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Bookshelf Briefs 5/21/12

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This week, Sean, Kate, MJ, and Michelle look at recent releases from Yen Press, VIZ Media, Digital Manga Publishing, and Kodansha Comics.

Ai Ore!, Vol. 5 | By Mayu Shinjo | VIZ Media – I have completely given up on these characters – especially Mizuki – growing or learning from any of their experiences. And honestly, doing that makes it much easier to get into the groove of this melodramatic, silly manga. From Akira’s desperately trying to be taken seriously as a guy while wearing a kitty hoodie, to Mizuki’s over-the-top “MY WORLD IS ENDING!” reaction to her first fight with Akira, the situations here are made for amusement. Sure, there’s some soap opera dramatics – the fight I mentioned earlier – but even the serious backstory for Akira, where he reveals that his tutor once brought in an older woman to “make a man of him” – is played with its tongue in cheek. The ending seems to hint we may be seeing the return of “Dark Akira”, though – let’s hope he’s merely firm and seductive, and not the callous ass he was at the start. Fun stuff. –Sean Gaffney

Arata: The Legend, Vol. 10 | By Yuu Watase | VIZ Media – The latest installment of Arata: The Legend features body-swapping hijinks. Usually these kind of comic interludes are a sign that the artist is marking time between big fight scenes, but Yuu Watase uses this time-honored trick to advance the plot in a meaningful fashion, allowing Hinohara to infiltrate Yataka’s stronghold. The body-swapping gimmick also provides the characters an opportunity to reflect on their feelings for one another, giving us greater insight into Hinohara and Mikusa’s personalities. The only drawback to the out-of-character behavior is that it grants Watase license for fan service — something that the series doesn’t need to be funny or sexy. That minor gripe aside, Arata remains engrossing, finding the perfect middle ground between shojo angst and shonen action. Recommended. -Katherine Dacey

Hana-Kimi, Vols. 4-6 Omnibus | By Hisaya Nakajo | VIZ Media – A lot of this second omnibus deals with the class culture festival, where most of Mizuki’s class is dressing up in drag. This gives her an excuse to wear a dress most of the time, even if it’s as Alice in Wonderland. After a strong start, the author seems to have realized that the series will be a long one, so the actual romance between Mizuki and Sano isn’t moved forward as much. Instead, Nakatsu gets the focus, as he struggles with his repressed feelings for a “guy”. He’s mostly comedic, but I liked how he handled telling the girl who likes him that he was breaking it off – he’s a sweetie pie that sadly is doomed in a series like this. The addition of a female friend – as well as a new rival – for Mizuki is also welcome, and I look forward to the third and presumably last teaser omnibus. –Sean Gaffney

Itazura Na Kiss, Vol. 8 | By Kaoru Tada | Published by Digital Manga Publishing – There are times when Itazura Na Kiss is so frustrating, one wants to hurl it against the wall. Usually this is because the protagonist, Kotoko, is almost aggressively incompetent. In this latest volume, she has decided that what she wants to do is become a nurse and help Naoki with his medical practice, so she enrolls in nursing school with practically no idea what this will entail. Naoki is cutting in his criticism, as usual, but what’s interesting is that one of Kotoko’s classmates objects to how Naoki treats his wife and eventually presents himself as an alternative. Naoki, faced with jealous feelings for the first time, is thrown for a loop and it’s what he does to win Kotoko back that makes up for every bit of irritation caused by other elements of the series. Still recommended, despite its flaws! – Michelle Smith

Pandora Hearts, Vol. 10 | By Jun Mochizuki | Yen Press – While the series’ last few volumes have posed many more questions than they have answered, things finally come to a head here in volume ten. This volume is chock full of revelations, particularly regarding Gil and Vincent Nightray, and the atmosphere is tense in exactly the way that shows off Jun Mochizuki’s fast-paced storytelling style to its best advantage. Though crystal-clear plotting has never been Mochizuki’s strong point, clarity in the moment is, which is what makes a volume like this work so well. Panel-to-panel, she maps out these characters’ emotional truths so clearly that the text becomes nearly irrelevant to our understanding of their plights. That said, some of Mochizuki’s dialogue is so delightful (Xerxes Break owns my soul), it would be a tragedy to do without it. Still recommended. – MJ

Psyren, Vol. 4 | By Toshiaki Iwashiro | VIZ Media – I’m starting to enjoy this the more I get into it. The lead is likeable and talented while retaining that ‘everyman’ spirit, the cast isn’t too overpowered yet, and of course hard work is emphasized, as in the best Jump works. The introduction of the Elmore Wood kids is well-handled – they act like typical kids, ranging from bratty to shy to stoic. They help Ageha to figure out how to control his powers (well, we presume – we haven’t seen it in action just yet) by virtue of a simpler mindset and learning at a younger age. And, as a cliffhanger shows, they may be mankind’s last, best hope. Of course, they may all be killed at the start of the next volume, too. The only downside here is Kabuto, who lacks enough likeable traits to make a good comic relief character – you want him to fail. Otherwise, very good stuff. –Sean Gaffney

Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, Vol. 12 | By Koji Kumeta | Kodansha Comics – “We’ll have to start a new campaign with easier content so that even first-timers can understand Zetsubou-Sensei,” declares suicidal teacher Itoshiki Nozumu in the first pages of volume 12. What follows is a sharp, funny deconstruction of a common manga practice: the catch-up chapter. I wish the rest of the jokes in volume 12 were as accessible to a Western reader as “The First-Timer Condition,” but the intricate wordplay and cultural allusions often sailed over my head. (Word to the translator: I know what Comiket is! More explanation of the yakuza jokes and economic references, please!) Zetsubou-Sensei ought to be in my wheelhouse — there was a Stendahl joke in chapter 112, for Pete’s sake! — but requires too much explanation to elicit more than an appreciative, “Oh, I get it. Very clever.” -Katherine Dacey

Until Death Do Us Part, Vol. 1

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Until Death Do Us Part is a slickly packaged compendium of action movie tropes that reads like a story. That’s not to say it’s bad — it isn’t — but to warn you that you may experience a powerful sense of deja-vu as you thumb through its numerous shoot-outs, explosions, and speeches about terrorism.

The opening pages plunge us directly into the action: a solemn pre-teen girl leaps from a speeding car, accosts a blind man, and begs him to help her, promising him jewels and money in return for his assistance. That man, Mamorou, proves surprisingly adept at dispatching bad guys; he’s a modern-day Zaitoichi, using a pair of special goggles and a fine-edged sword to disarm Haruka’s captors, a group of thugs in the employ of the Ex Solid Corporation. (Which begs the question: how does such an ill-named company stay in business? But I digress.) Haruka’s ability to pick Mamorou from a crowd of thousands is no accident; like the pre-cogs in Minority Report, she has an uncanny ability to predict the future. For several years, she used that power to enrich her family — mostly by playing scratch tickets — but now she finds herself running from several powerful organizations, each of whom sees her precognition as a tool for advancing their own interests.

Whether Until Death‘s similarities to The Professional, Mission: Impossible, Minority Report, and the entire oeuvre of Jason Statham are intentional is difficult to say; some of the plots skirt the line between theft and homage. Mamorou’s fellow crime fighters, in particular, seem like IMF recruits, as they’re armed to the teeth with the latest spy technology and weaponry — an incredible feat for an off-the-the-grid vigilante organization with no ties to the government or the mob. (Just in case we don’t fully appreciate how awesome this weaponry is, there are several scientists on hand to explain in excruciating detail how they work.) The sheer abundance of borrowed characters and story lines, however, work in Death‘s favor, with no single borrowing overpowering the resulting fusion of sensibilities.

Like many action manga, the artwork tacks between static scenes of talking heads — usually imparting some key points of information about a bad guy’s history, or describing a hypothetical technology — and kinetic scenes of bone-crunching violence. Though the fights aren’t as inventively staged as a John Woo shoot-out, DOUBLE-S wins points for carefully delineating the space in which the gun battles unfold; the reader is conscious of how walls, objects, and sight lines influence the outcome of those battles. DOUBLE-S is overly enamored of slo-mo bullets — a visual gimmick so overused in the last fifteen years it’s become a parodic gesture — but he uses it to good effect, demonstrating how swiftly Mamorou moves, and how precisely his blade slices through solid objects:

Mamorou slices bullets with his scientifically modified katana.

