Sean Gaffney

By Ken Akamatsu. Released in Japan as “Mahou Sensei Negima!” by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

With this second omnibus of Negima, Ken Akamatsu is starting to make his move. He’s obeyed his corporate masters and written in a giant harem cast, with tons of fanservice and blushing tsundere heroine, just like his last title. Indeed, this omnibus contains a mini-arc where the cast fight a battle to get a kiss from Negi. However, bigger things are afoot, and this omnibus is also where Akamatsu lets us know that there will be adventure and pure shonen fighting here as well – and that eventually it will be the main thrust of the plotline.

The most obvious thing we get out of this re-read of Volumes 4-6 is we see another of the main cast introduced – Setsuna Sakurazaki. Just as Asuna bears similarity to Naru from Love Hina, and Nodoka is like Shinobu, Setsuna is clearly meant to be the Motoko of this series, right down to the flustered panicking whenever love is mentioned. (Indeed, the connection to the Aoyama family is later made explicit, about 20-odd volumes later). Setsuna is briefly introduced as a potential villain, but that doesn’t last long, and soon we’re finding out about her loyalty to her friends, her amazing sword powers, her yokai heritage, and of course her repressed yearnings for her Konoka-ojosama, which manages to be played for laughs *and* taken seriously at the same time.

The other thing I noticed here was how casually we’re introduced to two of the major villains of the entire work. Fate and Tsukuyomi both appear as supposed ‘mid-level bosses’ of the villain of this arc, Chigusa. However, Chigusa proves to be mostly useless (Akamatsu lampshades this by having her defeated by Chachazero, Evangeline’s two-foot-tall puppet creature), so Fate quickly takes over, and proves to be more than a match for Negi, who is powerful but inexperienced. Fate is mostly drawn as a blank here, though I did like some of his dry humor when he muses about the water spells he’s using on Asuna, and how they interact with her magic cancel abilities. And Tsukuyomi is cute and adorable, and only wants to fight her sempai in a sword battle! Except for one panel, she is not at all the terrifying lunatic we will see later on.

Akamatsu is still feeling around how to work in all 31 girls in his plot without making the whole thing too unwieldy – he never did quite master that, though he got close. The popularity poll included at the end shows that Makie is the most popular of all the girls for two polls running, so perhaps she is the character that is most disappointing – despite a late run, Ken hasn’t really worked out her potential. On the other hand, he’s also realizing which girls *do* work well as a main cast member. Setsuna arrives and is immediately one of the crew, as I mentioned, and Nodoka is the second girl to get a pactio with Negi (and oh what a pactio it is). As for Evangeline, let’s just say I think her skyrocketing popularity caused both Shonen Magazine and Akamatsu to go “Whoah,” and after being casually disposed of by Negi in the first omnibus, she’s back to full strength here, going toe to toe with Fate, taking out huge building-sized ancient demons, and laughing all the while.

The translation here is new, as with the first one, with the Nibley twins replacing the work of Peter David (Vols. 4-5) and Trish Ledoux (Vol. 6). A replacement of David’s very loose adaptation was quite welcome. The extras have the preliminary sketches included at the end, but lack the ‘character bios’ and cover art sketches we get with individual releases.

Overall, if you’re going to be getting into Negima, this is likely where you’ll hop on. Vol. 5-6 have a great arc that shows the series finally escaping its harem roots, and even though there will always be fanservice, it’s a gamechanger. Fans want magical battles, and Akamatsu is here to provide them.

By Ken Akamatsu. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Weekly Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

Everyone has those titles. You know, the ones you were obsessed with 10-15 years ago. The ones you still enjoy, even though in the back of your mind you know you can never revisit it ever, because if you do you will be mature enough to see all the flaws you missed in the first rush of fandom. The mid-late 90s are a particularly strong time for me in that regard. Ranma, Oh My Goddess, Tenchi Muyo, and (a bit later) Love Hina. Four titles that in your early 20s are AMAZINGLY AWESOME, especially if you then get involved in fanfics, mailing lists, etc. And then you read them and you realize what you glossed over earlier annoys you now, and the plot you enjoyed has now been used by 80 other series to the point that you grow weary of it. Would Love Hina, now being re-released nine years after Tokyopop put it out, suffer the same fate?

