Features & Reviews

By Quin Rose, Owl Shinotsuki and Delico Psyche, based on the game by Quin Rose. Released in Japan as “Heart no Kuni no Alice ~My Fanatic Rabbit~” by Mag Garden, serialized in the magazine Comic Blade Avarus. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Well this has certainly turned into a franchise, hasn’t it? Given sales in North America seem to be relatively strong (for manga), we shouldn’t be surprised. Yet here is the third spinoff series from the original Alice manga, with promises of a fourth this spring and two more in the summer. Each focusing on a different pairing for our heroine, in the finest otome game tradition. And each managing to also deal with the main serious game plotline, where your secondary goal is to figure out that Alice actually regaining her memories is BAD BAD BAD. And with one exception (sorry, Bloody Twins, you still suck), the spinoff manga have done an impressive job of doing just that.

Not that you would know it from the first half. And I try not to begrudge the series its romance – after all, that *is* the other half of the goal of the games, and its primary audience is women who like to see hot guys of various types (all psychotic, but in different ways!) fall for our stand-in-for-the-reader heroine. This time around, it’s Elliot March, aka the march Hare, who is Blood Dupre’s #2 at the Hatter Mansion. As with the rest of the cast, Elliot is drawn to Alice being different (her ‘outsider’ status) and both he and Alice starting to fall for each other while simultaneously not knowing what that is. You know the drill – “what is this strange pain in my chest”, etc.

Things start to change as we are reminded that the hatter clan is a mafia organization – and that Wonderland has a very casual, even callous view of death, given that it’s impermanent (well, relatively). Alice has been trying to distance herself from the fact that she’s living with a bunch of killers, so Blood (deliberately, I suspect) makes absolutely sure that she gets this shoved in her face, and knows that Elliot is a trained killer as well.

Then comes the part of the book that really knocks it out of the park. For all that Alice is the heroine in Wonderland to whom all the guys are attracted, she has amazingly low self-esteem, constantly living in the shadow of her perfect big sister (whose fate, again, is alluded to but never specified by the other men in the cast) and having to be around Blood, who physically resembles her old boyfriend/crush/whichever. Elliot notices that Alice gets depressed every time this comes up, and offers a solution. And once again, the manga (and no doubt the games) remind you that it’s not just a case of picking a hot guy and living sexily ever after – these people are SCREWED UP. Wonderland is a world of twisted values about death and what it means to be alive, and they’re not attracted to Alice’s personality or beauty – they’re attracted to Alice as she has a beating heart rather than a clock.

After this, the rest of the manga isn’t quite as interesting – it doesn’t help that Peter shows up, and is in ‘obsessive’ mode. It does end on a good cliffhanger, though, with Vivaldi calling for Alice’s head even as Elliot races to the Hatter Mansion to save her. There’s only two volumes in the series, so everything will wrap up nicely next time, I imagine. But this series continues to show how to make a really interesting romance series – having you constantly question everything about the heroes, heroine, world, and premise. Nice job.

By Mayu Shinjo. Released in Japan as “Ayakashi Koi Emaki” by Shueisha, serialized in the magazine Margaret. Released in North America by Viz.

When I first heard this was licensed, I had assumed it was due to the popularity of Maru Shinjo, creator of Sensual Phrase and Ai Ore!, and that it would have lots of hot jerk guys trying to get into the female cast’s pants. Which is absolutely true. But little did I realize that the main reason this was licensed was probably because it played into Viz’s newfound obsession with yokai manga. I mean, this is basically just a sexier Kamisama Kiss, right? With adorable chibi-incubus!

This is very much on the ‘silly’ side of Mayu Shinjo’s work, which suits me just fine, as I like her best when she’s putting her heroes through the ringer rather than when they’re emotionally manipulating the heroine. Though there’s a fair bit of that going on here as well. But for some reason, I find it more acceptable here than I do in Ai Ore!. Miko is just a little bit stronger than Mizuki, and less likely to be taken in by some sweet talk and sweet loving (well, except in her dreams, where they’re apparently already gone pretty far). As for Kagura, there is a built-in plot device to keep him from being an ass – he’s in adorable SD-mode! Yes, many things that are hideously inappropriate when a grown man is saying them are totally OK when the guy snuggling the heroine’s breasts can fit easily in between them.

There are a few random yokai demons here, who look similar to the ones we see in, say, Nura, or Natsume’s Book of Friends. Those two titles would probably tone down the fact that Kagura is an incubus, of course. But Mayu Shinjo, who got her start writing softcore porn shoujo for Shogakukan and has never really strayed quite that far away, knows how to do the sexy. The relationship dynamics between the main couple go back and forth all the time, which makes things more interesting. Admittedly, things slow down a bit after the first 2/3 of the book, when the series switched from being a one-off to a longer run, and the author had to figure out what to do next. Thus we meet a new classmate who’s sensitive to spirits, and a manipulative fox creature (who, naturally, turns into a cute, shy bishonen).

This being a shoujo manga, there’s still plenty of waffling from the heroine about what these strange feelings are, with the added bonus of ‘what the hell did he do to me in my dreams?’. That said, the humor here is top-notch, with many amusing humiliations of our otherwise handsome seductive hero. There is a choice scene with a hamster that I won’t spoil, but made me laugh out loud. In Ai Ore!, Shinjo was always at her best when not taking her hero seriously, and the same applies here. Given all the cliches she has to work with – heck, the hero’s powers even awake with a kiss – I expect we’ll only see more of this in the future.

I always go back and forth on Shinjo manga, and indeed there’s a chance that this could turn sour in a hurry, depending on how Miko is developed. For now, though, we have a first volume that’s a winner, especially if you enjoy yokai comics but want a little spice to it.

