Features & Reviews

By Hajime Isayama. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Bessatsu Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

Attack on Titan has never really been a laugh riot to begin with, but you get the sense that the fun is over with this volume. There’s one last effort to have wacky survey corps times here, with Sasha going completely bugfuck over meat, and Eren and Jean having a nostalgic fistfight, but it feels a bit out of place and wrong, and just makes the reader realize that those times are probably gone for good. A feeling that only intensifies as the volume goes on and we reach Wall Maria, where Reiner and Bertholt (OK, mostly Reiner) as well as the Beast Titan await, luring our heroes into a trap that they’re mostly aware of and walking into willingly. I suspect the volume after this will be wall-to-wall action.

Meanwhile, the flashback with Instructor Shadis gives us the longest look yet we’ve had of Eren’s parents, and also discusses the mindset that the Survey Team needs to have to function properly, a mindset that some people (like Shadis himself) struggle and ultimately fail to find. Eren’s father Grisha is found outside the walls, and it’s implied came from even further outside. He’s able to find his calling in life, though, and it’s not the Survey Corps but medicine. As we see Shadis desperately attempting to prove that he’s special, that he’s better than everyone else and failing, we see Grisha fall in love, get married, have a family… and do scientific experiments on his children, of course, though this volume doesn’t get into that.

Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch has never really resonated with me, and Attack on Titan plays with the concept without choosing sides. Certainly we have characters throughout the series who seem to succeed with what appears to be a minimum of effort and looking cool while doing it – Mikasa, Levi – but Eren, who’s support to be the most special of them all, is seen constantly struggling and failing. He notes in this volume he’s not special – just the son of a special man. Shadis gives up command of the Survey Corps because he has a crisis of confidence and supposedly”realizes” that he’s not special while someone like Erwin is. But Hange, correctly in my opinions, calls that simple cowardice. Again, the ambiguity is discomfiting but appreciated.

Speaking of people struggling with being special, Armin has found that being the idea guy is not all it’s cracked up to be when time is running short and you can’t explain your ideas very well beyond “it’s a hunch”. Eren, Mikasa and Armin function best as a threesome because each one of them has something the other two lack, and I enjoyed the flashback to their youth as probably my favorite scene in the entire volume. Sadly, as I said, the volume ends with Reiner making his appearance, and even though he’s almost beheaded he isn’t quite, so I’m sure he’ll be back before you know it. Attack on Titan can be a struggle, but always makes you think and question why you’re making choices. That’s a big reason it sells as well as it does.

By Wataru Karasuma. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks, serialization ongoing in the magazine Dengeki Daioh. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

Once you see something make it big, be it here or in Japan, you’re going to see variations on the same basic theme in the hopes that a company can get some of that sweet profit. Be it vampires, zombies, Alices, or whatever, the media are ready to give you something that’s essentially the same with a few palette swaps. Even better is if you can mash more than one genre together – you get the chance to try to court multiple markets. Enter Not Lives, whose cover screams out that its’ a date sim, complete with an actual dialogue box, but it also ends up being ‘person ends up in a game world’ as well as the ever popular ‘survival game’ genre. The result isn’t terrible, but it feels like a title where stuff is thrown at the wall to see what sticks.

Oddly, despite being the most obvious thanks to the cover, the datesim/high school romance part is the least developed of the bunch. Our hero, for a change, is rather extroverted and talkative, and also has a genius for making and marketing games of any kind, but is somewhat useless about matters of the heart – not realizing that his long-suffering childhood friend is in love with him, for instance. One day he accidentally gets a copy of a mysterious game called Not Lives, and when he tries to play it it loads itself into his chest rather than the CD drive, downloading him into a VR game where he’s playing a young woman. The catch being that the young woman actually exists, and is rather frustrated with this newbie losing in his very first game.

So far so cute, but the survival game aspect takes precedence as the series goes on, and we discovers the players are trapped in a rather nasty way. First time losers become ‘avatars’, i.e. somewhat less than human, and are forced to recruit other players. If the avatar then loses again… they’re ‘deleted’, which seems to involve severed body parts. Needless to say, things get a bit cutthroat, especially since it becomes apparent that some of the players/avatars can use game powers in the REAL world to, say, throw a bunch of thugs in front of a truck and kill them all. Our hero may be a genius gamer, but will he be able to level up and beat this game where the rules are still a bit vague? Especially once his avatar ends up transferring to his class, thus neatly taking us back to the datesim in the very end.

There’s nothing overtly wrong with this – there’s some fanservice, but honestly I was expecting worse, and the avatar, Kyouko, manages to be emotionally repressed without being a stoic robot. That said, nothing in it screamed that I absolutely had to get the next volume. It plays to folks who like “trapped in a game” (me), “survival game” (not me), and “dateim romance” (it depends). My main concern is the 2nd, as I worry that, like almost all survival game titles, we’ll be introduced to likeable, sympathetic people who will then meet horrible ends. Childhood friend, I’m very worried for your future…

By Satoko Kiyuduki. Released in Japan as “Hitsugi Katsugi no Kuro – Kaichu Tabi no Wa” by Houbunsha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Manga Time Kirara. Released in North America by Yen Press.

