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Re-flipped: Kazuo Umezu

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For this week’s blood-soaked Manga Moveable Feast, I thought I’d revisit some old Flipped columns that have a horrific bent.

With so many aspects of the manga industry apparently in question, there is one thing I can say without too much fear of contradiction:  it’s a good time to be a fan of horror comics from Japan.

CMX is offering the creepy-cute moralizing of Kanako Inuki’s Presents.  Dark Horse is serving fans of Shaun of the Dead-style self-aware chills with The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, written by Eiji Otsuka and drawn by Housui Yamazaki.  Old-school angst and energetically rendered savagery take center stage in Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte from Del Rey.  In spite of some moments of uncertainty along the way, Tokyopop did a great public service by finishing the apocalyptic ten-volume run of Mochizuki Minetaro’s Dragon Head. Viz Media released new editions of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki and Gyo in its Signature imprint.

What really makes this a mini-golden age for horror devotees, and the Signature line a relative horn of plenty for such readers, is the quantity of Kazuo Umezu manga on offer.   Umezu’s tykes-in-trouble classic, The Drifting Classroom, recently wrapped up an 11-volume run, and Viz just released Cat Eyed Boy in two fat, prestige volumes.

The Drifting Classroom begins with an elementary school blowing sky high.  The community is devastated by the apparent deaths of hundreds of students and their teachers, not realizing that the victims should have been so lucky.  Instead of a quick and relatively merciful end, the school has been cast into a hellish, post-apocalyptic landscape filled with mysterious perils.  The grown-ups are less than useful, giving in to panic and madness.  Umezu dispatches them with ruthless efficiency, placing the focus on the kids and their attempts to survive external and internal threats.

I’ve rarely seen a comic with as much insanity per page.  Umezu’s pace is relentless as he tosses the dwindling student body from frying pan to fire and back again.  It’s like a child’s worst nightmares woven into one and infused with adrenaline.  Grown-ups are useless, and peers are even more pernicious than they suspected.

The brutality never becomes wearying, because Umezu has seemingly boundless imagination in finding new ways to render horrible things happening to children.  Some moments have slowly mounting terror, like a panicked stampede of kids charging at a handful of out-of-their-depth faculty.  Others pop out of nowhere with the kind of jarring effect that slasher film-makers only wish they could muster.

It’s incidental, but the series provides additional pleasure when you remind yourself that The Drifting Classroom was originally created for children, originally serialized in Shogakukan’s Shônen Sunday.  One shudders to think what Fredric Wertham would have made of manga.

After the hyperactive terror of The Drifting Classroom, Umezu’s Cat Eyed Boy seems almost serene.  Like a lot of horror manga, it’s episodic in its construction, following a half-demon protagonist as he’s drawn to scenes of horrible things happening to terrible people.

Actually, “protagonist” might be the wrong term.  Cat Eyed Boy has no vested interest in the misfortunes he witnesses.  Sometimes, he’s just an observer.  He can demonstrate a penchant for taunting humans, playing on their superstitions.  If he sometimes finds himself opposed to malevolent forces, it’s generally a matter of self-preservation.  He’s not admirable by any means, but he’s understandable.  If Cat Eyed Boy’s odd existence has taught him anything, it’s that people generally suck.

This is most clearly demonstrated in what might be described as his origin story, “The Tsunami Summoners.”  Rejected by both the human and demon sides of his family, Cat Eyed Boy is taken in by a lonely spinster in a seaside village.  The community doesn’t share his foster mother’s benevolence, and his childhood is characterized by alienation and hostility.  The Cat Eyed Boy becomes the scapegoat for the town’s misfortunes, blinding them to more insidious threats on the horizon.

“The Tsunami Summoners” is a wonderfully twisted morality play, easily my favorite entry in the first volume.  It delivers Umezu’s visual imagination, inventive plotting, and ambiguous morality.  The title character could easily be one of those prolific and slightly sickening types – hideous on the outside, but with a pure and childlike heart.  Umezu’s approach is much more interesting; the Cat Eyed Boy owns both his human and demonic heritage.  He can be hurt by human cruelty and fear, but the impish part of his nature earns at least a portion of it.

His foster mother, Mimi, is equally ambiguous to me.  She’s driven by loneliness as opposed to any specific affection for the Cat Eyed Boy; Mimi wants a child, any child.  Even the villagers aren’t entirely unreasonable in their fears; they come out on the wrong end of the moral equation, obviously, but the sliver of sympathy you feel for their fears adds extra spice to the story’s outcome.

If the Cat Eyed Boy is a bit on the adorable side, like a plush toy, Umezu doesn’t stint on disturbing character design.  “The Band of One Hundred Monsters” is a parade of the grotesque.  And ultimately, it’s the internal deformities, that are most disturbing – anger, jealousy, sadism, greed.  Umezu’s mastery comes from his ability to render both.

 

No Longer Human, Vol. 1

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By Usamaru Furuya, based on the novel by Osamu Dazai. Released in Japan by Shinchosha, serialized in the magazine Weekly Comic Bunch. Released in North America by Vertical.

Vertical released 3 new series in quick succession this past month, and this may be the least talked about of the three. However, it should be talked about more, as it’s excellent, with Furuya creating a disturbing mood of suffocation and pretense as he adapts a classic Japanese novel about despair into modern times.

The original novel by Dazai was released in 1948, and is still beloved in Japan. We’ve seen its influence here already; the first Book Girl novel used it as a focal point, and Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei has many similarities between its protagonist and the narrator of No Longer Human. Furuya uses a bit of a distancing device to bookend the manga, showing himself looking at a website that supposedly describes the life of Yozo Oba, a young man who seems dissolute and bored with life.

