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Perfect World, Vol. 1

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By Rie Aruga. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Kiss. Released in North America digitally by Kodansha Comics. Translated by Rachel Murakawa.

We’ve been getting a giant pile of digital-only titles for the last several months, and it can be very difficult to keep up. But the benefit is that we’re getting titles that would not normally get the time of day over here. A good example is this manga which runs in Kodansha’s josei magazine Kiss, involving a young woman who runs into her old high school crush, who’s now in a wheelchair after an accident. Five years ago this is probably the sort of title that I would be tweeting about and saying “see, this sort of thing is what they should be putting out!”. And now they are. And for the most part it’s a good decision, as this is an excellent, thoughtful and romantic manga. The female lead is perhaps a bit too idealized, but when you’re writing a josei romance for young woman about the same age as the heroine, you’re going to accept that.

Kawana is an aspiring interior decorator. One day at a business lunch she runs into Ayukawa, who is an architect from the firm they’re doing business with. He was her old high school crush, and a fantastic basketball player. Much to her surprise, he’s now in a wheelchair. As they begin to work together on projects and reconnect, she starts to realize the problems that need to be overcome for Ayukawa in day-to-day life, as well as the casual denial of ease of access that a lot of other folks who use wheelchairs have. The other problem is that she’s falling for him all over again, and while he’s nice and pleasant enough he’s putting up quite a wall preventing things from going any further, telling her one or two things about his life now (such as incontinence) that might make her pull back. I’m not even sure he does this consciously. But, of course, she is made of sterner stuff.

As I noted above, Kawana is a sweet and likeable heroine, but I sometimes found her going a bit above and beyond – after seeing Ayukawa and his ex-girlfriend have a bittersweet discussion about her upcoming wedding to someone else, she immediately whisks him off to the wedding anyway, because he needs closure. I don’t doubt he does, but this felt a bit rude. For the most part, though, the manga does an excellent job of balancing out the cute romance between the two leads and showing the daily life of a paraplegic, with all the difficulty that this entails, including a higher risk of kidney issues, and bedsores that you don’t notice until they get infected. We also see them interacting with a teenager, who was also a basketball player who now has to be in a wheelchair (and who also has a nice, patient girlfriend) so that Ayukawa can show off a wheelchair basketball league and tell the teen (and the reader) that there is still fun to be had.

The book had a larger number of endnotes to it, with more explanation of things that “manga fans” would already know. I suspect Kodansha knows this might sell well to an outside audience who doesn’t normally read manga. I agree. It’s not perfect, but I am absolutely ready to read more about this world.

Skip Beat, Vol. 40 by Yoshiki Nakamura

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Skip Beat Volume 40 by Yoshiki Nakamura

The cover of this volume made me happy, because it has been a little while since Kyoko and Moko were hanging out together! As a consequence this volume is decidedly light on Ren, but as always there are trade-offs and compromises in both life and manga. Skip Beat is such a long-running series that is so well-done that even when plot elements are used over and over again I find myself looking forward to what new spin Nakamura will put on the situation. When I realized that there would be a big audition coming up, I was curious to see how Kyoko would handle it with all the progress she’s been making to become more sure of herself and her acting.

Kyoko and Moko are up for a part in a ninja-related series, so there’s an impressive training montage where they have to visit a master of stage fighting and learn all the technique they need to be believable on the screen. The drama about the audition is amped up even more when Kyoko learns that she’s competing for the part against one of Ren’s former co-stars. An additional element of mystery is layered on with the return of Koenji, who has a psychosomatic illness after being in a bad accident. Kyoko heads into auditions with Ren’s manager on her side as well. Nakamura does a great job setting up a variety of story elements with a new beginning, making Skip Beat! still feel fresh 40 volumes in.

I Saved Too Many Girls and Caused the Apocalypse, Vol. 7

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By Namekojirushi and Nao Watanuki. Released in Japan as “Ore ga Heroine o Tasukesugite Sekai ga Little Mokushiroku!?” by Hobby Japan. Released in North America digitally by J-Novel Club. Translated by Adam Lensenmayer.

