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Dengeki Daisy Volumes 1 and 2

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Dengeki Daisy Volumes 1 and 2 Kyousuke Motomi

Just what I need, yet another shoujo series to follow! I didn’t run out and preorder the first volume of Dengeki Daisy when I saw it solicited. I tend to enjoy most Shojo Beat series, but I thought the idea of a girl getting over her brother’s death due to her guardian angel “Daisy” who is reachable only by cell phone was maybe not the greatest premise for a story. Then I saw all the positive reviews for the series from other manga bloggers and I started to think I was missing out. When Viz sent me a copy of the second volume, I decided to give in and try the series, and I was very pleasantly surprised.

Volume 1

Dengeki Daisy starts out with a rather worn out premise, but the execution of all the details made the story seem fresh. Teru’s older brother has died, but before he passed on he gave her a cell phone and said that the phone will connect her to a person named Daisy who will always be there to support her. As the volume opens poor but sassy Teru is treating the phone like a false diary, telling Daisy that she’s doing fine when she’s being bullied by the sadistic student council at her school. Teru isn’t a helpless heroine. After she gets splashed with a bucket of water she turns a hose on the perpetrators. She’s aided further as some balls thrown by a mysterious rescuer connect with the heads of her tormentors. Teru tries to throw the balls back in the direction where she thinks they came from, but they end up breaking a window at the school. Enter the creepy yet astoundingly young and handsome school custodian Kurosaki. Since Teru is too poor to pay to fix the window, he announces that she’ll become his servant and puts her to work performing custodial tasks while he communes with his laptop. They quickly fall into the habit of bickering, as Kurosaki gruffly orders Teru around and she bids him farewell by saying “I hope your hair falls out by tomorrow!” Kurosaki always seems to be around when Teru needs help. When Teru needs help hacking into a computer in order to aid a classmate, she texts Daisy and the situation is quickly resolved. She asks Kurosaki if he’s Daisy and he denies it.

That scene was where I thought there was an indication that Dengeki Daisy might be a little more interesting than the average shoujo manga. I think in a more conventional title, it would take at least a volume or two for Teru to register the suspicion that Kurosaki is Daisy. Bad boys who are secretly good are shoujo staples but Kurosaki is a superior example of the type. I found myself captivated by his expressions of unholy glee as he dealt with the people who were picking on Teru. He was gruff and surly with Teru, and only had a gentle expression on his face when she couldn’t see him. Thankfully the evil student council plot is left quickly behind and the odd couple end up having to unravel something more interesting – industrial espionage. Teru’s older brother was a genius engineer, and unscrupulous people suspect that since Teru’s only inheritance from him was a cell phone it might be more valuable than it appears. While Kurosaki isn’t revealing his identity as Daisy to Teru, he used to work with her brother and took the custodian job to watch over her. He’s filled with guilt about the death of his friend.

Motomi’s art easily shifts between different modes that expresses what the characters are going through. When Teru and a couple of her friends express solidarity, they strike a fighting pose straight out of comedic shonen manga and vow “Even if we are poor and are clothes are shabby! Even if we are ugly and girls don’t like us! Our hearts bloom like flowers, beautiful and strong! And we’re proud of it!!!” Kurosaki looks like a capable action hero when he leaps to defend his girl and when they share a quiet moment in the school’s garden the backdrop of flowers and significant glances creates an emotionally charged mood broken only by Kurosaki telling Teru that she’s stupid for thinking he’s Daisy.

Volume 2

Teru and Kurosaki become temporary roommates after somebody breaks into her apartment. He puts her to work doing various domestic tasks like cooking, organizing CDs, and providing him with shoulder massages. One of the things I like is the emotional give-and-take between the couple. Kurosaki attempts to tease her after she announces that to her Daisy is the best thing in the world by asking her what would happen if Daisy turns out to be a total jerk like him. She says “That goes without saying, I’ll love everything about you,” then wacks him in the head. Kurosaki is momentarily dumbfounded and as Teru walks away she thinks “Even if you aren’t Daisy, I’ve already fallen for you.”

The supporting cast is rounded out by the addition of the new school counselor Riko. She is also someone who used to work with Kurosaki and Teru’s brother. Riko’s also interested in looking after Teru and when Teru seeks her advice she tells Teru that Kurosaki is a terrible, selfish person. Teru thinks that it is true that Kurosaki might be terrible because she has no idea what he’s thinking, so she vows to become “a terrible woman whose thoughts are unreadable” so she can play with his emotions. Teru and Daisy’s texts to each other provide an interesting counterpoint to the relationship between Teru and Kurosaki. He has more knowledge of her inner feelings, and Teru will sometimes confess something to Daisy and put on an entirely different facade for Kurosaki. Teru’s troubles continue as she continues to be the target of people who are after her brother’s research. The emotional strain of protecting Teru and holding back his feelings for her begins to weigh more heavily on Kurosaki, and the reader sees a flashback to a scene between him and Teru’s brother that seems a little creepy.

One thing that I thought was curious about this manga was the author bios in the back of the books. I’d thought that Kyousuke Motomi was one of the few men working as a shoujo manga artist, but the author bios indicated the author was female. On the other hand, the self-portrait of the author looked like it had a very stylized mustache, and there’s an a author comment about facial hair growth. So I’m not sure what to think, but I’d honestly be curious to read more shoujo written by men just as I enjoy shonen manga written by women.