By Yoshiyuki Sadamoto and GAINAX. Released in Japan by Kadokawa Shoten, serialized in the magazine Young Ace. Released in North America by Viz Media.

The trouble with reviewing a manga series like Evangelion, with release dates from hell, is that of memory. I mean, I’m obsessed with Excel Saga, but even I had to do a bit of a reread when it was coming out on a once a year basis. And Evangelion isn’t even allowed that luxury – it comes out when a Japanese volume comes out, and Sadamoto is notorious for hiatuses, breaks, and 8-page chapters because the editors had to submit something or they’d lose their jobs. Luckily, he’s with Kadokawa Shoten, former home of CLAMP, so they’re used to things like this. What this means, though, is that it’s entirely possible that this manga, which started in 1995 in Japan, may not finish by 2015, which is the date it actually takes place.

However, the comet has passed by once more, which means that we have a new Evangelion volume. And luckily, Sadamoto continues to do what we all want him to do; he tells the basic story of Evangelion, but makes everything better and all the characters more tolerable. Now, this does have its down side, which is that he is still telling the same story. The manga looks as if it might end with Vol. 14 (though that’d be compressing things a bit), and we’re still heading for the orange goo horizon, if you know what I mean. But without Anno’s veneer of self-hatred and disgust surrounding Shinji and company, we’re left with a title that’s a bit less soul searching but has a lot more ‘hell yeah!’ moments.

Let’s start with the most obvious, which we started to see at the end of Volume 12: Shinji rescues Asuka. Now, this probably isn’t permanent; indeed, by the end of the volume, I’m not entirely certain if she’s dead or not. But that’s irrelevant. Shinji making an effort, doing something other than whine and clutch his knees, is the main reason to read the Evangelion manga at all. And his reunion with Asuka, however brief, is all the more touching for it.

As for the rest of the cast, well, Fuyutsuki and the Bridge Bunnies are mostly used to shout the plot at us, as you’d expect when the apocalypse is coming down and has to be carefully monitored. (At least they avoided saying that Lilith’s power levels were over nine thousand.) Ritsuko, meanwhile, also gets to meet a bad end, mostly due to the astonishing idea that she thought that the computers (i.e. her mother) would side with her over Gendo. I mean really, has she met her mother? That said, she too gets a better exit which is more satisfying, both for her and for us. (Who here wasn’t wanted to shoot Gendo in the throat? Come on, let’s not always see the same hands…)

We end on a cliffhanger, with Giant Rei towering over all, and Shinji having dream flashbacks to Yui trying to tell him something, only he’s not quite sure what it is. I’m not sure if everything will be resolved in the next volume, or even whether that volume will come out before I die. And I suspect this will all end in tears. But at least I’ll be able to look back on the cast and say they tried their best, which is more than I could say for the anime. (The new movies, I hear, are trying to do something similar.) Recommended, especially for those who enjoy seeing Shinji achieve things.

By Natsume Ono. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Morning Two. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

After seeing how popular (well, popular with manga bloggers) Natsume Ono’s other works were when Viz Media was putting her stuff out, Kodansha decided they wanted to get in on the game as well. After all, Ono didn’t only write for Ikki and Manga Erotics F, she also did stuff for Morning Two, Kodansha’s alternative manga magazine best known for Saint Young Men (which will never be licensed here ever). And Danza seems to be a good test market – it’s a collection of one-shot short stories, so little investment is required, and it deals with the same thing most of Ono’s best manga deal with – awkward conversations between people who have trouble communicating.

As with a lot of short story collections, it’s a mixed bag. Viz also did some of her collected short stories, and I think it shows that she works better at a slightly longer form with characters we can invest in (such as Ristorante Paradiso/Gente). Of course, this doesn’t mean that this collection doesn’t have some excellent stuff. But these are stories that are meant to provoke a wistful mood, with only one of them (involving Italian ices and police officers) even getting close to giving me a wry grin. When you draw mild, somewhat sad low-key manga, you need to anticipate that the reaction will be somewhat low-key as well. There’s also one short-story here that didn’t work for me, involving time-travel and father-son relationships. I felt this one added one too many plot complications, which is ironic given that almost 40 of its 60 pages are taken up with sitting at a table talking.

But as I said above, when Ono is on her game there’s no one I enjoy reading better. The best stories here involve things, again, I’ve seen from her before – grumpy fathers (or father figures) who gruffly disguise any feelings or emotions they may have under a veneer of indifference, doubly helped by the fact that they’re taciturn and uncommunicative naturally. Long pauses, saying things slightly poorly, shutting up for hours because you don’t want to risk spoiling the mood further… these are all things any reader is familiar with no matter what the country. And these stories (which take place in not only Italy, Ono’s default country, but also the United States and Japan)make you yearn for that connection, make you want to see everyone work it out. You want to see people talk, but it’s not drawn out enough that you’re yelling at the page.

As for Ono’s art, it is what it is, and I don’t think too many people read the story for her expressions. Which is a shame, as they fit her mood so well. If you have skill at drawing men who sort of frown and glance downwards furtively, well then write stories that use that! Ono’s heroes tend to look shifty even if they aren’t, which can sometimes help to pace a story as well, particularly the final one about a police officer and his new recruit, who’s listening to far too many rumors.

This isn’t going to be a knock-out up there with the best of Ono’s works, but nor is it just a collection of throwaways. It’s a Natsume Ono book, and if you don’t know what you’re getting by now it may not be for you. For those who do, it’s more of the same. (furtive glance to the side, frowns) And that’s enough.

(This review was based on a copy provided by the publisher.)