I was somewhat taken by surprise by the ending to this volume, as I kept reading and thinking “shouldn’t things be wrapping up soon?” It wasn’t until I got right near the end that I realized this would be Little Apocalypse’s first two-parter, something that should have been mnre obvious given this book features four heroines but only two of them are on the cover. It might be frustrating to wait till the 8th book too, as this volume actually ended up being one of the strongest in the series to date. The author has realized there’s only so far he can go with parody, and has moved on to deconstruction, which is a far richer vein. He’s also gotten better at juggling the heroines – sure, some are still missing or deliberately left out, but the balance we get here shows he’s thinking “who needs more attention?”, so Harissa gets a larger role here, as does Tsumiki. The series is beginning to mature… as much as a series like this can.

As I said, we stack up four different heroines in this book, and they are of a wide variety: an idol singer who’s getting tired of the grind; a psychic (which is a much broader term in Japan than it is here) on the run from a yakuza-like psychic gang; a (seeming) former hero sealed in the depths of an alien dungeon; and a sylpheed (wind fairy) dealing with a zombie infestation. It’s a tall order even for someone like Rekka. Fortunately, his current harem is not at war with each other (that’s supposedly in the future), and he is thus able to use them as sort of a mobile army. Thus, he and a team of girls go off to try to solve one issue, and Hibiki and another group try to work on the psychic problem. I really liked this, and enjoy that (for the most part) there’s not really much rivalry between the girls when serious events are happening. We also get lampshaded how weird everyone is when Rekka explains who he is to the idol and is surprised she DOESN’T know about magic.

The other highlight of the book is a bit of a spoiler, but I want to discuss it anyway: what happens when Rekka fails? And how do we define failure? The sylpheed rejects Rekka because her sister (who we saw in the prologue) is already dead – she died before Rekka even arrived in her world. As R points out, that doesn’t mean that the story is over, and Rekka is working on another aspect of it by trying to fix the zombie thing. But Rekka fixing the stories usually ends with everyone happy (and happily in love with Rekka), and that doesn’t seem like it’s going to work out this time around. Now yes, I am very familiar with the genre, and would not be too surprised if a magical sister-saving solution popped up in Book 8. But it’s still a good question to ask: what if Rekka fails? Can he deal with the aftermath of NOT saving someone’s story?

The book ends with everyone in trouble, and we’ve got to wait a bit till the next one. But Little Apocalypse in general has been qa quick, light, fluffy read. It’s nice to see it gain a bit of added depth.

A First Look at Starving Anonymous

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Have you been checking out Kodansha Comics’ digital-only and digital-first releases? I have, and I love this initiative: it lets me sample dozens of series that might otherwise never see the light of day in North America. Rugby manga. Karuta manga. Really weird horror manga. Medical drama. Josei. As you might expect, there’s a good reason why no one was clamoring to bring out print editions of, say, Deathtopia, but lurking among the pedestrian, the awful, and the amateurish are gems such as Dragon Head, PTSD Radio, Shojo FIGHT! and Tokyo Tarareba Girls. This week, I previewed one of Kodansha’s most recent digital offerings, Starving Anonymous, which, according to Kodansha’s editorial staff, is “an intense dystopian horror thriller in the apocalyptic vein of Dragon Head and Attack on Titan, from the team that brought you zombie actioner Fort of Apocalypse.”

That’s not a bad description of Starving Anonymous; if you can imagine an Eli Roth remake of Soylent Green in all its gory, sadistic intensity, you’ll have some idea of what it’s like to read Yuu Kuraishi and Kazu Inabe’s latest effort. Like the 1973 Charlton Heston film, Starving Anonymous takes place in a heat-ravaged future where supplies are scarce, birth rates are plummeting, and people are crowded into fewer and fewer cities. The series’ protagonist is I’e, a normal high school student whose life is violently upended when he’s snatched off a bus and deposited at an enormous industrial facility where the main product is — you guessed it — people.