Even though some of the plot points in Dengeki Daisy manga aren’t very unique, by the end of these two volumes I was totally invested in wanting to see what happens to Teru and Kurosaki. The industrial sabotage subplot and the events surrounding the death of Teru’s brother creates an ongoing mystery that works as a counterweight to the budding romance. Also, I find the idea of a romance between a high school girl and a seemingly benign yet emotionally traumatized hacker who is posing as a school custodian just creepy enough to be entertaining while not quite entering into the “No, this is yucky” territory of a manga like Black Bird. Teru seems to be extremely resilient and is able to cope with Kurosaki by coming up with quick put-downs whenever he seems mean. Dengeki Daisy manages to blend different emotional aspects to come up with a compelling story. I enjoyed reading this series because there’s suspense, romance, action, and just enough comedy to keep things from being too heavy.

Review copy of volume 2 provided by the publisher

My 10 Favorite Spooky Manga

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Whether by accident or design, the very first manga I read and liked were horror titles: “The Laughing Target,” Mermaid Saga, Uzumaki. I’m not sure why I find spooky stories so compelling in manga form; I don’t generally read horror novels, and I don’t have the constitution for gory movies. But manga about zombies? Or vampires? Or angry spirits seeking to avenge their own deaths? Well, there’s always room on my bookshelf for another one, even if the stories sometimes feel overly familiar or — in the case of artists like Kanako Inuki and Kazuo Umezu — make no sense at all. Below is a list of my ten favorite scary manga, which run the gamut from psychological horror to straight-up ick.

10. Lament of the Lamb
By Kei Toume • Tokyopop • 7 volumes
Kei Toume puts a novel spin on vampirism, presenting it not as a supernatural phenomenon, but as a symptom of a rare genetic disorder. His brother-and-sister protagonists, Kazuna and Chizuna, begin exhibiting the same tendencies as their deceased mother, losing control at the sight or suggestion of blood, and enduring cravings so intense they induce temporary insanity. Long on atmosphere and short on plot, Lament of the Lamb won’t be every vampire lover’s idea of a rip-snortin’ read; the manga focuses primarily on the intense, unhealthy relationship between Kazuna and Chizuna, and very little on blood-sucking. What makes Lament of the Lamb so deeply unsettling, however, is the strong current of violence and fear that flows just beneath its surface; Kazuna and Chizuna may not be predators, but we see just how much self-control it takes for them to contain their bloodlust.

9. School Zone
By Kanako Inuki • Dark Horse • 3 volumes
In this odd, hallucinatory, and sometimes very funny series, a group of students summon the ghosts of people who died on school grounds, unleashing the spirits’ wrath on their unsuspecting classmates. School Zone is as much a meditation on childhood fears of being ridiculed or ostracized as it is a traditional ghost story; time and again, the students’ own response to the ghosts is often more horrific than the ghosts’ behavior. Inuki’s artwork isn’t as gory or imaginative as some of her peers’, though she demonstrates a genuine flair for comically gruesome thrills: one girl is dragged into a toilet, for example, while another is attacked by a scaly, long-armed creature that lives in the infirmary. Where Inuki really shines, however, is in her ability to capture the primal terror that a dark, empty building can inspire in the most rational person. Even when the story takes one its many silly detours — and yes, there are many WTF?! moments in School Zone — Inuki makes us feel her characters’ vulnerability as they explore the school grounds after hours. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/29/09

8. Mail
By Housui Yamazaki • Dark Horse • 3 volumes
If you like you horror neat with a twist, Mail might be your kind of manga: a meticulously crafted selection of short, spooky tales in which a handsome exorcist goes toe-to-toe with all sort of ghosts. The stories are a mixture of urban legend and folklore: a GPS system which directs a woman to the scene of a crime, an accident victim who haunts the elevator shaft where he died, a possessed doll. Through precise linework and superb command of light, Hosui Yamakazi transforms everyday situations — returning home from work, logging onto a computer — into extraordinary ones in which shadows and corners harbor very nasty surprises. Best of all, Mail never overstays its welcome; it’s the manga equivalent of the Goldberg Variations, offering a number of short, trenchant variations on a single theme and then wrapping things up neatly.

7. After School Nightmare
By Setona Mizushiro • Go! Comi • 10 volumes
Masahiro, a charming, popular high school student, harbors a terrible secret: though he appears to be male, the lower half of his body is female. At a nurse’s urging, he agrees to visit the school infirmary for a series of dream workshops in which he interacts with classmates who are also grappling with serious problems, from child abuse to pathological insecurity. The students’ collective dreams are vivid and strange, unfolding with the peculiar, fervid logic of a nightmare; buildings flood, stairwells lead to dead ends, and characters undergo sudden, dramatic transformations. Making the dream sequences extra creepy is the way Setona Mizushiro renders the students, choosing an avatar for each that represents their true selves: a black knight, a faceless body, a long, disembodied arm that grasps and slithers. Attentive readers will be rewarded for their patient observation with an unexpected but brilliant twist in the very final pages.

6. The Drifting Classroom
By Kazuo Umezu • VIZ Media • 11 volumes
It’s sorely tempting to compare The Drifting Classroom to The Lord of the Flies, as both stories depict school children creating their own societies in the absence of adult authority. But Kazuo Umezu’s series is more sinister than Golding’s novel, as Classroom‘s youthful survivors have been forced to band together to defend themselves from their former teachers, many of whom have become unhinged at the realization that they may never return to their own time. (Their entire elementary school has slipped through a rift in the space-time continuum, depositing everyone in the distant future.) The story is as relentless as an episode of 24: characters are maimed or killed in every chapter, and almost every line of dialogue is shouted. (Sho’s petty arguments with his mother are delivered as emphatically as his later attempts to alert classmates to the dangers of their new surroundings.) Yet for all its obvious shortcomings, Umezu creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable tension that conveys both the hopelessness of the children’s situation and their terror at being abandoned by the grown-ups. If that isn’t the ultimate ten-year-old’s nightmare, I don’t know what is. —Reviewed at PopCultureShock on 10/15/06

5. Mermaid Saga
By Rumiko Takahashi • VIZ Media • 4 volumes
This four-volume series ran on and off in Shonen Sunday for nearly ten years, chronicling the adventures of Yuta, a fisherman who gained immortality by eating mermaid flesh. Desperate to live an ordinary existence, Yuta spends five hundred years wandering Japan in search of a mermaid who can restore his mortality, crossing paths with criminals, immortals, and “lost souls,” people reduced to a monstrous condition by the poison in mermaid flesh. Though the stories follow a somewhat predictable pattern, Takahashi’s writing is brisk and assured, propelled by snappy dialogue and genuinely creepy scenarios. The imagery is tame by horror standards, but Takahashi doesn’t shy away from the occasional grotesque or gory image, using them to underscore the ugly consequences of seeking immortality. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/29/09.