DOUBLE-S has several other nifty tricks up his sleeve as well. In one of the manga’s recurring visual gambits, DOUBLE-S shows us how Mamorou perceives his environment through his special goggles:

A Tokyo street as viewed through Mamorou’s goggles.

Though the characters are recognizable in their computer-enhanced form, they have a spectral quality to them; if anything, they resemble echoes or after-images, rather than corporeal entities. The artist’s quick cuts between Mamorou’s perspective and ours neatly underscores how much Mamorou must rely on his other senses to give these incomplete forms flesh and blood: how else could he be so devastating, given the limitations of his goggles?

Perhaps the best compliment I could give Death‘s creators is to note the skill with which it recycles familiar action-movie conventions. We’ve seen Death‘s characters and plots and scientifically implausible weapons in other stories, but Hiroshi Takashige and DOUBLE-S stitch them together in such a fashion that the seamwork is almost invisible. The resulting manga isn’t original, exactly, but it has enough style and integrity to engage the reader’s interest, making it an agreeable beach or airplane companion.

Review copy provided by Yen Press.

UNTIL DEATH DO US PART, VOL. 1 • STORY BY HIROSHI TAKASHIGE, ART BY DOUBLE-S • YEN PRESS • 448 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

One Piece, Vol. 62

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By Eiichiro Oda. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. Released in North America by Viz.

Now that the gang is back together, we are off to Fishman Island. No, really! Really and truly, they do finally arrive at Fishman Island this time. Which sort of ends up being a mixed blessing, I will admit. I’m afraid that Fishman Island’s arc is similar to Skypeia and Thriller Bark – you like it more on a re-read, but at the time, it just annoyed you. Still, being annoyed by One Piece is still superior to being entertained by other, lesser shonen series.

Of course, first we have to get to the island, which is not as easy as it sounds. This is the better half of this volume, with each of the crew showing off why they’re awesome – everyone gets to fight (except Nami, whose navigation skills are what’s awesome here), we get another dumb goofy villain who actually seems to have more staying power than we expect, and Luffy tames a kraken. Of course he does.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Fishman Island is not quite as welcoming as you would have expected given our adventures with Cammie and Hachi. It turns out that the island was under protection by Whitebeard, and with him gone, power balances are quickly shifting. Another of the Four Emperors – Big Mom – is supposedly protecting them now, but this seems more like mafia protection than anything else. What’s more, the issues of prejudice – on both sides – that we’ve seen before in the Arlong and Sabaody arcs are still around, and there’s some particular nastiness when it becomes very hard to find a blood donor for Sanji, who is dying due to idiocy.

No, I won’t ever stop complaining about this. I will give Oda credit – when he decided to overuse a dumb idea, he really goes all out – but I still hate Sanji’s complete incompetence around women, even if you do acknowledge that he was on the okama island for two years. We see everyone else’s flaws here as well – including Nami’s lust for money, which hadn’t come up in a while – but it’s just harder to take with Sanji nosebleeding all over the place. Even if he is surrounded by gorgeous mermaids.

Having arrived at Fishman Island, our heroes are escorted to King Neptune and his beautiful daughter, but there’s already a conspiracy against them, as the local fortune teller has said Luffy will bring ruin to Fishman Island. Sounds like one of those self-fulfilling prophecies to me, honestly. A bigger problem is that we’re simply introduced to too many characters too fast here – there’s at least 20 new characters, each with boxes giving names and what time of Fishman they are – and there’s simply no way to know at this point who we have to be paying attention to. Well, except for Hody Jones, who appears to be the villain of the arc so far.

On a side note, the last cover page shows Makino with a baby?!?! Oh Oda, why you gotta destroy the Shanks/Makino shipper dreams? :)

There’s lots of cool action here, and some fun goofy humor. I also like that Oda is not forgetting about Nami’s past – there’s a great shot of her shuddering when she sees one pirate has an Arlong tattoo. But the arc is a bit too new to see where the plot is going, and thus this whole volume ends up being a bit more confusing than I think it really deserved to be. Hopefully next time we’ll see Jimbei and things will begin to get knit together.

Off the Shelf: Ode to Lionel Richie

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MJ: Hello, hello!

MICHELLE: Is it me you’re looking for?

MJ: Heh. Yes. Though now I’m a little embarrassed about it.

MICHELLE: I had the sheet music to “Say You, Say Me,” if that makes you feel any better.

MJ: It does, it does. So. What have you been reading this week?

MICHELLE: Well, as promised, I undertook a marathon read of We Were There in order to finally get current with the series (now up to volume 14 in English). I must admit that I’m still kind of gathering my thoughts from the experience. But the thing that sticks in my head from when you talked about this volume last week is “That’s how you write a shoujo manga!” and I find that I couldn’t agree more.

There were several twists along the way that I totally didn’t expect, and I shan’t spoil them here, but I will say that I kind of love where the characters are at the moment, even though it’s pretty heartbreaking for some of them. I feel like mangaka Yuki Obata does an especially good job making readers understand exactly why Yano has the living situation he does without coming right out and saying, “it’s atonement.” I must also sing her praises in regards the “show, don’t tell” method of storytelling—in the volumes leading up to this one, we’d seen Yano referred to as kind but cold, and to see him so visibly, demonstrably moved in this volume shows how deeply he still loves Takahashi.

If I had any complaint at all, it would be that I could write multiple paragraphs about Yano, a couple of paragraphs about steadfast Takeuchi, and perhaps a sentence or two about Takahashi, the heroine. It’s not that she’s a flat character, exactly, but she is somewhat of an angelic figure, the only one who can heal Yano’s hurt. It struck me today that we see far more of a supporting character’s family than we ever see of hers!

Ultimately, I cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed catching up with this series, and how much I look forward to the final two volumes.

MJ: I feel like I could really write a lot about Takahashi, but maybe it’s just because I identified with her so strongly early on in the story. I suppose I feel like I *know* her in some way, despite the fact that she’s not as obviously fleshed-out. I could write a book about Takeuchi, though, mostly because I feel so freaking SORRY FOR HIM. Poor Takeuchi.

Seriously, though, this is a great shoujo manga.

MICHELLE: I definitely identify with her on some levels, to be sure. And man, Takeuchi. There are some especially painful moments for him in volume 14, too. I keep hoping he’ll get together with Sengenji in the end, but that’s a little bit Marmalade Boy.

Anyways, what have you been reading this week?

MJ: Well, first I read volume one of Shuzo Oshimi’s The Flowers of Evil, a new shounen series from Vertical. With the back cover tagline, “Aren’t you a perv too?” I wasn’t sure this would be a good fit for me, but I actually liked it quite a bit.

Kasuga is a bookish middle schooler who buries himself in Baudelaire poetry while admiring his pretty classmate, Saeki, from afar. One day after school, he finds himself alone in his classroom, along with Saeki’s gym bag, and impulsively steals her gym clothes to take home with him. He regrets this action pretty much right away, but by the time he has an opportunity to try to put the clothes back, the whole class is buzzing about a clothes-stealing pervert. Worse still, the class outcast, a foul-mouthed girl named Nakamura, saw him steal the clothes, and is using the information to blackmail him into hanging out with her.

Nakamura is obsessed with Kasuga’s bad deed, and with the idea of seeing Kasuga act out his fantasies (or what she imagines to be his fantasies) with the clothes, and she’s enough of a bully to get under his skin with it all, especially after Kasuga actually scores a date with his dream girl. This aspect of the story gives it a fetish-y feel, similar to something like Sundome, though the vibe is a bit different than that series, since the girl who’s controlling the hero isn’t the object of his sexual fantasies (at least not yet). If anything, it seems like she’s drawn to him mostly because she’s relieved to find out that she’s not the only person in her class having “perverted” thoughts, which is sort of heartwarming in an odd way.

