Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Katherine Dacey

Giant Spider & Me, Vol. 1

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Giant Spider & Me is a gentle fantasy that’s tinged with whimsy and rue. The story focuses on Nagi, a perky tween who lives by herself in a well-appointed cottage, awaiting the return of her father from a mysterious trip. In his absence, she’s proved remarkably self-sufficient, growing and foraging for her own food and preparing delicious meals for herself. Our first hint that something is amiss occurs early in chapter one, when she stumbles across a mastiff-sized spider in the woods. Their initial encounter doesn’t go well — Nagi is understandably terrified — but her apprehension soon gives way to a unique interspecies friendship when she discovers Asa (her name for the spider) shares her passion for pumpkin dumplings and leisurely picnics.

What inoculates Giant Spider & Me from a terminal case of the cutes is the specificity of Kikori Morino’s vision. On a superficial level, Giant Spider & Me is a culinary manga that walks the reader through the process of making turnip soup and miso ratatouille while conveying the joy of sharing food with others. (And yes, recipes appear at the end of each chapter.) On a deeper level, however, Giant Spider & Me is a thoughtful reflection on what it means to share your home with an intelligent creature, recognizing the pleasures of such an arrangement while acknowledging the communication gap between species. Asa proves a lively and willful guest in Nagi’s house, scaling walls and punching a hole in the roof in its quest for greater freedom — a detail that frustrated cat owners will appreciate.

The other secret to Morino’s success is her artwork, which strikes an elegant balance between clarity and detail. She never explains what caused the apocalypse of the title, but hints at its devastation with small but important clues: a partially submerged city, a vigilante in a gas mask and military-issue poncho. Morino applies that same mixture of restraint and exactitude to her character designs; Asa is both menacing and cute, an eight-eyed, eight-legged creature whose terrible mandibles are balanced by a feather-soft abdomen and a puppy-like demeanor. By emphasizing Asa’s duality as pet and monster, Morino helps us see Asa as Nagi does while also helping us understand why other survivors take a dimmer view of Asa. Something tells me I might need a tissue or two before the series finishes its run. Recommended.

Giant Spider & Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale, Vol. 1
Story & Art by Kikori Morino
Translation by Adrienne Beck; Adaptation by Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane
Seven Seas, 180 pp.
Rating: Teen

Pick of the Week: At Last, Farming Manga!

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SEAN: My pick this week is Silver Spoon Again!!, a touching story of a young man who dies from overworking himself as an agriculture student in Hokkaido, but is given the opportunity to go back and live his life again, and becomes an ouendan cheerleader for the school’s equestrian squad.

MICHELLE: Ha! I am behind that pick 100%!

KATE: I’m on Team Silver Spoon this week, but for selfish reasons: I’m hoping that Silver Spoon will be such a hit that Yen Press will rescue Hiromu Arakawa’s Hyakusho Kizuko and offer it in a snazzy print edition. JManga released the first volume in 2012 before folding up its tent, and I’ve always felt it deserved a second chance with American readers. Here’s a link to my original review; it has 100% more cow manure jokes than Fullmetal Alchemist.

MJ: I have been hoping for Silver Spoon so much for so long, that has to be my pick! Hiromu Arakawa is a manga goddess and I am always on her team. And hey, I will also get behind Kate’s argument. More Arakawa is always better!

MICHELLE: I’ll get behind it, too. There are definitely several JManga titles that I wish could find new homes.

ANNA: I’m also looking forward to Silver Spoon. I always feel like throwing a party whenever a manga I thought would never be available here gets released in translation.

ASH: Like everyone else here, Again!! and Silver Spoon are definitely at the top of my list this week. I’ve been waiting to read Silver Spoon longer, so I guess that’ll be my official pick, but I’m looking forward to the debut of both series a great deal.

Pick of the Week: Fish, Spiders and Distant Stars

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MICHELLE: By now, it probably goes without saying that I will definitely be getting the new volume of Chihayafuru, so I will instead pick Voices of a Distant Star. I never read it the first time around, but I remember MJreally loved it. The your name. movie made me cry buckets, so I bet I will probably love this story, too.

