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The Boston Examiner Experiment!

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Today marks my debut as the Manga Examiner with the Boston edition of Examiner.com. This will be a great experiment for both me and the Examiner, as it’s my first time working with their system and the Boston edition’s first stab at manga coverage (as far as I know).

Please take a look at my first article for the site, in which I discuss upcoming releases for May with a highlight on Boston-area critics. Writing for the Boston edition, I’ll be hoping to spotlight the local manga scene as much as possible, so any tips on news or events will be greatly appreciated! I’ll also be posting manga reviews, industry news, convention coverage, and anything else that seems timely.

Examiner.com offers several features for sharing and keeping up with new posts. First off, you can receive e-mail updates each time I make a new post by clicking the “Subscribe” button either on my main page or on any individual post. …

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NANA Project Special Edition!

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The NANA Project takes on a special topic this month (or rather, last month a little bit late), following some internet brouhaha around pages that were removed from volume four of Viz’s edition of NANA.

Join Danielle Leigh, Michelle Smith, and me over at Comics Should Be Good as we hash out trademark law, fan entitlement, publisher negligence, translation, adaptation, the meaning of “censorship,” and the power of “love.” And don’t forget to flame us in comments.

We’ll return in June with discussion of volumes 11 & 12 of NANA. Meanwhile, check out our special edition here!

Twin Spica, Vol. 1

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Asumi Kamogawa is a small girl with a big dream: to be an astronaut on Japan’s first manned space flight. Though she passes the entrance exam for Tokyo Space School, she faces several additional hurdles to realizing her goal, from her child-like stature — she’s thirteen going on eight — to her family’s precarious financial position. Then, too, Asumi is haunted by memories of a terrible fire that consumed her hometown and killed her mother, a fire caused by a failed rocket launch. Yet for all the pain in her young life, Asumi proves resilient, a gentle girl who perseveres in difficult situations, offers friendship in lieu of judgment, and demonstrates a preternatural awareness of life’s fragility.

If Asumi sounds like a stereotypically optimistic manga character, a can-do kid who maintains a positive attitude through every set-back, the first volume of Twin Spica reveals her to be more complex and damaged than her firm resolve might suggest. Mr. Lion, her imaginary friend, is proof of the wounds she carries: she “met” him when she was six, never quite outgrowing the need for his counsel or company. When Asumi suffers a traumatic flashback to the Yuigahama disaster, for example, she calls out Mr. Lion’s name; when her father responds angrily to the news that she passed the space academy’s placement test, she asks Mr. Lion if she should enroll or abandon her dream of becoming “a driver on a rocket.”

Though Asumi’s story ran in Comic Flapper, a seinen magazine, Twin Spica works surprisingly well for both adults and teens. The storytelling is direct and simple without being didactic, filled with the kind of characters that younger readers will recognize and embrace as true to their own experiences. At the same time, however, Twin Spica‘s subtexts are rich enough to sustain an adult’s interest, as the supplemental stories “2015: Fireworks” and “Asumi” attest. Both explore Asumi’s response to her mother’s death, acknowledging and validating Asumi’s curiosity about her mother’s appearance (Mom suffered disfiguring burns) and about dying itself. (Six-year-old Asumi scandalizes funeral-goers by leaning over her mother’s casket to see what death “smells like.”) Without a trace of mawkishness, Yaginuma shows us how Asumi makes sense of what happened to her mother, recognizing his young heroine’s keen emotional intelligence in the way she chooses to honor her mother’s memory. Tween and teen readers may well find these passages moving, as they touch on one of childhood’s most primal fears, but adult readers will find them more unsettling, as they remind us of our inability to protect children from painful experiences, and of the moment when we first grasped death’s finality.

The artwork, like the narrative, has a direct, expressive quality that keeps the focus on the characters’ interactions, rather than the gizmos and laboratories where their training takes place. Yaginuma draws his tyro astronauts in a simple, stylized fashion that treats them as collection of distinctive geometric shapes: Fuchuya, one of Asumi’s classmates, sports a ‘do evocative of Eero Saarinen’s iconic TWA terminal, while Asumi resembles a kokeshi doll with her exaggerated round head and tiny body. The characters’ slightly awkward proportions register as a deliberate artistic choice — call it studied naivete or primitivism — though at times the art seems a little clumsy and flat; readers will be forgiven for thinking Yusinuma’s storytelling skills outstrip his draftsmanship.