The back cover notes that he takes refuge in clowning, but honestly we only see that for the first chapter of the book. In reality, Yozo has a different face for each situation he’s in, and seems to throw on personalities at random. This is not all that uncommon, of course, but he’s also a teenager, and seems to regard his attitude as unique and everyone else as being happy and content. In other words, Yozo thinks too much. As the manga goes on, various bad things start happening to him, but he deals with it by either reacting on the fly or drifting aimlessly. Yozo lacks a purpose.

This isn’t a horror manga (more on that later in the week), but there are certainly several images within that could be right at home in a horror anthology. Furuya loves to draw surrealistic mindscapes showing his characters’ fractured psyches, and so we see swirling faces, blank puppet eyes, and dolls breaking apart in the sea. What Yozo goes through is no picnic, either – he may start out as a rich dilettante, but his family curtails his allowance, then cuts him off completely. And the political group he joins turns out to be a terrorist organization. Is it any wonder he ends Volume 1 where he does?

As with Genkaku Picasso, the emphasis here is on imagery. Furuya is served well by a pre-existing plot, however, even if he’s adapting it to modern times, and so things hold together better than they did in Picasso. This is also for a far older audience than Picasso; there are several scenes with Yozo having sex, and there’s also some violence and graphic situations, particularly at the end of the first volume. No one is going to have their psyche magically fixed by a pen here.

As with most of Furuya’s works, No Longer Human isn’t for everyone. But I definitely regarded it as a step up from Picasso, and it lacks (so far) the sexual violence and gore of Lychee Light Club. Intriguingly, the flipped format we see here *isn’t* flipped – Furuya redrew his entire manga left-to-right for the French market, and Vertical is using that version. It works very well. For those looking for a psychological thriller with intellectual overtones, give this a try.

License request day: Junji Ito josei

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As we approach the horror-tinged Manga Moveable Feast, I’m extremely happy that I can kill two license request birds with one stone: more Junji Ito, and more josei. I don’t know that publishers make a lot of money off of licensing Ito’s work, but they keep trying, bless them, so they must love his twisted, meticulous tales as much as I do.

When compiling The Josei Alphabet, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there’s a josei magazine that specializes in horror, Asahi Sonorama’s Nemuki. The fact that Ito has published a lot of stories in Nemuki made me like the idea even more. They’ve been collected in at least two volumes.

Yami no Koe came out in 2002. The mere fact that it has a story in it called “Blood-sucking Darkness” should be evidence enough of its merit, don’t you think?

Shin Yami no Koe – Kaidan started giving people nightmares in 2006. I suspect the highlights of this collection are probably provided by a horrible little boy with a mouth full of nails. French publisher Tonkam has published these stories as Le journal de Soïchi and Le journal maudit de Soïchi. For bonus points, this collection also seems to include a story about an accursed library.

I’m obviously not made of stone, and I would also love to read Ito’s comics about his cat and his one-volume look at Rasputin, but josei horror is just too enticing a prospect not to provide a starting point, you know?

 

Gate 7, Vol. 1

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I have good news and bad news for CLAMP fans. The good news is that Gate 7 is one of the best-looking manga the quartet has produced, on par with Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles and xxxHolic. The bad news is that Gate 7‘s first volume is very bumpy, with long passages of expository dialogue and several false starts. Whether you’ll want to ride out the first three chapters will depend largely on your reaction to the artwork: if you love it, you may find enough visual stimulation to sustain to your interest while the plot and characters take shape; if you don’t, you may find the harried pacing and repetitive jokes a high hurdle to clear.

Art-wise, Gate 7 most closely resembles Tsubasa. The character designs are elegantly stylized, rendered in delicate lines; though their proportions have been gently elongated, their physiques are less giraffe-like than the principle characters in Legal Drug and xxxHolic. The same sensibility informs the action scenes as well, where CLAMP uses thin, sensual linework to suggest the energy unleashed during magical combat. (Readers familiar with Magic Knight Rayearth will see affinities between the two series, especially in the fight sequences.) Perhaps the most striking thing about the artwork is its imaginative use of water and light to evoke the supernatural. As Zack Davisson observes in his review of Gate 7, CLAMP uses a subtle but lovely image to shift the action from present-day Kyoto to the spirit realm, depicting the characters as stones in the water, with soft ripples radiating outward from each figure.

The story, however, is less satisfying. The plot revolves around high school student Chikahito Takamoto, a timid dreamer who’s obsessed with Kyoto as a place of “history, ancient arts, temples, and shrines.” While exploring the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine, Chikahito is transported to an alternate dimension, where he encounters three warriors: Sakura, Tachibana, and Hana, an androgynously beautiful, child-like figure who possesses even greater spiritual power than the other two. Chikahito watches the trio dismantle a ribbon-like serpent, but before he can question what he’s seen, poof! he finds himself eating noodles with them in a Kyoto apartment as Sakura and Tachibana debate the ethics of erasing Chikahito’s memory.

Hana astonishes Chikahito with an awesome display of power.

The biggest problem with this introductory section is that the subsequent chapter traces a nearly identical trajectory: Chikahito returns to Kyoto, encounters Hana in the streets, then is whisked onto the spirit-plane for another round of magical combat. As soon as the monster is defeated, Chikahito once again finds himself eating a meal with Hana, Sakura, and Tachibana. (This time around, however, they gang-press him into cooking and cleaning for them.) CLAMP even recycles the same gags from the prelude: Hana’s fragile appearance belies a monstrous appetite for noodles, an incongruity CLAMP mines for humor long past the point of being funny.