SEAN: I’m definitely picking up Voices, but my pick this week goes to Giant Spider & Me. A combination of food manga, sweet slice of life, and post-apocalyptic survival, it feels like every new trend we’ve had brought into one title.

KATE: I’m exited about the return of Voices of a Distant Star, and charmed by the idea of a slice-of-life story about a girl and her giant spider, but my must-read manga this week is Fukushima Devil Fish, a collection of short stories by Susumu Katsumata. And yes, the Fukushima of the title refers to the nuclear plant that experienced a partial meltdown after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake; according to publisher Breakdown Press, the anthology includes “two stories from the 1980s on the subject of ‘nuclear gypsies,’ the men who labor under oppressive conditions to maintain Japan’s fleet of nuclear power plants.”

ASH: I’m certainly curious about Giant Spider & Me since learning that it is in fact a food manga but, like Kate, Fukushima Devil Fish is what takes priority for me this week.

ANNA: There’s a ton of great manga coming out this week, but I’m most interested in Voices of a Distant Star, since I wasn’t able to catch it the first time it was released.

Takane & Hana, Vol. 1

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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.

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

Baccano!, Vol. 1

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There are two things you need to know before you read this review. First, I’m a ride-or-die Godfather II fan, the kind of person who’s obsessively watched Robert DeNiro’s performance as the young Don Corleone more times than I can count. Second, I am not a Light Novel Person, despite my repeated efforts to embrace the format.

I disclose this information because Baccano! is a manga adaptation of a light novel series set in Prohibition-era New York, where rival families — one from Sicily, one from Naples — run guns, booze, and card games. That meant there was a 50% chance I’d love this series, since the premise screams “Manga Godfather!”, and a 50% chance I’d hate Baccano!, since the manga was conceived as a tie-in product for the novels’ hardcore fans. What I didn’t expect, however, was just how inept the adaptation would be; I assumed that my objections would be to content or characterization, not a sloppy, hole-filled (holy?) narrative. Shinta Fujimoto’s storytelling, however, is serviceable at best and amateurish at worst, cramming too many events and characters into volume one. The result is a jumbled mess of introductions, reunions, and exposition masquerading as conversation; I spent as much time backtracking two or three pages as I did moving forward, relying on the Wikipedia to demystify poorly explained plot twists, not the least of which is that some characters are immortal. 

Superficially, the artwork seems more polished than the narrative, but a close examination reveals just how perfunctory Fujimoto and Katsumi Enami’s character designs really are. The Martillos and Gandors are so blandly drawn that nothing about them reveals about the characters’ ethnicity, social standing, or profession, let alone the time period in which the story unfolds. The same is true for the physical environment. A few establishing shots depict fire escapes and brick buildings, but Fujimoto seldom provides much in the way of period detail, nor does he convey just how densely settled Little Italy was in the 1920s.

His lazy world-building is most evident in chapters two and three, when Firo Prochainezo, a foot soldier in the Martillo Camorra, tracks an assassin through the tumult of the San Gennaro Festival in much the same fashion as Don Corleone pursues Don Fanucci in The Godfather II. In Coppola’s hands, these scenes are bursting with the activity of brass bands and puppeteers re-enacting San Gennaro’s martyrdom, a vibrant pageant of Sicilian Catholic tradition. In Fujimoto’s version, however, the festival looks about as exciting as a high school pep band rehearsal, with a few token shots of musicians and festival goers. Worse still, Fujimoto has difficulty making these scenes an organic part of the story, inserting them into a potentially suspenseful cat-and-mouse game that unfolds in the alleyways of … well, it’s supposed to be Little Italy, but honestly, it looks as much like Sesame Street as any real city.

About the best I can say for Baccano! is that it clocks in at a mere 160 pages; anything longer would seem as eternal as the characters themselves. I know I’m not the intended audience for this manga, but the series’ die-hard fans — those who read the novels and watched the anime — surely deserve a more artful tie-in than this disastro totale.

