finding his purpose. His incentive for trying a little harder is, unsurprisingly, a girl — specifically Aki Mikage, a pragmatic, cheerful soul whose horse-wrangling skills, can-do attitude, and endless patience with dumb questions endear her to Hachiken. Though she’s instrumental in persuading Hachiken to join the equestrian club, her main role in volume one is to help Hachiken overcome his sentimental ideas about farm life, encouraging him to see the farm as a factory or business rather than a collection of cute animals.

This bracing dose of reality is one of the manga’s strengths, preventing the story from devolving into a string of sight gags and super-deformed characters screaming and flapping their arms at the sight of poop. Near the end of volume one, for example, Mikage invites Hachiken and fellow classmate Ichirou Komaba to the Ban’ei Racetrack to watch a draft horse pull, an outing that quickly turns somber when they stumble upon a horse funeral in progress. “Some souls are thrust into a cruel existence where there are only two options, life or death, simply because they happen to be born livestock,” Mikage’s uncle observes — a statement that makes a deep impression on Hachiken, who’s just beginning to realize that many of the piglets and chickens he’s raising will be on someone’s dinner table in a matter of months.

The racetrack episode also highlights Silver Spoon‘s other secret weapon: its terrific supporting cast. Though Hachiken, Komaba and Mikage’s more serious conversations dominate the chapter, one of the series’ most memorable personalities — Nakajima, the equestrian club supervisor — makes a cameo appearance as well. Nakajima exemplifies Arakawa’s gift for creating visually striking characters whose goofy, exaggerated appearances belie their true nature. He looks like a Bodhisattva but acts like a gambler, a tension that plays out almost entirely on his face. When riding a horse or encouraging Hachiken to join the equestrian club, for example, his eyes are half-open, framed by two semi-circular brows that suggest a meditative state, but when he visits the race track, the thrill of betting brings a maniacal gleam to his eyes, pulling his eyebrows into two sharp peaks. He even dresses the part of a Saratoga regular, trading his pristine riding outfit for a trenchcoat — collar popped, of course — and low-slung fedora.

As this comic interludes suggests, the twists and turns of Hachiken’s evolution from sullen teen to happy young man are dictated more by shonen manga convention than fidelity to Naka’s The Silver Spoon — there are 200% more jokes about cow teats and chicken anuses — but the sincerity with which Arakawa captures the emotional highs and lows of adolescence shows affinity with Naka’s writing. Hachiken’s mopey interior monologues and fumbling efforts to connect with his classmates are as authentic as Naka’s own reminiscences; both convey youthful angst without irony, embarrassment, or “the layered remembrances of adulthood” (Kosaka). And for readers more interested in laffs than literary references, there are plenty of those, too; Hachiken spends as much time hanging out with ornery ruminants as he does ruminating, all but ensuring a bumper crop of manure gags in volume two. Highly recommended.

Works Cited:

Arakawa, Hiromu. Silver Spoon, Vol. 1, translated by Amanda Haley, Yen Press, 2018.

Kosaka, Kris. “A misanthropic memoir from Meiji Era Tokyo.” The Japan Times, 26 Sep. 2015, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/09/26/books/misanthropic-memoir-meiji-era-tokyo/#.Wres_5PwY1g. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

Voices of a Distant Star

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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.

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

Pick of the Week: An Assortment of Manga

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MICHELLE: There are quite a few good things coming out this week! I’ll definitely be reading the latest Giant Killing and Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty, and I’m happy to see more Sweet Blue Flowers. Too, there’s Perfect World, a josei series with a very interesting premise. But still, Twinkle Stars is coming to an end, and I find I’m really in the mood to see how this one wraps up, so that’s my pick for this week.

SEAN: Sadly, I suspect I will be the only one picking this, meaning I can’t call Pick of the Week “Take Back Your Mink”. But my Pick this week is definitely the first omnibus of Dragon Half, which I’m hoping will let me wallow in nostalgia.