A concept this potentially repulsive lives or dies by the thoughtfulness of the execution, and it’s here where Kuraishi and Inabe stumble. The writing is efficient but artless, establishing the direness of the world’s condition through news flashes and pointed conversations but revealing little about I’e; he’s more a placeholder than a character, a collection of reaction shots in search of a personality. The artwork, by contrast, varies from slickly generic — Tokyo apparently looks the same 50 years from now — to willfully ugly; once inside the factory, Inabe draws rooms and conveyor belts filled with distended bodies, rendering every roll of fat and bulging eye in fetishistic detail. If Kuraishi and Inabe were trying to make a point about the ethics of factory farming, or the evils of overconsumption, that message is quickly shoved aside in favor of a more conventional escape-from-prison plot in which I’e and a group of young, healthy rebels fight their way to the outside. Nothing in the first chapter suggested that Starving Anonymous has anything on its mind other than characters doing and seeing horrible stuff, so I’ll be passing on this one.

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

New Game!, Vol. 1

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By Shotaro Tokuno. Released in Japan by Houbunsha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Manga Time Kirara Carat. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Jenny McKeon. Adapted by Jamal Joseph, Jr.

I have joked before about the tendency of trends in the Japanese manga and light novel industry, and over here in North America as well. The piles of vampire manga, the buttloads of zombie manga, the oddly weird Alice in Wonderland deconstruction mangas, etc. But one that has been around forever, and likely will be long into the future, is “a group of cute girls do cute and funny stuff in a 4-koma”, aka the Azumanga Daioh clone. The series are of various types – mostly in school, but some (like this one) in a workplace, and sometimes there may be a token man. But for the most part, that describes an endless number of series that have essentially the same premise and audience, and generally also succeed about the same way – “that was cute”. They also sometimes have yuri subtext, though that isn’t a requirement. It even has its own magazine devoted to the genre, Manga Time Kirara Carat. And now we have New Game!.

New Game! stars Chiyo-chan… sorry, Aoba, who looks like she’s a 7th grader but has actually graduated high school and headed into the workforce – in this case, a game company, where she’s starting off designing characters. The rest of the team consists of Kou, the “ladette” sort of woman who’s the main character designer; Rin, the art director and team mom who seems to have an unrequited crush on Kou; Hifumi (character design), who is painfully shy but also rather cute (and apparently a heavy drinker); Yun (also character design), who I didn’t get much of an impression of except she has a heavy accent; and Hajime (motion), who seems overearnest and a bit hyperactive. The bulk of the first volume shows us Aoba fitting into the team, learning how they do things, and designing background NPCs for the fantasy RPG they’re working on.

New Game! is cute. I enjoyed it as I read it. That said, a lot of the actual humor has difficulty sticking in your head after you move on. The one joke I recall is also, oddly, the most out of character, when Kou amuses herself by having Aoba finish the design of a character that’s clearly based on herself (which Aoba doesn’t realize), who is an NPC who’s there to start the plot and then get killed, much to Aoba’s horror. Apart from that, there’s a few workplace gags that touch on the insane hours these jobs entail, and some character development showing Aoba settling in but still being somewhat hapless. As I noted above, Rin seems to have a crush on Kou, and this occasionally comes up, mostly when she’s frustrated that Kou isn’t picking up on it. It’s all standard stuff, but I did find it quite enjoyable. I will note that, once again, the decision to translate a heavy Kansai (I’m assuming) accent as something out of the ordinary doesn’t always work well. Yun saying “Wot’s all this, then?” and calling someone a “tosser” took me right out of the manga and made me notice the effort, which it shouldn’t.

Despite having forgotten much of the manga a few minutes after reading it, I was pleasantly amused enough that I’ll get the next book. If you enjoy cute girls doing cute things with no plot to speak of, New Game! is an easy buy.

