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H. P. Lovecraft’s The Hound and Other Stories

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By Gou Tanabe. Released in Japan by Enterbrain, serialized in the magazine Comic Beam. Released in North America by Dark Horse Comics. Translated by Zack Davisson.

This is the first in a series of Lovecraft adaptations that are still being done in the pages of Enterbrain’s oddball magazine Comic Beam, home of Emma, Thermae Romae, and other hard-to-classify series. The mangaka, Tanabe Gou, has specialized in adapting horror titles to the comics page, and just reading a few pages into this volume will show you that he knows his stuff. This volume collects three of Lovecraft’s more well-known short stories and turns them into fairly gripping horror manga, with plenty of the author’s tortured, overdone prose, but not so much that you want to stop reading (as I frequently do with Lovecraft). Thankfully, the nameless horrors in these particular stories also don’t feature Lovecraft’s awful brand of racism that has led fans to back away from him a bit in modern times. You can enjoy them for what they are: scary stuff with no reasonable explanation.

We begin with “The Temple”, which takes place in WWII – something which may puzzle readers, as the story was written in the 1920s. The ‘about the author’ at the end mentions that Tanabe moved the action up a few decades, and honestly it works even better that way – the original U-Boat Captain was so villainous he may as well have been a Nazi. they find the head of an old Grecian statue on a dead British soldier, and its presence gradually makes the crew of the U-Boat lose its sanity – not helped by the captain shooting “traitors”. Soon he ends up discovering Atlantis underwater, and where that statue really came from. In “The Hound”, two men who enjoy grave robbing for kicks find a jade amulet and take it back to England, where they are soon haunted by the ghastly beast that they may have killed at the gravesite. Finally, in “The Nameless City”, there’s only our narrator, exploring a city in Arabia that no one dares go near, and finding (all together now) eldritch horrors beyond his comprehension.

Honestly, the plot is pretty much irrelevant. What matters most here is mood, and Tanabe nails it, particularly in The Hound, which I found the best of the three stories. The sense of an encroaching doom that will engulf our characters (all male – women rarely if ever appear in a Lovecraft story) grows more and more with every turn of the page, and the few actual shots of violence are striking. Lovecraft stories are about the unseen, the imagined, and the unimaginable. Therefore a lot of adaptations risk becoming silly by showing said unshowable evil and having it not measure up. Tanabe has just the right amount of balance, as The Temple relies on its narrator’s own villainous depths, and The Hound is glimpsed mostly in shadow and corners. The Nameless City does draw a few monsters in detail, but its viewpoint is still firmly on the narrator (and the amazing vistas that he’s passing through).

Lovecraft is not for everyone, and I would not blame people from passing simply based on the name. But if you like horror and want to read something really creepy and offputting, this is an excellent adaptation. He’s done more of these – I think The Colour Out of Space was also adapted – and I hope it does well enough that we see more.

Kagerou Daze VII: From the Darkness

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By Jin (Shinzen no Teki-P) and Sidu. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Kevin Gifford.

Each volume in the series has competed to see who in the Mekakushi Dan has the worst childhood, and we may have a new winner with Kido, who gets the focus here. The book is divided into two parts that it goes back and forth between, like previous volumes in the series. The main story continues, with Shintaro, the Mekakushi-Dan and a newly revived Takane trying to find a way to stop Tateyama – or rather, whatever is behind Tateyama – and figure out how to stop this whole mess. This is interspersed with Kido’s childhood, being a child of an affair whose mother then dies several years later, causing her to be taken in by her rich father. Kido is an introverted self-hating mess, which honestly fits pretty well with what we’ve seen of present-day Kido, so the flashbacks work pretty well. Luckily, she also has a big stepsister looking out for her. Unluckily, this book is called “From the Darkness”.