BACCANO!, VOL. 1 • ORIGINAL STORY BY RYOHGO NARITA, ART BY SHINTA FUJIMOTO, CHARACTER DESIGN BY KATSUMI ENAMI • TRANSLATION BY TAYLOR ENGEL • YEN PRESS • 160 pp. • RATED T, FOR TEEN (LANGUAGE, VIOLENCE)

Pick of the Week: Happiness Will Prevail

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SEAN: My pick this week is the 15th volume of Haganai: I Don’t Have Many Friends. It’s been 15 months since the last volume, where we saw Kodaka finally getting the ever-loving crap kicked out of him for his feigned obliviousness. Will this actually shake up the harem, though? I want to find out. Or at least see him get pounded again.

KATE: Any week that sees the release of a new Descending Stories is a good week in my book, but I’m also stoked for Theory of Happiness, a sequel to one of 2017’s most pleasant surprises: I Hear the Sunspot. It wasn’t as dramatic or splashy as some of 2017’s best books, but it won a place in my heart for its sensitive portrayal of male friendship — something we don’t see often enough in our popular culture.

ANNA: I agree with Kate, I Hear the Sunspot was such a wonderful surprise. Theory of Happiness is my pick of the week, I’m eager to find out what happens next with this series.

MICHELLE: I haven’t yet managed to read I Hear the Sunspot, so while I’m sure its sequel will be great, I’ll cast my vote for the fifth volume of Descending Stories, one series I have finally managed to read and am enjoying quite a bit.

ASH: I’ll definitely be reading the latest volume of Descending Stories, but this week my heart (and my pick) belongs to Theory of Happiness. I loved I Hear the Sunspot and have been looking forward to its sequel from the moment I learned that it existed.

MJ: Theory of Happiness! Theory of Happiness! Theory of Happiness! I’m not sure what else to say.

Pick of the Week: Return to Neverland

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MICHELLE: I will definitely be picking up the tenth Yona of the Dawn, and Takane & Hana is intriguing too, but having been positively stunned by the awesome that is Promised Neverland, I must pick the second volume of that series. I literally made an entry on my calendar to remind me.

SEAN: I honestly am torn. I enjoyed Takane & Hana so much – it’s exactly the sort of manga I love. But The Promised Neverland was so good last time and feels like the more IMPORTANT manga out this week. Really, get both. Don’t try to choose. (It helps that they’re nothing alike.)

KATE: I vote for volume two of The Promised Neverland. ‘Nuff said!

ASH: Like everyone else so far, the next volume of The Promised Neverland is certainly high on my list. However, I’m pretty excited to read the psychological thriller Perfect Blue, too. Even if it wasn’t the basis of Satoshi Kon’s striking film, the novel sounds like it should be something right up my alley.

MJ: Since I am the big loser who hasn’t actually read the first volume of The Promised Neverland, I will go ahead and indulge my interest in Takane & Hana, which has lured me in with a combination of its source magazine and its spunky-looking heroine. Shoujo, I am in your corner this week!

ANNA: I enjoyed the first volume The Promised Neverland and I’m intrigued by Takane & Hana, but the title that thrills my heart is Yona of the Dawn . It just keeps getting better and better, and at 10 volumes in has built up an extended cast of characters that I’m rooting for.

Pick of the Week: Predictable Yet Welcome

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SEAN: Some interesting stuff out this week, both in manga and light novels. I will be predictable, though, in choosing the first Baccano! manga. I read this when it came out as chapters digitally, and am greatly looking forward to seeing it in print. Plus, content that wasn’t in the novels!

MICHELLE: I will be predictable by expressing my anticipation for another installment of Giant Killing, but I’m awarding my official pick to the ninth and final Full-Time Wife Escapist. I’ve enjoyed this series very much!

KATE: I second Sean’s pick of Baccano!, since I am obsessed with the flashback scenes in The Godfather Part II and will watch or read anything that reminds me of them. I realize that Baccano! is even MORE over the top than anything Mario Puzo ever wrote, but I think that’s actually a good thing. It’s an offer I can’t refuse!