4. Dororo
By Osamu Tezuka • Vertical, Inc. • 3 volumes
The next time you feel inclined to criticize your parents, remember Hyakkimaru’s plight: his father pledged Hyakkimaru’s body parts to forty-eight demons in exchange for political power, leaving his son blind, deaf, and limbless at birth. After being rescued and raised by a kindly doctor, Hyakkimaru embarks on a quest to reclaim his eyes and ears, wandering across a war-torn landscape where demons take advantage of the chaos to prey on humans. Some of these demons have obvious antecedents in Japanese folklore (e.g. a nine-tailed fox), while others seem to have sprung full-blown from Tezuka’s imagination (e.g. a shark who paralyzes his victims with sake breath). Though the story ostensibly unfolds during the Warring States period, Dororo wears its allegory lightly, focusing primarily on swordfights, monster lairs, and damsels in distress while using its historical setting to make a few modest points about the corrosive influence of greed, power, and fear. For my money, one of Tezuka’s best series, peroid. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 7/27/09

3. Parasyte
By Hitoshi Iwaaki • Del Rey • 8 volumes
Part The Defiant Ones, part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Parasyte focuses on the symbiotic relationship between Shin, a high school student, and Migi, the alien parasite that takes up residence in his right hand after failing to take control of Shin’s brain. The two go on the lam after another parasite kills Shin’s mother — and makes Shin and Migi look like the culprits. If the human character designs are a little blank and clumsy, the parasites are not; Hitoshi Iwaaki twists the human body into some of the most sinister-looking shapes since Pablo Picasso painted Dora Maar. The violence is graphic but not sadistic, as most of the action takes place between panels, with only the grisly aftermath represented in pictorial form. The best part of Parasyte, however, is the script; Shin and Migi trade barbs with the antagonistic affection of Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, revealing Migi to be smarter and more objective than his human host. Shin and Migi’s banter adds an element of levity to the story, to be sure, but their heated debates about survival are also a sly poke at the idea that human beings’ intellect and emotional attachments place them squarely atop the food chain. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 7/2/10

2. The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
By Eiji Otsuki and Housui Yamakazi • Dark Horse • 13+ volumes
The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is comprised of five members: Karatsu, a monk-in-training; Numata, a hipster with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture; Yata, an odd duck who communicates primarily through a puppet that he wears on his left hand; Makino, a chatty embalmer; and Sasaki, a hacker with an entrepreneurial streak. Working as a team, the quintet helps the dead cross over, using their myriad talents to locate bodies, speak with ghosts, and resolve the spirits’ unfinished business. The set-up is pure gold, giving the episodic series some structure, while allowing Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamakazi the flexibility to stage grisly murders and discover corpses in a variety of unexpected places. Think Scooby Doo with less wholesome protagonists and scarier spooks and you have a good idea of what makes this offbeat series tick. And yes, the gang even has their own van. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 6/24/09

1. Gyo
By Junji Ito • VIZ Media • 2 volumes
From the standpoint of craft, Uzumaki is a better manga, but it’s hard to top the sheer creepiness factor of Gyo, which taps into one of the most primordial of fears: being eaten! Here’s how I explained its appeal to David Welsh at The Comics Reporter:

Like many other children of the 1970s, Jaws left an indelible impression on me. I wasn’t just terrified of swimming in the ocean, I was reluctant to immerse myself in any standing body of water — swimming pools, bathtubs, ponds — that might conceivably harbor a shark. That irrational fear of encountering a great white somewhere it’s not supposed to be even led me to wonder what it might be like to bump into one on land — could I outrun it?

I’m guessing Junji Ito also suffers from icthyophobia, because Gyo looks like my worst nightmare, a world in which hideously deformed fish crawl out of the sea on mechanical legs and terrorize humans, spreading a disease that quickly jumps species. As horror stories go, many of Gyo‘s details aren’t terribly well explained — how, exactly, the fish acquired legs remains unclear despite talk of military experiments gone awry — but the imaginative artwork appeals on a visceral level. Gyo‘s highpoint comes midway through volume one, when a great white shark chases the hero and his girlfriend through a house, even scaling the stairs (no pun intended) in pursuit of its next meal. The scene is utterly ridiculous, but it works — for a few terrible, thrilling pages I learned the answer to my long-standing question, What would it be like to be chased by a shark on land? In a word: scary.

In other words, this is my worst nightmare:

So those are ten of my favorite spooky manga! What horror manga are on your top-ten list? Inquiring minds want to know!

My 10 Favorite Spooky Manga

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Whether by accident or design, the very first manga I read and liked were horror titles: “The Laughing Target,” Mermaid Saga, Uzumaki. I’m not sure why I find spooky stories so compelling in manga form; I don’t generally read horror novels, and I don’t have the constitution for gory movies. But manga about zombies? Or vampires? Or angry spirits seeking to avenge their own deaths? Well, there’s always room on my bookshelf for another one, even if the stories sometimes feel overly familiar or — in the case of artists like Kanako Inuki and Kazuo Umezu — make no sense at all. Below is a list of my ten favorite scary manga, which run the gamut from psychological horror to straight-up ick.