Kido’s sections are the strongest in the book, doing a good job (despite the author’s self-deprecation in the afterword) of a realistic young girl resented by most people in the mansion, ignored by her father, and waiting to be abused by a sister that she’s sure hates her. But Rin does not, in fact, hate her, and after a series of painful to read but oh so accurate scenes of Kido wondering when the next blow is going to fall, she gradually begins to open up to the other girl and speak. Unfortunately, her dad is not merely cold and withdrawn, he’s rather unhinged, something which I wish was written in a slightly less abrupt way – the shortness of these books means that sometimes motivations get either left out or reduced to a villain monologue, and in this case it’s the later, as Kido’s father insanely expounds on why he went mad. After tragedy strikes, Kido finds herself in Azami’s realm, where Azami – rather startled to be meeting someone – realizes that Kido has one of her Eyes, and tries to explain as best she can. This section works much better.

Things don’t get much better in the main storyline, where we learn that you rarely gain a cool cyborg body without its creator having the ability to take the body over and turn it evil. Balanced against this is the reunion of Shintaro and Takane, who has to explain why she did what she did as Ene – which is fairly heartwarming – and why she ACTED like she did as Ene – which is the funniest part of the book. Unfortunately, while Shintaro’s plan to take out Tateyama is a good one, as I said, it reckons without one of the group being possessed. And so how we end the book with Shintaro dead, Kido dead, everyone else presumably about to die, and the realization that Book 8 not only may be the last but also isn’t out in Japan yet. This will have to satisfy Kagerou Daze fans for now, but I think it will do a fine job.

Also, will Seto ever get developed?

Princess Jellyfish, Vol. 5

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By Akiko Higashimura. Released in Japan in two separate volumes as “Kuragehime” by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Kiss. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics. Translated by Sarah Alys Lindholm.

I realize that it is coincidence, but frequently the volume of Princess Jellyfish that I am reading is there to answer the questions and concerns I mentioned in my review of the previous volume. Last time I talked about wanting Kuranosuke to have to deal with consequences and be thrown off his game more, and I also mentioned the market for the jellyfish dresses being upscale and not for people like Tsukimi. Lo and behold, in this volume Kuranosuke is not only dealing with once again being told how hard it is to be a successful clothing maker in the world today, but also has to stand by and suck it up as Shu and Tsukimi get close enough to start dating, although given the two of them are still talking at cross-purposes a bit, I’m not sure if that’s going to be an endgame. And yeah, what fashion would Amars, the most unfashionable, wear?

Amars is actually pretty impressive here; for all that they may whine and complain a lot (especially Mayaya), they’re very much involved in both saving the apartment complex and getting the jellyfish brand out there. And the biggest worry of the book, how they will react when they hear that Tsukimi and Shu are going out, also turns out to less of a crisis than expected – Shu is, after all, the son of a politician and being groomed for greater things. Ergo, a political marriage would be a godsend for the rest of Amars. Of course, as a reader I’m not entirely convinced that Tsukimi would make a very good politician’s wife. As for the dresses, now that we’ve established the high-end dresses, we need cheaper stuff for the casual buyer. But what if the casual buyer is Amars? Would they wear this stuff? Not a chance. So.. what WOULD they willingly buy?

This volume features not one, not two, but THREE characters slowly realizing that they’ve fallen in love, each with different impact. Tsukimi is the most obvious, adn I’m still not sure it’s sunk in for her, or even if she grasps what it means going forward. The proposal certainly hasn’t sunk in. Inari, meanwhile, hears from Shu that he has a “fiancee” at the apartments, and is horrified not just at the idea that one of those girls (she doesn’t know which one) could have bewitched him but that it hurts her enough for her to realize that she has genuine feelings of love for Shu as well. As for Kuranosuke, I think he’s the furthest behind, as he’s not really admitting to himself at all how he really feels about Tsukimi even as he distances himself by saying he’s the “sorcerer” who placed a spell on her to make her a “princess”. Which is all very well and good, but sounds pretty cowardly to me.