What really makes this story work for me, is that both Kasuga and Nakamura are sympathetic characters, whose personal failures and perversions really ring true for their age. It’s hard not to relate to the boy who is aware that his obsession with foreign poetry is based in a kind of desperate pretension, but can’t stop himself from embracing that anyway, or the unpopular girl who is so grateful to find that she’s not all alone with her sexual fantasies, and can’t quite keep herself from wanting to know more, even if she has to be a bully to get it.

It may be too early to say this, but while I never would have recommended Sundome to *you*, Michelle, I think I actually might recommend The Flowers of Evil. And I certainly recommend it to everyone else.

MICHELLE: Yeah, I just don’t know. I’m a little intrigued and a little hesitant. I may just have to bolster my courage and give it a go.

MJ: I can at least reassure you that the first volume is very tame, sexually, so testing the waters should be relatively risk-free.

So what else have you got for us this week?

MICHELLE: To give a little bit of contrast to We Were There, I opted for another shoujo love story now in its fourteenth volume, Karuho Shiina’s Kimi ni Todoke: From Me to You.

Despite a few superficial similarities—the protagonists live in Hokkaido, there’s a girl named Takahashi and a somewhat inscrutable character named Yano…—the depiction of first love in these series could not be more different, with the sweetness of Kimi ni Todoke offering a bit of brain balm after the more-or-less realistic drama of We Were There.

The premise of the series is that Sawako Kuronuma has always unintentionally scared her classmates with her spooky behavior and resemblance to a horror movie character, but has now finally made a couple of good friends and found love with the popular Shota Kazehaya. The fourteenth volume finds the main characters on a school trip to Okinawa, and while Sawako and Kazehaya come reeeeeeally close to sharing their first kiss, and it’s all very adorable, the really emotional moments belong to her two friends.

Most of the time, tomboyish Chizu is rather ditzy, but when she realizes that her childhood friend, Ryu, likes someone and hasn’t told her who it is, it really bothers her. She is genuinely shocked to learn that she is the object of his affections, but the volume ends before she can really begin to process the information. Even more affecting is Ayane Yano’s failed attempt to fall in love—seeing her two friends confess their love in recent volumes (Chizu has long had a thing for Ryu’s brother) made this mature and rather private girl yearn to experience love, and when a boy in another class asked her out, she said yes, thinking she might be swept away on the tide of his feelings for her. Alas, things don’t go as planned, and she ends the volume in tears.

I love that a character as complex as Ayane exists in the realm of shoujo manga, usually populated by girls who don’t think much before they speak, and find myself rooting for her happiness even more strongly than I do for the main characters, now that they seem to be on the path to happily ever after. I wonder if Yuki Obata and Karuho Shiina are in secret communication and Ayane is, like, Motoharu’s long-lost cousin or something.

MJ: I’m a few volumes behind in this series, but I love the fact that its cheerful sweetness manages to feel just as rich and emotionally true as the delicate melancholy of We Were There—thanks largely to the awesomeness of Chizu and Ayane. I’m a real sucker for female friendship in manga, and these two are the greatest example of that since Fruits Basket‘s Uotani and Hanajima. I’m so glad to hear there’s so much of them in volume fourteen.

MICHELLE: I am sure that Chizu and Ayane would totally be friends with Uotani and Hanajima. Not only that, the four of them would look on proudly as Tohru and Sawako tentatively became friends.

What else did you read this week?

MJ: This week, I also read volume one of Kyudo Boys, a series of short shoujo manga by Keiko Nishi, available from JManga. I say “shoujo,” because the stories are school-based, and it ran in Wings, but for the record, JManga classifies it as josei.

The stories all revolve around the members of a high school archery club—both male and female members. Some of the stories are romantic, like one about a boy who can’t decide whether he has a crush on a new girl or her twin brother, or a later story (one of my personal favorites) about an archery nerd who discovers that it’s his very nerdishness that makes him attractive to a pretty team member. I should note, however, that not all the stories are romances, and even the ones that are, are more concerned with exploring the idiosyncrasies of their subjects than reaching any kind of romantic conclusion. I love romance—we all know that—but even I have to admit that it’s refreshing to read a shoujo manga in a school setting that isn’t playing by those rules.

Short stories have never been my favorite format for manga, but these make the best of their brevity, by focusing on small moments and embracing an open-ended feel. Nishi never gets too ambitious. She doesn’t rush. She presents us with a few deft snapshots that let us feel like we’ve really gotten to know and love these students, without ever giving us too much to handle, story-to-story. Her artwork is charming, and relatively sparse, with a light touch that matches the breezy tone of the book overall.

Though it may seem like I don’t have a lot to say about this manga, the truth is, it’s simply charming. It’s a very satisfying light read, and I’d recommend it without question.

MICHELLE: I’ve definitely had Kyudo Boys on my radar as a candidate for a future Going Digital column. That’s largely because Keiko Nishi was responsible for some of the first josei to hit American shores. Like you, I’m not particularly into short stories, but I am definitely, definitely down with idiosyncratic romance!

MJ: Unlike Flowers of Evil, I can *wholeheartedly* recommend this series to you. It’s absolutely your kind of manga.

MICHELLE: That’s good to know!

Manga the Week of 5/23

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Only publishers at the end of the alphabet are welcome in next week’s manga shipment!

Vertical features the first volume of their new shonen romantic blackmail comedy The Flowers of Evil, and I’m afraid everyone has to buy it, as otherwise the cover image will continue to stare into your soul forever. Into your SOUL. FOREVER.

Viz has the 5th volume of Saturn Apartments, which I’ve lost track of but which is from the SigIkki line, so clearly it is deserving of your praise.

And there is a huge pile of stuff from Yen. Including two big new debuts. From Square Enix’s Young Gangan, we have Until Death Do Us Part, an action/adventure/esper epic that they are releasing in omnibus format, meaning we get the first 2 volumes here in one. This is 15 volumes and still running in Japan, so should be a lot of fun. And from Houbunsha (I believe they went straight to graphic novel, a rarity in Japan), we have the first volume of Magic Girl manga Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Hey, do you want to buy a magical girl manga? Kyubei can sell one to you!

But wait, Yen has even more! The penultimate volume of Bamboo Blade; the 12th Haruhi Suzumiya manga, which starts to adapt the 7th novel; new Nabari no Ou, Omamori Himari, Pandora Hearts, and Sumomomo Momomo, which I don’t have anything clever to say about; and the 9th Soul Eater, which I would say features things spiraling out of control, except that might imply Soul Eater had control in the first place. And lastly, there’s the 3rd volume of Daniel X, which is an OEL adaptation of the James Patterson series. Who doesn’t love OEL?

So what are you devouring next week?

Combat Commentary: Bleach (The Entire Series)

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It occured to me that in the event that I ever run out of fights to cover (HA!), I needed to think of variations on my basic theme. And then I thought, instead of focusing on individual fights, it would be worth it to look at the basic fighting style(s) of entire mangas. If the overall fighting style of the manga isn’t interesting, then no amount of individual fights can salvage it. So in the spirit of imposing my opinion on which fighting manga are worth your time, I will start this brand new variation on my old theme.

Bleach has been called Dragonball Z, with swords. And I personally have absolutely no idea where anyone ever got that idea. I mean it’s not like Bleach spends insane amounts of time on fights, has characters of world shattering power, constant powerups, and always one more enemy to overcome … okay so maybe I can see where people might get that idea. But this is not a piece comparing DBZ and Bleach, rather it’s about the fighting in Bleach as a whole.

While Bleach does fall under the category of a “sword” manga, the swords are never really focused on that much, at least not later on in the series. There is no actual swordplay that goes into the series, rather it’s about who has the higher spirit power. Essentially the swords could be removed from the equation, and absolutely nothing would change.

Where a series like Rurouni Kenshin focuses a great deal on the philosophy of swords, different sword techniques, etc, Bleach takes a different approach. Rather than taking a swordsman philosophy stance, Bleach instead takes a “warrior” stance. The characters are not seen as swordsmen, but rather as warriors. This is emphasized by the fact that several of the characters have releases that remove all semblance of swordsmanship from their fighting style.