Other problems prevent Gate 7 from taking flight in its early pages. As we begin to learn more about the Kitano Tenmagu Shrine, for example, various characters take turns explaining its history. These narratives are clearly intended to set the table for a more complex plotline, but have the unintended consequence of stopping the story dead in its tracks. The script also makes some maddening detours into mystical clap-trap; in trying to understand how the seemingly ordinary Chikahito can enter the supernatural realm, characters lapse into Yoda-speak. “We’re alike,” Hana informs Chikahito. When asked, “In what areas?” Hana cheerfully replies, “In areas that are… ‘not.’ Where he’s the same is… ‘not.'”

The most disappointing aspect of Gate 7 is the flimsiness of the characterizations. CLAMP seems to be relying on readers’ familiarity with other titles — Cardcaptor Sakura, Chobits, Tsuaba, xxxHolic — in establishing each character’s personality and role in the drama. Hana, for example, slots into the Mokona role: Hana refers to himself (herself?) in the third person, repeats pet phrases, and behaves like a glutton, yet proves surprisingly powerful. Chikahito, on the other hand, is a carbon copy of xxxHolic‘s Watanuki, a nervous, bespectacled everyman who unwittingly becomes the housekeeper and magical errand-boy for more supernaturally gifted beings. The frantic pace and abrupt transitions between the mundane and supernatural world further complicate the process of establishing Hana and Chikahito as individuals; with so much material stuffed into the first two hundred pages, CLAMP leans too heavily on tics and mannerisms to carry the burden of the characterization. (Cute finger-wagging does not a character make.)

The dramatic introduction of a new character in the volume’s final pages suggests that CLAMP may finally be hitting its stride in chapter four. As promising as this development may be, I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m reading a Potemkin manga, all surface detail and no depth. Let’s hope volume two proves me wrong.

GATE 7, VOL. 1 • BY CLAMP • DARK HORSE • 192 pp. • NO RATING

Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking, Vols. 1-10

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By Koji Kumeta | Volumes 1-8 published by Del Rey, Volumes 9-10 published by Kodansha Comics

When I first set out to read Koji Kumeta’s Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei, my goal was to finish the first eight volumes in time for Kodansha’s June 2011 release of volume nine.

You can see how well that worked out.

The problem was that this series simply doesn’t benefit from a marathon read. After four volumes, I burnt out and switched to reading it a chapter at a time as the mood struck me. Obviously, it took a lot longer this way, but turned out to be the ideal manga to read on breaks at work or while sitting around in the lobby of the doctor’s office. Interestingly, I found the most recent volumes to be so good that devouring them in their entirety was no problem at all!

There’s not a whole lot of plot to Zetsubou-sensei. Nozomu Itoshiki, the fourth son of a wealthy family, is a high school teacher with a penchant for nineteenth century garb. The title of the manga refers to the fact that when the characters of his name are written too closely together, they can be read as “zetsubou,” or “despair.” Which is convenient, since despairing over various things (and occasionally trying to kill himself) is Itoshiki’s specialty. His class is full of a variety of quirky students, whom we meet gradually, including a girl who sees everything positively, a methodical and precise (and possibly homicidal) girl, a girl who speaks only in text messages, a stalker, a fujoshi, an impoverished housewife, etc. We also meet a few members of his family, including his brother Mikoto, a doctor whose name can be read as “zetsumei,” or “certain death.”

Each chapter follows more or less the same pattern: the first couple of pages establish where the characters are, then something sets Itoshiki off on a rant. (For example, a hinamatsuri display inspires a diatribe about heirarchical societies.) Eventually he spews out a list of items that correspond to the topic of the day. Then the positive girl (Kafuka) will put forth a different opinion and, a couple of pages later, the chapter ends. As I’ve described it, this sounds tedious, but it’s often quite clever and absurd.

Some chapters are more Japanese-centric than others, with copious references to entertainers and public figures or topics specific to Japan, like tanabata or fukubukuro. These can be somewhat less fun to read, especially in earlier volumes when the (admittedly thorough) end notes provide so much information that one ends up reading the book with a finger permanently lodged in the back to reference the explanation as needed. With a change in translator for volume five, most of these notes disappeared.

At first, I was bothered by knowing there were all sorts of references I was missing, but in the end I think I prefer to just cope with ignorance; it helps that more recent volumes have dealt with some universal topics like dream endings, assumptions, jokes you’ve heard a million times, how we perceive the passage of time, modern conveniences leading to inconvenience (“Thanks to Amazon,com, we’ve got piles of books that we haven’t had time to read”), skewed priorities, gifts you feel obliged to accept, and getting sucked into other people’s drama. Somewhat to my surprise, it feels like we’re beginning to learn a little bit more about the characters, as well.

In addition to following the established formula in terms of chapter progression, there are also several recurring gags in Zetusbou-sensei. I’m not very fond of the poor dog with a stick in its butt who appears on occasion, but the creative ways Kumeta finds to insert a panty shot from a particular character are kind of fun, and I’m quite fond of Itoshiki’s stalker, Matoi, who suddenly pops up in the middle of scenes, surprising the characters. “You were here?” And the way in which the characters continue to fail eleventh grade and must repeat it pokes fun at those series—Ouran High School Host Club is the most notorious example to come to mind—where seasons pass but the characters inexplicably fail to graduate.

Artistically, Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei has a very unique look. Kumeta uses very little screen tone, and all of his characters (except one) have pitch-black hair and eyes. There are many girls in the cast, but they all have distinctive hairstyles. Even if I can’t remember someone’s name, her hairstyle will clue me in. “Oh, that’s the delusional self-blaming girl!” Kumeta’s got a recurring trick for page layout too: frequently, a character will be drawn full-length to one side of the page and depicted with extremely skinny ankles and extremely large feet. In more recent volumes it seems that facial closeups are happening more often, or that characters are being viewed from some new angles, which is a welcome development.