There are a few things you will have to come to terms with as a reader if you are going to enjoy Love Hina. It is a harem manga. Worse, it is a harem manga where the outcome is never in doubt – thus if you like a girl who isn’t Naru, you know you’re doomed and spend 13 more volumes getting progressively more annoyed. It is filled with blatant and obvious fanservice, mostly involving girls under the age of 18. This never goes away. It is filled with what has been commonly dubbed ‘comedic sociopathy’ – which is to say characters are angry and hit each other all the time because the author thinks it’s funnier that way. In the 550 pages of this omnibus, I believe Naru punches Keitaro almost 50 times, and I may be underestimating that. And this doesn’t even count Su kicking him, or Motoko trying to slice him in two with her katana. It’s a comedy. Keitaro recovers 2 panels later. Learn to roll with it.

If you can get past all that… this is a fun, heartwarming title. Admittedly, it takes a while to get going. As with Negima, Volume 1 of Love Hina is pretty obviously the nadir. Keitaro was a highly influential harem lead, but for all the *wrong* reasons. Ataru was after the girls himself, Tenchi had actual superpowers to bust out, and Ranma was a martial arts master. Keiichi Morisato comes closest, and is certainly unlucky, but lacks the patheticness Keitaro Urashima has at the start. We see him as a 2nd year ronin, having failed to get into the prestigious Todai university. Again. He also notes that he’s not handsome, and has no real friends, and has never had a girlfriend. What does he have? Well, he has the bad luck to always walk in on women naked, and tends to fall over clutching their breasts. Oh yes, and he’s NICE. Keitaro was first, so I won’t get on his case as much, but he was the prototype for many harem leads who literally have no redeeming qualities except their ability to be extra super nice. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Added to this, we have a cross-section of girls that end up living in the inn his grandmother leaves to him in the introductory chapter. Tsundere Naru, aka the second most polarizing female in all of anime (Akane Tendo being first) tends to lash out with her fists when angry, embarrassed, or scared, which, around Keitaro, is all the time. Luckily, like most tsundere characters, this is only half of her persona, and we do over the course of these three volumes see Naru’s softer, more caring side. She also starts to see that Keitaro means well, and begins to realize that she might even be falling for him. Which… makes her angry, embarrassed, and scared. Cue fists, repeat as needed. If you leave out all the scenes when she’s hitting him, what you’re left with is quite a sweet relationship between two people who are a lot more alike than Naru would like to admit.

As for the others, like most ‘date sim’ or harem mangas they’re designed to provide a selection of different female leads to appeal to the reader. Cute and shy Shinobu, who’s 7 years younger than Keitaro – and can cook to boot! Hyperactive Su, who is foreign but not from India, and runs through each scene she’s in on pure energy. Stoic Motoko, the young kendo swordswoman who worries she may be dealing with those pesky feelings of love. Trickster Mitsune, who enjoys alcohol and teasing Keitaro and Naru, probably not in that order. Motoko and Shinobu will get far more focus in future volumes (indeed, Motoko seems rather out of character here, and won’t come into her own till she gets just as flustered and blush-ridden as Naru currently gets), Su slightly less so. Mitsune gets virtually no page time of her own, it needs to be said, and the anime deepened her friendship with Naru quite a bit.

Then there’s Mutsumi, a.k.a. my favorite character. Again, this is for purely irrational reasons – she only appears sporadically through the series, and is never one of the main cast. Of all the cast, she probably comes closest to winning Keitaro’s heart – except she’s nowhere near it either, and knows it – the man only has eyes for Naru. Mostly I think I like her because of my penchant for, if you’ll pardon the expression, ‘dizzy dames’. Mutsumi is the type who will get a perfect score on a test and forget to write her name; or will end up on a desert island without realizing that if she walks back into it 50 yards she’ll find her house. She is, however, savvy enough to pick up on Keitaro and Naru’s relationship almost immediately – certainly before either of them do. (She also kisses Keitaro, and then to make up for it kisses Naru. When I first read the series, this was VERY IMPORTANT to my young self.) I am always happy when Mutsumi’s around in this series.