Whatever conclusions the reader reaches about Yusinuma’s style, it’s impossible to deny the emotional power of Twin Spica as a coming-of-age story about one girl’s journey from childhood to adulthood, and one nation’s journey from terrestrial power to space race competitor. A beautiful, thought-provoking book for star gazers of all ages.

Review copy provided by Vertical, Inc. Volume one of Twin Spica will be released on May 4, 2010.

TWIN SPICA, VOL. 1 • BY KOU YAGINUMA • VERTICAL, INC. • 192 pp. • NO RATING

Twin Spica, Vol. 1

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twinspica1Asumi Kamogawa is a small girl with a big dream: to be an astronaut on Japan’s first manned space flight. Though she passes the entrance exam for Tokyo Space School, she faces several additional hurdles to realizing her goal, from her child-like stature — she’s thirteen going on eight — to her family’s precarious financial position. Then, too, Asumi is haunted by memories of a terrible fire that consumed her hometown and killed her mother, a fire caused by a failed rocket launch. Yet for all the pain in her young life, Asumi proves resilient, a gentle girl who perseveres in difficult situations, offers friendship in lieu of judgment, and demonstrates a preternatural awareness of life’s fragility.

If Asumi sounds like a stereotypically optimistic manga character, a can-do kid who maintains a positive attitude through every set-back, the first volume of Twin Spica reveals her to be more complex and damaged than her firm resolve might suggest. Mr. Lion, her imaginary friend, is proof of the wounds she carries: she “met” him when she was six, never quite outgrowing the need for his counsel or company. When Asumi suffers a traumatic flashback to the Yuigahama disaster, for example, she calls out Mr. Lion’s name; when her father responds angrily to the news that she passed the space academy’s placement test, she asks Mr. Lion if she should enroll or abandon her dream of becoming “a driver on a rocket.”

…

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Manhwa Monday: May Preview

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Welcome to another Manhwa Monday! As May begins, let’s take a look at what’s on the way from our favorite manhwa publishers this month!

First off, Udon Entertainment offers up the fourth in their Korean artbook series, Apple, scheduled for release on May 11th, according to Amazon.

Yen Press has an impressive lineup for May, with new volumes of sunjeong series Legend, Sarasah, Sugarholic, as well as all-ages title, One Fine Day (my special favorite of the group), and action series Black God and Laon.

Lastly, NETCOMICS continues weekly chapter releases of several fantastic series (mostly for grown-up women!), including There’s Something About Sunyool, Please, Please Me, The Adventures of Young Det, and Full House, which is about to begin its fourth volume….

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Moving Day

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Hello readers! I’m going to be moving over the next week, which means updates here may be sporadic until we’re finally all in place (and with working internet service). One point of interest: I hadn’t quite realized just how large my manga collection had grown until I packed it all up this morning. Also, wow were those boxes heavy!

On deck we have the upcoming edition of Manhwa Monday as well as reviews of Ode to Kirihito, One Fine Day, Vol. 2, Hikaru no Go, Vol. 19 and as much more as I can manage in between all the hauling.

In the meantime, check out my blogroll for links to all of my favorite blogs.

More from Manga Bookshelf soon!

Bokurano: Ours, Vol. 1

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Among the most discussed scenes in the new Kick-Ass film is one that pits a tweenage assassin against a roomful of grown men. To the strains of The Banana Splits theme song, thirteen-year-old Hit Girl dispatches a dozen gangsters with a gory zest that has divided critics into two camps: those, like Richard Corliss, who found the scene shocking yet exhilarating, a purposeful, subversive commentary on superhero violence, and those, like Roger Ebert, who found it morally reprehensible, a kind of kiddie porn that exploits the character’s age for cheap thrills. What’s at issue here is not children’s capacity for violence; anyone who’s run the gauntlet of a junior high cafeteria or cranked out an essay on Lord of the Flies is painfully aware that kids can be beastly when the grown-ups aren’t looking. The real issue is that Hit Girl seems to be enjoying herself, raising the far more uncomfortable question of how children understand and wield power.