ASH: With the promise of a little bit of yuri, a little bit of boys’ love, and a whole lot of complicated relationships, the debut of Nameless Asterism is the release I’m most curious about this week!

Children of the Whales, Vols. 1-2

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Children of the Whales suffers from the same problem as many prestige television shows: it boasts a thought-provoking premise, compelling lead characters, and sophisticated visuals, but is such a relentlessly downbeat experience that you’d be forgiven for abandoning ship after a few chapters.

The story unfolds aboard the Mud Whale, a sentient vessel. Its 513 inhabitants have been exiled from their homeland for over 90 years, drifting across a vast ocean of sand punctuated only by the occasional island or abandoned boat. Fourteen-year-old Chakuro is the community’s archivist, tasked with recording births and deaths, strange encounters, and changes in the Mud Whale’s leadership, events he catalogs with almost fanatical devotion. Making his job more bittersweet is the discrepancy between the “marked” residents, whose ability to wield magic (or “thymia,” in the series’ parlance) dooms them to a short lifespan, and the unmarked residents, whose normal lifespans have forced them into the role of caretakers and governors.

To stave off despair, the Mud Whale’s residents eschew emotional display — a point reinforced in the earliest pages of volume one, when Chakuro sheds a tear at a 29-year-old woman’s funeral. Immediately, his peers enjoin him not to weep, lest “the souls at the bottom of the sea cry out for you.” It’s a simple but effective scene, one that reminds us that the Mud Whale’s inhabitants are caught between the real prospect of extinction and the uncertain possibility of survival; only their fierce commitment to living in the present moment preserves their tenuous existence.

While scavenging for supplies on a seemingly deserted island, Chakuro stumbles across a blank-faced girl about his own age. She attacks him with swords and sorcery, only to collapse, unconscious, from the effort of casting a spell. Chakuro is frightened but intrigued, and brings Lykos back to the Mud Whale where he learns her true identity: she’s an apatheia, an emotionless soldier. “Emotions will destroy the world,” she informs Chakuro. “The outside world you want to know so badly about is ruled by people deficient in feeling, using apatheias who have no heart to fight a war without end.”

The next major plot development — a surprise attack — delivers the series’ first truly grim moments, as the Mud Whale’s inhabitants are beaten, impaled, and gunned down by unknown assailants. Though Chakuro and Lykos have been fleshed out enough to earn the reader’s pity, the sheer size of the cast and the suddenness of the ambush blunt the impact of the carnage; we can see that Chakuro is devastated by the loss of his childhood friend Sami, but Sami is such a stock character — innocent, impetuous, infatuated with Chakuro — that her gruesome death registers as a manipulative attempt to illustrate the truth of Lykos’ earlier comments about the outside world. That same kind of heavy-handed editorializing extends to the villains’ physical appearance as well. They look like Juggalos in chain mail, sporting maniacal grins that scream, “Sadists ahoy!”, a point underscored in the gleeful way in which they violate corpses and taunt sobbing victims.

The most frustrating thing about these frenetic chapters is that they seem fundamentally at odds with the deliberate pacing and meticulous world-building in volume one. In these introductory pages, Umeda maps every nook and cranny of the Mud Whale, creating an environment as imposing and intimate as Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa. She approaches her character designs with same patience and care, bestowing a semblance of individuality on each resident while establishing their collective identity as a people. Even Chakuro’s frequent voice-overs — presumably read from the Mud Whale’s archives — play an important role in helping us experience time the way the Mud Whale’s residents do; there’s a lyrical quality to Chakuro’s narration that captures the rhythms of their day-to-day existence.

Yet for all Umeda’s world-building skills, Children of the Whales‘ dour tone puts the reader at arm’s length from the characters. Minus the flashes of joy, humor, and warmth that temper Miyazaki’s most downbeat films, Children of the Whales feels more like an episode of The Leftovers or Rectify than Castle in the Sky; it’s so utterly mirthless that it casts a pall over the reader instead of prompting deep thoughts or empathy for the characters. Take my manga, please!