10. LAMENT OF THE LAMB

KEI TOUME • TOKYOPOP • 7 VOLUMES

Kei Toume puts a novel spin on vampirism, presenting it not as a supernatural phenomenon, but as a symptom of a rare genetic disorder. His brother-and-sister protagonists, Kazuna and Chizuna, begin exhibiting the same tendencies as their deceased mother, losing control at the sight or suggestion of blood, and enduring cravings so intense they induce temporary insanity. Long on atmosphere and short on plot, Lament of the Lamb won’t be every vampire lover’s idea of a rip-snortin’ read; the manga focuses primarily on the intense, unhealthy relationship between Kazuna and Chizuna, and very little on blood-sucking. What makes Lament of the Lamb so deeply unsettling, however, is the strong current of violence and fear that flows just beneath its surface; Kazuna and Chizuna may not be predators, but we see just how much self-control it takes for them to contain their bloodlust.

9. SCHOOL ZONE

KANAKO INUKI • DARK HORSE • 3 VOLUMES

In this odd, hallucinatory, and sometimes very funny series, a group of students summon the ghosts of people who died on school grounds, unleashing the spirits’ wrath on their unsuspecting classmates. School Zone is as much a meditation on childhood fears of being ridiculed or ostracized as it is a traditional ghost story; time and again, the students’ own response to the ghosts is often more horrific than the ghosts’ behavior. Inuki’s artwork isn’t as gory or imaginative as some of her peers’, though she demonstrates a genuine flair for comically gruesome thrills: one girl is dragged into a toilet, for example, while another is attacked by a scaly, long-armed creature that lives in the infirmary. Where Inuki really shines, however, is in her ability to capture the primal terror that a dark, empty building can inspire in the most rational person. Even when the story takes one its many silly detours — and yes, there are many WTF?! moments in School Zone — Inuki makes us feel her characters’ vulnerability as they explore the school grounds after hours. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/29/09

8. MAIL

HOUSUI YAMAKAZI • DARK HORSE • 3 VOLUMES

If you like you horror neat with a twist, Mail might be your kind of manga: a meticulously crafted selection of short, spooky tales in which a handsome exorcist goes toe-to-toe with all sort of ghosts. The stories are a mixture of urban legend and folklore: a GPS system which directs a woman to the scene of a crime, an accident victim who haunts the elevator shaft where he died, a possessed doll. Through precise linework and superb command of light, Hosui Yamakazi transforms everyday situations — returning home from work, logging onto a computer — into extraordinary ones in which shadows and corners harbor very nasty surprises. Best of all, Mail never overstays its welcome; it’s the manga equivalent of the Goldberg Variations, offering a number of short, trenchant variations on a single theme and then wrapping things up neatly.

7. AFTER SCHOOL NIGHTMARE

SETONA MITZUSHIRO • GO! COMI • 10 VOLUMES

Masahiro, a charming, popular high school student, harbors a terrible secret: though he appears to be male, the lower half of his body is female. At a nurse’s urging, he agrees to visit the school infirmary for a series of dream workshops in which he interacts with classmates who are also grappling with serious problems, from child abuse to pathological insecurity. The students’ collective dreams are vivid and strange, unfolding with the peculiar, fervid logic of a nightmare; buildings flood, stairwells lead to dead ends, and characters undergo sudden, dramatic transformations. Making the dream sequences extra creepy is the way Setona Mizushiro renders the students, choosing an avatar for each that represents their true selves: a black knight, a faceless body, a long, disembodied arm that grasps and slithers. Attentive readers will be rewarded for their patient observation with an unexpected but brilliant twist in the very final pages.

6. THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM

KAZUO UMEZU • VIZ • 11 VOLUMES

It’s sorely tempting to compare The Drifting Classroom to The Lord of the Flies, as both stories depict school children creating their own societies in the absence of adult authority. But Kazuo Umezu’s series is more sinister than Golding’s novel, as Classroom‘s youthful survivors have been forced to band together to defend themselves from their former teachers, many of whom have become unhinged at the realization that they may never return to their own time. (Their entire elementary school has slipped through a rift in the space-time continuum, depositing everyone in the distant future.) The story is as relentless as an episode of 24: characters are maimed or killed in every chapter, and almost every line of dialogue is shouted. (Sho’s petty arguments with his mother are delivered as emphatically as his later attempts to alert classmates to the dangers of their new surroundings.) Yet for all its obvious shortcomings, Umezu creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable tension that conveys both the hopelessness of the children’s situation and their terror at being abandoned by the grown-ups. If that isn’t the ultimate ten-year-old’s nightmare, I don’t know what is. —Reviewed at PopCultureShock on 10/15/06

5. MERMAID SAGA

RUMIKO TAKAHASHI • VIZ • 4 VOLUMES

This four-volume series ran on and off in Shonen Sunday for nearly ten years, chronicling the adventures of Yuta, a fisherman who gained immortality by eating mermaid flesh. Desperate to live an ordinary existence, Yuta spends five hundred years wandering Japan in search of a mermaid who can restore his mortality, crossing paths with criminals, immortals, and “lost souls,” people reduced to a monstrous condition by the poison in mermaid flesh. Though the stories follow a somewhat predictable pattern, Takahashi’s writing is brisk and assured, propelled by snappy dialogue and genuinely creepy scenarios. The imagery is tame by horror standards, but Takahashi doesn’t shy away from the occasional grotesque or gory image, using them to underscore the ugly consequences of seeking immortality. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 10/29/09.