On the whole, I enjoyed Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei a great deal. I felt that it improved as it went along, and I look forward to remaining current with the series henceforth. It may not have made me laugh aloud continuously, but it was always amusing enough to make me smile, and it’s to its credit that it was still capable of making me giggle in its 100th chapter.

Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei: The Power of Negative Thinking was originally published in English by Del Rey, who put out the first eight volumes, but is now being published by Kodansha Comics. The series is ongoing in Japan; volume 27 came out there earlier this week.

Review copies for volumes five, seven, eight, and ten provided by the publisher.

Drifting Net Café, Vol. 1

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By Shuzo Oshimi. Released in Japan by Futabasha, serialized in the magazine Manga Action. Released in the United States by Futabasha on the JManga website.

Of all the titles released so far by JManga, no magazine has more examples of its wares than Futabasha’s seinen magazine Manga Action. It’s a bi-weekly magazine that caters to the same sort of reader as all of the ‘Young’ magazines, which is to say each edition features a hot Japanese gravure model on the cover. Now, to be fair, the content is just as varied as any other magazine for men. You have bento manga, medical manga, sports manga, and even Star Protector Dog. That said, you also have manga about guys trapped in loveless marriages who end up with the hot girl of their dreams.

Drifting Net Café stats off with this basic plot. Toki is a salaryman with a pregnant wife, and is dissatisfied with how he got there. Yukie, his wife, is having mood swings; he’s incredibly horny but unable to have sex; and he keeps thinking about the girl he had a crush on in high school, whom he hasn’t seen since then. Then one day as it’s raining he goes into a net café to ride it out, and runs into none other than his old crush!

So far so normal, and the entire first volume is set up so that you’re supposed to root for the adultery. Yukie is cute, and he loves her in that ‘yeah, whatever’ sort of way, but with Tohno it’s clear he still has chemistry and an undefinable spark. Unfortunately, they can’t immediately hook up because the café they’re in is suddenly transported to the middle of a hostile swampy desert in the middle of nowhere.

Yes, that’s right, this isn’t just an adulterous salaryman romance manga, it’s also a takeoff on Kazuo Umezu’s classic horror title The Drifting Classroom. Instead of children, we have bored and jaded young twenty-somethings cast adrift, and the conflict between then erupts almost immediately. We’re only one volume in, so we don’t really get to know the whole cast, but the characters we’ve seen get in the spotlight have issues. I honestly can’t even remember their names, I define them by their roles. The huge guy with some sort of rage disorder. The shallow girl who whines about wanting to go home. The psycho guy.

Speaking of the psycho guy, this is another manga rated M for mature. For most of the volume, that’s due to the occasional bout of violence, with folks beating up other folks because they’re all confused at being transported from Tokyo to a strange swamp in the middle of nowhere. Then right at the end, one of the meek characters, who’s been bullied by his boss since the start, goes nuts. He stabs his boss with a penknife, then grabs the shallow girl and forces her to go down on him at knifepoint. It’s as sordid as it sounds, and made me feel ill. Then another guy pulls out a taser… and that’s our cliffhanger. Didn’t take long for morality to erode, much like its older counterpart.

So we’ve got a wannabe cheating hero, a heroine who through one volume is still somewhat faceless (in flashbacks, she’s shown to be the cool mysterious beauty, but in the present she seems very passive), a lot of violence, and we end with sexual assault. Is there something to like about this title? Well, it’s certainly very good at setting a mood. From the moment we enter the net café, there’s a creeping feeling of horror that is conveyed very well on the page. I’m just… not sure I want to read the mood that this story is good at setting. If you want to see a horror/mystery title with a side of sex and violence, this may be for you. As for me, it lost me by the final chapter.

BL Bookrack: October 2011

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Welcome to the October installment of BL Bookrack! This month, MJand Michelle take a look at three offerings from Digital Manga Publishing’s Juné imprint, Yakuza Café, Sky Link, and volume three of A Strange and Mystifying Story.

Sky Link | By Shiro Yamada | Digital Manga Publishing/Juné | Rated YA (16+) – Ritsuki Ban is a troubled young man just starting university. On his first day, he collides with a man who praises him for being his type, and who (of course) turns out to be one of his professors. The professor, Takagi, pursues Ritsuki vigilantly, despite his surface apathy. How does Ritsuki really feel?

Truthfully, there’s a lot more going on in this story than what I’ve just described, but I sort of wish there wasn’t. This story, more than any other I’ve read recently, really suffers from the limitations of being a one-shot, which means that all of its best character development amounts to nothing more than false promises in the end.

Things start out pretty well. Ritsuki is a sullen guy with a mysterious past, written just subtly enough to be more intriguing than cliché. Takagi is aggressive and over-confident, but with enough sensitivity to dodge that cliché as well. Their relationship develops slowly (and reluctantly) in the beginning, with just enough real sexual tension to allow us to root for it. Then, perhaps pressed for time, the mangaka suddenly rushes them to being “in love,” eliminating all their troubles and sending them off on a world adventure. None of the volume’s early tension is meaningful by the end, and even the characters’ title-inspiring bond over their love for the sky deteriorates into sentimentality of the most cloying kind.

Believable romance is incredibly difficult to write in a single volume, and many BL mangaka don’t even try. But while I might criticize those stories as being simply “not for me,” Sky Link actually would be, if only it succeeded, and that’s what I find so heartbreaking about it. I love a happy ending as much as the next romance-addict, but I prefer ambiguity (or even sadness) over unearned happiness any day. Ultimately, Sky Link is attractive but disappointing. – Review by MJ

A Strange and Mystifying Story, Vol. 3 | By Tsuta Suzuki | Digital Manga Publishing/Juné | Rated Mature (18+) – The first two volumes of this series are the story of a sickly fellow named Akio who is cured of his illness thanks to the sexual healing provided by his family’s guardian beast, Setsu. These volumes are pretty good, but volume three beats them by a mile.