I should take some time to talk about the re-release. If you’re a fan of the old manga, and are wondering if the upgrade is worth it – yes, it is. The artwork is much clearer, the translation retains honorifics and last name usage (important in a series like this where so much could depend on Keitaro saying Naru rather than Narusegawa – he doesn’t, in the entire omnibus, call her by her first name). The lettering is professional and looks neat – a far cry from Tokyopop’s… um, enthusiastic lettering job of old. The old ‘bonus pages’ are retained, and we get the usual Kodansha endnotes, detailing things such as Naru namechecking Doraemon.

I will admit that when I heard this series was going to be part of the Manga Movable Feast, I raised an eyebrow. Love Hina is no deep, meaningful masterpiece, and merely flipping through it can tell you that. But if you want a romantic comedy with a hearty emphasis on the comedy, and don’t find it aggravating when slapstick violence happens every two pages, there’s much to enjoy here. The loud rampaging scenes make the occasional quiet, heartfelt ones sweeter, and it’s there, where Naru is quietly cheering Keitaro on to study harder, or confessing her own worries and fears to him, that we start to see what a good couple they will eventually make.

Eventually. Once we have 11 more volumes of slapstick violence.

This review was based on a review copy provided by the publisher.

By John Ford. First published in 1633 (approximately 7-8 years after its first performance) by Nicholas Oakes for Richard Collins. Current edition published by Arden Shakespeare in 2011.

Sometimes I think that the current generation on the internet likes to believe that they were the ones who made incest cool, what with all the squee and the Ouran and Harry Potter fanfics out there. But incest has been around since pretty much the dawn of mankind, and has been written about in the greatest works of literature just as much. Almost every high schooler has to read Oedipus Rex these days, though I suspect their local church likely skips over all the Old Testament fooling around.

Thus, in terms of being a play about incest, John Ford was not breaking exciting new ground. The new ground was in how he dealt with it. This is not the usual wacky comedy uncle lusting after his sweet young niece as we’ve seen in other Jacobean plays, nor are the siblings royalty (incest is always more acceptable when they’re kings, strangely enough). No, we have a merchant family here, and their son, Giovanni, is no slavering neanderthal. Not for him the baseless lust approach. He is madly in love with his sister and so he tries to rationalize it intellectually, coming up with all sorts of arguments he can present to his local friar. The friar’s position can basically be summed up by this ellipsis: “…” Luckily for Giovanni, his sister Annabella has fallen madly for him as well, and they declare, then consummate their love in Act II.

The next three acts are everything going to hell, as you can imagine. This is a tragedy, and there will not be door slamming and talk of sardines here. A lot of modern productions of this play apparently want to focus purely on the main couple, and cut out a lot of the other stuff going on, which mostly involves Annabella’s many suitors and a whole lot of plotting of revenge. Which is a shame, as it helps to show that, despite what many critics have said over the years (usually in the process of condemning the play), Ford is *not* sympathizing with the leads. He does not regard their love as Romeo and Juliet, and the way the production plays out shows this. He does not, however, portray either Giovanni or Annabella as monsters. This is the difference.

Annabella actually shows remorse for her mistakes of passion, right about when she realizes that her troublesome suitor, Soranzo, actually does love her. She is also not the instigator of the relationship (which makes it harder to blame the evil woman seducing the poor innocent man, a common enough reasoning in this time period), and ends up having her heart gouged out of her by a now insane Giovanni. Nevertheless, while the play was very popular at the time it was first written and performed, it was condemned by critics for years afterwards, with the compilers of Ford’s Complete Works choosing to omit the play entirely rather than sully the book with this heathenism. It also was thought unsuitable for the stage and unperformed for about 250 years, only being revived consistently after 1940 or so.

This is not exactly a fun play to read, but I think it’s very well-written. And, as with Shakespeare, I think it’s a lot more ambiguous than usually ends up being presented on the stage in modern productions. Ford is not saying the incestuous lovers are right, but he is saying that they are human, and that we can understand their all too human failings. Thus the title, which aptly sums up those two dichotomies: ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore.

By Kate Beaton. Released in North America by Drawn & Quarterly.