They just announced the manga is wrapping up in Japan this fall, though we still have a few omnibuses to go to catch up. In the meantime, it gets better with each volume, and if you haven’t picked it up yet you should.

I Saved Too Many Girls And Caused The Apocalypse, Vol. 4

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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.

Life as a parody can be difficult, especially when it’s unclear whether you are a parody or not anymore. Little Apocalypse started off being pretty blatantly a parody of all of those harems with piles and piles of women, as well as titles where the male lead goes around “rescuing” the girl of the week (hi, Index). But as the volumes have gone on I think it’s safe to admit that sometimes it tends to forget this and just tries to be a straight up harem action novel. You can usually tell by the fact that the author is forgetting to include R’s sarcastic asides for dozens of pages at a time, and it’s R that reminds us that Rekka’s frustrating indecision and waffley-ness is not actually bad writing but a deliberate decision. That said, I would not blame those who hate indecisive male leads from dropping the series, though I do wonder why they started it in the first place.

We’re back to three girls on the cover, and the author brags in the afterword about having made it to double digits on the heroines. That said, one of the previous ones doesn’t even get mentioned, and a second is only mentioned in passing. As with Negima, all heroines are important but some heroines are more important than others. New heroines this time include Rosalind, the blonde loli vampire that you knew we were going to get sooner or later, and who serves as the main antagonist (though she’s also a heroine); Silver Slayer, a homunculus trained to destroy Rosalind who has been chasing her the last two hundred years or so; and Chelsea, a mage who is desperately searching for a way to save her dying little brother. Add to all this Hibiki (from Book 3), who actually brings Chelsea to Rekka; Lea (from Book 2), who’s there to provide some muscle; and the main three heroines from Book 1, who likely always will be the top heroines.

And then there’s Rekka, who continues to be the savvy-only-when-necessary male lead. As with most of these books, the first half drags quite a bit as we set up the pieces, and the second half is much better as the pieces all interlock and Rekka can deal with them all at the same time. When Rekka is fretting about having set up dates on Sunday with all the girls at the same time, the book sadly falls into the exact cliches it’s meant to be making fun of, and is not as interesting. (Also Christ, I hope he went to buy Harissa some clothes after this.) For a book that’s so low in page count, there’s a lot going on in each one – I didn’t mention the evil genie, or the Philosopher’s Stone. The author knows how to bring a situation to chaos and let it play out. He now needs to work harder on what to do when everything is at rest. Recommended for those who can tolerate a wishy-washy male lead, written by design. If you can’t, avoid this series with great avoid.

Manga the Week of 8/2/17

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SEAN: The Dog Days of August begin with a manga pile worthy of an entire dog show.

Cross Infinite World has been releasing some shoujo light novels digitally, something I had shamefully forgotten till now. They have a release next week of AkaOni: Contract with a Vampire.

ASH: Oh, shoujo! I’d forgotten as well. It’s great to see these being released.

SEAN: Fantagraphics has the 2nd and final Otherworld Barbara omnibus, and I really really want to get it. Sadly, I actually ordered it from Amazon rather than Diamond, and for once Diamond is ahead of the game here.

MICHELLE: Woot. Looking forward to this one.

ANNA: Can’t believe I missed the first one, well now I can get both!!!!

ASH: Likewise, I’m going to have to wait for my copy, but I’m always excited to read Hagio’s work.

SEAN: J-Novel Club will be releasing the 3rd How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom. Take a shot for each mention of Machiavelli.

And we get our monthly Invaders of the Rokujouma?!, the 5th volume in that long series.

Kodansha Digital gives us a new Del Rey rescue with the 20th Alive.

Kodansha has a 22nd volume of Attack on Titan, which finally gives us a beach episode.

ASH: Hahaha! Does it really? I admit, I’ve fallen a bit behind in reading Attack on Titan.

SEAN: GTO: Paradise Lost has a 4th volume digitally.

As does suspense title Kasane.

There’s also 2nd volumes for new series Kounodori: Dr. Stork and Love’s Reach.