Mohiro Kitoh, creator of Shadow Star and Bokurano: Ours, likes to muck around in this uncomfortable space. In Shadow Star, for example, Kitoh pairs teens with powerful supernatural allies — in this case, “shadow dragons” — who become instruments not for fighting evil but for exacting revenge on their masters’ peers and asserting their masters’ primacy in the school pecking order. Shadow Star‘s graphic violence and sex scenes clearly made some folks uneasy, as a few of the later chapters were censored here in the US. (Dark Horse dropped the series before completing it.) Bokurano: Ours hasn’t crossed that line — at least not yet — but once again finds Kitoh subverting a familiar manga trope to suggest the darkness of the underage psyche. This time, he takes a stock shonen formula — kids piloting giant robots to save Earth from aliens — and gives it a nasty twist: the pilot of a successful sortie dies after completing his mission.

The first volume of Bokurano: Ours is neatly divided into three acts, the first explaining how Kokopelli, a mysterious computer programmer, dupes fifteen kids into “playing” this lethal game; the second profiling Waku, a brash jock who pilots the first mission; and third profiling Kodama, a ruthless loner who leads the second. In just a handful of pages, Kitoh establishes both boys’ personal histories and personalities with efficiency and nuance. Waku, for example, views his mission in the same light as a soccer match, as something to be won, while Kodama views his sortie with calculated detachment: by stomping flat an entire neighborhood, he hopes to create work for his father’s construction business. (He’s a youthful Donald Trump, minus the comb-over.)

As these first two sorties suggest, Kitoh seems intent on laying bare the unspoken truth about the giant-robot genre, that kids’ power fantasies are seldom as heroic and self-abnegating as we’d like to think; given the opportunity to control an enormous, destructive piece of machinery, many kids would just as soon turn it on others as save the day. His point is well-taken, but is driven home with such grim determination that it feels more punitive than insightful. The same could be said for his fight scenes, in which he meticulously documents the destructive effects of the children’s behavior. Kitoh’s robots look more like flesh-and-blood creatures than machines, making every body blow and puncture as viscerally real as a wound. The fights aren’t exciting; they’re exhausting, grim spectacles with terrible consequences for everyone caught in the crossfire.

Which brings me back to Kick-Ass: if a story’s tone is serious and dour, rather than cheeky and excessive, how are we to process the sight of young children committing terrible acts of violence? I wouldn’t go as far as Ebert and pronounce Bokurano: Ours morally reprehensible, as I think Kitoh recognizes that a child’s capacity for inflicting — and enjoying the sight of — pain comes from a different place than an adult’s, something that’s less self-evident in the Kick-Ass movie. At the same time, however, there’s something undeniably exploitative about Kitoh’s fondness for depicting children in peril; he seems to take pleasure in stomping all over the idea that children are more innocent and pure than adults, even though he’s devised an unfair scenario for testing that hypothesis. (As I note above, the kids are tricked into “playing” what they believe is a game, with no way to renege on their contract.) I’m not sure if his aim is to shock or simply tell unpleasant truths, but either way, his relentlessly pessimistic view of human nature wears thin fast.

BOKURANO: OURS, VOL. 1 • BY MOHIRO KITOH • VIZ • 200 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN

Bokurano: Ours, Vol. 1

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BokuranoOurs_1Among the most discussed scenes in the new Kick-Ass film is one that pits a tweenage assassin against a roomful of grown men. To the strains of The Banana Splits theme song, thirteen-year-old Hit Girl dispatches a dozen gangsters with a gory zest that has divided critics into two camps: those, like Richard Corliss, who found the scene shocking yet exhilarating, a purposeful, subversive commentary on superhero violence, and those, like Roger Ebert, who found it morally reprehensible, a kind of kiddie porn that exploits the character’s age for cheap thrills. What’s at issue here is not children’s capacity for violence; anyone who’s run the gauntlet of a junior high cafeteria or cranked out an essay on Lord of the Flies is painfully aware that kids can be beastly when the grown-ups aren’t looking. The real issue is that Hit Girl seems to be enjoying herself, raising the far more uncomfortable question of how children understand and wield power.

Mohiro Kitoh, creator of Shadow Star and Bokurano: Ours, likes to muck around in this uncomfortable space. In Shadow Star, for example, Kitoh pairs teens with powerful supernatural allies — in this case, “shadow dragons” — who become instruments not for fighting evil but for exacting revenge on their masters’ peers and asserting their masters’ primacy in the school pecking order. Shadow Star‘s graphic violence and sex scenes clearly made some folks uneasy, as a few of the later chapters were censored here in the US. (Dark Horse dropped the series before completing it.) Bokurano: Ours hasn’t crossed that line — at least not yet — but once again finds Kitoh subverting a familiar manga trope to suggest the darkness of the underage psyche. This time, he takes a stock shonen formula — kids piloting giant robots to save Earth from aliens — and gives it a nasty twist: the pilot of a successful sortie dies after completing his mission.

