Sean Gaffney

By Mizuki Mizushiro and Namanie. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On.

Achieving the balance between supposedly new and exciting things and using the popular cliches that everyone knows will sell well can be quite difficult. Once you get the basic premise out of the way, you can feel free to roll out the typical gags and characters. The teacher who’s in her mid-20s but looks about 10 years old; the clumsy crying girl; the classic tsundere (combine with the cool beauty for extra points!), and the eccentric ditz. Throw in a hero who manages to rise above the typical harem lead sightly, but still let him crash into large breasts on a regular basis and have a sister with an unhealthy obsession with him. All this can be added, and is fine – but only if you get the premise that draws people in. With Psycome, the author seems to have found their premise, as all this takes place in a school/prison devoted to “rehabilitating” murderers. Which most of the above ‘types’ actually are.

Psycome is short for “Psycho Love Comedy”, and they ain’t kidding. Our hero is Kyousuke, who grew to be strong to protect his little sister from being bullied. A bit too strong, in fact, as one day said bullies are all found dead in a warehouse, leading him to be the obvious suspect. He’s sent to the aforementioned prison, where he meets his classmates, also composed of murderers and psychopaths, and their teacher with a hair-trigger temper and no school rules to hold her back. Much of the beginning of the book is devoted to comedy revolving around the premise, with “typical” high school romantic comedy situations made ridiculous by the setting and people doing it. The violence is over the top, but mostly seems to be inflicted on only one person, and you suspect that the majority of the plot of this 6-volume series will be devoted to our hero finding out why he’s been falsely imprisoned and what kind of place this is anyway.

So imagine my surprise when all that’s revealed by the end of the first book. The second half is still amusing, but gets far more serious. The teacher takes her eyes off her usual abuse target to send Eiri (the aforementioned tsundere who tries to be cool) to the infirmary, and we learn that Kyousuke may not be the only one who’s only here on a technicality. Through a series of fights, we also see that Kyousuke has an endurance that’s truly inhuman, which is of course what got him noticed in the first place. And then there’s Renko, the girl in the gas mask on the cover, whose bizarre, over the top genki personality takes a far darker turn when the mask comes off. The fight between her and Kyousuke at the climax is brutal, and the highlight of the book, particularly the resolution being the opposite of what you’d typically expect in this situation.

So yes, another book I expected not to enjoy but did. It’s not perfect – I am very weary with the loli teacher/parent concept, and the fact that Kurumiya appears to be a straight ripoff of Komoe-sensei from Index only evil did not help matters. I’m also not happy we appear to have more brother/sister incest shoehorned in, though at least it’s seemingly one-sided. And then there’s Maina, whose baby-talk way of speaking is grating and irritating, but I’m pretty sure that was deliberate and meant to be the same in Japanese, so I’ll give it a pass. In the meantime, it’s a fairly typical light novel recommendation: if you can deal with the typical romantic comedy cliches, and don’t mind lots of big chested vs flat chested talk, Psycome is an intriguing series, and I look forward to seeing where it goes next.

By Hazuki Takeoka and Tiv. Released in Japan by Ichijinsha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Comic Rex. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

The arrogant, haughty girl who owns the campus and can destroy your entire life with just a well-placed word. It’s a common sight in fiction for young adults, both here and in Japan, and it’s no surprise that Masamune-kun’s Revenge uses it as a starting point. Makabe Masamune was deeply wounded in elementary school by his crush, Adagaki Aki. Now starting high school, he’s lost the weight she mocked him for, cultivated a ‘handsome male lead’ personality, and is ready to win her heart only to crush it once and for all. Then he will finally have his… well, revenge, as the title implies. This premise sounds almost like one of the fanfics you read by 19-year-old men writing when they dislike the tsundere harem girl, but if handled well could be interesting. In the first volume, the authors handle it pretty well.

First of all, the narrative seems to be fairly self-aware at how ridiculous and petty Masamune is for carrying his grudge on an 8-year-old for so long. Every smooth move he makes is balanced out by his inner stress about how he looked and how he handled it, just to make it clear that no, he’s really just like you, the reader, honest. Secondly, as the second half of the book shows, he’s hardly the only one who’s devoted his life to messing with Aki. Yoshino is probably the best character in the book, a supposedly meek and put upon followers of Aki’s who in reality is happily manipulating her behind the scenes (and may come from a family of said manipulators). And, of course, he’s beginning to genuinely fall for Aki – if this were JUST about the revenge, there would be no point in reading it. It’s a romance.