One Peace has two debuts hitting comic shops next week (and bookstores a bit later). I Hear the Sunspot (Hidamari ga Kikoeru) is from Printemps Shuppan, running in the mostly BL magazine Canna. This isn’t BL, and appears to be about a student with hearing loss. It seems interesting.

ASH: My copy of I Hear the Sunspot actually arrived early. I’m very curious about the manga and hope to read it soon.

ANNA: Huh, that does sound interesting.

SEAN: They also have a light novel debut, Mikagura School Suite. It seems to be a Battle School title, based on a series of Vocaloid songs.

Seven Seas has a 3rd Magical Girl Site, which despite its title is dark horror.

And there’s a 3rd There’s a Demon Lord on the Floor, which is comedy fanservice just as its title implies.

Udon has a 6th volume of Persona 3.

Vertical has a done-in-one manga debut. She and Her Cat is written by Makoto Shinkai, so expect a bittersweet ending, but it should be very good.

ASH: As many Shinkai manga are, I suppose.

MICHELLE: Of course I am entirely down for this.

ANNA: Done in one manga are certainly nice sometimes!

SEAN: And now it’s time for Viz. The 17th Assassination Classroom has the kids arguing about whether they should assassinate in the classroom, fittingly.

There’s a 4th Behind the Scenes!!, which I continue to be a bit lukewarm on.

And an 8th Black Clover, which will feel even more like Fairy Tail now that Fairy Tail has ended.

Bleach’s 3-in-1 release hits Book 20.

And Food Wars! has a 19th volume – will things continue to be ‘darkest just before the dawn’?

Haikyu!! continues its monthly release with its 14th volume. The Japanese release is around Vol. 27 or so, so we’ve a ways to go before we catch up.

MICHELLE: I’m eager for both Food Wars! and Haikyu!!.

ASH: I’m still loving this series, and loving that it’ll continue to be released monthly for a while yet.

ANNA: I clearly need to go on a big volleyball binge.

SEAN: JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has another hardcover of its least impressive arc with a 4th Stardust Crusaders.

ANNA: I love these hardcovers and the insane action of JoJo’s.

SEAN: Rejoice! August means Kaze Hikaru, which may be only one volume a year but it tries harder!

MICHELLE: Yaaaaaaaaay!

ASH: I plan on picking it up!

ANNA: I LOVE IT SO MUCH!!!!!!!!

SEAN: Kuroko’s Basketball has its 13th/14th volumes out in this omnibus, which will involve the characters playing basketball.

MICHELLE: *snerk*

ANNA: I thought they were all pastry chefs!

SEAN: Maid-sama! has come to an end with this 9th omnibus. Will Misaka be able to kick ass and take names? And how much blushing will we have? (Answer: so much.)

MICHELLE: I’m looking forward to the finale.

SEAN: My Hero Academia is one of Jump’s biggest hits, containing a cast filled with characters everyone loves, and Mineta. The 9th volume ships next week. (Seriously, everyone hates Mineta.)

One Piece’s 83rd volume will continue to develop Sanji’s predicament and upcoming marriage.

Platinum End’s 3rd volume will be there for hardcore fans of this manga team.

So Cute It Hurts!! is almost over, as the 14th volume is the penultimate one.

Toriko is also almost over, though the 39th volume shows we have a few more to go.

Vampire Knight: Memories is the debut from Shojo Beat. It’s nice to see the author return to her most popular world, I guess, though I worry it’s because she wasn’t able to duplicate that success.

Yona of the Dawn’s 7th volume continues our PIRATES! theme, though I do not believe ninjas, zombies or robots feature.

ASH: I think I’m okay with that.

ANNA: I so enjoy Shojo Beat’s fantasy manga.

Yu-Gi-Oh! never quite ends, as this is the 11th 3-in-1 and we’re still not near the end.