CHILDREN OF THE WHALES, VOLS. 1-2 • BY ABI UMEDA • VIZ • RATED T+ (FOR OLDER TEENS)

Pick of the Week: My Manga Is Orange

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KATE: I suspect I’m not the only one who’s eager to read orange: future; I still get the sniffles just thinking about orange, and am eager to see how Ichigo Takano continues the story. Looking over this week’s new arrivals, though, I’m also curious about Made in Abyss, which sounds like a dark fantasy-adventure with an interesting heroine. And I’ll also give a plug for PTSD Radio, despite its unfortunate title and godawful covers. It’s a solid horror series that benefits from unique artwork and an unusual narrative structure.

SEAN: There’s several titles I’m interested in, including a final volume of Golden Time and the debut of Made in Abyss. But yeah, in the end the clearly obvious Pick of the Week is orange: future, which I reviewed here in a spoilery fashion, as Seven Seas helpfully noted. It may not please everyone, but it’s well-crafted.

MICHELLE: Having now read and loved the first two volumes of Frau Faust, I am definitely looking forward to volume three. But, yes, my heart really does belong to orange: future. I’m a little afraid of what it might reveal, given how much I loved the original series, but there’s no way I’m skipping it.

ASH: I’ll definitely be reading more of Frau Faust, and I’m rather curious about Made in Abyss, too, but orange: future is unquestionably my pick this week. Like so many others, the original series made a huge impression on me.

RWBY

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There was a moment in the early 2000s when Tokyopop slapped the “manga” label on just about anything it published, from licensed Japanese comics to comics made by aspiring American artists who were trying to break into the industry. Looking back on the heated debate over the legitimacy of OEL manga, I wonder how today’s readers will view RWBY, a work that meets the basic definition of manga as “comics created in Japan,” but has a more complicated history than other American properties that have been reimagined for Japanese readers.

RWBY’s path to the Shonen Jump imprint began in 2013 when Rooster Teeth, an American production studio, had a viral hit with an original, anime-influenced show about a team of girls who fight monsters. Over the next four years, interest in RWBY was strong enough to inspire a spin-off series, a video game, four soundtrack albums, and a manga illustrated by Shirow Miwa, creator of Dogs and Dogs: Bullets & Carnage. Like Miwa’s other work, RWBY ran in the pages of Ultra Jump alongside JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Bastard!! before being licensed by VIZ for American readers.

Flipping through its pages, there are hints that RWBY is a slightly different animal than Jiro Kuwata’s Bat-Manga or Kia Asamiya’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. RWBY reads like a skillful imitation of a battle-heavy shonen manga, a riot of flying fists, kicking legs, swinging scythes, and extreme camera angles. Almost every imaginable visual cliche is on display, from a girl with cat-ears (she’s a Faunus, or a “therianthrope”) to a school uniform that consists of a waist-nipping blazer and impossibly short skirt. And while Miwa’s artistic persona is evident in the story’s best pages, RWBY feels less like a manga adaptation of a popular American show than a compendium of things that American fans like about anime and manga.

The story follows a familiar template: four — or three, or five — special teens attend a special school where they learn how to use their special powers to defend the Earth from demons or aliens. Each teen has one unusual gift — say, teleporting or making killer bento boxes — and one well-defined personality trait that dictates the costume she wears, how much she talks, and whether she plays well with others. Though individually effective, the quartet — or trio, or quintet — is more formidable when they team up against their shared enemy, a lesson that’s reinforced early and often in the series both in the outcome of the battle scenes and in the characters’ on-the-nose conversations about friendship and cooperation. In RWBY, the principal team consists of four girls: Ruby Rose, a weapons expert, Weiss Schnee, a rich girl, Blake Belladonna, a former gang member, and Yang Xiao Long, a cheerful spazz who loves a good brawl. All four attend attend Beacon Academy, where teens train to become Hunters, skillful warriors who wield cool weapons and magical spells against the Grimm, a race of “soulless monsters” that threaten humanity’s existence.