As for Aki, I like her. More than I expect I’m supposed to. It’s fairly clear as the volume goes on that much of her arrogance is just as much of an affectation as Masamune’s cool persona. The annoying nicknames are completely lame, but I have to admit, the scavenger hunt she led him on to reject him made me laugh out loud at the payoff. That was well-played. Really, most of the things people hate about her seem to be simple social ineptitude, as she’s shown to have no idea how real life works, being very much a coddled rich girl. I expect in the next few volumes Masamune is going to want to dial back his revenge, and likely external forces will try to stop him. Because honestly, these two would make a pretty good couple if they both stopped putting on an act.

I’m not certain if this is a plain old revenge fantasy or a subversion of same yet, but I hope it’s the latter, as I would find a simple ‘break the haughty’ plot to be far too tedious. But based on the first volume, I think that the authors could pull off something nice. There was also less fanservice than I’d expect from a title like this, that foot fetish cover aside. Fans of guy-oriented romantic comedy might give this a try.

By Izumi Miyazono. Released in Japan as “Totsuzen Desu Ga, Ashita Kekkon Shimasu” by Shogakukan, serialization ongoing in the magazine Petit Comic. Released in North America by Viz.

The ruke of thumb, be it in a shoujo comic set in school or a josei comic set in the workplace or really in any other piece of fiction ever, is that happy people are boring. Conflict is what drives a story, and anybody who insists that they know exactly what they’re going to get out of life is likely due for cruel disappointment. Of course, the goal after this is to make sure that the main characters read like real people and that you aren’t constantly slapping your forehead. We’ve seen quite a few Petit Comic titles over in North America over the last few years, and while I’ve enjoyed them to a greater or lesser degree, there has been quite a bit of forehead slapping. Everyone’s Getting Married, though, seems to be made of sterner stuff.

Our heroine, Asuka, is a highly successful businesswoman, but what she really longs to do is settle down, get married, and be a housewife. The narrative points out several times that this is because of her own home upbringing and a definite choice she wants to make, rather than anything like “women shouldn’t be working” or other tropes you’d expect to see at this point. The guy who breaks up with her at the start of the book says she’s looking for “anyone who’d put a ring on her finger”, but we see over the course of the volume that’s not true – she has standards, and most guys fail to live up to them. The trouble is, this is modern Japan, and most guys she meets aren’t looking for a wife to stay at home and keep house.

Enter our hero, Ryu. He’s a highly successful newscaster with a reputation as a playboy, but he’s actually just the sort of man that Asuka is looking for. There’s just one problem, of course – he is absolutely not looking for marriage, for both professional reasons (as a handsome face who gets female viewers, ratings would drop if he was “unavailable”) and personal reasons (a hinted bad relationship with a married woman before the book begins). However, aside from that, he’s basically exactly what Asuka is loking for. And it’s mutual, as he’s quite attracted to Asuka as well, but both of them are holding themselves back due to their insistence on marriage/no marriage respectively.

The characters in this book are what makes it. We see Asuka’s friend begin to date Ryu’s roommate in here as well, and there relationship proceeds far smoother, even though Asuka’s friend has said, much like Ryu, she’s not looking for anything permanent. But, because she’s also open to compromise and not locked into stubbornness, things can move forward in surprising ways. This is a title you read to see how the hero and heroine can compromise their principles in order to gain the happiness that’s right in front of their nose – after which, no doubt, the story will end, because the conflict is over. Definitely awaiting the next volume.

By Yuki Tabata. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. Released in North America by Viz.

If you’ve been reading manga for a long time, you not only start to read series that are clearly influenced by another, but also series that are influenced by their successors. When Fairy Tail debuted, a lot of people were highly amused at how blatantly it wore its One Piece influence on its sleeve (despite the author not remotely being a newbie, as Rave Master fans can tell you). Well, now Fairy Tail is 54 volumes and counting, and it’s starting to have artists who are influenced by its own plot and attitude. Which brings us to Black Clover, a story of a firey hothead who ends up in a magic guild that’s home to a bunch of eccentrics. But in Jump, not in Magazine, so it’s OK.