While there are several fighting styles presented in the manga, the most basic form of combat is using Zanpakuto, which are essentially the only weapons capable of damaging spirits. Each Zanpakuto has three forms it can take. The basic form is that of a Katana, which rarely gets used during fights as the series progresses; the next form is the Shikai, which changes the form of the Zanpakuto and gives it extra powers—very few of the Zanpakuto still look like swords after this initial release; the final release is the Bankai, which enhances the basic powers given by the Shikai, and enhances the spirit powers of the wielder.

Initially the basic enemies, Hollows (fallen spirits that devour other souls), have a variety of powers, but as the series progresses they are replaced by the Arrancar, a new form of Hollow that have removed their masks to gain Soul Reaper powers. They seal their Hollow powers into Zanpakuto that they can release to unseal those powers.

Throughout the later volumes of the series, a lot of focus is put on why Ichigo fights, with a fair bit of philosophizing going on about what it means to be a warrior. The fights, early on at least, are well developed, and take advantage of the unique powers to make every conflict interesting. In a way, despite the initial focus being swords, moving away from swords is a good idea, as it provides an infinite number of possible powers. But as the series progresses, more focus is put on nothing but the fights. And without the investment required to care about the conflict, I for one was left uninterested in any of the fights, especially since many of them devolved into just sword fights, something the series had moved away from.

Overall, Bleach took full advantage of a large variety of powers, and made fights that were a delight to read. Unfortunately, the fights lost their luster later on, resulting in a series that focuses entirely on fights, but fails to instill them with any kind of gravitas. Considering that for a while it was one of the only series where the outcome of the fights could really get me emotionally invested (see Ichigo vs Ulquiorra), it’s a real shame to have lost that.

I hope you enjoyed this new format. I’ll still focus on individual fights, but I think it might be interesting to look at the fighting styles of a series overall. I can’t promise anything just yet, but eventually I plan to broaden my gaze even further, and compare fighting styles of different series, to really show how they compare to each other, in an attempt to really understand what makes for a good fight scene.

Feel free to check out Derek’s blog over at Burning Lizard Studios, for manga and anime, as well as general graphic novel and cartoon reviews.

FLCL Omnibus

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By GAINAX and Hajime Ueda. Released in Japan in two separate volumes by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Magazine Z. Released in North America by Dark Horse Comics.

I recall when Tokyopop first released this manga, a number of years ago, my general reaction to it was sort of a flat ‘what’. Of course, I was a much younger reader then, and have since read many experimental manga with weird art, weird plotting and a certain gonzo style to them. So I picked up Dark Horse’s new omnibus, which has a spruced-up translation, color pages, and some extras by the author, wondering if I could now appreciate the deep and beautiful meaning in the series. But as it turned out, most of FLCL still ends up making me say the same thing: what?

To be fair to its authors, this is probably the reaction they were going for anyway. It’s OK to write something that’s surreal, and if FLCL is anything else, it’s that. The plot, for those who may not know, involves a young boy named Naota and his metaphors for puberty, which in this series emerge from his head and turn into giant robots. He has a crush on a girl named Mamimi, a ditzy older girl who’s in love with Naota’s older brother (who is in the US) and using Naota as an emotional crutch. She’s also an arsonist. He also goes to school, where he has the usual two male friends, plus the class president, who is the mayor’s daughter and is tsundere for him. All of this is turned upside down when a woman named Haruko arrives, bringing chaos in her wake and fighting the robots… or using the robots to fight one another… in an intergalactic battle that is never really explained properly.

This manga ran in Magazine Z, which no longer exists but was basically Kodansha’s media tie-in magazine. And it should come as no surprise to you that this was based on an anime by GAINAX, who were trying to deconstruct everything so they could reconstruct themselves after putting out Evangelion. The anime was 6 episodes long, and the manga is sort of a truncated adaptation. However, unlike the manga version of Evaangelion, which sticks to the same plot/events but makes the characters more likeable, FLCL’s author is allowed to shake things up a bit. Certainly I don’t remember Naota killing his father in the original.

Sometimes the author does actually remember that this is supposed to be about Naota growing up. At one point, all three female protagonists are living in his house, and Haruko and Mamami decide to tease him by pretending to be lesbians, something that does actually play off of male teenage sexuality. The ending is also rather interesting, changed slightly from the original – Haruko actually gives Naota her broken Vespa, and challenges him to fly to outer space after her. Of course, now our last shot is of his bruised and bloody fingers trying to fix/fly the thing. One might argue it’s more downbeat than the original.

The art is very stylized, and may possibly be worth a look-see. And I still like Mamimi despite myself. But for the most part, what read as an incoherent mess 8 years ago is *still* an incoherent mess, even if the author would like us to think otherwise. If you’re looking for teenage metaphors for sexuality, there are better manga than this.

Adventures in the Key of Shoujo: Sailor Moon Vol. 4

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Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Vol. 4 | By Naoko Takeuchi | Published by Kodansha Comics USA | Rated: T, Ages 13+

After my aggravation over volume 3, in this volume, things start taking on a more serious angle with the remains of the team trying to make sense of new villains (Black Moon), and the kidnappings of Sailors Mars and Mercury. Chibiusa’s backstory begins to be fleshed out and Usagi starts to buckle under the stress of having all her friends snatched away from her. I was really frustrated by the previous story’s lack of tension despite all the danger they were in, but Takeuchi re-applies the pressure by bringing more people in on the fact that the Sailor Senshi are missing. So now things are moving faster, and this is better for the narrative in my humble opinion.

I find that despite Usagi discovering her royal lineage, she proves she’s still a teenager with her jealousy over Chibiusa hanging out with Mamoru so much. But as we learn more about Chibiusa, we discover that Usagi and she are more alike than they realize. Turns out Chibiusa and Usagi are related to each other and Chibiusa is from the thirtieth century. Using the two girls as a sounding board, I often wonder what would happen if I met my future descendants. Would I have anything in common with them? Or more importantly, if they were in trouble, would I fight for them? It’s interesting to speculate, especially since I had previously derided Usagi’s somewhat childish behaviour towards Chibiusa. Does this completely absolve Usagi? No, she can still go over her boundaries into somewhat irrational territory but I’ll give her a pass from now on, within reason.

A little window gets opened in relation to Sailor Jupiter. Since she was introduced, I haven’t seen sight nor hair of the poor girl, except when she’s needed to defeat evil, blah, blah, blah. But I get an teeny tiny window into her thoughts and how important the others have become to her, and she then perfectly articulates why the rest of the girls and Mamoru don’t look (on the surface at least) to be all that concerned about their missing comrades. Also, we see her and Motoki have a tender, quiet moment only to have it snatched away without Motoki knowing it’s happened. Is this a comment on the attrition of war and its effect on its soldiers? It would be interesting if I could confirm this. The manga runs its usual wire-thin line between tragedy and comedy, so all bets are off in this volume as to where Takeuchi takes this.

In my quest to understand what theories you could derive from Sailor Moon, I’m looking at the concept of Black Moon as villains. For the most part, the individuals fall into the Dark Kingdom’s mold of villainy for villainy’s sake. But the overarching idea behind them (and I’m trying to stay out of spoiler zones here) is they are rebelling against the established order. They don’t want to simply accept that this is how society has gone and they won’t agree with it. The problem for them is, like all rebellions, there’s nothing inherently wrong with not wanting to go with the rest of society, just that once you get out of talking and protesting about your ideals, you reach an impasse. You can either accept that change will take time and get into the trudge of eventually changing things, or you decide more drastic measures are required. Black Moon falls into the latter category. So they murdered and maimed their way to the top of Chibiusa’s world and now want to do the same to the present. So in this way, I would surmise, the lesson here is you can get what you want, the only thing you’ve got to do is not mind stepping on people to do it. It would be fantastic to think Takeuchi was trying to say something about the manga industry but I fear I’m grasping at straws here.

