Sean Gaffney

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…

By Takao Saito. Released in Japan by LEED Publishing, serialized via Shogakukan in the magazine Big Comic Special. Released in the United States by LEED Publishing on the JManga website.

(Note: Despite saying Vol. 1 on the JManga site, I believe the series is complete in one volume.)

The main player involved so far in JManga’s site has been Futabasha, but there are several other companies who also have made previously unseen content available. LEED Publishing was created by Takao Saito in the early 1970s to market his manga empire, which was already monumentally successful due to his action thriller Golgo 13. I’m not certain how many of his titles are done by Saito himself and how many are his huge team of artists – he’s sort of the Jim Davis of Japan, if Garfield was a stone-faced assassin, of course. (Yes, I’ve read that fanfic.)

This particular title, Kitty Hawker, dates from the mid-1990s. It ran sporadically from 1995-1998 in the magazine Big Comic Special, and is the story of Oki, a Japanese hotshot pilot who gets stranded in the United States after he accidentally breaks an incredibly expensive flight simulator due to his hotshot antics. Forced to take on jobs so he can pay off his debt and return home to his wife and child, he signs on with a tiny airport in Texas, and takes on dangerous political jobs that no sane pilot would ever take on. All the while, of course, while enduring the casual racism and looks of hatred from his immediate superiors (though he does also gain some friends as well).

Oki looks a lot like Golgo 13 (not a huge surprise – Saito’s heroes tend to have similar features), but certainly doesn’t act like him, and it took me a while to get used to him actually talking and having conversations, not to mention showing emotion. Oki is likeable enough to be a hero, but lacks Golgo 13’s super-perfection – Oki’s cockiness and tendency to mouth off to people get him in trouble quite a bit. As for the other characters, everyone in the manga is painted with rather broad strokes – there’s enough depth to keep you reading, but this is in no way a manga that lives and dies by its characters.

What it is is another action thriller, with added political content. Oki gets a job that needs to be done hush-hush, has massive political implications, and will require superhuman flying skills. And he manages to pull it off, usually with the help of his copilot and mechanic Bud. Again, we get stock characters from Action Thriller 101 here: the sexy and mysterious government agent, the nervous CIA guy who hinders more than he helps, and of course the sexy Latin American native who has an affair with the aforementioned Bud. (Oki is married, and though occasionally remarking on the attractiveness of his clients, does not stray.)

So, what you see is what you get here: a political thriller with lots of wordy dialogue followed by lots of awesome scenes of planes doing difficult to impossible stuff, all to save the world. By the end of this volume, Oki has come to terms with his exile, and tells his wife that he’ll be staying a little longer. Kitty Hawker may appeal to those who like old Westerns – it has much the same feel. Very little pretension or attempts to be anything more than a good yarn.

By Ryou Ryumon and Kouji Megumi. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Weekly Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

Take a typical John le Carré novel, only have it star a bunch of Japanese high school students, and you might come close to what’s going on in Bloody Monday. This sort of story demands a certain suspension of disbelief (indeed, this particular story might need an entire suspension bridge for your disbelief), but once you get past that and accept the premise, there’s a lot of fun stuff to be found here.

The basic premise has our hero Takagi, who is an ordinary high school student – except he has absolute world-class hacking abilities, and his father appears to be a super-spy. But other than that? He goes to class, he worries about his sister, who apparently is hospitalized often, and he spends his spare time decrypting mysterious files that are vital to national security. His friends (who, at the start of this, are mostly unaware of his talents) are a typical shonen bunch: handsome laid-back best friend, tsundere childhood female friend, shy girl who probably has a crush on him, and geeky guy.

Unfortunately, his worlds are about to intersect. There’s a virus going around that makes folks cough up blood, collapse and die, and it would seem to be engineered by a nasty enemy agent (that’s her on the cover in her lingerie)… who now shows up at Takagi’s school as the new teacher, and gives off a lovely aura of ‘I am not an enemy spy honest’ for the rest of the book. What’s more, his father has disappeared after calling to tell him “Bloody Monday” (how cryptic… if it weren’t the title), and he’s getting special deliveries of boxed agents sent to defend him from mysterious foes.

Much of this volume is simply setting up the premise of the series, so things move pretty slowly at first. Takagi and his friend Otoya are the only ones who we really get to know, though we also get a nice impression of Takagi’s father before he is forced to leave the manga for reasons of plot. Takagi seems a bit too perfect, so I actually liked them undercutting this by having him reveal everything he knows to his friends… and the new teacher who mysteriously arrived there recently. Hey, she’s an authority figure! And stacked! I imagine as the series goes on this lack of precaution will become less common.

I was reminded of last year’s aborted Del Rey series Code: Breaker a bit with the style of this manga, which is very much in the thriller style. It may seem startling that it runs in Shonen Magazine, given the children coughing up blood and dying, as well as the enemy agent in her underwear, but honestly the magazine has always been like that – it’s the most fanservicey of the three, and also sometimes hardest to pin down in terms of genre.

In the meantime, we have a series that I suspect we won’t really know how good it is until three or four volumes in. Not that there’s anything really wrong with this first volume, but it’s much like reading Chapter 1 of a le Carré novel, then having to wait two months to read Volume 2. This may be a series to collect in batches.