Pick of the Week: Manga a Go Go!

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

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

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

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

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

Bookshelf Briefs 3/26/18

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Blue Morning, Vol. 7 | By Shoko Hidaka | SuBLime – Encouraged by Akihito to pursue his own individual ambitions for once, Katsuragi becomes determined to save the workers at the spinning mill he briefly had charge of, and most of this volume depicts his plans to wrest control of the mill from a powerful ally without jeoparding said ally’s support of Akihito. It’s interesting, but of course the most important thing is Katsuragi finding something he really wants to do that does not involve serving the Kuze family. After a volume that’s 95% chaste, he finally travels to the remote villa where Akihito is recuperating and, okay, yes, they totally get it on. It’s not just smut, though; there is so much love between these men. Mutual respect, the sincere wish for other to find happiness and fulfillment… Blue Morning continues to be something special. – Michelle Smith

DNA Doesn’t Tell Us, Vol. 1 | By Mintarou | Seven Seas – Now that Monster Girls have become the new trend, it’s perhaps inevitable that we’ll get Animal Girls along with it. And so we get this series, which has animals spontaneously turning into human girls for no real reason. (Yes, always girls.) They’re still basically animals, though, so they go to a school to learn how to be human. This first volume follows the “tame” animals through the eyes of Youko, a Bighorn Sheep who is a bit more together and sensible than the rest of her goofy classmates. This edges towards the ‘fanservicey’ edge of the spectrum, but is essentially harmless, and didn’t really bother me too much. That said, I’d only recommend it to fans of animal girls—there’s nothing beyond that. – Sean Gaffney

Dragon Half, Vol. 1 | By Ryusuke Mita | Seven Seas – Before reading the first Dragon Half omnibus, I only knew the series by name, mostly due to the fans of the anime adaptation from the early 1990s. The manga itself was originally serialized between 1988 and 1994. Dragon Half is a ridiculous, absurd, and incredibly silly blast from the past. As a gag manga heavily inspired by fantasy and role-playing games, the series has its fair share of powerful, scantily clad women, including the titular half-dragon Mink. The daughter of a red dragon and a famous swordsman, Mink is on a quest to become human so that she can win the love of the dragonslayer (and teen idol), Dick Saucer. While I was amused from the very beginning, it wasn’t until about halfway through the omnibus that Mita’s sense of humor really started to click with me. The comedy can be a little hit-or-miss, but at it’s best, Dragon Half is hilarious. – Ash Brown

The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún, Vol. 4 | By Nagabe | Seven Seas – There are many scenes in this volume of The Girl from the Other Side that elicit a pang of empathy. There’s Shiva, feeling so bad for lying to Auntie about having been touched by an Outsider. There’s Auntie, gradually losing her memory of her humanity and revealing to Teacher that the worst part about the curse is that after it fully takes hold the afflicted can’t die, putting a new spin on humans killing those who are only suspected of having been exposed. And there’s Teacher, watching Shiva and Auntie together and concluding that the girl no longer needs him, that it’d make no difference if he was around or not, and that perhaps he’s harming her by trying to keep her close. At least Shiva has other ideas about that, but it’s hard to see how a happy ending is going to be possible for this story. – Michelle Smith

Horimiya, Vol. 10 | By Hero and Daisuke Hagiwara | Yen Press – We don’t seem any closer to wrapping up, but there is a bit more forward progress here, though anyone expecting a straightforward answer to last volume’s proposal may be disappointed. Instead, the reader can enjoy seeing the over-serious Sengoku dealing with the pangs of love, and his conversation with Remi is also something of a proposal in a way, spoken through the plots of books. I enjoyed it. There’s also a nice helping of humor here, as we see Sengoku’s dad was friends with the Horis—and is not fond of that fact. We also see Hori’s dad with his hair up, and I straight up did not recognize him at first. We seem to be back on an upswing, and I’m looking forward to more. – Sean Gaffney

Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Four-Panel Comic: Days of Goddess | By Masaya Takamura and Fujino Omori | Yen Press – These sorts of spinoffs are all over the place in Japan, but we rarely see them over here. It’s exactly what you’d expect—the DanMachi story told as 4-koma gags with the cast in superdeformed mode. Since it’s “Days of Goddess,” we follow Hestia more than Bell, as she struggles to get by despite only having one follower. It’s sort of nostalgic given how far the series has come since then. The other early cast members appear as well, though given Ais’ running gag of always eating, you’ll wonder if the author confused her with Saber. There’s another volume in the fall—twice a year seems about right for this cute and funny spinoff. – Sean Gaffney

Kemono Friends: Welcome to Japari Park!| By Fly and Kemono Friends Project | Yen Press – Sadly, this is one of those series where the real-life travails of the franchise prove to be far more interesting than the manga that came out of it. Based on an unsuccessful mobile game that got an anime that was VERY successful… until it blew up… the manga concerns a young woman named Nene, who is hired to essentially be a zookeeper for various young animal girls who are able to talk to humans and are basically eccentric young women with animal characteristics. Cute ensues. This volume contains both volumes of the original series, and as such wears out its welcome quite fast—series this fluffy should not be omnibuses. If you really like Kemono Friends, get this. – Sean Gaffney

Land of the Lustrous, Vol. 5 | By Haruko Ichikawa | Kodansha Comics – Although the narrative as a whole remains somewhat ambiguous, Land of the Lustrous continues to be one of the most visually striking series currently being released in English. With world-building and character introductions happening in fits and starts, the manga tends to favor mood and style over an obvious, logical narrative, but the melancholic atmosphere that Ichikawa has created with the manga is a compelling one. There is an intensity of emotion that makes it feel as though the gems’ psyches are as precariously close to shattering as their physical manifestations. Phos, the manga’s lead, has suffered immense trauma over the course of the series and has transformed dramatically as a result. However, as more is revealed about the characters and world, it becomes clear that Phos isn’t the only one hiding both secrets and pain. I’m still incredibly intrigued by Land of the Lustrous. – Ash Brown

Nameless Asterism, Vol. 1 | By Kina Kobayashi | Seven Seas – The premise of this sweet but deliberately frustrating series is that all of the main cast are in unrequited love with someone else in the main cast, and none of it ever goes anywhere. As such, it can be a bit teeth-grinding to see everyone confess over and over in their head but not do anything. A lot of the unrequited relationships are between girls, which explains some of the angst—indeed, one of the girls who goes on about all the boys she dates and talks about how that’s “normal, right” is possibly in the most transparent closet I’ve ever seen in any media. It’s decently written, and the kids are all likeable, but I have to admit that the volume did not really do anything for me. Still, if you like frustrating yuri. – Sean Gaffney

The Young Master’s Revenge, Vol. 1 | By Meca Tanaka| Viz Media – An unfortunate trend of most Meca Tanaka series that I read is that I enjoy them while also having very little to say about them, and that’s the case here. The premise is also remarkably similar to Masamune-kun’s Revenge, another series licensed over here, but fortunately the core audience are almost total opposites. Our hero was traumatized by an unthinking childhood friend when he was a kid. He returns, as a gorgeous rich teen, to make her fall for him and then dump her, as a somewhat petty revenge. Sadly, she’s no longer rich. Also sadly, she’s cute, plucky and adorable, and he rapidly finds himself falling for her for real. This fits the Shojo Beat line admirably, though I wasn’t wowed. – Sean Gaffney

Obsessions of an Otome Gamer: Elementary School Years

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By Natsu and Shoyu. Released in Japan as “Ongaku de Otome wa Sukuenai” by the author on the Syosetu website. Released in North America digitally by Cross Infinite World. Translated by Charis Messier.