4. DORORO

OSAMU TEZUKA • VERTICAL, INC. • 3 VOLUMES

The next time you feel inclined to criticize your parents, remember Hyakkimaru’s plight: his father pledged Hyakkimaru’s body parts to forty-eight demons in exchange for political power, leaving his son blind, deaf, and limbless at birth. After being rescued and raised by a kindly doctor, Hyakkimaru embarks on a quest to reclaim his eyes and ears, wandering across a war-torn landscape where demons take advantage of the chaos to prey on humans. Some of these demons have obvious antecedents in Japanese folklore (e.g. a nine-tailed fox), while others seem to have sprung full-blown from Tezuka’s imagination (e.g. a shark who paralyzes his victims with sake breath). Though the story ostensibly unfolds during the Warring States period, Dororo wears its allegory lightly, focusing primarily on swordfights, monster lairs, and damsels in distress while using its historical setting to make a few modest points about the corrosive influence of greed, power, and fear. For my money, one of Tezuka’s best series, peroid. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 7/27/09

3. PARASYTE

HITOSHI IWAAKI • DEL REY • 8 VOLUMES

Part The Defiant Ones, part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Parasyte focuses on the symbiotic relationship between Shin, a high school student, and Migi, the alien parasite that takes up residence in his right hand after failing to take control of Shin’s brain. The two go on the lam after another parasite kills Shin’s mother — and makes Shin and Migi look like the culprits. If the human character designs are a little blank and clumsy, the parasites are not; Hitoshi Iwaaki twists the human body into some of the most sinister-looking shapes since Pablo Picasso painted Dora Maar. The violence is graphic but not sadistic, as most of the action takes place between panels, with only the grisly aftermath represented in pictorial form. The best part of Parasyte, however, is the script; Shin and Migi trade barbs with the antagonistic affection of Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, revealing Migi to be smarter and more objective than his human host. Shin and Migi’s banter adds an element of levity to the story, to be sure, but their heated debates about survival are also a sly poke at the idea that human beings’ intellect and emotional attachments place them squarely atop the food chain. –Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 7/2/10

2. THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE

EIJI OTSUKI AND HOUSUI YAMAKAZI • DARK HORSE • 13+ VOLUMES

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is comprised of five members: Karatsu, a monk-in-training; Numata, a hipster with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture; Yata, an odd duck who communicates primarily through a puppet that he wears on his left hand; Makino, a chatty embalmer; and Sasaki, a hacker with an entrepreneurial streak. Working as a team, the quintet helps the dead cross over, using their myriad talents to locate bodies, speak with ghosts, and resolve the spirits’ unfinished business. The set-up is pure gold, giving the episodic series some structure, while allowing Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamakazi the flexibility to stage grisly murders and discover corpses in a variety of unexpected places. Think Scooby Doo with less wholesome protagonists and scarier spooks and you have a good idea of what makes this offbeat series tick. And yes, the gang even has their own van. —Reviewed at The Manga Critic on 6/24/09

1. GYO

JUNJI ITO • VIZ • 2 VOLUMES

From the standpoint of craft, Uzumaki is a better manga, but it’s hard to top the sheer creepiness factor of Gyo, which taps into one of the most primordial of fears: being eaten! Here’s how I explained its appeal to David Welsh at The Comics Reporter:

Like many other children of the 1970s, Jaws left an indelible impression on me. I wasn’t just terrified of swimming in the ocean, I was reluctant to immerse myself in any standing body of water — swimming pools, bathtubs, ponds — that might conceivably harbor a shark. That irrational fear of encountering a great white somewhere it’s not supposed to be even led me to wonder what it might be like to bump into one on land — could I outrun it?

I’m guessing Junji Ito also suffers from icthyophobia, because Gyo looks like my worst nightmare, a world in which hideously deformed fish crawl out of the sea on mechanical legs and terrorize humans, spreading a disease that quickly jumps species. As horror stories go, many of Gyo‘s details aren’t terribly well explained — how, exactly, the fish acquired legs remains unclear despite talk of military experiments gone awry — but the imaginative artwork appeals on a visceral level. Gyo‘s highpoint comes midway through volume one, when a great white shark chases the hero and his girlfriend through a house, even scaling the stairs (no pun intended) in pursuit of its next meal. The scene is utterly ridiculous, but it works — for a few terrible, thrilling pages I learned the answer to my long-standing question, What would it be like to be chased by a shark on land? In a word: scary.

In other words, this is my worst nightmare:

So those are ten of my favorite spooky manga! What horror manga are on your top-ten list? Inquiring minds want to know!

Let’s Get Visual: Speechless

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Once again, it’s time for Let’s Get Visual, a monthly art-focused exercise with Michelle Smith, hosted at her blog, Soliloquy in Blue.

This month, we respond to a request for discussion of nonverbal storytelling. My choice for the exercise is a scene from the fourth volume of Fumi Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery. Though the scene does contain some minimal dialogue, I provided scans from the Japanese book in order to illustrate how profoundly the artwork does the talking.

Though we discuss only the scene as presented, and never reveal what is said between the two characters, thinking about this series made me want to start handing it out to gay teens as my version of an “It Gets Better” video. The way that Ono moves on from this moment to discover a new life, while Tachibana hangs on to his guilt for years after… it’s so close to the stories of many of my own friends who left high school to move on to things much, much greater, while their tormentors stayed behind, still mired in the world of our high school social scene.

As always, please remember that we’re asking for your help. We want to improve our ability to analyze visual storytelling and we’re anxious for feedback from those who know more than we. Though we’d prefer you be gentle, we’ll take what we can get!

So head on over to the latest Let’s Get Visual and let us know how we’re doing!