On the screen, such a shopworn premise could still work with the addition of snazzy animation, strong voice acting, great sound design, and judicious pacing. On the page, however, RWBY falls flat. Miwa is hamstrung by the pedestrian source material, cranking out a manga whose principal characters are blandly pretty and prone to explaining things to one another. Just a few pages into chapter one, for example, Ruby blithely asks her teammates about Dust, the magical substance that powers their weapons. Without missing a beat, Schnee responds, “It’s a crystallized energy propellant that helps to power our world.” She then launches into a lengthy rumination on Dust that’s supposed to reveal something about her character — her family’s fortune is tied to Dust — but is such a poorly disguised information dump that it never rises to the level of conversation.

Glimpses of Miwa’s signature style — his sharp-featured characters and spidery linework — emerge most clearly in the battle sequences, when Ruby and friends face off with the Grimm. Miwa frames the action in panels whose bold, diagonal boundaries mimic the combatants’ slashing motions and flying leaps. In one of the manga’s most striking sequences, Miwa traces a bullet from the barrel of Ruby’s gun towards its target. This kind of tracking shot is a hackneyed gesture, but Miwa does something playful and surprising with it: he breaks the frame to create the illusion that the bullet is emerging from the page and whizzing past the reader:

The rest of the sequence, however, is a hot mess. Miwa’s relentless shift in perspective makes the fight as incomprehensible as a badly edited car chase; it’s never clear how many monsters are involved, or what makes the Grimm so lethal, despite the fact that Miwa has tried to mimic the show’s swooping camera work to show the carnage from every possible angle.

Miwa’s indifference to the material also manifests itself in the almost total absence of background detail. Though he introduces the fight sequences with an establishing shot or two — a glimpse of trees, an aerial view of a railroad track — the action unfolds in blank space. Plenty of manga-ka take similar shortcuts, but when a manga is 70% combat and 30% character-building, the effect is like looking at a scene from The Last Jedi or Avatar before the special effects were added; in the absence of any objects, buildings, or landmarks that would contextualize their actions and words, the characters look downright silly.

Part of me wishes RWBY were better, as it’s fascinating to see an American program get the manga treatment, especially one that wears its Bleach and Magic Knight Rayearth influences on its sleeve. Ten years ago, fans would have derided such a program as inauthentic; today, it seems, such trans-Pacific exchanges are unremarkable. Too bad RWBY never escapes the prison of Overused Anime and Manga Tropes to become something more original, compelling, or entertaining.

RWBY • MANGA BY SHIROW MIWA • BASED ON THE ROOSTER TEETH SERIES CREATED BY MONTY OUM • TRANSLATED BY JOE YAMAZAKI, ADAPTED BY JEREMY HAUN & JASON HURLEY • VIZ MEDIA • 260 pp. • RATED T, FOR TEENS (Fantasy violence, mild fanservice)

Pick of the Week: What Is a Dragonewt Anyway?

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SEAN: My pick senses are turned towards Viz this week. Fire Punch looks worthy, but I have now read it, and while it is a story well told it is not my kind of story. As such, my pick of the week is RWBY. It’s always nice to see a Japanese take on a Western property, especially when the Western property is anime-influenced. Knock my socks off, RWBY!

MICHELLE: I’ve said Chihayafuru a bunch in this space already, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, so instead this week I will pick the fourth volume of Waiting for Spring. It’s not groundbreaking shoujo, but it’s enjoyable, and I like the lead characters (and the heroine’s fujoshi best friend).

ANNA: I adore Chihayafuru, but sometime I pick titles based on the titles alone. And based on the title, Fire Punch sounds pretty great. That’s my pick!!!

KATE: I’m with Sean: Fire Punch is just too damn grim for me. I’m bullish about Children of the Whales and Kitaro the Vampire Slayer, though, and am intrigued by Juana and the Dragonewts’ Seven Kingdoms — just look at that lovely cover!

ASH: I’m certainly curious about Fire Punch, and I’m definitely looking forward to more of Children of the Whales and Kitaro, but Juana and the Dragonewts’ Seven Kingdoms has caught my eye as well. So, I guess I’m largely following Kate this week!

