Reading The Drops of God is like drinking a good table wine: the flavor may not be as complex as a finely aged varietal, but it goes down easily, leaving a pleasant aftertaste of melodrama, intrigue, and romance.
Like Oishinbo, the manga it most closely resembles, The Drops of God revolves around a slightly preposterous contest between a father and son. Kanazaki Yutaka, a revered wine critic, dies unexpectedly, leaving behind a will that’s a much a gauntlet as it is a set of instructions for his son: Shizuku will inherit Yutaka’s wine collection, but only if Shizuku can identify the thirteen different wines mentioned in his father’s will.
To complete his task, Shizuku must overcome several serious handicaps, not the least of which is his own lack of experience buying and drinking wine. (At the start of the series, Shizuku is a junior sales executive at a beer distributor, proudly eschewing wine for ale.) Adding special urgency to his quest is a rival, Tomine Issei, a handsome young wine critic who was adopted by Shizuku’s father. If Issei successfully names the “Twelve Apostles” and the “Drops of God” before Shizuku, Issei will inherit the entire collection….
MICHELLE: Well, one thing I read was the fourth volume of Kakifly’s moe comedy, 
MJ: Well, I suppose you could classify my first read as “fluff” as well, but it’s classic fluff, so it has a very different feel. I’m talking about volume one of Osamu Tezuka’s 
I am talking about Gosho Aoyama’s long-running shounen mystery, 
MJ: My second selection can’t rightly be called “fluff,” though it does have a slow, gentle quality to it that is perhaps a completely different kind of brain balm. This week, I read the second volume of Kaoru Mori’s 
The deck consists of 50 cards in five colors (red, orange, blue, black and green). Each color consists of the following cards: 1,1,1,2,2,3,3,4,4,5. At the beginning of the game, the cards are shuffled together and a hand of either 4 (4 or 5 players) or 5 (2 or 3 players) is dealt to everyone. The cards are picked up by each player with the backs facing them so that they cannot see their own hands but may see everyone else’s. The game also includes colored tokens. 8 blue tokens are placed on the table in the box cover and three red tokens are placed next to the box cover on the table.
When discarding a card, you will simply declare that you are discarding a card and then place that card in the discard area. This card is out of play permanently, but it will now be visible to everyone including yourself. You then draw a card from the deck so that you have the same number of cards that you started with. But more importantly, you may return one of the blue tokens to the box cover. This is how you “recycle” the blue tokens so that more clues can be given. Remember, you only start with 8 blue tokens and no one knows anything about his own hand!
Play continues until either the third red token has been used, all 5 fireworks have been completed, or the draw deck runs out. If the draw deck runs out, players continue with the cards remaining in their hands until the person who drew the last card gets one additional turn.
Memory is very important since each player will be getting information about her hand that may or may not be immediately useful. I often find myself thinking things, “Okay, this is a 3, these two cards are blue, and this card is black. Do I know anything about the other cards? Well I guess I know they aren’t 3s, blue, or black, since I haven’t played any of these cards yet” Yes, it’s deliciously tricky!
Conclusion:
One minute Whit Allgood is falling asleep in front of the TV, the next an army is breaking down his door, brandishing guns and dragging his sister Wisty out of her bed. But the biggest shock for Whit and Wisty comes when they’re accused of being a wizard and a witch by the New Order—the all new government that’s taken over the whole country—and are sentenced to death. As they struggle to survive in their jail cell, the siblings discover that they do have special powers, from telekinesis to bursting into flames. Even after they manage to break out, thanks to the help of a ghostly friend, Whit and Wisty still have to find their parents, and they might have to break back into jail to do it.
Now we come to Yen Press’s manga adaptation by Svetlana Chmakova. The visual aspect of the comic actually helps with the clunky-ness in the book. New character appearances are less sudden, and we see the transition from one place to another, so there’s no flipping back a page to see how Whit and Wisty suddenly got from point A to point B. Chmakova’s art also helps to brighten up some of the less-than-stellar character personalities. Sure, the villains are just as one-dimensional as in the novel, with their little dark beetle eyes, but other characters seem more human in her hands. Whit wears a blank look of shock when he discovers that Celia is a ghost, and Wisty’s range of expressions, from cartoonish excitement at living in a fancy department store to the dark, narrow-eyed look when she casts her angry spells, make this witch even more fun and exciting than her novel version.
MJ: Hmph. Fine. Well, I finally got a chance to read the latest from CLAMP, volume one of 
First up is the debut volume of 
MJ: My second read this week was volume one of Rei Toma’s 
MICHELLE: An odd yet interesting one shot from One Peace Books!