Another thing that pops up is the idea of pre-destiny. For those who do not know, predestiny is the idea that all the major events in your life were pre-ordained before you ever existed and continue after you’re gone. Two people suffer this problem: Chibiusa and Mamoru. Mamoru is in a brief (and I’m stumbling for the next word) spiritual conference with his dead lieutenants—the ones who were Queen Beryl’s resurrected minions but who later came to see the folly of their ways. He wonders why he was even reincarnated if he can’t protect Usagi. Was he fated to fail? No, say his lieutenants, because you’re here means that Usagi will be Queen and you King. While Mamoru begins to understand from that point on, it’s not decided or explained by the author whether Mamoru’s men know this truth about him because it is a truth or because they have advanced knowledge. Is it predestiny if it’s imparted by a person outside the need for a personal destiny? On Chibiusa’s side, was she always fated to find Usagi and the Sailor Senshi? Is the fact that she’s related to Usagi a deciding factor in her arrival in our present? Again, no answers, just concepts.

I have to say this volume has me thinking, rethinking and over-thinking the plot and concepts it brings with it. We haven’t even talked about the amount of pressure Usagi—that she alone finds herself under by the end of the volume. Things get very grim for our heroes—decidedly so. While I’m sure there’s an inner light or a new spell to call upon, I find myself hammering away at the cogs of the machine rather than the machine itself.

Hey, I’ve a homework assignment for all of you, if you’re interested. Can you tell me what part of Sailor Moon got you thinking beyond the page? What ideas or theories did it throw up? If not Sailor Moon, you can use any shoujo manga you like. I’ll print whatever you send me in next month’s Sailor Moon post. If your comment has spoilers for SM, then I’ll ask MJto post them for me so I don’t read them ^-^!

After my blood pressure problems with dealing with volume 3, I should be equally angry with this volume, but that one conversation with Sailor Jupiter took the wind right out of my sails. So is the series getting better for me? Certainly, and my initial hangups about the series (it’s too girly, the villains are wishy-washy) have largely evaporated due to Takeuchi’s layering of plot on plot, dialogue over dialogue as we start to see the whole thing start to coalesce into something close to a concept in motion. This series, despite the occasional landmine, continues to shine and hold my attention.

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Vol. 5

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By Naoko Takeuchi. Released in Japan as “Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon” by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Nakayoshi. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

Sailor Moon is at Vol. 5, and the R arc is nearing its end. Things are getting bad. Mercury, Mars and Jupiter are still abducted, Moon’s been kidnapped, and now Wiseman seems to have spirited off Chibi-Usa. Will our heroes be able to stop the rising tide of pervasive evil? Well, there’s 7 more volumes of the main storyline, so the answer to that is obvious. The question is how dramatic and interesting can the author make it before Usagi fires her beam of super-concentrated pureness at the villain?

Quite a bit, as it happens. The villains below Wiseman seem to get a bit more depth to them than their first arc counterparts. In particular, Saphir seems like he might actually betray the villains for the sake of his family. Unfortunately, we’re not at the point yet where the manga starts redeeming minor villains, and the power of Death Phantom within him proves too much. Demande fighting his conditioning was also interesting, though I find Demande so loathsome that the impact was lessened for me. Unfortunately for the Black Moon Family, they find themselves replaced by a more useful villain, who has closer ties to our heroes.

That’s right, it’s time for Black Lady. Take all of the frustrations, desires and fears of a typical eight-year-old girl (again, ignore that she’s supposedly 902, that makes no sense). Then infuse her body with evil, and age her up so that she looks like an adult. This plotline can get a little creepy, be warned – Chibi-Usa’s jealousy of Usagi gets played out here with incestual subtext, and seeing Black Lady kissing her mind-controlled dad is meant to be as unpleasant as it sounds. Still, Black Lady does an excellent job of making the villain’s plan come to fruition – so much so that if they’re going to stop her, it’s going to require the big guns. They’re just going to have to – STOP TIME.

I have to admit, re-reading this volume, I hadn’t realized how emotional Sailor Pluto gets in it. I’d gotten used to the concept of her as the cool, stoic warrior of time – which she clearly isn’t here. Lamenting her fate (she can’t leave the time gate, she can’t let people through the time gate, and she can’t stop time, all rules she breaks in this arc), we realize that her true desire has simply been to be able to fight with the rest of the senshi. This is why she has such a close bond with Chibi-Usa, who has similar feelings of loneliness. Of course, you don’t break the only three rules of your position without consequences, and Pluto’s are particularly heartbreaking, even if you do know how things end up in the S arc and beyond. That said, her sacrifice was definitely worth it, as they were able to get Chibi-Usa back, as well as give Sailor Moon the final bit of determination she needs to beat the bad guys (even if the “name of the moon” speech seems a little jarring after such a serious scene.

The rest of the volume is basically getting Usagi in place to defeat Death Phantom, then getting her back. (Which reminds me, there’s a very amusing scene towards the start of the book where Tuxedo Mask runs off to rescue Chibi-Usa, and a stressed Sailor Moon collapses. They decide to take her back to the 20th Century to recuperate… for about 10 minutes, then the Black Moon Family messes things up so they have to return again. Pacing can sometimes be a problem with Takeuchi.) Luckily, everything works out, and Sailor Moon is even able to briefly meet her future self (hey, they’ve already broken all the other laws of time). We also see the three abducted senshi reuniting with the human side characters who their chapters focused on, which was nice and sweet. (I can’t remember if we ever see them again, but that’s par for the course with minor Sailor Moon characters.)

This volume really doesn’t let up at all, being a breathless race to the climax from beginning to end. And while that may disappoint some fans of the anime (certainly the other four senshi really have very little to do here), it helps to convey the tension needed to support such scenes. And Chibi-Usa goes home to the future! … no, wait, she’s back immediately, as Neo-Queen Seremity apparently regards her past self as free babysitting. Oh well, it’s always nice to end an arc on a cute note. On to the third, and some might say best, arc.

Comic Conversion: The Baby-Sitters Club

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The Baby-Sitters Club: Kristy’s Great Idea | Novel: Ann M. Martin / Scholastic | Graphic Novel: Raina Telgemeier / Graphix

Kristy Thomas has a great idea — she and her friends can work together to give beleaguered a one-stop-shop for baby sitters. That’s how the Baby-Sitters Club is formed, with Mary-Anne, Claudia, and the new girl, Stacey. A few problems pop up—prank calls, crazy kids, and accidental dog-sitting among them—but the club can work through it all. Stacey has a secret, and Kristy’s dying to know what it is. But when she pushes her new friend too hard, she risks losing the club when it’s barely even started.

Kristy’s Great Idea, the very first book in The Baby-Sitter’s Club, was originally published in 1986. Since then there have been 131 novels (and that’s not including any of the spin-off series!), though original author Ann M. Martin only wrote the first 35 herself. In 2006, five years after the conclusion of the novel series, Scholastic’s imprint Graphix released a graphic novel adaptation by Eisner Award winner Raina Telgemeier. The books themselves went out of print in 2009, but recently, Scholastic began rereleasing the first several books for a new generation of fans.

Confession time—I was a HUGE Baby-Sitters Club fan. I owned half the novels, and continued getting the other half out of the library until I realized I was older than the characters I was reading about. I picked up the first Baby-Sitters Club book again with some trepidation. At the very least, it’s been 13 years since I last read a BSC novel, and as it tends to go with many things I loved as a child, I worried the book wouldn’t stand up today. I was wrong. Martin tells the story in simple but interesting prose, easily keeping her readers engrossed. And it’s funnier than I remembered, like when one child insists her cat, Boo-boo, has been bewitched by the creepy neighbor when the animal begins to freak out and streak across the yard. Now over 25 years old, the book has some quirks that date it in the 80’s (handwritten essays, overalls as a fashion statement), but much of the novel focuses on the girls and their relationships with both family and friends—universal problems with any preteen reader—so that the story still feels current and relatable. And although each of the characters has a particular role that she fills—the tomboy, the popular girl—within 150 pages Martin gives them enough depth so that we get realistic, fleshed-out characters instead of a group of stereotypes.