As I’ve noted consistently in these reviews, unoriginal and cliched does not always mean bad, particularly in the manga industry, and Black Clover did hold my interest throughout, and was a good deal of fun. But it was highly amusing coming up with a drinking game on the fly when each previously overused cliche kept dropping into the bucket. Asta, our hero, is a kid who in any other series would be happy, upbeat and relaxed, but in this particular series suffers from having no magic talent in a world where magic talent defines your place in life, and therefore he is defined more by extreme frustration adn slight obnoxiousness, which thankfully gets a bit better when he actually discovers what he can do – anti-magic.

The other characters are also types, but they seem to be the sort of types that will grow and develop into real people as the series goes on. Asta’s best friend is cool and collected, and has a giant pile of magic talent – needless to say, there’s a seemingly wide gulf in their friendship, but this is Jump, so it’s only seemingly. We also meet the supposedly terrifying master of the “evil magic guild”, who actually turns out to be the master of a lovable gang of magic users who are Just Misunderstood (TM). And then there’s Noelle, who’s from a royal family but is running into the same issues Asta has – she has magic, but can’t control it, so is thought of as useless. Putting on a haughty princess attitude to mask feeling worthless – again, not unfamiliar.

I suspect that defending the ‘have-nots’ will make up a good chunk of this manga. We see a group of villains toward the end who think nothing of using a village of commoners simply as they’re in the way, and they’re typical good, sneering villains who inspire our hero and heroine to level up. One thing I did like is Asta’s response to not having any magic for years and years – he’s been developing his body to the point where he’s freakishly strong (though he still looks like a typical wiry Jump hero), which manages to surprise many. (He also hits on nuns, but I suspect that aspect of him will go away as the series goes on.)

Black Clover may be trying to be Fairy Tail for Jump, the same way that Fairy Tail was One Piece for Magazine. but it’s off to a decent start, and I’m happy to see where it goes next.

By Cotoji. Released in Japan by Houbunsha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Manga Time Kirara Forward. Released in North America by Yen Press.

There is a sort of subgenre of school life manga that flits across all genres, be it shonen, seinen or shoujo. This is the ‘separate class filled with special students’ genre. They can be special in the bad way, as with Assassination Classroom’s 3-E class of low-graders, special in a superpowered way, with both Medaka Box’s Class 13 and Class -13, or special in the doomed way, as with many a survival game manga where the class finds itself in a situation where they all die one by one (Battle Royale, Dangan Ronpa, etc.). And now we have Anne Happy, a mostly lighthearted comedy about a group of girls who are all ‘unlucky’ in some way, be it poor health, misdirection, or what have you. The title character (though not, oddly, the protagonist so far) is Anne, a girl whose bad luck is SO bad that it almost comes out the other side.

Our heroine is Ruri, who at first seems out of place in this class, till we realize that she has a fetish for the construction sign of a cartoon worker who directs you to move out of the area. I hesitated to reveal this, as honestly it’s the best joke of the volume, and it’s really the only thing keeping her in the class at all, as otherwise she’s a fairly normal, if dour, young girl. Anne is just like you’d expect from a series like this: overly upbeat and peppy to an unreasonable degree, whether she’s being picked as 49th most lucky in a class with only 40 people in it or accidentally falling into a river and almost getting mauled by a bear. There’s also Botan, who is the ‘calm airhead’ sort (apologies if I call her Mugi by accident) whose body is so fragile that a mild handshake can break all her fingers.

Everyone in this class has been put there supposedly to change their bad luck and find happiness, which mostly seems to involve a series of endurance tests given by their semi-sadistic teacher (who seems to have a split personality). There’s a sense that Anne is worse than the others – she is the title character, after all – and at one point she loses her hair clip and her luck turns to negative fifty zillion. Honestly, though, the plot is mostly an excuse for a series of school gags based around goofy, unlucky girls. We also meet Hibiki, a tsundere sort who seems to be in love with her Takarazuka-esque classmate Ren. I assume that everyone will get to know each other better in the 2nd volume.

This isn’t really a must-read, even for fans of comedies like this one. But it’s pleasant enough, and there weren’t many points where I was irritated or wanted to stop reading. And, aside from a few jokes about Botan’s chest, there’s less fanservice than you’d normally expect in a title like this, possible as Kirara Forward lacks that sort of thing in general. Anne Happy falls into the category of ‘Not bad, will try another volume’ for now.