Saturday Morning Cartoon: FLCL Ending

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I decided to steal an idea from Bully and start a regular Saturday morning cartoon feature. To kick things off, let’s go back a few years and appreciate the gloriousness that is found in the ending credits to FFLCL. I saw this anime some time ago, so it is just a jumbled mess in my head of robots, vespas, aliens, and an inexplicable giant iron. One of the most memorable things about this show was the sound track, provided by The Pillows. I don’t think you can listen to “Ride On Shooting Star” and not feel a little bit happier by the end of the song.

I Wish I Wrote That!

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Welcome to the second of my new, recurring Friday features, “I Wish I Wrote That!” (concept thanks to the awesome Deb Aoki) in which I highlight manga discussion and criticism so awesome I wish I’d written it myself.

Since this is my very first stab at this feature, I’m going to let myself talk about some pieces that aren’t necessarily new, and even one that has nothing to do with manga.

First off, wow, do I wish I’d taken part in the wonderful AXed Twitter roundtable. Besides being great conversation, it was a wonderfully creative use of the medium. Here are links to parts one and two, and a bit of an excerpt:

  MangaCur Let’s start with the stories, in order: “The Watcher,” by Osamu Kanno.

That piece felt very much like a “Chef may use peanuts in some recipes” kind of warning, if that makes sense. Not that every story is going to have kind of ugly art, dogs peeing into skull wounds, and creepy nudity, but some do, so… Or if not precisely set the tone, at least made sure nobody would be surprised that the collection would go weird places.

debaoki Yes, that’s true – like the first song in an soundtrack or concept album, “The Watcher” set a certain tone as the first story in AX. I didn’t really get what Osamu Kanno was going for with The Watcher, other than to make fun of selfish suburbanites

Toukochan Bleah. It seems Japan also has what I dislike about indie comics in its own manga. The art in The Watcher reminded me of Leo and Diane Dillon’s work for Dangerous Visions, for some reason.

factualopinion “The Watcher”: probably one of the best last panels of all the stories available. Little too long, i’d say.

The latest installment of the Manga Moveable Feast, this time hosted by Sean Gaffney, led Manga Curmudgeon David Welsh to repost his older review of Setona Mizushiro’s After School Nightmare. After reading that review, I realized that I never need to move beyond my own first volume review. I’ll simply point people to David’s. An excerpt:

  In a lot of manga aimed at an adolescent audience, the characters’ objectives are sunny and straightforward. Do your best! Be true to yourself! Learn! Grow! Befriend! Love! You can dress those objectives up however you like and contextualize them in sports or sorcery or pop stardom, but the bottom line is basically the pursuit of happiness.

What makes a book like Setona Mizushiro’s After School Nightmare (Go! Comi) so alluring is that it’s about the aversion of unhappiness. The objectives here are just as straightforward, but they’re bleaker and probably more honest. Keep your secrets. Hide your flaws. Try not to hurt anyone more than you can avoid, but a teen’s got to do what a teen’s got to do.

Speaking of be-all and end-all reviews, I made the mistake of reading Kate Dacey’s wonderful review of Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream and Other Stories and it’s stymied me ever since. I can’t imagine being able to write about it so beautifully, and I certainly don’t have the background Kate provides at the beginning of the piece which informs her analysis throughout.

  Perhaps the best compliment I can pay Hagio is praising her ability to make the ineffable speak through pictures, whether she’s documenting the grief that a young woman feels after aborting her baby (“Angel Mimic”) or the intense longing a middle-aged man feels for the college friends who abandoned him (“Marie, Ten Years Later”). Nowhere is this more evident than in the final story, “The Willow Tree.” At first glance, the layout is simple; each page consists of just two large, rectangular panels in which a woman stands beneath a tree, watching a parade of people — a doleful man and a little boy, a group of rambunctious grade-schoolers, a teenager wooing a classmate — as they stroll on the embankment above her. A careful reading of the images, however, reveals a complex story spanning many years; Hagio uses subtle cues — light, weather, and the principal character’s body language — to suggest the woman’s relationship to the people who walk past the tree. The last ten panels are beautifully executed; though the woman never utters a word, her face suddenly registers all the pain, joy, and anxiety she experienced during her decades-long vigil.

Finally, because you know I like to cheat, I’ll throw in one piece of criticism that isn’t about manga at all, but that kept me thinking for days after I’d read it. That would be Shaenon Garrity’s piece on Cathy Guisewite’s Cathy, posted shortly after Guisewite announced her retirement from the strip. “I wish I wrote that” is a sentiment I can apply to nearly everything of Shaenon’s, but this is the section that really stuck with me:

  After decades of mainstream popularity, Cathy is still widely disliked by pop-cult elites like you and me. It whirls eternally between the Scylla and Charybdis of gender essentialism: men don’t like it because it’s about girly stuff, and feminist women don’t like it because it’s about girly stuff. Anti-feminists don’t have reason to like it either, what with the single-career-woman heroine who’s always been as open as newspaper syndication will allow about her casual sex life. That leaves just one demographic: women who are all for liberation and being your own woman and all that, but can’t quite figure out how to reconcile it with their actual lives. Women who never stopped feeling the pressure to cook like Betty Crocker and look like Donna Reed, and just added to it the pressure to change the world like Gloria Steinem. In other words, almost every woman of the Baby Boom generation.

When I think about some of the other, mostly-unflattering sentiments I read about Cathy around that time, like this horrifying essay from Tim Kreider at The Comics Journal (Kreider lets us know where he’s coming from with the title alone), it really highlights everything I’ve come to despise about the way so many men write about women’s comics. If they can’t relate to it, it must be crap, right? That’s the overwhelming message of Kreider’s essay and half the writing I see spewing from the keyboards of male comics critics online (kudos and gratitude to the other half, seriously, you have no idea). Thankfully there are women as brilliant and funny as Shaenon Garrity out there to create some balance.