That’s because mangaka Tsuta Suzuki is wise enough to know when a story is played out and brave enough to risk angering her fans by taking things in an entirely new direction. Akio and Setsu appear but briefly, therefore, as Suzuki devotes the first half of this volume to the absolutely adorable love story between two of Akio’s coworkers and the second half to a teenager named Tsumugi who has just encountered a guardian beast of his own.

We’ve met Akio’s coworkers—cheerful middle-aged boss Keiichiro Minamiura and stoic twenty-something Tetsushi Hatoki—before, and there have been hints that something might be going on between them. The first chapter devoted to the pair reveals their history before Akio was hired, with Tetsushi being drawn in by Keiichiro’s personality (“Surely it’s a gift, such hearty, carefree laughter”) but unable to make a move because he is convinced he will be rejected, since others have pursued Keiichiro with no success. The second chapter seems to take place in the present. I loved both unstintingly and without restraint. Tetsushi may seem impassive, but he’s really straightforward with his emotions, and Suzuki adeptly captures the qualities that make Keiichiro simultaneously warm and enigmatic. I could seriously read about these guys forever.

The second half of the book pales in comparison somewhat, but is better than expected. Tsumugi Shirota—who, as it turns out, is Keiichiro’s former step-son—is one of those manga guys who excel at all manner of domestic tasks, especially cooking. On his 16th birthday, he finds out that he’s been assigned these chores as a means of training to become the “bride” for the family’s guardian fox-beast, Kurayori. Kurayori is displeased to find that his bride-to-be is male, but Tsumugi’s diligence wins him over and he decides to continue protecting the family until such time as Tsumugi is grown and can provide for them. It’s a little weird how accepting Tsumugi is of this arrangement (though I suppose that’s better than inflicting a lot of spastic flailing on readers), but I am overall intrigued and glad that this setup did not immediately lead to sexytimes.

As a final note, the volume’s mature rating is likely due to content in earlier volumes, because this one is markedly chaste. Suzuki writes in her afterward, “On a personal note, I am quite disappointed that I was not able to portray for you the panting of a middle-aged man.” Hee! – Review by Michelle Smith

Yakuza Café | By Shinano Oumi | Digital Manga Publishing/Juné | Rated M (18+) – When Shinri Irie receives an invitation from his father, absent from his life for many years, to come live with him, he decides to accept. As it turns out, his dad (Daigo) is the former head of the Fujisaki clan, a yakuza group he disbanded in order to devote himself to being a better father. Many of his former devotees have been cast out, but a select crew remains to help the boss in his new venture: running a café.

The café’s décor is rather abysmal and their tea is even worse, so Shinri works together with the business manager, Zaouji, to whip the place into shape. Everything’s going smoothly on opening night until the disgruntled former clan members return with mayhem on their minds until they are quelled by the sight of Daigo’s phoenix tattoo. Really.

The romance angle comes in the form of Shinri’s relationship with Mikado, the leader of the henchman. He has reportedly loved Shinri for years and is dedicated to protecting him, but he has a weird quirk: whenever anyone touches the dragon tattoo on his back, he goes into savage mode—seriously, he has a line of dialogue translated as “rawr”—and, on one occasion, this leads to a nonconsensual encounter with Shinri. Not only is Shinri forgiving about this, he actually gets kind of wistful about it. “Even though it hurt and I was scared…. I didn’t hate it, either.”

The comedic element of a group of yakuza attempting to run a café is kind of fun, and I did like the scene where Shinri and Zaouji are dazzling some coeds with their looks and tea-making skills. But the business with the tattoos is just ridiculous, and Shinri’s acceptance of Mikado’s violent assault grates on my nerves. Worst of all, though, is the characters themselves. Mikado has almost zero personality. And if I told you to think of the most generic uke in the history of ukes, you’d probably come up with someone just like Shinri. I don’t believe in their relationship at all, but it’s not just them: a side story about Zaouji and his lover’s death has no impact at all because the characters are so flat.

If you want to read about yakuza and tea, I recommend Crimson Snow or I Give to You. There’s no need to read something this tepid. – Review by Michelle Smith

Review copies provided by the publisher.

Disclosure: MJ is currently under contract with Digital Manga Publishing’s Digital Manga Guild, as necessitated for her ongoing report Inside the DMG. Any compensation earned by MJin her role as an editor with the DMG will be donated to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

Manga Bestsellers: 2011, Week Ending 16 October

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Comparative Rankings Based on Consolidated Online Sales

last week’s charts
about the charts

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Manga Bestsellers

1. ↔0 (1) : Sailor Moon 1 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [472.7] ::
2. ↑2 (4) : Sailor Moon Codename: Sailor V 1 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [454.5] ::
3. ↓-1 (2) : Sailor Moon 2 – Kodansha Comics, Nov 2011 [440.3] ::
4. ↑1 (5) : Vampire Knight 13 – Viz Shojo Beat, Oct 2011 [435.0] ::
5. ↓-2 (3) : Naruto 52 – Viz Shonen Jump, Jul 2011 [412.0] ::
6. ↑3 (9) : Rosario+Vampire Season II 6 – Viz Shonen Jump Advanced, Oct 2011 [394.8] ::
7. ↑1 (8) : Blue Exorcist 4 – Viz Shonen Jump Advanced, Oct 2011 [375.1] ::
8. ↓-1 (7) : Skip Beat! 25 – Viz Shojo Beat, Oct 2011 [363.9] ::
9. ↑4 (13) : Maximum Ride 1 – Yen Press, Jan 2009 [325.8] ::
10. ↑1 (11) : xxxHolic 17 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [314.1] ::