I’d never really read a Cross Infinite World novel before now. They specialize in both novels geared towards young women and also going directly through the author, i.e. most of the books published were published on the Syosetsu original fiction website, or various equivalents, rather than going through a publisher. (That said, the author has had published work as well.) But nothing had really caught my attention until the announcement of this series. I love visual novel-style storytelling, and I love classical music, so I was delighted to see the two combined. As I started to read the book, I was expecting things to be very light and fluffy, with the occasional warped sense of humor. I was surprised at several plot and character choices the book made, though. I was even more surprised by a plot twist that I will do my best not to spoil (yes, really) about one-third in. And I was not surprised but a bit taken aback by the length. This book is HUGE.

One thing that surprised me was the decision to have the entire book take place when our reincarnated heroine, Mashiro, is between the ages of seven and twelve, something that I blame on the light and hard to read font on the front cover, which meant I missed the subtitle. She’s the reincarnation of Rika, a young woman who was obsessed with an insanely difficult otome game called Hear My Heart, where you not only had to make the right romantic choices with regards to the two guys (one outgoing and arrogant, one sullen and introverted), but you also had to compose music – and if the music wasn’t good enough, you failed. That’s a high bar to clear. She then sees a poster advertising a remake of the game… and falls into an open manhole and dies. (This would be the warped sense of humor I mentioned above.) As Mashiro, she recalls her previous life when she’s seven years old and just your average elementary school girl who folds origami of Angkor Wat in her spare time. Now she’s in the game world, and has met Kou and Sou, the two heroes, as young boys. But is the game world what she really wants from life?

While Mashiro is eighteen years old in her head (at times – it’s lampshaded that this isn’t consistent, and is actually an important plot point), she and the two boys are young kids, and despite the occasional schoolkid flirtation, the book maintains those boundaries. Of course, this doesn’t mean we don’t get a heartfelt confession or two, but you may relax and not have to worry about kiddie makeouts. There’s also a heavy emphasis on classical music and piano, as Mashiro burns with a sudden desire to learn the piano, at first because she wants to meet the guy she liked from the game, but her love rapidly becomes genuine and all-consuming. The book helpfully tells us the names of the pieces she’s working on, and you could make an excellent Spotify playlist if you liked. Mashiro is a prodigy, though she may not be aware of it. And there’s also that spoiler, which revolves around her best friend Kon, who is Kou’s sister – and also reincarnated into this world from a previous one. Mashiro only has memories of the first version of the game. Kon played the remake, but not all of it. Is she really what she seems? And can Mashiro really avoid being a heroine?

The writing and plotting can get immensely wordy at times – I understand this was actually edited down from the original text, but it’s still super long, about twice the size of your average light novel. That said, I never found myself counting pages till it was over. Mashiro is a fun heroine, savvy when needed, clueless also when needed. There’s also a surprisingly deep look at how reincarnation into another world would work when you retain some of your own memories. The book ends with Mashiro graduating and moving on to Middle School, which I imagine will take up Book 2 of the series. If you’re looking for a nice romantic book with hidden depths, or love shoujo and visual novels, this is a fantastic read.

Sweet Blue Flowers, Vol 1

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Sweet Blue Flowers Volume 1 by Takako Shimura

The Viz signature line might not have quite as much hype as it did when it first launched, but it is nice to see it reserved for titles that deserve special treatment, like Sweet Blue Flowers. I had high expectations for this title based on Takako Shimura’s sensitivity and artistry in her other series Wandering Son, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Sweet Blue Flowers starts by showing old friends reconnecting. Akira Okudaira meets Fumi Manjome on her way to school, and the girls fend off train gropers together. They head off to different schools, where Fumi deals with her crippling shyness, and Akira has an easier time fitting in. Akira banters with her family about the possibility of bringing home a girlfriend from her all-girls high school. The girls’ mothers reconnect and they realize that they were kindergarten friend. Back then, Akira served as Fumi’s protector when dealing with all the trials and tribulations of childhood.