It can at times be rather hard to believe that this mostly dark and surreal fantasy series can come from the same author as GA Art Design Class, a 4-koma series about the adventures of five girls in art college. But there are moments when the two series seem to connect more than you’d expect. Kiyuduki frequently believes in “show, don’t tell” in regards to not only her plot but also her characterization, leaving the reader to guess much of what’s going on; we sometimes see this with The Professor in GA. Likewise, Kisaragi’s surreal and sometimes unnerving dream sequences could easily fit into Kuro – indeed, Kisaragi and Kuro look similar enough that you could headcanon this as one long nightmare she’s having. Because it does feel more and more like a nightmare – Kuro’s not getting as many fluffy stories as it did back in Volume 1.

Part of the reason for that might be that this volume gives us a lot more background on the witch that has supposedly cursed Kuro – we see what may be a sort of origin story for her, and a story where we see her own journeys, which appropriately mirror Kuro’s. But I think it’s simply that almost all the stories in this volume deal with death and being unable or unwilling to move on. Three very different young women meet unfortunate ends but want to leave something behind. A balloon race seems to literally end up in heaven. Kuro, Nijuku and Sanju end up in a valley where perspective and illusions seem like an optional extra, and Kuo once again cannot let go of what she regards as the things that make her what she is – her hat and coffin. Even the happiest story in this volume involves a cursed painter whose subjects all seem to die right after they’re painted. Luckily, Kuro can’t seem to die, so that’s one problem solved.

The second half of the book gets even more chilling, at times almost seeming to descend into pure horror. Two sisters are offered a grim bargain by the Witch, and Kuro has to deal with the consequences, once again taking on someone else’s suffering into her own body. b The last story introduces us to what seems like another in Kuro’s long line of spunky female merchant girls she seems to run into, only to find that reality is murderously different. And this also gives us the reason for Kuro’s journey. Yes, she’s trying to seek death, but in order to do that, she has to take in life as well, because without life death is meaningless. It’s something that the witch doesn’t quite understand, and even Kuro isn’t really confident in her feelings till the end of this book. But it’s true, and also a reminder of the depth and quality of the stories in this volume. Anyone who likes dark, thoughtful fantasy should be reading this, no exceptions.

By Keiichi Arawi. Released in Japan by Kadokawa Shoten, serialized in the magazine Shonen Ace. Released in North America by Vertical Comics.

I have a weakness for gag manga, as some of you may have noticed, and also a weakness for high school slice-of-life starring a bunch of quirky high school girls. It should be no surprise, therefore, to learn that I have been awaiting the release of Nichijou for some time. It was initially licensed by Bandai Entertainment about 5 years ago, but they folded their US manga division before it could even get a volume out. That said, the anime did appear over here, and was quite popular – in fact, arguably far more popular than it ended up being in Japan. And so Vertical, which has been dipping its toes into the surreal gag world with titles like My Neighbor Seki, now introduces us to a very unordinary manga.

Nichijou has quite a large ensemble cast, but for the most part is the adventures of five girls. Three of them, Yuuko, Mio, and Mai, are classmates at the local high school. Yuuko is peppy, somewhat dense, and very fond of attempting to make jokes that no one finds funny but her. Mio is the “normal” girl in the csat, but that’s only a matter of degrees, as we discover when she realizes her secret yaoi manga doodle is about to be discovered and becomes Superwoman. Mai is my personal favorite, a quite and shy girl who loves to bait and get reactions from Yuuko, I suspect as it’s the only way she can really show her feelings. There are apparently fans of Nichijou who dislike Mai for her gadfly nature, but these people are objectively wrong, so there’s no need to worry about them.

The other two main cast members are Nano, a robot girl who also attends class and her child genius inventor Professor, who’s a genius at making robots but an immature child in almost every other sense. Those familiar with the anime might be taken aback by Nano appearing in class right away – the anime decided to move all the stories with her in class to the second half of the series, the better to separate the ‘school’ and ‘Professor’s house’ segments of the show. We also meet a few other amusing minor characters here, like the farmer’s son who acts like a stereotypical rich boy, and the parody of tsunderes who can be seen literally blowing people’s brains out (though they’re fine a panel later – this is essentially a cartoon, in the Western Looney Tunes sense).

There’s not a lot to review in Nichijou beyond the gags, which I don’t want to spoil if you haven’t seen them. As with most manga of this sort, the humor can be found in facial reactions, and Arawi is very, very good at these – check out Chapter 9 for the best example. The girls are cute as well, but there is a blissful lack of fanservice that I also greatly appreciate, and there don’t seem to be any obvious romances besides the one-sided crushes Mio and the tsundere parody have. Nichijou is content to make jokes and be strange, and if it has to choose between being funny or being strange, it will pick the latter. If you like laughing, or if you like tilting your head and going “wuh?”, either way you’ll enjoy this.