[more]

Top Imprints
Number of volumes ranking in the Top 500:

Viz Shonen Jump 83
Viz Shojo Beat 70
Yen Press 68
Viz Shonen Jump Advanced 38
Kodansha Comics 35
Vizkids 31
Tokyopop 25
HC/Tokyopop 20
Del Rey 18
DMP Juné 15

[more]

Series/Property

1. ↔0 (1) : Sailor Moon – Kodansha Comics [1,081.5] ::
2. ↑1 (3) : Vampire Knight – Viz Shojo Beat [786.3] ::
3. ↑1 (4) : Maximum Ride – Yen Press [703.0] ::
4. ↓-2 (2) : Naruto – Viz Shonen Jump [677.4] ::
5. ↑1 (6) : Black Butler – Yen Press [632.3] ::
6. ↓-1 (5) : Negima! – Del Rey/Kodansha Comics [585.2] ::
7. ↔0 (7) : Blue Exorcist – Viz Shonen Jump Advanced [553.1] ::
8. ↔0 (8) : Pokemon – Vizkids [525.5] ::
9. ↑5 (14) : Skip Beat! – Viz Shojo Beat [485.1] ::
10. ↑6 (16) : Rosario+Vampire – Viz Shonen Jump Advanced [465.6] ::

[more]

New Releases
(Titles releasing/released This Month & Last)

1. ↔0 (1) : Sailor Moon 1 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [472.7] ::
2. ↑2 (4) : Sailor Moon Codename: Sailor V 1 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [454.5] ::
4. ↑1 (5) : Vampire Knight 13 – Viz Shojo Beat, Oct 2011 [435.0] ::
6. ↑3 (9) : Rosario+Vampire Season II 6 – Viz Shonen Jump Advanced, Oct 2011 [394.8] ::
7. ↑1 (8) : Blue Exorcist 4 – Viz Shonen Jump Advanced, Oct 2011 [375.1] ::
8. ↓-1 (7) : Skip Beat! 25 – Viz Shojo Beat, Oct 2011 [363.9] ::
10. ↑1 (11) : xxxHolic 17 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [314.1] ::
12. ↓-6 (6) : Negima! 31 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [303.8] ::
15. ↓-1 (14) : Black Bird 10 – Viz Shojo Beat, Sep 2011 [272.8] ::
16. ↑1 (17) : Bakuman 7 – Viz Shonen Jump, Oct 2011 [272.4] ::

[more]

Preorders

3. ↓-1 (2) : Sailor Moon 2 – Kodansha Comics, Nov 2011 [440.3] ::
13. ↓-1 (12) : Sailor Moon Codename: Sailor V 2 – Kodansha Comics, Nov 2011 [288.3] ::
17. ↑10 (27) : Sailor Moon 5 – Kodansha Comics, Apr 2012 [269.2] ::
19. ↑1 (20) : Sailor Moon 3 – Kodansha Comics, Jan 2012 [265.5] ::
25. ↑3 (28) : Sailor Moon 4 – Kodansha Comics, Mar 2012 [240.3] ::
65. ↑19 (84) : xxxHolic 18 – Kodansha Comics, Dec 2011 [137.7] ::
67. ↓-8 (59) : Negima! 32 – Kodansha Comics, Nov 2011 [136.0] ::
71. ↑92 (163) : Maximum Ride 5 – Yen Press, Dec 2011 [127.4] ::
75. ↑69 (144) : Naruto 53 – Viz Shonen Jump, Dec 2011 [123.8] ::
102. ↑78 (180) : Fullmetal Alchemist 27 – Viz, Dec 2011 [98.8] ::

[more]

Manhwa

104. ↑676 (780) : March Story 3 – Viz Signature, Oct 2011 [97.3] ::
405. ↑new (0) : Black God 14 – Yen Press, Oct 2011 [26.9] ::
521. ↓-235 (286) : Pig Bride 5 – Yen Press, Jul 2010 [19.3] ::
555. ↓-107 (448) : Goong 12 – Yen Press, Sep 2011 [17.3] ::
706. ↔0 (706) : Priest vols 1-3 collection – Tokyopop, Jun 2011 [11.2] ::
744. ↑919 (1663) : JTF-3 Counter Ops (ebook) – RealinterfaceStudios.com, Mar 2011 [10.0] ::
745. ↑58 (803) : March Story 1 – Viz Signature, Oct 2010 [10.0] ::
773. ↓-444 (329) : Evyione: Ocean Fantasy 2 – Udon, Sep 2008 [9.4] ::
838. ↑120 (958) : March Story 2 – Viz Signature, Apr 2011 [7.9] ::
920. ↑261 (1181) : Bride of the Water God 9 – Dark Horse, Oct 2011 [6.3] ::

[more]

BL/Yaoi

44. ↓-15 (29) : Finder Series 4 Prisoner in the View Finder – DMP Juné, Aug 2011 [185.9] ::
70. ↑7 (77) : Maelstrom (Kindle ebook) 1 – Yaoi Press, Jun 2011 [127.5] ::
123. ↓-4 (119) : An Even More Beautiful Lie – DMP Juné, Jan 2012 [85.2] ::
134. ↓-11 (123) : About Love – DMP Juné, Nov 2011 [79.1] ::
142. ↑171 (313) : Border 2 – DMP Juné, Oct 2011 [72.8] ::
145. ↓-40 (105) : Finder Series 5 Truth in the View Finder – DMP Juné, Dec 2011 [71.1] ::
148. ↑1 (149) : Secrecy of the Shivering Night – DMP Juné, Dec 2011 [69.8] ::
152. ↓-2 (150) : Mr. Convenience – DMP Juné, Nov 2011 [68.3] ::
165. ↑73 (238) : Private Teacher 2 – DMP Juné, Jan 2012 [63.9] ::
225. ↓-14 (211) : Maelstrom (Kindle ebook) 4 – Yaoi Press, Jul 2011 [47.8] ::

[more]

The Favorites Alphabet: H

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Welcome to the Favorites Alphabet, where the Manga Bookshelf battle robot gaze upon our respective manga collections to pick a favorite title from each letter of the alphabet. We’re trying to stick with books that have been licensed and published in English, but we recognize that the alphabet is long, so we’re keeping a little wiggle room in reserve.