One thing I didn’t notice as a kid was the diversity in the book. A main character is Asian, many characters come from broken or mixed homes, and another deals with a disease. The Baby-Sitters Club covered a spectrum with its characters, but what’s really fantastic is how blended and natural this diversity is. Being a different race or having a non-traditional family doesn’t feel strange in this book, or forced as if Martin was trying to make a point. Instead it’s just natural—the way things simply are—a wonderful point of view for a children’s book to have.

Having now rekindled my love of Ann M. Martin’s series I went into Raina Telgemeier’s graphic novel with a decent level of excitement. From the front cover you can tell that this adaptation is crafted by a fan. The character designs are alive with personality, from Kristy’s wide grin to Mary-Anne’s perpetually nervous looks. She even manages to make Claudia look sufficiently more “grown up” than her friends while still making her believably 12-years-old. Characters’ faces carry a range of emotions that are more telling than some of the prose, like with the loaded looks Kristy gives Watson, her stepfather-to-be.

The graphic novel matches the quick pace of the novel, packing in all of the events without making the comic feel crowded and rushed. Like a lot of adaptations, Telgemeier transfers parts of the novel’s narration to the comic’s voice over, but it works better here than in most cases. The first person point of view keeps the narration sounding like Kristy’s telling the story. Also, Telgemeier is pretty wise in how she uses it, generally only inserting the narration when it would be too awkward or long-winded to put the information into dialogue or thoughts.

I was absolutely wrapped up in the world of The Baby-Sitters Club through elementary and middle school, and it’s with a glad heart that I say I can still recommend the novel today. The novel is funny and easy to relate to, and with the cute updated cover little girls might not notice that the book is three times as old as they are. Telgemeier’s graphic novel is also a great introduction to the series, so much fun and so well-crafted that I’m genuinely disappointed that only the first four BSC books received adaptations. Acknowledging my own bias, I lean more towards recommending the novel, but both are great books that I’d give to any little girl.

Have any graphic novel adaptations you think do a good job? Or a comic you want me to check out for you? Leave suggestions for future columns in the comments!

Rohan at the Louvre

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In 2007, NBM Comics-Lit published Nicolas de Crecy’s Glacial Period, the first in a series of graphic novels commissioned by the Louvre Museum. The goal of Glacial Period — and the four books that followed it — was to introduce readers to the richness and complexity of the Louvre’s vast collections through a familiar medium: comics.

The artists’ strategies for bridging the divide between fine and sequential art have varied. In Glacial Period, for example, a team of anthropologists unearth the Louvre’s collections, which have been buried under ice for a millennium. The scientists try to make sense of the objects they discover, not unlike a group of aliens speculating about the purpose of a Coke bottle or an Etch-A-Sketch. Other novels are more fanciful: Eric Liberge’s On the Odd Hours reads like a classy version of Night at the Museum, in which the museum’s iconic pieces come to life, roaming the empty galleries until the night watchman can subdue them. Still others are explicitly historical: Bernar Yslaire and Jean-Claude Carriere’s Sky Over the Louvre, for example, stars two of the French Revolution’s best-known bad boys: Maximilien Robiespierre and David.

Hirohiko Araki’s Rohan at the Louvre, by contrast, takes its cues from the world of J-horror, using the Louvre as the setting for a nifty ghost story. In the book’s opening pages, we’re introduced to Rohan, an aspiring manga artist who lives with his grandmother in a nearly deserted rooming house. (N.B. Fans of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure may recognize Rohan as a minor character from one of the later volumes of the series, though prior knowledge of JoJo is not necessary for appreciating Louvre.) The unexpected arrival of a beautiful divorcee turns the normally placid household upside down with tearful drama. Within a week of her arrival, however, Nanase disappears into the night, never to be seen again.

We then jump forward ten years: Rohan, now 27, is a successful manga artist who decides to visit the Louvre to view what Nanase once described to him as “the darkest painting in the world.” The painting, he learns, has never been publicly displayed; it sits in a long-forgotten basement vault. What transpires in the bowels of the Louvre is a mixture of old-fashioned Japanese ghost story and contemporary slasher flick; if one were to update Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan for today’s audiences, the denouement of “The Black-Haired Woman” or “Hoichi the Earless” might look like the climatic scene of Rohan.

For all the gory zest with which that scene is staged, Rohan‘s artwork is uneven. Araki’s command of color is impeccable: the prelude is bathed in a golden light, while the scenes at the Louvre are rendered in a cooler palette of grey, blue, and pure black, a contrast that nicely underscores Rohan’s journey from youthful inexperience to maturity. Araki’s sexy character designs are another plus; even the most muscle-bound figures have a sensual quality to them, with full lips and eyes that that moistly beckon to the reader.

When those figures are in motion, however, Araki’s artwork is less persuasive. Rohan and Nanase’s bodies, for example, rotate along several heretofore undiscovered axes; only Power Girl and Wonder Woman twist their bodies into more anatomy-defying poses. Araki’s fondness for extreme camera angles similarly distorts his characters’ bodies, as he draws them from below, behind, or a forty-five degree angle, eschewing simple frontal views whenever possible. Such bodily distortions are meant to give depth to the picture plane, I think, but the result is curiously flat; the characters often look like paper dolls that have been bent into unnatural shapes, rather than convincing representations of walking, talking people.

What Araki’s artwork does best is convey a sense of place. The opening pages are lovely, offering us a peek into a world that is largely — though not completely — untouched by modernity. Araki takes great pains to render the boarding house’s environs — its rock garden and gnarled pine trees — as well as its interior of spartan rooms and sliding doors. We feel the stillness and seclusion of the inn, and bristle when Nanase’s cell phone pierces that tranquility.

Likewise, Araki captures the Louvre in vivid detail. He guides the reader through its galleries, marching us past the Nike of Samothrace and several rooms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings. We follow Rohan’s gaze upwards towards vaulted ceilings encrusted in sculptural detail and elaborate frescoes, pausing to meet the gaze of the Dutch burghers and Roman gods whose images are mounted on the gallery walls. We then descend into the museum’s extensive network of tunnels and storage vaults, a veritable catacombs of neglected and obscure objects spread out over hundreds of acres. Although these dark, claustrophobic spaces make an ideal setting for a horror story, they’re also a powerful reminder of the Louvre’s history; the tunnels are remnants of a twelfth-century fortress that once occupied the site of the present-day museum.

If the artwork is, at times, overly stylized, Rohan at the Louvre is still an imaginative celebration of the Louvre Museum, conveying its scale, age, and majesty. Araki’s book is not as sophisticated or ambitious as some of the other titles in this series, but is one of the most dramatically satisfying, achieving a near-perfect balance between telling a ghost story and telling the Louvre’s own story. Recommended.

ROHAN AT THE LOUVRE • BY HIROHIKO ARAKI • NBM/COMICS-LIT • 128 pp. • NO RATING

The Flowers of Evil, Vol. 1

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By Shuzo Oshimi. Released in Japan as “Aku no Hana” by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Bessatsu Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Vertical.

Sometimes you get one of those series coming down the pike where you know, based on your own personal tastes, you’re going to both love it *and* hate it. I sort of felt that way when I heard about Flowers of Evil. It’s somewhat twisted, which appeals to me, and also has a very distinctive cover, which Vertical has adapted well from the original Japanese. On the other hand, it features that classic beloved-in-Japan but not-so-much-here “weak male lead”, which tends to frustrate me quite a bit more than it probably should. If I’m going to be identifying with characters in stories I read, I’d like them to be less aggravating, thanks. In addition, I’d read the author’s Drifting Net Cafe on JManga, and found it riveting yet thoroughly unpleasant.

(Note that the typeface for the cover title has changed between releasing the above picture to retailers and actually coming out – Vertical has a lot of last-minute changes to spruce up their covers, mostly for the better.)