3 Things Thursday: Love in Disguise

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Yesterday, Deb Aoki posted a transcript of a panel from this year’s New York Anime Festival, Gay for You? Yaoi and Yuri Manga for GBLTQ Readers, featuring Erica Friedman (Okazu/ALC Publishing), Leyla Aker (Viz Media), Alex Wooflson (Yaoi911), librarian Scott Robins, and Christopher Butcher (Comics212), moderated by author/super-librarian Robin Brenner. It was the most compelling and informative panel I attended all weekend, and the only negative thing I can say about it was that I wish it had been scheduled for two hours instead of one.

One of the things I found most surprising during the panel, was how willing its panelists were to recommend yaoi and yuri manga to GBLTQ readers here in the west. Though I can’t speak much to the yuri question (not too surprisingly, I guess, since Erica’s recommendations make it pretty clear that most of the best yuri has yet to be translated into English), I’ve been a guilt-ridden BL fan for several years now, enjoying more than a few books within the genre while cringing at its frequent elements of misogyny and a level of fetishization that sometimes even reads as homophobia. But while the panelists made it clear that they wouldn’t recommend every BL series (as Chris Butcher said, “I recommend comics, but i don’t recommend shitty comics.”), it was clear that they felt that representation, even representation without identity, was too important and too rare to scoff at.

At one point in the panel, Robin, who had conducted quite a bit of research for an upcoming publication, said, “One of my favorite responses that I got from the survey was from a young gay man who said he liked reading yaoi because it made him think that one day he’d get a cute boyfriend too.” It’s pretty hard to argue with that.

Panelists also made it clear that cultural differences could not be ignored, that there were reasons behind the way that BL and yuri are presented as they are in Japan, and that we can’t expect those things to change anytime soon. Still, as a reader, I found myself wishing–wishing that the kind of stories I’d like to see might one day come to be. I love romance, don’t get me wrong. I want romance. But my favorite kind of romance is also so much more. I want action, adventure, mystery, fantasy, or even just really good epic soap-opera. Thing is, these kinds of stories already exist, and some of them even appear to be same-sex love stories of one sort or another. They just don’t quite go there, at least not yet.

So finally, I get to my point. :)

For this week’s 3 Things, I’d like to talk about three same-sex love stories I wish would actually go and BE LOVE STORIES.

1. Banana Fish | Akimi Yoshida | Viz Media – Listed just last week as one of my three favorite “classic” shojo series, it’s too late for 1980s manga Banana Fish to become the love story it might have been, but that doesn’t stop me from indulging in the dream. Though the series doesn’t necessarily shy away from discussion of homosexuality, the close, tender relationship between its two male leads remains chaste and ambiguous to the end.

Yoshida attempts to clarify things a bit in her later side-story Garden of Light (“But they did love each other…maybe the way lovers do”) and her Angel Eyes art book is not terribly shy about it either. But what kind of story might she have written if she’d been comfortable enough (or allowed) to turn Banana Fish‘s generous subtext into actual text? I’d have liked to read that story. I’d have liked to read that a lot.

2. Wild Adapter | Kazuya Minekura | Tokyopop – “But wait!” you protest. “Wild Adapter is BL! It’s published in a BL magazine!” Sure, that’s true, I’d respond, and certainly there’s more overt sexuality in WA than in something like Banana Fish, but six volumes in, I still haven’t seen it. I’m not talking about sex, either. I’m talking about any kind of genuine acknowledgement of the apparently romantic relationship between its two leads.

Obviously this series is still running (and there may truths already revealed in the Japanese chapters that haven’t yet made it over), and its presence in a BL magazine does give one hope. But from what we’ve seen in English so far, Wild Adapter is still a love story that refuses to admit it’s a love story.

So bring it on, Minekura. I’m dying to see it.

3. NANA | Ai Yazawa | Viz Media – Now, most of us who love this series have long reconciled with the fact that we’re never going to see its two title characters finally shake off the screwed-up men in their lives and really shack up together (and at this point, frankly, we’re just hoping against hope we’ll see it finished at all). Still, there’s a corner of every NANA fan’s heart that wishes it might be so. Don’t get me wrong–I adore some of those screwed-up men. But Nana/Nana is the ultimate ‘ship that will never be, leaving us to subsist only on a few voiced fantasies and some super-romantic narration.

“The hand that I was holding then… was the only one I wanted to hold… that night… and forever.”

I mean, come on. *Sigh*

So, time to open up the floor! Readers, what are your favorite love stories in disguise? Respond in comments or in your own blog!

In the Walnut 1-2 by Toko Kawai: B+

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More mystery than romance, this BL series features some unremarkable “cases” but a pair of interesting leads who are already an established couple when the story begins! Shocking!

You can find my review for Manga Bookshelf here.

In the Walnut is published in English by Digital Manga Publishing. The series is still ongoing in Japan; the third volume was just released there on October 9th.

Review copies provided by the publisher.

BL Bookrack: October Mix

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Welcome to the October installment of BL Bookrack, a monthly feature co-written with Soliloquy in Blue‘s Michelle Smith.

First up this month, I take a short look at two one-shots, Baseball Heaven from BLU Manga and Deeply Loving a Maniac from DMP’s 801 Media. Then Michelle provides the real meat of this installment, with a thoughtful look at DMP/Juné’s In the Walnut.

Baseball Heaven | By Ellie Mamahara | Published by BLU | Rated Mature – Tokyo Elephants shortstop Chiaki Ogata is concerned when otherwise friendly rookie pitcher Eiji Uno seems to like everyone but him. It comes as a surprise to Ogata, then, when he discovers that Uno actually believes himself in love with him. Unable to consider getting involved with a much younger teammate, Ogata declares he won’t sleep with Uno until he pitches a perfect game, hoping to delay any need for decision. Can Uno stay interested under these conditions?