Kate Beaton is a very funny woman. This is the main reason to buy this collection. Her words are funny, her situations are funny, and her art is funny. That’s a triple-funny combo, folks, and it’s rare these days. People have been reading Hark! A Vagrant as an online webcomic for some time now, and I even have her original self-published book Never Learn Anything from History as well. This is the one to get, though, a handsome hardcover with a larger collection of stories, including all of her high points.

You should still go and check out the HAV archives at her website (here), as this is cherry picked to collect the best of her historical and literary humor, rather than the more random strip we see every week. We don’t get the strips about her own life, or a lot of the dashed-off sketches and earlier comics. There’s fun stuff there as well, including punchlines I don’t even have to look up to laugh about again. “It’s okay, you’re upset.” “Sometimes I pretend to be Neptune!” My own personal favorite, where Kate Beaton reads the letters of James Joyce, is also absent here.

But this strip is an excellent collection, and I have no issues with how it was cherry-picked. I mentioned remembering Kate’s punchlines, and that’s because she has an ear for dialogue that almost begs to be read aloud. It’s not necessarily accurate to its period – Dude Watching with the Brontes is funny *because* of the dissonance, and most of the historical sequences are done in modern tones – but its cadences are funny in and of themselves. They stick in your head, like the best kind of humor. “Jam!” is a classic example of a punchline that’s since become a meme.

Of course, this is helped along by the subject matter. Kate’s a smart cookie, and does not stop to explain the joke as she goes along. She trusts that you will know why Pearson vs. Diefenbaker is fun, and that you have already read The Great Gatsby in high school like the rest of us had to. I had worried all the Canadian strips would be gone, but there’s a large chunk of Canada here. Don’t get me wrong, the strips are funny even if you don’t know who Raskolnikov is, but if you *have* read Crime and Punishment it’s even funnier.

Lastly, Kate’s art is funny. This is sometimes forgotten in a medium where it’s frequently OK to just have funny words and have bland talking heads impart them. The art is caricature, but expressions are conveyed easily and succinctly. Anger and rage are particularly fun, as she draws an open mouthed angry moan that just elicits a giggle. Faces are clearly the emphasis here – Kate’s arms sometimes owe their influence to Mickey Mouse cartoons from the early 1930s – and the cartoons wouldn’t work without the words, but the art helps to accentuate each comic and bring out its best.

Drawn and Quarterly has done an excellent job here as well, with a nice handsome hardcover with a fantastic index at the back for the true history nerd in all of us who wants to skip straight to the strip about The Perfect Joy of St. Francis. It even has a sketch of a portly Napoleon on the cover, his attempt to look menacing somewhat undercut by also looking like he will squeak when he hits the ground like a child’s toy. If you haven’t experienced the fun of Hark! A Vagrant, this is the starting point. Go get it.

By Maru Nagao. Released in Japan by Shonen Gahosha, serialized in the magazine Nekopanchi. Released in the United States by Shonen Gahosha on the JManga website.

I’m not sure I’ve come across a title at JManga that so typifies what I wanted from the site – at least intellectually. This is a cat manga. From a magazine devoted entirely to cat mangas. About supernatural cat stories in the Edo period. And no, it’s not particularly adorable, though the cats can be cute. It’s not meant for a casual fan. It’s meant for hardcore manga readers who buy this magazine for cats and by god, they will have cats. (It also has one of the flaws of the site, which is the title is in Japanese with no English translation. I don’t mind the Japanese title, but at least tell me what it means. I think Jubei, Cat-Painter of Edo is close to an approximation.)

The plot is basically a series of supernatural mysteries, wrapped around our hero and his yokai cat-spirit. Jubei is a wandering painter, who specializes in painting cats – more specifically, a painting of a cat that will terrify the nice and other creatures from the Edo home. One reason his paintings are so good is they are semi-sentient, thanks to the magic of Nita, the aforementioned cat-spirit, who infuses the painting with some of his essence. We learn a little bit about Jubei as we go through this first volume, but for the most part the stories are about various cat owners, and the trials and tribulations they are going through with their pet. Jubei happens to be around at the time, and takes it upon himself to solve the mystery.