The first volume of Bokurano: Ours is neatly divided into three acts, the first explaining how Kokopelli, a mysterious computer programmer, dupes fifteen kids into “playing” this lethal game; the second profiling Waku, a brash jock who pilots the first mission; and third profiling Kodama, a ruthless loner who leads the second. In just a handful of pages, Kitoh establishes both boys’ personal histories and personalities with efficiency and nuance. Waku, for example, views his mission in the same light as a soccer match, as something to be won, while Kodama views his sortie with calculated detachment: by stomping flat an entire neighborhood, he hopes to create work for his father’s construction business. (He’s a youthful Donald Trump, minus the comb-over.)

As these first two sorties suggest, Kitoh seems intent on laying bare the unspoken truth about the giant-robot genre, that kids’ power fantasies are seldom as heroic and self-abnegating as we’d like to think; given the opportunity to control an enormous, destructive piece of machinery, many kids would just as soon turn it on others as save the day. His point is well-taken, but is driven home with such grim determination that it feels more punitive than insightful. The same could be said for his fight scenes, in which he meticulously documents the destructive effects of the children’s behavior. Kitoh’s robots look more like flesh-and-blood creatures than machines, making every body blow and puncture as viscerally real as a wound. The fights aren’t exciting; they’re exhausting, grim spectacles with terrible consequences for everyone caught in the crossfire.

Which brings me back to Kick-Ass: if a story’s tone is serious and dour, rather than cheeky and excessive, how are we to process the sight of young children committing terrible acts of violence? I wouldn’t go as far as Ebert and pronounce Bokurano: Ours morally reprehensible, as I think Kitoh recognizes that a child’s capacity for inflicting — and enjoying the sight of — pain comes from a different place than an adult’s, something that’s less self-evident in the Kick-Ass movie. At the same time, however, there’s something undeniably exploitative about Kitoh’s fondness for depicting children in peril; he seems to take pleasure in stomping all over the idea that children are more innocent and pure than adults, even though he’s devised an unfair scenario for testing that hypothesis. (As I note above, the kids are tricked into “playing” what they believe is a game, with no way to renege on their contract.) I’m not sure if his aim is to shock or simply tell unpleasant truths, but either way, his relentlessly pessimistic view of human nature wears thin fast.

BOKURANO: OURS, VOL. 1 • BY MOHIRO KITOH • VIZ • 200 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN

Crown of Love, Vol. 2

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Crown of Love, Vol. 2
By Yun Kouga
Published by Viz Media
Rated T+ (Older Teen)

Buy at RightStuf | Buy at Amazon

With Hisayoshi’s help, Rima crams for the Hakuo High entrance exam. Terrified of losing the opportunity to spend time with her, Hisayoshi attempts to suppress his true intentions but is thrown off-guard by unwelcome attention from another idol with whom he’s been cast in a commercial. With the spotlight narrowing decidedly on Hisayoshi, can Rima ever see him as anything but a hated rival?

This series’ hero, Hisayoshi, continues to be both intensely creepy and surprisingly relatable. It’s a combination guaranteed to make most readers uncomfortable, but it’s also one of the series’ greatest strengths. Watching Hisayoshi perilously straddle the line between crushing teenager and bona fide stalker quickly becomes a rather terrifying series of “There, but for the grace of God,” moments for anyone who has experienced unrequited love (in other words, roughly everyone). His inner thoughts echo the kind of late-night self-confessions that rarely see the light of day, tucked firmly away in those dark, hidden corners where shame and denial conveniently coexist.

Meanwhile, Rima remains full of contradiction. Certain at every moment that the entertainment world is poised to chew her up and spit her out, she feels threatened by everyone. She is also desperate for approval, even from those she fears most. Her own obsessive crush reads closer to poignant than creepy, but even there she’s filled with resentment more than anything else.

Kouga’s art really shines in this series, putting her knack for pretty faces to great use, while maintaining a subversive undertone. With the unevenness of the series’ first volume behind her, Kouga continues on with a lot of clean paneling, breaking into more free-form shojo-stylings only in the story’s most dramatic moments.