After reading Flowers of Evil 1, I’m prepared to hang in there for the long haul. As with Drifting Net Cafe, riveting is the adjective I find myself using to describe it. The plot itself is not the most original – outcast girl blackmails weak male guy, who’s interested in pretty-yet-unapproachable other girl – but as ever, it’s not the plot that matters so much as what the author does with it. Takao is an *interesting* weak male lead. His obsession with Baudelaire – particularly Flowers of Evil, his collection of poetry from which this manga gets its title – is interesting, but mostly as he almost uses it as a psychological crutch. I read important books, he thinks, so I am better than the people around me. It’s the teen intellectual approach, and god knows I did it myself a bit when I was in high school.

Most of the characterization in this volume goes to Takao. The object of his affection, Nanako, gets a little bit of oblique development towards the end – I liked her discomfort as the other classmates were accusing Nakamura, and she and Takao do actually look like a nice couple. We’re still mostly seeing her through his eyes, though. As for Nakamura, the girl on the front cover… I still don’t quite know what to make of her. She seems to enjoy manipulating Takao for her own amusement, but is that all there is? In this case, the fact that we can’t see what she’s thinking is what drives us on. Is she simply bored with life? Does she have feelings for Takao (something he accuses her of towards the end, and which she very quickly rips apart)? Is she simply enjoying having power over someone, in the way that many teenagers find they love? Or is she trying to get Takao to mature, to develop into a stronger man?

I notice how much I wrote above about how teenagers think. This first volume deals with that subject a lot. What is considered to be perverse, what can you say or not say around your friends… how much you’re allowed to show how puberty is changing you. Takao is actually, compared to some of the freaks we’ve seen in other shonen manga, a rather mild case, but because this is a fairly realistic plotline, it hits closer to home. Likewise, Nakamura seems to have a few perversions of her own. (I like the flush she gets as she’s stripping him in the school library. That and the ending where she screams at him shows that she’s not controlling her emotions as well as we think.) The combination of nostalgia and discomfort drives Flowers of Evil, and it’s done well enough that I absolutely want to see what happens next. Even if I may squirm a bit.

Off the Shelf: Second volumes & others

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MICHELLE: Hey, MJ? What did the fish say when he ran into the wall?

MJ: I don’t know, Michelle, what did the fish say when he ran into the wall?

MICHELLE: “Dam.”

MJ: Okay, that time I actually laughed.

MICHELLE: Yay! Victory at last!

Anyhoo, I believe it’s your turn to go first in talking about some of the manga you’ve read since we last convened.

MJ: You’re right!

So, first I caught up with you (and the rest of the manga blogosphere), and finally read the first two volumes of GTO: 14 Days in Shonan, the latest hit from Vertical. I have to admit, that despite all the praise, I was a little reluctant to dive into the GTO universe. I’d never read any of it when it was published by Tokyopop, so I wasn’t at all familiar with the characters, and even after your reassurances a few columns ago, I still couldn’t quite shift myself from simply “intrigued” to “actually cracking the books.” This week, I finally did it, and I am pleased to say that I enjoyed myself so much that I decided to bring it here to the column, even though we discussed the series so recently.

You’ve already covered the premise, so I won’t rehash it all here. While, unlike you, I didn’t worry about the comedic sensibility coming too close to something like Detroit Metal City (I loved Detroit Metal City), I did worry that I’d just find it all kind of… boring. Or maybe contrived. Fortunately, it was neither, and (again, unlike you) I think I just might be looking to try to track down all the series’ previous volumes.

What I found pretty spectacular about 14 Days in Shonan, is that it features a main character who spends a lot of time telling other people just how much of a badass he is, while actually being a badass. Usually, if a character has to tell me how great he is, that’s a sure sign that I won’t think he’s great at all—but in this case, Eikichi is exactly what he says he is, and I find myself with absolutely no doubt at all that he’ll be able to do absolutely anything he says he can, including winning over all the teens at the White Swan Children’s Home, while also possibly saving the world. And perhaps curing cancer. Can you tell I liked him?

Seriously, though, I enjoyed these volumes so much more than I expected, I find myself wishing I had some kind of award to give out for it, or something. It’s been a while since my expectations were so neatly trounced.

MICHELLE: Yay, I’m glad you liked it! I like what you said about the reader’s confidence in the protagonist’s ability to make good on his promises; I absolutely felt the same. I should also note that I liked the second volume even more than the first, and am at least intrigued by the prospect of reading the earlier series, if daunted by the expense of such an endeavor.

MJ: I’d say that I preferred the second volume as well, and I’m actually glad I saved them up to read together. Though now, of course, I’m anxious to get to the third!

So what have you been reading this week?

MICHELLE: Well, speaking of second volumes… I checked out volume two of Durarara!! this week. For the uninitiated, this is ostensibly the story of a kid named Mikado, who has moved to Ikebukuro to attend high school and has encountered its various peculiar residents. There’s a lot more going on besides that, though, including a mysterious gang, a nefarious pharmaceutical company, and a headless (female) figure in black who rides through town on a motorcycle.

I deemed volume one “weird but intriguing,” and was hoping things would start to make a bit more sense in the second volume. And they do. I think, though, that my favorite plotline—the mystery surrounding Celty, the black rider—may actually now make a bit too much sense. A key revelation regarding her felt so obvious I’m left wanting a twist of some kind. “Is that all there is?” Meanwhile, other aspects of the story are still fairly baffling at this point.

I guess my gripe is I’d prefer a more balanced march towards clarity, as opposed to a lopsided one. Durarara!! is a very stylish series, and not one with a whole lot of depth, and I’d hate to see Celty’s tale resolved in a perfunctory manner.

MELNDA: I admit I had little patience with volume one, and though it’s heartening to hear that volume two is more coherent, I’m not sure it’s my cup of tea. Normally, I can deal with waiting for things to make sense, but it sounds like the payoff may not be worthwhile.

MICHELLE: Yeah, I really don’t know at this point. I’m willing to keep going with it a while longer, but I have no idea whether I’ll be satisfied or annoyed in the end.

What else did you read this week?

MJ: On a very different note, I also read the latest volume of one of my favorite current shoujo series, Yuuki Obata’s We Were There. Though this is a title I have reviewed regularly, I think this may be the first time I’ve brought it to Off the Shelf.

For anyone who might be unfamiliar with this series, it’s one of those titles like Sand Chronicles that begins as a high school romance, but eventually takes its characters much further into their lives, ultimately feeling much more like josei than shoujo, at least for my money. Though unresolved teen emotions are a major element of the romance, the characters also must face much more grown-up concerns, like jobs, marriage proposals, and taking care of ailing parents.

Clinging to first love is often a theme in these types of stories, and that’s certainly the case with We Were There, though it’s only “first love” for Nanami, the story’s heroine, as one of the romance’s primary conflicts is hero Motoharu’s lingering feelings for his former girlfriend who died in a car accident (and some of the ill-considered choices he makes out of guilt and grief). Though the plot is pure soap opera, Obata’s handling of it is so thoughtful and complex, it feels very little like anything I would normally describe with that term. Like Obata’s writing, the relationships in We Were There are as delicate as a scrap of old lace, ready to crumble at the slightest touch. And crumble they do.

This series has long been a favorite of mine—one of a short list of shoujo manga (along with more dramatic titles like Banana Fish and Tokyo Babylon) that’s made me sob helplessly for long periods while reading. So it was a bit of a surprise to me to find that volume 13 left me feeling completely disillusioned with the story’s primary relationship, to the point where I no longer had any desire to see it rekindled. I was okay with this, really. After all, there was another perfectly wonderful love interest just waiting there for my heroine. I didn’t need to care about Nanami and Motoharu anymore. I really, really didn’t.

Except now I do.

And that, volume 14, is how you write a shoujo manga. Heh.

MICHELLE: I stalled out on volume four of We Were There, but I actually just started over from the beginning the other day! If all goes according to plan—and if you don’t mind a bit of redundancy—I’ll be talking about this volume next week! I really look forward to seeing how the series progresses, as I am still firmly in the high school portion of the story.

MJ: I will be thrilled to hear what you think of this volume next week! And I’ll take care not to spoil you any further.

What else do you have for us this week?