“H” is for…

Here Is Greenwood | Yukie Nasu | Viz Media – Again, I could pick any number of ‘H’ titles – Hayate the Combat Butler, High School Girls, Higurashi – but I have a soft spot in my heart for Greenwood, which was first seen in North America in the mid-1990s as an anime. Viz brought over the 9 volume manga in 2004, and to be honest it did not sell well. This is a shame, as it’s part of that classic genre of shôjo manga – BL tease. There are many people (including myself) who may read Greenwood for Hasukawa, and seeing him struggle with his temper and with the hijinks that surround him at the Greenwood dorms. Seeing him eventually win the heart of the girl he’s trying to win is a highlight of the entire run. But if I were honest, I’d admit that 98% of all Greenwood fans read it to see Mitsuru and Shinobu not be lovers at each other. The two best friends complement each other perfectly, and even the Japanese audience demanded, at the end, that Nasu show the two of them kissing. (She did not comply.) This may not have sold well here, but those female fans who had the anime be one of their gateways into BL fandom should try the manga – it’s better, and gives them even more ammo. – Sean Gaffney

High School Debut | Kazune Kawahara | VIZ Media – On the surface, this is just another shôjo high school romance. There’s the earnest heroine, Haruna, who’s got a tremendous heart and athletic ability, and the more stoic boy, Yoh, whom she taps to be her dating coach. What’s different is that they fall in love within the first few volumes and spend the rest of the time working out what it means to be a couple. I love that Yoh admires Haruna for all of her terrific qualities, and I love that Haruna trusts Yoh and truly wants what’s best for him. Although the story itself may not be new, I adore the characters so much that when the final volume came around, I was tempted to write a review consisting entirely of hearts and sniffles. I’ve loaned this series out a couple of times already and know that I will be rereading it often. – Michelle Smith

Hikaru no Go | By Yumi Hotta and Takeshi Obata | Viz Media – Oh, what to say about Hikaru no Go that I haven’t already said? Hikaru no Go was my first exposure to manga, and managed in one two-day whirlwind read to win me over to a medium (comics) I had previously sworn I could never, ever love. In a very real way, Manga Bookshelf exists because of Hikaru no Go. It is an epic, deeply compelling, emotionally resonant sort-of-sports manga, with some of my favorite artwork in in the medium overall. And though I later realized that the sense of non-ironic optimism that (in part) drew me to the series originally is a trait common to the genre, there is something unique about this quality as it inhabits Hikaru no Go.  It is elegant in its innocence, and in its sadness too. And though I’ve read many more moving and complex manga since, nothing can ever replace Hikago in my heart. It is that special. – MJ

Hotel Harbour View | By Jiro Taniguchi | Viz Media – This slim volume explores terrain familiar to anyone who’s watched Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, or Stray Dog: it’s a world of gangsters, molls, and taciturn killers. Though the stories unfold in present-day Shanghai and Paris (or what was the present day when Taniguchi wrote it), the mood is decidedly retro: the characters speak in a highly self-conscious, stylized language borrowed from the silver screen; they wear hats, waist-cinching dresses, and formidable shoulder pads; and they die dramatic deaths. If the prevailing sensibility is mid-century noir, the artwork owes a debt to John Woo and the Hong Kong action films of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with balletic gun fights and artfully composed kill shots. Much as I love titles like Zoo in Winter and A Distant Neighborhood, Hotel Harbour View may be my favorite Taniguchi title. – Katherine Dacey

House of Five Leaves | By Natsume Ono | Viz Media – It frankly seems wrong that we’ve gone this far in The Favorites Alphabet without me having a chance to mention Ono’s work, but it’s nice that I can start with what I think is her very best licensed series. This tale of an out-of-work samurai who falls in with a motley gang of generally benevolent kidnappers falls right in my tonal sweet spot – casual, character driven, but packed with surprising and potent emotional highlights that seem to creep up on the reader. The look of the series is essential to its success, and it’s easily Ono’s most stylish, gorgeous work. There’s a wonderfully concise quality to her illustrations here. She manages to convey a great deal with the tiniest modulations in facial expression, framed as they are by her languid, graceful staging. House of Five Leaves represents everything I like about Ono’s work, and it features those qualities at their very best. – David Welsh

What starts with “H” in your favorites alphabet?

Manga the Week of 10/26

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As is traditional with the last week of the month, we have a nice, reasonable, quiet week. Oh, if only they were all like this.

It is rather scary that Blade of the Immortal 1 came out in 1997, and here we are 14 years later getting Volume 24. But hey, that’s what happens when you are the very last manga series in the West to cease coming out in monthly floppies. This particular volume is entitled Massacre, and I’ve no doubt it will deliver on that. Speaking of old-school Dark Horse titles, they are almost caught up with their Oh My Goddess re-release unflipped. Volume 19 is out next week, and wraps up the Phantom Racer story, as well as giving us another plot with Skuld’s ‘robot girl’.