KATE: I hate to be predictable, but my pick is volume four of Golden Kamuy. Is it a cooking manga with action sequences, or an action manga with lengthy discussions about squirrel meat preparation? Danged if I know, but I’m hooked.

ASH: So much is coming out this week that I’m looking forward to! Sweet Blue Flowers, Golden Kamuy, Twinkle Stars, Dragon Half and more. I’ll take this opportunity to pick one that hasn’t been mentioned by someone else yet, Natsume Ono’s ACCA 13-Territory Inspection Department. The first volume was a slow burn, but stylish and intriguing.

ANNA: There’s a lot of great titles coming out this week! I have to go with my general inclination to celebrate josei whenever a new series comes out, so my pick is Perfect World.

MJ: since I’m going last here, I’ll round things out by picking the third omnibus of Sweet Blue Flowers. I’m a fan of this series, and I’m a fan of angst, so this works well for me.

Toppu GP, Vol. 2

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For two decades, Kosuke Fujishima’s Oh! My Goddess was a veritable institution in the US. It arrived in comic book stores in 1994 and finished its run in 2015, along the way introducing several generations of manga fans to the fraught relationship between the nebbishy Keiichi Morisato and his otherworldly companion Belldandy. Fujishima’s current project Toppu GP debuted last year with little attention from critics, but this sports manga might just be the better of the two series; as I noted in my review of volume one, the characters are types and the drama predictable, but the motorcycle races are thrilling, funny, and surprisingly educational, helping the novice appreciate the skill necessary to ride at an elite level.

The latest installment of Toppu GP does all the things you’d expect the second volume of a sports manga to do: it introduces new rivals for the principal characters, expands the supporting cast, and features several lengthier, riskier races. Not all of these gambits work. Toppu’s new fanclub — which includes Billy Izumo, a tow-headed bike enthusiast, and Itsuki Nagoya, a nerdy girl with a crush on Toppu — provides the weakest sort of comic relief by making Nagoya and Myne compete for Toppu’s attention. (“Who is this old lady?” Nagoya sniffs when introduced to Myne.) When the action shifts to the race track, however, the story roars to life, offering Fujishima a unique opportunity to explain the physics and strategy of moto GP through imaginative visual metaphors. In one sequence, for example, Toppu compares the components of his bike to instruments in a rock band — a neat way to suggest the sound and function of each — while in another, Fujishima represents Toppu’s anxiety as a giant, coiled rattlesnake. These metaphors are corny, to be sure, but they enliven the racing sequences, breaking the relentless stream of speedlines, facial close-ups, and banked turns.

Though Toppu gets top billing, Myne also gets a turn in the spotlight in a fiercely competitive race against Daiya Ishibashi, the reigning champ at the Course 2000. Their race is a genuine nail-biter, with Ishibashi and Myne aggressively vying for the lead. By the end of the volume, it’s not clear if Myne will prevail over Ishibashi, but her tenacity and cunning have made that outcome a real possibility. Readers who want to know whether Myne wins have two choices: wait until August for volume three, or purchase chapters 15 and 16 right now. (The digital serialization is up to chapter 23.) Me? I’m going to tough it out until August, since Toppu GP is one of the few series I’m actively collecting. Recommended.

Toppu GP, Vol. 2
By Kosuke Fujishima
Translated by Stephen Paul
Kodansha Comics, 192 pp.
Rated T, for Teen (13+)

Pick of the Week: Different Sides

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SEAN: My pick this week, despite my whining and groaning, goes to the 12th and final volume of Genshiken: Second Season. I’m afraid to say that my reason for this is entirely selfish. It’s because MY SHIP WINS! HAH! (cough) Or, in other words, the harem plot is finally satisfactorily resolved. I will miss complaining about it.

KATE: Predictably, my pick for the week is the fourth installment of The Girl from the Other Side, but I’ll need a chaser for that one — words like “moody” and “harrowing” come to mind when describing it — so I’ll throw a copy of Sorry for My Familiar in the basket, too.