By Yumi Unita. Released in Japan as “Usagi Drop” by Shodensha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Feel Young. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Another volume of Bunny Drop, and another volume where we see Daikichi struggle with the joys and stresses of being a single dad. What’s more, life doesn’t stop just because you’re having difficulty keeping up. Will he be able to cope on his own?

I thought the start of the book was easily the strongest, with two chapters dealing with Daikichi’s cousin Haruko leaving her home for a bit and taking her daughter over to live with him and Rin. Daikichi is not generally a talkative and inquisitive person, so while we see him thinking about the awkwardness this creates, or wondering about what Haruko is going through, there’s very little actually said. The author’s strengths are frequently in the unsaid and absent, and although Haruko does reunite with her husband here, we get the feeling that her struggles will continue.

Honestly, Daikichi seems to have it pretty easy by now, even if he may not be aware of it. Rin’s a good kid who generally does what she’s told (we once again see Kouki’s still unnamed mother stressing out about getting constant meetings with the teacher), and even a bad cold doesn’t really put her down that much. She does get a few faults, such as her lack of physical ability… but even that’s dealt with here with the jump rope training, and she manages to overcome it a bit in a nice, heartwarming moment.

I will admit that the heartwarming moments are nice, but I could do with some forward plot motion. Rin’s mother wasn’t in this volume at all, and I’ve come to suspect that any potential romance between Daikichi and Kouki’s mother will mostly be hypothetical. What this means is that we get a volume that is, after the first two chapters, more ‘adorable kid raised by goofy yet nice dad’ stories. It’s perfect for Feel Young, the josei magazine it runs in, and likely worked better in monthly installments, but I admit I am starting to get weary of it.

That said, once again I get the feeling that I am not the audience for this series, and that forward movement of the plot is not the point. ‘The day passes, something else happens’ is a very common genre in Japan, especially in manga with children, and even though Daikichi is our viewpoint character here, that’s exactly what we get. We sympathize with him, grow frustrated sometimes, but mostly we’re watching Rin grow up alongside him. And while Rin may not have quite enough faults, she’s certainly cute as a button. Let’s see if Volume 5 can bring something new to the table, though.

(No spoilers in the comments, by the way. They will be deleted.)

By Kenjiro Hata. Released in Japan as “Hayate no Gotoku!” by Shogakukan, serialization ongoing in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz.

We have arrived at the end of “The End Of The World” arc, and just as predicted, things quickly turn sour. This is not a fairy tale with a happy ending, but a story of two children getting broken, one by supernatural happenstance, the other by his own “loving” parents. Hata has said he had this arc planned nearly from the start, but it kept getting put off. My guess is Sunday’s editors wanted to wait till the series was popular enough that it could withstand 10 chapters that are nothing whatsoever like what has come before it.

These three final chapters to the arc are heartbreaking. I’ve gone on about Hayate’s parents before, so won’t do so now (they’re loathsome monsters, FYI). The rift between Hayate and Athena, though, is that of two six-year-olds who find that sometimes you say things you can’t take back. We don’t know exactly what happened to Athena’s parents, though certainly we can guess based on her reaction here. And so they fight (and Athena seems to be possessed by evil at some point), and she tells Hayate to leave. Which he does. And again, words you can’t take back. There’s a nice mirror of both children looking up desperately to hope the other has returned, only to find cold reality instead.

We have no idea how Athena left the castle, but we do get Hayate’s aftermath – and we also meet his brother! Yes, a family member of Hayate’s who is not hateful and deceptive. While you’re left wondering why his brother leaves Hayate with those parents, his advice is certainly good… though it comes a little too late. And so Hayate is resolved to become the best he can be, but also closes off his heart to a certain degree. He’s also resolved, if he ever meets Athena again, to tell her that she was right and he was wrong, at least in regards to his parents.

And hey, what a coincidence! Athena is now 10 years older, and in Athens! And dressed entirely in black – not suspicious at all! But I doubt we’ll see her again. After all, it’s not like the entire cast is going to wind up in Greece anytime soon…

So we have the rest of the volume, which is devoted to the entire cast, in various ways, ending up on a holiday in Greece. We’re not there yet, of course, so it’s also an excuse to catch up with characters shoved to the side by the enormous Hayate/Athena story. (Nagi and Maria lampshade this, in one of the funnier parts of the book.) Maria in particular gets a rare focus here, as she goes on a pretend date with Hayate, who is being stalked by a mysterious girl who is obsessed with him and wants him dead. (Well, no, not really.) They’re cute together, but you’re reminded that Maria still sometimes sees Hayate as a toy to dress up rather than as an actual male – she’s far less comfortable when reminded of that.

And then there’s Ayumu and Hinagiku, who continue to bond here – in fact, Hina makes a big sacrifice in order to advance her cause in a contest (the winner of which gets two tickets to Athena – subtlety went back out the window once Athena left the manga, in case you weren’t aware). And Nagi seems to be starting to learn the value of money – very slowly. And of course, there’s Fumi, who in a manga composed entirely of eccentrics manages to outdo them all – her answer for the ‘what is a fire station symbol’ question makes your jaw drop.

Casual readers will get nothing out of this, as it’s entirely dependent on knowing the characters. But longtime Hayate readers will enjoy it, and may be happy we’re back to the standard comedic antics after a long hiatus of drama. And Volume 19 is only 5 months away, rather than 6! Progress!