As the story unfolded in this manga, I was struck with the economy of Shimura’s storytelling, and how small moments or single panels are filled with significance. Fumi is upset about her cousin’s marriage to an extent that seems slightly beyond the norm, even for a girl who has retained some of her childhood tendency to burst into tears as an adolescent. Shimura captures the hazards of teen girls taking public transportation in a short panel sequence that focuses on a disembodied reaching hand and Akira’s shocked facial expression. Shimura is also wonderful at scattering plot points throughout the manga in a way that makes the narrative feel like it just evolves naturally from the daily lives of the characters. Fumi’s relationship with her cousin is mentioned more as the book unfolds, as Fumi becomes involved with the dashing Yasuko, who takes on the role of Heathcliff in a production of Wuthering Heights.

Akira is steadfastly supportive, and as the manga unfolds Sweet Blue Flowers’ slice of life approach to exploring friendship and romance draws the reader in. Shimura’s subtle storytelling and sensitivity towards character development makes reading this manga a pleasure. I’m disappointed with myself that I took so long to finally read this volume!

Dragon Half, Vol. 1

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By Ryusuke Mita. Released in Japan as two separate volumes by Fujimi Shobo, serialized in the magazine Dragon Magazine. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Andrew Cunningham. Adapted by David Lumsdom.

In another world, this sort of title would have been licensed around the time it came out, back in the late 1980s/mid-1990s, when its art style and sort of humor were far more common and appreciated, and the anime had become a cult classic due to its over the top humor and pacing. Of course, back in 1994 or so when the Dragon Half OAVs came out, and the manga had just finished its run, the “manga scene” did not really exist as such – we’re talking a time when Mai the Psychic Girl was the hot thing, and Ranma 1/2 was still in 32-page pamphlet form. Still, what goes around comes around, and a lot of the cliches that were ripe for mocking in the late 80s RPG/fantasy scene are still ripe for mocking. And thus, despite artstyle and personalities that remind me a bit of Urusei Yatsura, Dragon Half manages to be a heck of a lot of fun, which is surprising given that humor titles tend to wear out faster in omnibus format.

I must say, the cover does the title no favors – Mink is a lot more dynamic than the passive little girl figure we see there. She’s the daughter of a human adventurer and a dragon, who can helpfully turn human when she wants to. As such, Mink has certain advantages like super strength and flight, but also has teenage girl obsessions, such as the teen idol (and also adventurer) Dick Saucer. (Yes, he’s named Dick Saucer in Japanese.) Unfortunately, Mink is half-dragon, and Dick is dedicated to killing dragons. Poor Mink! Can her feelings ever get through to him? Well, no, but nobody really cares, because the plot is just an excuse for Mink and her two friends (the airhead “bi-curious” Lufa and the childish always-armored Pia) to go around having adventures and making fun of everything that 80s RPGs and bad fantasy novels had to offer.

Everything in Dragon Half is subservient to the humor – and there are a lot of laughs, all of the “broad comedy” variety. If you’re looking for subtlety, look elsewhere, but if people getting hit with rocks is your thing, you’re in the right place. Surprisingly, Mink ends up being the “straight man” for much of the volume, using her semi-superpowers to bail her foolish friend out of trouble (yes, friend – Pia usually just goes along with things, but Rufa is actively harmful most of the time). She’s be in danger if the villains were any threat at all, but from the evil princess who’s really a slime in disguise to the soldier who brags that the tiny size of his brain is an advantage, Mink can usually do pretty well for herself. Towards the end of the volume (as the author notes) there are one or two stories that actually have a semi-serious tone, but fortunately they fit in pretty well, and more jokes are just around the corner.

This is the first of three omnibuses schedules, and is filled to the brim with extras such as color pages, promotional artwork, and author commentary. It’s a good title if you like humor, a great title if you enjoy mocking old-school games, and essential if you’re nostalgic for the late 80s-early 90s style of manga art and characterization.