It was hard when I first read this not to think of Natsume’s Book of Friends. The art style is very similar, and a man and his wandering cat spirit solving mysteries, many of them featuring ghosts, also rings very close to home. But we aren’t really all that connected to Jubei the way we are to Natsume. Jubei seems to drift through the manga as he does through Edo. He has several admirers (a few women throughout are clearly attracted to him, but nothing comes of it), and is in fact the Edo Period’s version of a bishonen, complete with the hair, which the artist mentions is out of period but she didn’t want to cut it. I expect as we get more volumes we’ll learn about his backstory with Nita and see some depth, but the lead character is not the reason to read this manga.

On the other hand, the stories themselves are very well done. Sometimes a bit melodramatic, and designed to pull on the heartstrings of cat lovers, but that’s okay. You’re hear to read about cats being adorable, so some extent. Admittedly, there’s a lot more of cats being mysterious or aloof than there is adorable, but that’s okay. We see a cat who sacrifices his life to save his owner’s sight; a young man who realizes his cat may be MORE than just a cat; a pretty tea-shop worker with a tragic cat past; a stoic courtesan whose cat never leaves her side; and a samurai who is terrified of cats due to a haunting from when he was a child. Even the last story, which is mostly about a young man who’s about to be disinherited and is sent to Jubei’s master to try to find a profession, ends up being about how to paint cats, and how cat’s bodies move. You can’t say this doesn’t cater to its audience.

This is, I believe, the first Shonen Gahosha title we’ve ever seen over here that is not from their seinen otaku magazine Young King OURS. They really only have a few demographics as a publisher: Young King/Ours readers, porn readers (their Young Comic titles), and Nekopanchi, the magazine this title runs in. I’m happy to see something from the latter, which, as has been noted, is a classic example of something that would never otherwise have been licensed in Japan. Recommended, even if you’re not a cat lover.

By Yasuiriosuke. Released in Japan as “Pink Shock!” by Max Corporation Tokyo, serialized in the magazine Comic Potpourri Club. Released in North America by Project-H Books.

(This review is of an explicit title, be warned.)

You’ll note there’s no picture of the cover in this review, and with good reason – it’s covered in nude women. Shocking Pink is the first in Digital Manga Publishing’s Project H line, a chance to see if folks will actually pay for pornography for guys the way they shell out if it’s BL for girls. They announced 3 titles to start with, and this is the first, a harem version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, finished in one volume.

The plot is actually quite busy for porn. Takaaki is a grumpy 20-something, working 3 different jobs to try and escape the debt his parents got into after their business failed. Then one day a busty pink-haired girl named Ryuubi shows up at his door, pays off all his debt, and announces that she’s the reincarnation of Gentoku Ryuubi from Romance of the Three Kingdoms. She’s here to take over the world, and wants Takaaki – who is apparently the reincarnation of Koumei Shokatsu – to be her chief strategist.

Of course, not much battling goes on. Our hero is reluctant to believe the words of a clearly insane women. However, once she strips and starts to seduce him, he ends up going along fairly quickly (if grumpily). We quickly meet her two compatriots, Kan’u and Chouhi, both of whom are different personality types and also quite willing to sex him up at the drop of a hat. And then we discover he also has a large-breasted childhood friend, Moutoku, who’s been tsundere for him for years but has never done anything about it. Is she going to just accept all these new women in his life?

The characters are right out of a typical hentai dating sim, though there are a few interesting variations. The adorable shy girl has a split personality that turns her into an evil sadist, a nice way to fit two types into one girl. And Moutoku’s sister not only doesn’t have sex with the lead male (she’s happily married, and does have sex with her husband, fear not), but also has an eyepatch and a backstory more interesting than most of the other girls. Eventually we do have a battle of sorts, as our heroine and her new harem face off against Moutoku and her family to see who gets to keep screwing Takaaki.