Lastly, Yen Press has one straggler, as the third Twinkle Stars omnibus finally shuffles onto the scene, looking furtively at its shoes as it apologizes for being so late.

MICHELLE: <3

ASH: I quite taken with the first two omnibuses, so I’m glad the third is finally here!

ANNA: Maybe I will finally read the first two volumes that are stacked up on my to-read pile!

SEAN: Which of these titles dog your footsteps?

Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler, Vol. 1

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Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler resists easy labels, combining elements of a tournament manga, high school drama, and instructional comic. The plot focuses on Yumeko Jabami, a wealthy girl who transfers to Hyakkaou Private Academy, one of those only-in-manga institutions where the curriculum emphasizes poker and roulette instead of reading and writing. Although Jabami seems demure, her pleasant demeanor turns to maniacal resolve at the first mention of gambling. Within hours of arriving at Hyakkaou, she’s engaged in a high-stakes game of rock, paper, scissors with another student, betting ¥10,000,000 on the outcome. (When in Rome, I guess?)

To make the contest more exciting, author Homura Kawamoto adds a few novel rules, transforming a simple set of challenges into a complex game of chance involving cards, ballot boxes, and voting. He also raises the dramatic stakes by initially portraying Jabami as impulsive — even foolish — in her decision to stake ¥500,000 on a single face-off. By the end of the game, however, we realize just how cunning and observant Jabami really is, as she not only triumphs over her snotty opponent Saotome, but does so by figuring out how Saotome was cheating and using that information against her.

What really puts this chapter over the top is the artwork. Toru Naomura stages the contest like an extreme sporting event, using her entire bag of tricks to convey the contestants’ intense effort — sweatdrops, speedlines, split screens, sound effects — and mimicking the kind of camera work that ESPN trots out for the X Games. The fluid, inventive layouts are also key to making these betting matches come to life, artfully illustrating the rules of play without too much speechifying; even the most inexperienced Go Fish player could follow the game and calculate Jabami’s odds of winning. Naomura’s most effective gambit, however, is the way she draws Jabami’s face. When Jabami is playing her cards close to the vest, her eyes resemble dark, placid pools, but when she’s trouncing the competition, her eyes go supernova, turning into a set of concentric, fiery rings that mimic the line work in Saul Bass’ iconic Vertigo poster:

For all the swagger with which Jabami’s first match is staged, it’s clear that Kawamoto is more interested in the mechanics of gameplay than in the development of three-dimensional characters or the introduction of new plot twists. Each of the subsequent chapters follows the same basic pattern as the first, with Jabami besting her opponent after blowing the whistle on her for cheating. Then there’s the fanservice: Naomura never misses an opportunity to draw an extreme mammary close-up or a glimpse of underwear. And ugly underwear, I might add; Naomura’s artwork is solid, but her application of plaid screentone is so clumsy that it screams MacPaint.

Despite these shortcomings, volume one of Kakegurui is a fun, trashy read that has the good graces not to take itself too seriously. I’m not sure if the premise is strong enough to sustain my interest for more than a few volumes, as the series’ cast of schemers, cheaters, and sadists seem doomed to repeat the same patterns of behavior from chapter to chapter. I put my odds of continuing with Kakegurui at 3 to 1, but other readers may find the psychological combat between Jabami and her opponents enough to persevere through seven or ten installments.

KAKEGURUI: COMPULSIVE GAMBLER, VOL. 1 • STORY BY HOMURA KAWAMOTO, ART BY TORU NAOMURA • TRANSLATED BY MATTHEW ALBERTS • YEN PRESS • 240 pp. • RATING: OT, FOR OLDER TEENS (16+)

Love’s Reach, Vol. 1

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By Rin Mikimoto | Published digitally by Kodansha Comics

I am an enormous fan of Kodansha’s digital offerings, so it pains me to admit that I can’t find anything to recommend about Love’s Reach.