By Mamare Touno and Kazuhiro Hara. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On.

As I’ve said many times before, Log Horizon has a bit of a fandom war with a similar series, Sword Art Online. It’s something of a one-sided war, given that SAO has about 10 times the number of fans LH does, but being #2, Log Horizon fans try harder. And one thing that comes up in complaining about SAO is how Kirito is the sort of self-insert perfect hero type who always gets all the attention and the girls. This contrasts with Shiroe in Log Horizon… somewhat. Shiroe’s not a front-line combatant, being more of a general and tactician. And there are many girls in the series who seem totally uninterested in him. This is perhaps balanced by the events at the end of this book, in which he reveals that with a properly written contract, he appears to have the power to resurrect the dead and create life. Which is something Kirito could never do. (Isn’t it sad, Sachi?)

Of course, Shiroe’s role in this book is not as big as it has been, mostly as the cast continues to be fleshed out and expanded. On the cover we have Crusty and Reinesia, two similar characters who are able to project a veneer of serenity and competence even though they’d rather be doing something else. And, as we find in this book, both are able to supporess their lazy impulses when the need arises. Reinesia impressed me the most in this entire book, showing off impressive political acumen in cutting through all the red tape and ego tripping of the Council arguments and realizing what had to be done. And then she goes and does it, despite being forced to dress in a revealing Valkyrie costume “for morale reasons” and getting exposed to horrific battles (and, even more terrifying, Crusty loving those battles). I really hope to see more of her soon.

Meanwhile, we discover the terrible secret of Rundelhaus, though admittedly we don’t get the extensive background story I was expecting. He’s an NPC who desperately wants to be a hero, and has tried even harder than the others, despite the fact that the game itself won’t let him level up as much. So, naturally, he’s killed in combat, which leads to Shiroe doing what I said he did in the first paragraph. I had sort of hoped that this would lead to Isuzu finally treating him like a man instead of a big dog, but to no avail. Actually, shippers will be happy-yet-left-wanting with the ending, in which no less than four ships get teases but that’s about it. Also, I am amused that it became so obvious Akatsuki had done next to nothing since the first book that she actually whines about it here.

Log Horizon continues to do a very good job of building a world logically based on “what if we were trapped in a game” mechanics, with the plot of these two books being particularly clever, as it relies on the adventurers not doing something due to the crisis, and the consequences being horrible. I do wonder if we’ll ever see the original core trio battling together again, though. Perhaps next time.

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.

This is another one of those titles where I haven’t seen the anime that was based on it, but sheer word of mouth has made me incredibly excited for its release. First of all, it’s very rare to see Kodansha Comics taking a chance n josei over here at all – lately they’ve been licensing some Dessert, but that’s still shoujo for older teens. Kiss is for young women, and it shows – this title features adults, even if much of the cast are jobless and living off their parents. Its humor and energy are absolutely worth a read, though I found more flaws in it than I was expecting.

Our heroine is, as you may have guessed, the girl in the braids in the foreground, not the pink-haired pretty thing behind her. Tsukimi is a shy introvert with an obsession for jellyfish, who has to force herself to go outside her apartment – an apartment she shares with similar-minded women, all of whom are obsessed with something (kimonos, trains, older men, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms). Then one day, while trying to work up the nerve to tell a fish store employee that the ways he’s put the jellyfish into the tank will kill one of them, she runs into Kuranosuke, who she assumes is a gorgeous, extroverted young woman who helps her out and ends up back at her apartment. Then it turns out that Kuranosuke is a man.

The main reason to read this title, and it’s absolutely worth it, is the humor. Tsukimi may be a massive introvert, but her reactions are nicely over the top and horrified much of the time, especially trying to deal with this new free spirit in her life. Of the rest of the female cast, Mayaya is the one that stands out the most, something she brings on herself with all of her posing and dramatic declarations. Kuranosuke’s own frustrations at his family, his new friends, and his growing realization that he actually likes Tsukihi is also highly amusing. The art is also excellent, helping to show off the humor and being distinct but not overly busy.

That said, I do have a few issues. This is a little progressive, but not overly so – Kuranosuke emphasizes he’s not gay a couple of times, and there’s some slangy ‘homo’ refs sprinkled throughout, which the endnotes helpfully tell us isn’t as caustic as it sounds here, but is still very defensive. The main villain of the piece, meanwhile, is almost a cliche, and it doesn’t help that she uses sex as a weapon to get what she wants – this is likely meant to contrast with the ‘pure’ Tsukimi, and I was happy to see one or two times when she didn’t act like a cartoon character, but it was only once or twice. Lastly, Kuranosuke’s attempts to drag these women out of their shells and have them ‘don armor’ to deal with the real world is both inspiring and frustrating – I sense he’s of the school that feels that introverts just aren’t trying hard enough to be extroverted.

All that said, this is still a definite title for your collection. Tsukimi is sweet and a bit over the top, and I look forward to seeing her Cinderella-type story, while hoping that she still retains the parts of her that are why we fell for her in the first place. Want to see more of this.