Drifting Dragons, Vols. 1-2

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The nineteenth century whaler was a tough character. He’d board a ship in Nantucket or New Bedford, sail around the tip of South America and then into the Pacific hunting grounds in quest of sperm whales. Every aspect of his job was dangerous and unpleasant; as author Eric Jay Dolin notes in Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, crewmen endured “backbreaking work, tempestuous seas, floggings, pirates, putrid food, and unimaginable cold” during their long stints at sea. At the end of a two- or three-year tour, a whaler might still be in debt from all the equipment he’d purchased at the outset of his journey, especially if the ship’s yield was low. Yet the gruesome work he performed was vital to the Victorian economy: whales’ bodies yielded the fat, bones, and oils that illuminated homes, corseted ladies, and gave shine and staying power to paint (Dolin 12).

The characters in Taku Kuwabara’s Drifting Dragons are engaged in a similar enterprise: they trawl the skies in a flying ship looking for dragons. The opening pages of the story make the connection between whaling and “draking” explicit, as we join the crew of the Quin Zaza on an aerial Nantucket sleigh ride. We glimpse a dragon through a parting in the clouds: first its back, then its tail, and finally the entire animal, as enormous and majestic as a blue whale. As the wounded dragon begins to tire, a crew member rappels down the tow line to plunge a harpoon into the animal’s back, delivering the final blow:

This image is a perfect introduction to draking, simultaneously conveying the peril and thrill of hunting such a powerful, swift animal at high altitude. Kuwabata’s thin, graceful lines and sparing use of screen tone capture the speed of the wind, the texture of the dragon’s skin, and the delicate feathering on the dragon’s ears, but also the vast emptiness of the sky. These details allow us to imagine for ourselves what it would be like to stand astride the dragon’s back, gazing at a mountain peak that’s poking above the clouds, or looking back at the ship and realizing the impossibility of rescue if something goes wrong.

As exciting as the dragon hunting sequences are, Drifting Dragons is as much an exercise in careful world-building as action-oriented storytelling. Kuwabara devotes page after page to the crew’s routines, capturing the heat, smell, and physical labor of stripping meat from bones and rendering fat. He also renders the physical environment of the Quin Zaza in precise detail, from the main deck and crow’s nest to the sleeping quarters and the hold, where most of the butchering, smoking, and boiling takes place. Last but not least, Kuwabara shows us how each member of the crew contributes to the functioning of the ship, and explains what first drew them to the skies.

Though the crew is drawn in broader strokes than the ship itself, the characters are distinctive enough to register as people with feelings, desires, motivations, and frustrations. Kuwabara is generous with his supporting cast, giving each a scene or subplot that reveals an unexpected facet of their personalities. Kuwabara lavishes the most attention, however, on the Mutt-and-Jeff duo of Mika and Takita: he’s a bold risk-taker with little regard for his own safety, while she’s a cautious newbie, eager to learn the ropes and prove her worth.

In trying to make Mika a more fully rounded character, however, Kuwabara depicts him as a swaggering gourmet, an Anthony Bourdain of the air. Mika is always dreaming up new strategies for preparing dragon meat, regaling his shipmates with lengthy monologues about a new technique he tried or goading the Quin Zaza’s cook into making his favorite dishes. This culinary concept carries over to the end of each chapter, which concludes with detailed recipes for Dragon Tail Meat Sandwich, Dragonet alla Diavola, and Pressed Dragon Liver Confit. These interludes aren’t very funny or appetizing; if anything, they feel more like a naked attempt to jump on the weird-cooking-manga bandwagon than an organic part of the story Kuwabara’s trying to tell.

If Drifting Dragons’ efforts at comedy fall flat, the manga is nonetheless engrossing. Kurabawa clearly knows the history of whaling, and has found a clever way to integrate those details into his fantasy world. At the same time, however, the vividness of the world he’s created has its own integrity; one could read Drifting Dragons in blissful ignorance of Moby Dick or The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex and still be swept up in the activity of the Quin Zaza’s crew and the thrill of flying alongside dragons in the clouds. Highly recommended.