By Ichigo Takano. Released in Japan by Shueisha and then Futabasha, serialized in the magazines Bessatsu Margaret and Manga Action. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

I’d mentioned while reviewing the first omnibus of orange that it wasn’t a slam dunk that Kakeru was going to be saved. Fortunately, the author agreed with me, and most of this 2nd omnibus shows us that trying to change the future is hard, especially when you’re dealing with someone who killed themselves – it’s not always something you can fix just by being really nice. Naho and the others don’t really screw much up here, and they try their hardest, but there’s a lot going on in Kakeru’s head, and even Future Vision can’t solve his own inner demons. This leads to a devastating chapter that is easily the best of the book, as we see from Kakeru’s POV the thoughts and actions that led to his suicide in the original world.

And there is, of course, the romance between Naho and Kakeru as well. I’m pleased that the future flashforwards we see here show that Naho and Suwa’s marriage isn’t an unhappy one – they’re two people who’ve led a good life, and even have a kid, but they’re both still devastated by the boy they couldn’t save. Perhaps this is why, despite all the suggestions and hints, the romance is mostly left on the back burner, and we don’t get a definitive “and they married and lived happily ever after” here. Much like A Silent Voice, this is a series that’s trying to be about friendship and overcoming difficulties. Because in the end, after everything they changed, and every way they tried to make Kakeru feel loved and welcome, he *still* tries to kill himself.

But they did make a difference – he pulls back at the last minute, realizing he doesn’t want to die. (Admittedly, Hagita breaking his bike helped – Hagita is mostly used as comic relief throughout, being the “friend nobody likes” sort, but he’s also quite clever and absolutely one of the gang here.) I was rather surprised that, in their tearful talk after his attempt, they all confess they got letters from the future, and show them to him. The science of how this happened is very vague, and I don’t think we’re meant to dwell too hard on it. In the end, appropriately, the six friends bury the time capsule we’ve seen before, only now dedicated to a new future.

There wasn’t quite enough orange to fill a 2nd omnibus, so we get a short multi-part romance from the same author, Haruiro Astronaut. It’s not as good as the main story, but isn’t too bad, and has some good twists – the romantic setup is theoretically between the cool guy and the sweet guy, but ends up taking a third option, and there’s some talk about actually trying to care about what girls think rather than just trampling all over them. It’s good, but the main draw of this collection is orange itself. It’s excellent, and both omnibuses are absolutely worth your money.

By Katsuhisa Kigitsu. Released in Japan by Akita Shoten, serialized in the magazine Champion Red. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

Franken Fran has many grotesque, nasty images throughout. There’s blood, gore, other bodily fluids, and truly disgusting things being done to the human body. And yet the most terrifying thing in the entire series is easily Fran herself, who is quite simply impossible to understand or empathize with, and whose concept of what life is does not remotely cross over with the majority of humanity. Fran is simply a force of nature, and this omnibus shows us several times when your jaw drops at what she carries out. Oddly enough, it’s Veronica, her sister the assassin who was introduced at the end of the last book, who ends up being the voice of sanity in the series (as well as the straight man).

This is not to say that Veronica is a good guy, of course. In one of the more touching chapters in this book, Veronica and walking organ bank Adorea go to a high school undercover to, theoretically, give Veronica “social skills”. (The fact that Fran is the one who says she doesn’t have these is one of the best jokes in the book.) Of course, veronica is a small, sullen, scarred girl, so naturally she proceeds to get bullies to hell and back, with only one other girl nice enough to be friends with her. And then, of course, everything goes even MORE horribly wrong, as we discover a slavery ring and Veronica has to clean house and chop up a few bad guys. If this were a normal, non-funny thriller series, Veronica might be the anti-hero.

And of course there are the plots of the chapters themselves. Franken Fran is to a large degree an anthology horror series, with Fran and her occasional cast dealing with tragic young love, evil matriarchs seeking immortality, and of course at least two chapters dealing with bugs, which are absolutely not for the squeamish. There’s even a cameo by a certain cult religious deity. The two best chapters in the book are two of the most touching (note that I’m defining touching in the venue of Franken Fran, not beyond it) – in one, a suicidal young man who changes his mind is given new life as a children’s mascot, and crosses paths with a young girl who’s being abused by her father. In the other, a young girl’s dog is killed by a truck, and it’s Fran to the rescue, though her new dog is, shall we say, not what you’d expect. The series even mocks itself by having a Hollywood movie made out of the latter chapter, with dire consequences. (“The bestiality was a nice touch.”)

In the end, Franken Fran is about the stories. They won’t make you feel good, they may gross you out, and one or two of them may give you nightmares. But they’re all stories that stay in your head. And Fran, being a protagonist (I refuse to call her a heroine) who is our guide through this twisted world, is just as memorable.