It’s truly a pleasure to see a new shojo series making good on the promises of its first volume. For teenage romance with a dark, cynical bite, check out Crown of Love.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Kobato, Vol. 1

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Kobato Hanato has a job to do: if she can fill a magic bottle with the pain and suffering of people whose lives she’s improved, she’ll have her dearest wish come true. There’s just one problem: Kobato is completely mystified by urban life, and has no idea how to identify folks in need of her help. Lucky for her, Ioryogi, a blue dog with a foul mouth and fierce temper, has been appointed her sensei and guardian angel, tasked with helping Kobato develop the the street smarts necessary for completing her mission.

It’s perfectly possible to read Kobato as a story about a sweet, clueless girl who teams up with a gruff but lovable animal to collect wounded hearts. That book is beautifully drawn, but isn’t terribly interesting; most of the stories follow the same template so, well, doggedly, that even the most committed fan of cute would find Kobato too repetitive to be much fun. A more productive way to understand Kobato is as a moe parody, a gleeful skewering of an entire genre in which the cute, underage heroine’s primary role is to endear herself to readers with her mixture of enthusiasm, naivete, and sensitivity.

Exhibit A in the case for moe parody: CLAMP has provided Kobato with a name and a mission, but no history that would explain her bizarre behavior. (Is she an amnesiac? An alien? A simpleton?) Nor does CLAMP reveal Kobato’s deeper motivation for collecting wounded souls. “There’s a place I want to go!” she cheerfully tells Ioryogi without elaborating on the why and where. Exhibit B: Kobato’s behavior seldom endears her to anyone. When Ioryogi instructs her to “do the things that are appropriate for Christmas,” for example, Kobato casually asks a stranger to spend the night with her in a hotel, to the consternation of his girlfriend, while an old man interprets her request to “heal his heart” as a solicitation for sex. Exhibit C: Ioryogi has a sadistic streak that far outstrips the basic demands of the plot. Though his comments are shockingly abrasive at first, it doesn’t take long for the reader to realize that Ioryogi’s assessment of Kobato is spot-on; in effect, he gives the audience permission to dislike Kobato, despite her sweet face and Holly Hobbie outfit.

CLAMP has performed this sleight of hand before with Chobits, another series that can be read as a straightforward genre exercise or a parody. In the case of Chobits, CLAMP starts from the basic nebbishy-guy-meets-magical-girl premise, adding some perverse ruffles and flourishes that call attention to the genre’s more unsavory aspects. (Chi, the magical girl/robot/love interest, behaves like a horny frat guy’s idea of the perfect girlfriend, eschewing underwear, hanging on her owner’s every word, and buying him porn magazines as a gift.) The complexity of the story and the size of the cast eventually overwhelm the satire, however, making it hard for the reader to know how, exactly, she’s supposed to react to Chi and Hideki’s relationship. In Kobato, on the other hand, CLAMP strips things down to the bare essentials, putting the focus squarely on the darkly comic hijinks.

Lest I make Kobato sound unbearably mean-spirited, the manga equivalent of kicking a puppy, let me assure you that it’s actually good fun. Ioryogi, the unquestionable star of the series, is a hoot; CLAMP wrings considerable laughs from the cognitive dissonance between his cute, doll-like appearance and his destructive rages, martial arts moves, and unsavory habits. (Like Mokona Modoki, Ioryogi is always jonesing after beer or sake.) Long-time CLAMP fans will enjoy the cameos sprinkled throughout the book, as characters from Chobits, Suki, and xxxHolic cross paths with Kobato in subtle, unexpected ways — think Where’s Waldo for the Card Captor Sakura crowd. (Bonus points if you can identify the characters without consulting the translation notes.) As one might expect, the artwork is clean and elegant, filled with beautiful costumes, lovely title pages, and crisply executed action sequences in the manner of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles.

A quick glance at the Wikipedia entry suggests that future volumes of Kobato may cant more towards romance than satire. So long as Ioryogi is along for the ride, however, I’m confident that Kobato will remain edgy enough for readers, like me, who have a limited tolerance for insipid heroines. Recommended.

Review copy provided by Yen Press. Volumes one and two of Kobato will be released simultaneously on May 18, 2010.

KOBATO, VOL. 1  • CLAMP • YEN PRESS • 160 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)