WORKS CITED

Dolin, Eric Jay. Leviathan: The History of American Whaling. W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.

Kuwabata, Taku. Drifting Dragons, vols. 1-2. Translated by Adam Hirsch. Kodansha Advanced Media, LLC, 2018.

Pick of the Week: Scrounging

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MICHELLE: There’s really nothing that I simply must have this week, so I suppose I’ll pick volume two of Lovesick Ellie for no deeper reason than that the cover of volume one kind of reminds me of Honey So Sweet.

SEAN: I’m uninspired as well, so I will go with a favorite author and pick Vol. 2 of Imperfect Girl, which will hopefully continue to be intriguing and disquieting in equal amounts.

KATE: I’m woefully behind on I Am a Hero, so I’m going to take advantage of a light week to dive in and catch up. Zombies ahoy!

ANNA: There isn’t a ton that’s coming out this week that inspires me either, so I’m just going to go with Full-Time Wife Escapist because I picked up a few volumes on sale recently, and that’s going to be my catch-up reading.

ASH: The second volume of Spirit Circle is unquestionably my pick this week! I had largely enjoyed the creator’s other series Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer so I was expecting to enjoy the manga, but I was still surprised by how much I ended up liking it.

The Manga Critic’s Year in Review: 2017

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When I put The Manga Critic on hold in 2012, the Internet was changing: Facebook and Twitter were replacing forums, Live Journals, and personal blogs as the primary way in which Internet users shared opinions. The manga industry, too, was in flux, recovering from the collapse of brick-and-mortar retailers such as Borders, the scourge of One Manga, and the demise of power players such as Tokyopop. Looking back on that transitional moment, I feel pangs of nostalgia for the old blogosphere — where each blog functioned like a virtual water cooler, providing a place for manga lovers to gather and discuss what they were reading — and for the days when teenagers clogged the graphic novel aisles at bookstores as they pored over the latest installments of Naruto.

At the same time, however, I recognize how necessary many of these adjustments were. The introduction of digital manga and the increased emphasis on day-and-date releases have had a positive effect on the market, creating a viable alternative to scanlations (at least for licensed titles). Manga publishers have also gotten bolder with licensing choices: who’d have thought that Seven Seas — the company that brought us Aoi House and Monster Girls — would play such an instrumental role in bringing classic manga to the US, raising the possibility that 2018 might be the first time two manga by Ryoko Ikeda were available in English?

Finding my voice in this new environment has been my biggest challenge this year. I often found myself struggling to say anything insightful about the books I was reviewing, not because they were offensive or poorly executed, but because they were too obvious, too familiar, too… focus grouped. These are occupational hazards for anyone who reviews popular media, to be sure, but I felt that weight more fully this year, in part because I felt a stronger responsibility to myself and to my readers not to treat middle-of-the-road titles with contempt — a goal I didn’t always achieve.

On a more personal note, 2017 was the year I said goodbye to Grendel, my canine sidekick for the last thirteen years. She’d been with me through graduate school, divorce, moving, and job changes — the low points — but also with me for wonderful adventures: climbing Mount Washington and kayaking in the Finger Lakes. I learned a lot from her, from the importance of routine to the importance of being in the moment. Most of all, however, she taught me the importance of boundaries; she was tough, sweet, willful, and not above nipping my ankles when she wanted me to do something. I’d never lived with a dog who was as feisty or independent as Grendel, two qualities that made her a pain in the ass sometimes, but also made our relationship richer and more rewarding. R.I.P., Woozums — I miss you.

What I’ve compiled below is an index of sorts, an attempt to document in numbers and links what I accomplished here at The Manga Critic in 2017. The format owes a debt to — OK, shamelessly copies — the Harper’s Index, but the contents are a lot less stodgy. So without further ado, here is a guide to my first year back in the saddle as a manga reviewer.

THE YEAR IN NUMBERS

BOOKS REVIEWED

MANGA REVIEWED

* Denotes a digital-only or digital-first release