The sex is, with one exception, fairly tame, and also fairly consensual. The girls are all sex-starved, and Takaaki is the sort of guy who is reluctant to do anything until people are naked in front of him, then just goes along. The exception is during the competition, where Moutoku’s twin cousins kidnap Chouhi and plan to blackmail her into giving up. Of course, they had to pick the girl who has an evil split personality. She quickly turns the tables, ties the siblings up, and then forces them to have sex with each other. It’s the only non-consensual scene in the book, and also involved incest and urination, as well as the implication of mind-control (the two love what Chouhi does to them so much they become her slaves). I note they’re also supposed to be in “prep school”, and are clearly the youngest of the entire cast. However, for the sake of legality, they are of course over the age of 18.

In the end, this is what it is. 200-odd pages of nonstop sex with a thin plot wrapped around it. That said, it could have been much worse. This lacks the faceless gangrapes seen so often in many Japanese hentai manga and doujinshi, and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms plot, though never actually used well, at least attempts to make things interesting. In fact, the main argument against it is the heroine, a shallow Haruhi Suzumiya-alike who never gets to be remotely likeable, unlike almost every other woman in the book. Nevertheless, I have to say this book delivers what Project-H promised to give us.

By Ken Akamatsu. Released in Japan as “Mahou Sensei Negima!” by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

When I reviewed the previous volume of Negima, I noted that our heroes would start kicking ass in this next one. Which is true, but we do have about 50 pages before that happens. And in that 50 pages, a whole lot more sympathetic characters get killed off by our suddenly body-count happy author.

Of course, this is a shonen romantic comedy manga, despite occasional drama, and the people killed off are being turned into magical feathers and dissipated, not having huge bloody chunks cut out of them. Thus, it is not particularly a surprise when, just a few chapters later, it’s revealed we may be able to get all of them back. Still, for the chapters where it’s happening, it’s horrible to see. Yue’s rival Emily, Jerk with a Heart of Gold Tosaka, and even the giant Teddy Bear woman all get taken out. Least surprising but most devastating of all, Fate takes out Jack Rakan, who manages to briefly resurrect himself from the dead (because he’s just that awesome – no, really, that’s the canon explanation) and give our heroes a brief pep talk. Even Chisame ends up in tears.

Of course, not everyone takes this lying down. Yue’s reaction to Emily’s death is to turn into MAGICAL PSYCHO BERSERKER, and it works for about 10 seconds till Mana talks her down. Then there’s Nodoka. Remember a few months ago, when I posted my top 10 Negima moments, and hinted more would be in future books? This is the one I was thinking of. Nodoka, having seen two of her companions killed in front of her, snaps out of her funk and proceeds to kick the bad guy’s ass with her pactio powers, cleverness, and a few magical dodging skills she picked up in case stuff like this happened. Afterwards, the entire cast’s jaw drops when they hear about it. Normally when an author has the characters lampshade how awesome something was, it seems self-serving, but here, it’s more acknowledgement.

And so, after Chachamaru takes care of the giant Chtulhu monster with her new pactio weapon, we pause to briefly run away and regroup. Which is good, as Rakan noted something else that our heroes are finally clued in on (even if the reader has known for some time): the Asuna they’re with is a fake, and the reason the villains are able to do all this damage is they’re using the real Asuna’s power. So it’s time to interrogate the false Asuna… which is a bit of a problem, as the fake doesn’t know she’s a fake. Luckily, Negi has his secret weapon. (cough) Hey, when all you have is a hammer…

As the volume ends, Luna is no longer Asuna, and tells them what she knows (which isn’t a lot), without even needing enhanced interrogation (kudos to the Nibleys for that phrase, by the way). So Negi needs to power up again, and must call on imaginary Evangeline once more to draw out his inner beast… which may not be able to be put down after all this is over. This is the trouble with siding with dark magic.

Much as I enjoyed the volume as a story, I would be remiss if I did not point out that it was even more riddled with typos than usual. In previous Kodansha/Del Rey reviews, I asked who was editing the books and if they knew what continuity was; in this one, I wonder if they even use editors at all anymore, or just have the translators edit their own work. “Nodoka56…” was particularly egregious. It also seems to be missing the character commentary on Asuna. I realize that there was a rush to get out Negima every 2 months to catch up after the hiatus, but come on, shoddy product does not help you at all, Kodansha.

That said, another great volume of Negima, and I do look forward to seeing how this battle continues to play out. Surely Akamatsu can’t introduce anything more surprising than what we’ve already had…