Sixteen-year-old Yuni Kururugi, a “genius ice queen,” excels in every subject except for English, which is taught by her 24-year-old, supposed-to-be temporary homeroom teacher, Haruka Sakurai. He’s flirty and unprofessional with his students, and though Kururugi likes the way he looks, she finds everything else about him unpleasant. When he calls her to his office after school one day, he creepily backs her against a wall and says, “Have you been getting answers wrong on purpose? Maybe you’re really just trying to get my attention.” The briefly gratifying fact that Kururugi smacks him and says, “Let me be perfectly clear. I hate you” is undercut by her reflections upon how cute he looks in that moment. Sakurai ends up requiring Kururugi to attend daily tutoring sessions and, inevitably, they fall in love.

This is one of those cases where, even setting aside the problematic student-teacher relationship aspect, I just don’t see why these characters like each other. Sakurai flip-flops between manipulative mind games and minimal acts of kindness (oh boy, he left her some patches for her sore ankle!), and allows other teenage girls to hang all over him. What’s to like about that jerk? For her part, although we are told several times that Kururugi is a genius, she sure doesn’t act like one. Some of her behavior might be excused as romantic inexperience, but not the fact that after insisting on a date with Sakurai, it never occurs to her that someone might see them out together until someone does. Eyeroll.

None of the relationship drama is interesting and by the halfway point, I was thinking, “When can this be over?” and that was before the predatory lesbian teacher showed up to blackmail the happy couple! Too, the art style is really weird. The space between a character’s eyebrows and the top of their head occupies as much space as their entire face!

So, to sum up. Weird art. Unlikeable characters. Inexplicable and icky romance. I won’t be continuing this series.

Love’s Reach is complete in ten volumes. One volume is available in English now and the second comes out next week.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Generation Witch, Vol. 1

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By Uta Isaki. Released in Japan as “Gendai Majo Zukan” by Ichijinsha, serialized in the magazine Comic Rex. Released in North America by Seven Seas. Translated by Jill Morita. Adapted by Janet Houck.

It’s been nice to see the ‘slice of life’ genre move, to a certain extent, beyond ‘a bunch of female students living their everyday high school life’ in recent years. We’re seeing slice of life manga with actual twists, and one of the more current ones, fitting in with manga’s current obsession with anything supernatural, is “slice of witch life”. Flying Witch is an example of the ‘pure’ slice of life genre, with regular characters and an ongoing plot, but now we also have Generation Witch, which is more of an anthology series, each new chapter featuring a new witch and new issues. This works in the book’s favor, as it allows stories to have more resolution than they otherwise might have, and also lets the stories be a bit more depressing and dark than you’d sometimes see in slice of life.

The premise is that this is a modern-day Japan, but in a world where about 1% of the population have magical powers of some way, shape or form. The world, somewhat surprisingly, seems to have adapted to this very well, and witches are quite popular and cool. This first volume shows us a series of stories that are basically ‘what is life like around someone who can do magic?’ We start with a traditional witch (complete with broom), who’s also an overprotective older sister, trying her best to save her sibling from a guy who might be a new friend but in reality turns out to be just another pervert. The longest story in the book, taking up about half of it, involves a young man who was teased for his dreams of using magic as a kid (his powers matched an anime girl), and so is trying to live like a normal person. We all know how that ends, he runs into a very eccentric witch who wants him to join her club which helps find people’s lost things.

The last couple of stories take a much more serious turn, and show the dangers of magic powers. The first is a somewhat disturbing story of a young salaryman who goes home to his “daughter”, who turns out to be his childhood friend who he promised to marry as a kid. Sadly, she’s a witch who can’t control her powers, which means a) she can’t leave the house, and b) she won’t grow beyond a little girl. But he’s with her anyway, in a thankfully chaste way, and it’s a bit melancholy how he tries to assure himself that he’s been very lucky. The last story is let down by the fact that we can see where it’s going almost immediately, but shows us a young girl who can see the future and her budding relationship with her classmate, and ends in tragic fireworks.