ANNA: There’s not a lot coming out this week that appeals to me, but The Girl From the Other Side is so unique and surreal, it would likely be my pick during a week with many of my favorite series being released.

MICHELLE: I’m with Kate and Anna on this one! For my chaser, I’ll go with Blue Morning, as I love BL with a complex storyline.

ASH: Oh, that sounds like a great plan, Michelle! The Girl from the Other Side is absolutely marvelous and is without a question my pick. I definitely look forward to getting my hands on Blue Morning, too, though. I don’t read quite as much BL as I once did, but the series is very high on my list, BL or not.

Again!!, Vol. 1

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There are no second chances in life, but there are in manga — think A Distant Neighborhood, Erased, and orange. The latest entry in the second-chance sweepstakes is Again!!, a dramedy about Imamura Kinichirou, a loner who tumbles down a flight on stairs at his high school graduation and wakes up on the first day of freshman year. Doomed to repeat the worst three years of his life, Imamura impulsively signs up for the school’s ouendan, but quickly runs afoul of prickly captain Yoshiko Usami, whose dedication to the struggling club proves more deterrent than draw for would-be members.

Imamura isn’t the only time-traveler; joining him on his temporal odyssey is Akira Fujieda, a perky classmate who also tumbles down a flight of stairs at graduation. Unlike Imamura, Akira greets this development with enthusiasm, but her fond memories of high school make her too quick to assume that everything will unfold the same way twice: she propositions her not-yet-boyfriend too boldly (he turns her down) and dismisses a would-be friend’s taste in music. (“It’s too bad Cara Mana broke up so soon,” Akira declares. “It didn’t take me long to get sick of them, though, since all their songs sort of sound the same.”) Crushed by the double rejection, Akira becomes Imamura’s reluctant ally in the quest to restore the ouendan to its former glory.

Whether you cotton to Again!! depends on how you react to the principal characters. I found Usami’s fierce commitment to tradition exhausting; she bellows, belittles, complains, accuses, and sobs, but seems fundamentally unable to have a normal conversation. Her bluster is meant to suggest her sincerity and vulnerability, I think, but has the opposite effect, reducing her to a one-note character. More convincing is Imamura, who decides that a do-over isn’t as terrible as he’d imagined. (I particularly enjoyed his nonchalant turn at the board in his math class; his classmates’ reaction to his display of mathematical acumen is priceless.) Imamura even flirts with the possibility of a social life: when the girls’ cheer squad mobilizes against Usami, for example, Imamura conspires with Akira and Reo, a pretty classmate, to undermine the cheerleaders’ plan.

Akira, too, is a pleasant surprise, a busybody who’s suddenly relegated to the margins of freshman life. Though her sense of the school’s pecking order remains unchanged, she can’t resist the opportunity to advise the once-lowly Imamura on how best to manipulate the cheerleading squad — it’s her chance to demonstrate her expertise, and perhaps to reclaim her former Queen Bee status by engineering a major social coup. As one might expect, Akira gets the sauciest lines, but she also learns the hardest lesson of the three principal characters: serendipity plays as big a role in popularity as personality and looks.

Mitsurou Kubo’s art plays a vital role in helping us understand Imamura and Akira’s predicament. In the first two chapters, Kubo does an excellent job of distinguishing past from present with subtle details: Imamura’s mom, for example, is a little plumper, while Akira is shorter and less physically developed. (Akira realizes something is amiss when she realizes that her breasts are smaller.) Equally impressive is the care with which Kubo reconstructs the same sequence of events that precede the time jump, showing us Imamura’s memories of the day and then Akira’s. Here again, it’s the little details — a snippet of conversation, a minor change in hairstyle — that convey whose perspective is represented, and how that character’s personality influences what we’re seeing and hearing.