MICHELLE: You may remember that I was a big fan of Dining Bar Akira, a BL oneshot published by NETCOMICS. So when JManga licensed another oneshot by its creator—Tomoko Yamashita—I knew I had to read it.

Don’t Cry, Girl is first and foremost an exceedingly silly manga. Due to unspecified problems with irresponsible parents, 17-year-old Taeko is sent to live with an acquaintance of her father named Masuda. Unfortunately for virginal Taeko, Masuda is a nudist and opens the door in his birthday suit. Taeko freaks out, as any normal person would, and I was giggling by page three, thanks to dialogue like, “Oh, shut up! Shut up, you stupid naked dumbass!”

Still, she’s got nowhere else to go, so Taeko and Masuda continue to cohabitate. Yamashita has a lot of fun with the premise, positioning speech bubbles and house plants in front of Masuda’s nether regions, and eventually introducing a friend for Masuda whose cool and sophisticated veneer hides a penchant for juvenile humor. A couple of would-be serious moments don’t quite work however, and make it hard to remember that this is a comedy and certain things don’t really need to make sense.

Also included is a story called “3322,” in which another young woman is staying with her father’s acquaintance. Kanoko is considering leaving school, so her father has her stay with Chiyoko, who is probably her mother. While Chiyoko has a dalliance with a local man, and her friend Yoko seems to pine unrequitedly for her, Kanoko finds herself interested in Yoko while frustrated by the adults and all their secrets. It’s an interesting tale and one I wish could be expanded upon.

Although a little uneven, Don’t Cry, Girl is still a lot of fun. And JManga’s now got another Yamashita title up—Mo’some Sting—which I will definitely be checking out!

MJ: Okay, now I’m giggling thanks to just the bit of dialogue you quoted! Silly manga is not always to my taste, but this sounds like far too much fun to pass up!

MICHELLE: I think it’s just the right kind of silly. Once again, I find myself thanking JManga for offering something it’s very unlikely we would’ve been able to get in English otherwise. New est em, new Tomoko Yamashita… could new Saika Kunieda (Future Lovers) be next? One can only hope!

MJ: That’s worth some hope, indeed!

The Flowers of Evil, Vol. 1

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If you grew up in a small town, you probably knew someone like Takao Kasuga, the nebbish-hero of The Flowers of Evil. Kasuga is a precocious middle-schooler who copes with provincial life by burying his nose in a book. His peers tolerate him, but find him a little too smug and strange to be one of the guys. Kasuga, for his part, takes pride in his sophisticated reading habits, stashing poems in his desk and telling his classmates that they’re too stupid to appreciate his favorite writer, Charles Baudelaire.

In a moment of impulse, Kasuga steals the gym outfit of beautiful classmate Nanako Saeki — an act witnessed by Sawa Nakamura, the class outcast. Nakamura confronts Kasuga after school, threatening to expose him as the thief unless he complies with her requests. Her motives for blackmailing Kasuga are complex, a mixture of prurient interest in Kasuga’s sexual fantasies and sadistic delight in wielding power over a boy. At times Nakamura  physically dominates him — she punches and tackles him — and at times she manipulates him with humiliating tasks and questions.

I’d be the first to admit that the similarities between Flowers of Evil and Sundome — however superficial — predisposed me to dislike the book. I didn’t think I had the stomach for another story in which a ball-busting girl sexually and psychologically tortured a sad-sack boy. Yet Flowers of Evil proved a far more compelling and honest look at adolescent sexuality than Sundome, thanks, in large part, to Shuzo Oshimi’s sympathetic portrayal of Kasuga.

Throughout the book, author Shuzo Oshimi hints that Kasuga’s character was inspired by his own experiences as a book-toting misfit. “I read Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil for the first time in middle school,” he explains at the end of chapter one. “I didn’t understand much of it, but the book’s feel — suspicious, indecent, yet nastily noble — made me think, I’m so cool for reading it.” Kasuga, too, clearly feels a sense of superiority for having discovered Baudelaire at a young age; in a fit of self-pity, he muses, “How many people in this town understand Baudelaire?” At the same time, however, he’s keenly aware that his peers think he’s weird. Kasuga may be mature enough to appreciate Baudelaire — or perhaps, more accurately, to think he understands Baudelaire — but he isn’t quite old enough to shake off his classmates’ teasing.

Oshimi also does an exceptional job of dramatizing Kasuga’s inner sexual turmoil. Early in the book, for example, Kasuga catches sight of Saeki. In a flash, he pictures her clad in gym clothes, blushing and telling him, “I love you.” His acute embarrassment at being discovered mid-reverie is all the more palpable for the way in which he’s drawn: Kasuga sinks into his chair, his shoulders slumped, brows furrowed, and body foreshortened, making him look like a moist ragdoll. In later chapters, Oshimi uses surreal imagery — a wall of eyes, a fun-house mirror, a giant sink hole — to suggest that Kasuga’s normal teenage discomfort with sexual feelings has become something more powerful and destructive: shame.

If Kasuga is a sympathetic character, Nakamura poses greater difficulties for the reader. She claims her true agenda is to expose him as a pervert, but nothing about Kasuga’s behavior indicates that he is; if anything, Kasuga is naive, torn between romantic and sexual ideas about love. (That he calls Saeki “my muse, my femme fatale, my Venus” suggests the extent of his confusion.) Nakamura, too, appears to wrestling with complicated sexual feelings; in several scenes, she hints at her own predilections, only to accuse Kasuga of harboring even nastier ones. In short, Nakamura seems intent on finding someone more self-loathing and sexually confused than she is, yet her behavior is so violent and manipulative it sometimes feels as if Oshimi is trying too hard to suggest her disaffection; Nakamura’s character veers dangerously close to being a symbol of castration anxiety, rather than an emotionally damaged teenage girl.

That said, The Flowers of Evil is a shockingly readable story that vividly — one might even say queasily — evokes the fear and confusion of discovering one’s own sexuality. Recommended.

THE FLOWERS OF EVIL, VOL. 1 • BY SHUZO OSHIMI • VERTICAL, INC. • 202 pp. • NO RATING (BEST FOR OLDER TEENS)

Manga the Week of 5/16

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Don’t mind me, I’m just depressed. Still no Oresama Teacher 8 for me. And now Story of Saiunkoku 7 is missing as well. Oh Diamond, why must you hurt so?

That said, Midtown Comics is still getting a bunch of stuff in next week. Let’s go over it publisher by publisher.

Being around the Manga Bookshelf team has made me feel guilty that I tend to ignore manwha, so I’ll just note that the 11th volume of romantic fantasy Bride of the Water God is here. It runs in a magazine called Wink. Also, I hear there are gods.

Digital Manga Publishing has a bunch of new BL series, as well as some old favorites. Both Castle Mango and Samejima-kun & Sasahara-kun sound much sillier than the usual solicits I see, which pleases me. More silly BL, please! As for Starry Sky, it’s hard to find info on it except that I think it came from Comic B’s Log, so may not be true BL but BL-ish. It does seem to star a female. Lastly, we have new volumes of Private Teacher and The Tyrant Falls in Love, both of which tie for this week’s ‘sounds most like a USA Up All Night movie’ award.

Kodansha gives us Sailor Moon Vol. 5, which wraps up the ‘R’ arc, and features my all-time favorite Sailor Moon manga moment. We also get the 6th volume of the Emily Rodda series Deltora Quest, which Kodansha snapped up and turned into manga before, say, Yen Press could. :)

Seven Seas has the 4th volume of A Certain Scientific Railgun, which says right on the back that it’s beginning the long-awaited ‘Sisters’ arc, thus showing that any attempt to market this series to newbies has long since left town. Should be good, though. I quite enjoyed the last volume.

Lastly, Viz stuff is still trickling in, as we see Naruto 56 (huge good pile of ninjas battle the enemy’s huge evil pile of reanimated ninjas), and Inu Yasha VIZBIG Edition 11, which presumably has Vols. 31-33. It’s more than halfway there! And also features the undead, which is apparently Viz’s theme this week.

So what floats your boat?