Romance manga is a tricky thing. Even the most realistic example of the genre must contain some element of fantasy in order to fulfill the expectations of its readers. On the other hand, the genre also provides an opportunity for complete immersion in a fantasy space for authors who wish to explore their readers’ more unlikely desires. Where writers most often stumble is in achieving believability within the construct of this fantasy, and unfortunately that is exactly the problem with Baseball Heaven.

Though there are plenty of scenarios, even in the workplace, in which an author might reasonably insert middle-school-quality romantic comedy, complete with wacky misunderstandings, wide-eyed confessions, chaste kisses, and blushing embraces, the world of professional baseball is simply not one of them.

Had Mamahara chosen a lighter, more commonplace fictional universe–a restaurant, perhaps, or a supernatural detective agency (for that fantasy touch)–her sweet (if mundane) romance might have gained a little traction. As it is, however, the incongruity of the story’s setting and its characterization is just too great to be satisfying for anyone. Readers looking for fantasy will be distracted by the intrusion of stony-voiced baseball announcers, while those with any knowledge of or interest in baseball will just feel embarrassed and sad.

Could there be a great BL baseball manga out there? I surely hope so. Unfortunately, Baseball Heaven is not it.

-Review by MJ

Deeply Loving a Maniac | By You Higashino | Published by 801 Media | Rated Mature (18+) – Morita is a dedicated otaku, who up until recently had spent all his waking hours buried in magazines filled with drawings of scantily-clad anime girls. This was before he met Sakura, a sexy, gay classmate and his first true love. Though trading in endless 2D girls for one hot 3D boy comes pretty naturally to Morita, he’s worried about what Sakura must think of him as a sex-obsessed otaku with no interests other than him. Can joining the track team make him into a more desirable man?

The answer is, hilariously, “yes,” a sentiment that might be applied to nearly everything in this oddly realistic piece of cracktastic pornography. Though perhaps this is due more to the high school yaoi genre’s predisposition to saccharin romance than it is to You Higashino’s actual skill, there is something incredibly refreshing about a story featuring two high school guys who simply admit to being total horndogs.

Really, though, it’s not just that. While the manga is steeped in explicit sexual fantasy, even from its very first pages, it is, overall, one of the most realistic depictions of actual high school boys I’ve yet to see in this genre. Though they each have their own urgent emotional concerns (Sakura’s worried that Morita’s new athletic-induced hotness will turn him back onto girls, and Morita wonders whether his obsession with a Sakura-like anime figure constitutes “cheating”) they are unable to communicate any of it to each other in a remotely coherent way. Sakura rages, Morita spaces out, and if they’re not really successful at anything but sex, that’s okay, since it’s all they’re really thinking about anyway.

Higashino’s artwork is filled with over-the-top BL imagery that manages to be genuinely sexy even as it pokes fun at the genre’s most ridiculous tropes. Her voice is satirical but never cutting, and she’s careful to skewer her characters (and readers!) with love. And for that we love her right back.

For suprising mix of otaku humor, hot porn, and unexpected realism, check out Deeply Loving a Maniac.

-Review by MJ

In the Walnut, Vols. 1-2 | By Toko Kawai | Published by Juné | Rated YA (16+) – The back cover of In the Walnut‘s second volume describes the series as “light and quirky.” While both are true at times, that makes it sound a lot more frivolous than it really is.

In what is a welcome departure from the typical BL formula, the leads are an established couple: sloppy and enigmatic Hideo Tanizaki, who has inherited a gallery (the titular In the Walnut) from his grandfather, and Sohei Nakai, a cheerful aspiring filmmaker. In the Walnut is known as a gallery that doesn’t ask too many questions, so Tanizaki is constantly fielding requests that seem a bit shady.

In the Walnut reads more like a mystery than a romance, as Tanizaki encounters a new art-related puzzle each chapter and must figure out what’s going on. Coincidence plays a huge factor in these “cases,” like when Tanizaki is asked to restore a battered old painting only to have a customer offer him its twin later the same day, or the way Tanizaki solves the mysteries—in a manner reminiscent of the TV show House—thanks to Nakai saying or doing something that sparks a realization.

While the cases themselves really are not that interesting, the same can’t be said for the characters. Eventually we do go back in time to see how Tanizaki and Nakai met, and while their current-day relationship seems rather casual, the depth of their feelings for one another becomes more clear as the series progresses. I also love that they talk to each other about things other than their relationship—if there were such a thing as a BL Bechdel Test, this would pass! True, Nakai, being the cheerful one who “grew up among goats” in Hokkaido, doesn’t really get fleshed out too much, but Tanizaki is a delightfully complicated character.

In early chapters, Tanizaki does a few things that might be construed as wrong but which have beneficial results for his customers. From this, we conclude that he’s a good man. Nakai reaches the same conclusion, and when he tells Tanizaki so, the latter is surprisingly affected, thinking, “I needed to know that I’m not evil.” But! It turns out things aren’t so cut and dry after all when, in the second volume, Tanizaki sells a painting to a young woman who lacks artistic knowledge for nearly six times its worth and later fails to tell another customer the full story behind what appears to be a cheap souvenir. He does do good, but sometimes his actions are spurred by greed rather than benevolence, which is a dichotomy I find intriguing.

Ultimately, I enjoyed In the Walnut quite a lot and it’ll be a sad wait until the third volume (just released in Japan earlier this month) finally makes its way here. Hopefully then we’ll learn more about Nakai!

-Review by Michelle Smith

Review copies provided by the publishers.