Kubo’s facial drawings show the same degree of meticulousness as her handling of the time travel sequences. Her reaction shots do more than just capture a character’s immediate response to a new development; they convey the emotions and experiences that underlie that reaction. Consider this split-screen image of Imamura:

This panel appears at the end of chapter one, as Imamura stands at a temporal and figurative crossroads: he can change his future by joining the ouendan, or recede into the background and be a loner once again. Imamura’s furrowed, sweaty brow and crestfallen expression capture his sense of helplessness; he has the look of someone who’s actively reliving a terrible experience moment by moment, contemplating the real possibility that nothing will change the second time around.

It’s this level of nuance that makes Again!! worth reading, even when the plot mechanics are creaky and the characters too strident. Watching Imamura forge new connections on his own terms is both funny and poignant, a reminder that we always have the potential to change our destiny, even when it seems preordained. I’m curious to see how Imamura and Akira grow and change, and how their behavior influences the future. Count me in for volume two.

AGAIN!!, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY MITSUROU KUBO • TRANSLATED BY ROSE PADGETT • KODANSHA COMICS • 208 pp. • RATED TEEN (13+)

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 2

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The first volume of The Promised Neverland was a masterclass in how to launch a series: the plotting was intricate but the brisk pacing and well-timed twists prevented an exposition-heavy story from sagging under the weight of its own ambition. Of necessity, volume two unfurls at a slower clip than the first, as the principal trio of Emma, Ray, and Norman work through the logistics of escaping Gracefield Manor, weighing the pros and cons of each element in their intricate plan. Kaiu Shirai also expands the cast to include other stakeholders, dedicating several chapters to Krone, Mother’s new subordinate, and Don and Gilda, two high-achieving students who haven’t yet learned the true purpose of Gracefield Manor.

These character moments are one of the great strengths of volume two. Krone, for example, turns out to be more resourceful than we might have guessed from her brief introduction in volume one; Shirai and Posuka Demizu use a woodland game of tag to reveal Krone’s formidable strength, speed, and cunning, establishing her as yet another major obstacle to escape. In other passages, Shirai peels away the outer layers of her principal characters, complicating the reader’s understanding of who they are, what motivates them to escape, and with whom their true allegiance lies — a necessary corrective to the first volume, which portrayed Emma, Ray, and Norman as just a little too smart, too capable, and too thoughtful to fully register as twelve-year-olds.

Volume two hits an occasional speed bump when characters discuss the escape plan. One overly deliberate scene, for example, finds Roy and Norman in full Scooby Doo mode, explaining how they figured out there was a mole among the residents. And volume two’s physical depiction of Krone is, frankly, uncomfortable, as some of her facial features have been exaggerated in ways that recall the iconography of blackface minstrelsy. Despite these lapses, The Promised Neverland remains suspenseful thanks, in no small part, to Demizu’s brief but horrific dream sequences; these suggestive images — a swirl of bodies, teeth, and monstrous eyes — provide a potent reminder of what’s at stake if the kids don’t escape Mother’s clutches.

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 2
Story by Kaiu Shirai, Art by Posuka Demizu
Translated by Satsuki Yamashita
VIZ Media; 192 pp.
Rated T, for Teen

Pick of the Week: We Got the Beat

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MICHELLE: There’s a lot that I’m getting this week. Ace of the Diamond, Haikyu!!, One-Punch Man… But, honestly, this week’s pick was preordained because one of my favorite series only comes out twice a year: Skip Beat!, I choose you!

KATE: I’m suffering from a manga hangover at the moment, since last week was EPIC. Is it OK to plug Again!! and Silver Spoon a second time? ‘Cuz there’s nothing coming out this week that makes me as happy of either of those debuts.

SEAN: My pick this week goes to a title I know nothing about except really good word of mouth. There was much happiness when Kaguya-sama: Love Is War was licensed, and I am excited to see why.

ASH: Like Kate, I’m still thrilled about last week’s debuts. I’m looking forward to catching up on some ongoing series this week, though, such as Frau Faust and Haikyu!!.

ANNA: Last week was great and this week is pretty good too! Like Michelle, I’m always thrilled when there is a new Skip Beat volume, so that is my pick!