This was pretty solid, if not groundbreaking. The idea of an anthology series about witches is a good one, and this also looks to be 5 volumes and done in Japan, which seems just about right. If you like witches and don’t mind that sometimes there aren’t happy endings, this is a good book to pick up.

Behind the Scenes, Vol. 4

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Behind the Scenes Volume 4 by Bisco Hatori

I thought the first few volumes of Behind the Scenes were ok but a little rough just due to the somewhat frantic pacing of character introductions and the episodic nature of the plot. I enjoyed the forth volume very much, because it gave me more insight into the background of many of the characters.

The volume opens with difficulties as everywhere Ranmaru goes he seems to be trailed by an eccentric group of people. It ends up being his family in town for a surprise visit. After seeing his lolita sister, his mother the former spy, and his father who is obsessed with social networking and western culture, it is easy to see why Ranmaru fits in so well with the extreme personalities in the art club at school. Ranmaru still has a tendency to look on the dark side of things, and isn’t fully able to interpret his family’s devotion as affection.

This shorter story is followed by a longer episode that showcases the art squad’s ability to get a job done at any cost, as Goda has to work with a director he’s clashed with in the past. The tension is made even worse when it turns out that the perfect location for the shoot is Goda’s childhood home, where his father is still in residence and passing judgement on his son’s chosen path. Becoming an art director is not very similar to Goda’s family tradition of the priesthood! Goda’s approach to finishing up the photo shoot demonstrated both compassion and sacrifice, so perhaps the two careers aren’t as misaligned as someone would think.

I’ve been wondering about Izumi’s breezy personality, and he finally gets some of his history filled in with this volume. The backdrop for this is the manga plot staple of a school festival, but Hatori’s spin on it is to show the art squad continuing to work behind the scenes to ensure that everyone else is a success. I found this volume so much more satisfying with the stories that focused a little bit more on character development than wacky antics. Hatori’s art is polished, and I’m enjoying the slight hints of steampunk illustration that she tucks in to the opening pages of each chapter.

Manga Giveaway: The Royal Tutor Giveaway

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It’s once again the final Wednesday of the month which means it’s once again time for the monthly manga giveaway here at Experiments in Manga! For this month’s giveaway, everyone participating will have a chance to win The Royal Tutor, Volume 1 by Higasa Akai as published in English by Yen Press. (The series started out as a digital-only release, so I was very happy when a print edition was announced, too.) As usual, the giveaway is open worldwide!

The Royal Tutor, Volume 1

While I have almost no interest whatsoever in the lives of contemporary royal or imperial families, I find that I actually do have a significant fondness for fictional stories, historical or otherwise, that deal with royal dynasties and their courts. Generally, what particularly captures my attention is the seemingly inevitable court intrigue–the intense relationships that develop between people and the resulting complicated, shifting web of power. Potentially, all of this drama can lead to a very serious story, but some manga like The Royal Tutor are also able to incorporate a fair amount of humor and levity into the narrative.

So, you may be wondering, how can you a copy The Royal Tutor, Volume 1?

1) In the comments below, tell me a little about one of your favorite members of royalty from a manga. (Don’t have a favorite? Simply mention that instead.)
2) If you’re on Twitter, you can earn a bonus entry by tweeting, or retweeting, about the contest. Make sure to include a link to this post and @PhoenixTerran (that’s me).

That’s really all there is to it. Participants in the giveaway have one week to submit comments and can earn up to two entries. Comments can also be sent to me directly via email using the address phoenixterran(at)gmail(dot)com if needed or desired. I will then post those entries here in your name. The giveaway winner will be randomly selected and announced on August 2, 2017. Good luck, everyone!

VERY IMPORTANT: Include some way that I can contact you. This can be an e-mail address in the comment form, a link to your website, Twitter username, or whatever. If I can’t figure out how to get a hold of you and you win, I’ll just draw another name.

Contest winner announced–Manga Giveaway: The Royal Tutor Giveaway Winner