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Venice

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Venice — one of the last projects Jiro Taniguchi completed before his death in 2017 — is perhaps the most beautiful work he produced, a paean not only to the great Italian city, but to his own superb command of light, color, and line. Rendered in watercolor and ink, Venice‘s subtle palette and expansive treatment of the page are reminiscent of Taniguchi’s Guardians of the Louvre, while its premise recalls The Walking Man, Furari, and The Solitary Gourmet, three manga in which an unnamed male character strolls through the thoroughfares and byways of a major city, stopping to admire a blossoming tree or duck into an unassuming noodle shop.

Taniguchi makes an agreeable guide to Venice, frequently pausing to luxuriate in the very places that a visitor would find most charming: an outdoor marketplace filled with fruit and vegetable vendors, a moonlit promenade dotted with strolling couples, a faded but elegant hotel. Though Taniguchi renders these locations with the utmost precision, his most striking images are of canals and harbors. He captures the play of light on water with the same authority as a great maritime painter like Homer Winslow, using a watercolor palette of greens, blues, grays, blacks, and pinks to pinpoint the time of day and weather, as well as the tide — a small but potent reminder of Venice’s precarious relationship with the sea.

Though framed as a travelogue, Venice also explores similar thematic terrain as Taniguchi’s A Distant Neighborhood. Like the protagonist of Neighborhood, the Venetian wanderer is a middle-aged man making sense of his family’s past, a quest triggered by the discovery of a small lacquer box among his late mother’s possessions. A single image — a photo of a dapper Japanese couple feeding pigeons at the San Marco Piazza — leads him to Venice, where he retraces the couple’s steps. Taniguchi handles the mystery in an elegant fashion, eschewing pointed dialogue or voice-overs in favor of evocative imagery: a sepia-toned portrait of a family, a hand-drawn postcard of the Grand Canal. By focusing on these artifacts, Taniguchi provides just enough information for the reader to figure out who this young couple was without baldly explaining what drove them apart; only a brief inscription on the back of a postcard suggests the length and anguish of the couple’s separation.

These temporal shifts in the narrative are echoed in the way Taniguchi draws Venice itself. On several pages, for example, Taniguchi shows us familiar Venetian streetscapes as they looked in the 1930s, when the mystery couple lived there. On other pages, Taniguchi achieves a similar effect through the juxtaposition of the traditional with the modern: kayakers bob alongside gondoliers, floating past Renaissance merchants’ grand homes, while the mouth of the Canal de la Galeazze frames the arrival of a giant cruise ship. (In a nice touch, Taniguchi tracks the ocean liner’s stately progress over several panels, allowing us to appreciate its enormous size and sleek lines.) Even the most prosaic scenes emphasize the degree to which Venetians’ daily routines are shaped by its lengthy history; we see young children in baseball jackets sipping water from a fountain built in the 17th century and dog walkers chatting in the shadow of Venice’s great Campanille, unawed or unaware of these landmarks’ significance.

And while such sensuous images are fundamental to Venice‘s appeal, Taniguchi does more than recreate Venice’s great architecture; he conveys the rhythms and emotions of a journey, the experience of savoring new places while realizing in the moment that the place where you stand will be different the next time you visit. He evokes the curious sensation of déjà vu you experience in an unfamiliar city, as you see small elements of your own life reflected in the way that strangers live theirs. And he conveys the profound sense of discovery that comes from visiting a place that holds significance for a parent, lover, or friend, as you see the landscape through their eyes for the first time. That Taniguchi evokes these emotions primarily through the artful use of color and detail, rather than character development or dialogue, is testament to the depth of his artistry. Highly recommended.

For more insight into Venice, I encourage you to watch this brief video in which Taniguchi discusses the genesis of the story, and how he created some of the book’s most arresting images:

VENICE • BY JIRO TANIGUCHI • FANFARE/PONENT MON • NO RATING • 128 pp.