Kodansha put out 3 books this week, and this is Diamond Comics, so that must mean we have three books coming out next week. Hey, they’re getting closer! The second volume of Animal Land is out, which Dallas Middaugh praised highly at NYCC. There’s also a second volume of cyberpunk mystery Mardock Scramble. And for those who have been despairing, fear not! Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei has hit Volume 11. Now with 100% more body doubles.

So does anything please you? Or will you spend the week getting everything you put aside as it all came out the first week in October?

Princess Knight, Vol. 1

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By Osamu Tezuka. Released in Japan as “Ribon no Kishi” by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Nakayoshi. Released in North America by Vertical.

We’ve been waiting for this one a while. Gripping, depressing Tezuka seinen is all very well and good, but sometimes you have to bring out the big guns. And there are few guns bigger than Princess Knight, which most argue is one of the most influential titles ever, inspiring a generation of shoujo artists. There are actually several versions of the title; the original, in 1954; a sequel with the heroine’s children, in 1958; a rewrite and expansion in 1963; and a science-fiction tie-in to an anime in 1967. Vertical is releasing the 3rd and most well-known version.

Though enjoyable to children and adults alike, this work is definitely aimed at the younger reader, with its premise being couched in fairy tale language. In heaven, they give out girl hearts and boy hearts to babies about to be born, determining their gender. A mischievous angel, Tink, feeds a baby a boy heart right before God gives the same baby a girl heart. As a result, the girl is both with hearts for both genders. And what’s worse, the girl is a princess of the kingdom of Silverland! Now the girl is raised as a boy, to avoid rousing the suspicious of the evil Duke Duralumin, who wants his own son on the throne.

The inherent sexism of the kingdom (which must have a male ruler) is offset by Sapphire herself, who manages to be incredibly badass. Yes, there are those moments where the series undercuts itself – at one point, Sapphire’s boy heart is temporarily removed and she grows weak and loses her fencing skills – but for the most part she is a bright and active heroine, one who longs to be a young woman but who also does not want to give up the freedoms of being a young man. Things aren’t subtle here – her love for Prince Charming (yes, really) verges on the histrionic at times – but Sapphire remains a great heroine throughout, who you want to see emerge victorious.

That may be difficult, though. As with many stories in this vein, there are any number of traumas and disasters that befall her. Her father is killed, her mother imprisoned. She is forced to work menial tasks a la Cinderella, turned into a swan, and kidnapped by pirates. Sexy pirates. Once it gets started, the action never really lets up, just like the best children’s stories. Not that it’s all grim tidings. The basic plot trimmings may sound like Disney, but a lot of the gags are also right out of animated cartoons, with circus horses mocking the King, plucky mice helping the heroine escape, and the villain double-act of Duralumin and Nylon hamming it up for all they’re worth.

Vertical is releasing the three original Japanese volumes here as two slightly larger ones, and so naturally we end with a cliffhanger. Their presentation is excellent, with a lovely original cover (whose color is slightly more purple than the picture above, the only one I can find online), and the translation captures the broad, declamatory language. As Sapphire swashbuckles her way through various deathtraps and tries to gain her love and her femininity while remaining strong and speaking her mind, you’ll find that you absolutely can’t put the book down. The second volume cannot come soon enough.

The Drops of God, Vol. 1

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By Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto. Released in Japan as “Kami no Shizuku” by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Morning. Released in North America by Vertical.

Everyone’s been waiting for this one for a long time – since before the announcement of its license, in fact. It’s rare that you can say that a manga actually has an effect on the real world, but that’s what we have with The Drops of God, which has drastically impacted the sales of wine in Japan and the Far East. It’s been featured in the New York Times over here, and there’s buzz about it in wine magazines as well. Does it live up to the hype?

It does, even though it’s not quiet as revolutionary as you may have been led to believe. This is another in a long line of foodie mangas, and this time around it happens to be about wine. The plot could almost be taken straight from Oishinbo: there is a truculent young man, at odds with his father, who joins forces with a cute young woman to try to capture the “perfect” wines. Indeed, the basic setup of “people bring out food/drink and the hero and heroine gasp and describe its taste” could be from any number of food mangas out in Japan, many with volumes numbering into the 50s and 60s.

That said, where Drops of God draws you in is its writing. The main duo are perhaps not as well-written as the rest, but I’m hopeful we will see character development for them as the book goes on. (Less hopeful for romance, I’m pretty sure that there isn’t an ongoing plot with them as there was in Oishinbo.) More interesting is the so-called villain of the series, Tomine, who manages to capture that ‘sneering bastard’ type very well. I also really liked his sister Sara, who comes across as a shallow and vain model but whose description of the wine she’s drinking is possibly the highlight of the entire volume. I hope we see more of her.

The wraparound story of finding Shizuku’s father’s wine collection is really a way to develop any story needed. Here we see a man and his lover torn apart by circumstance and by his misreading the taste of a wine 15 years earlier; and the cliffhanger deals with a co-worker who refuses to accept French wine, noting that Italian is the best there is. Naturally, most of these problems can be solved by just the right vintage.

The descriptions of the wine can be a bit over the top – everyone by now knows that Shizuku describes a wine as tasting like a Queen concert – but that’s apparently true to life, and it’s noted that the ability to speak poetically about wine is just as important as the identification. Oh yes, and for lovers of fanservice, we get to see Miyabi in bed with Shizuku and in her underwear (don’t worry, nothing happened), as well as Tomine pouring wine onto the back of his lover (yeah, something happened there, but not on screen.)

Vertical’s translation and presentation is as good as we’ve come to expect from them. I was startled to find that the series is unflipped – Vertical tends to go for the widest readership they can get, which usually means flipping the art – but apparently the wine labels used throughout the manga made this impossible. You’re also getting two volumes in one, as Vertical is publishing 4 omnibuses of the first 8 Japanese volumes. The series is 28+ volumes in Japan, and not ending anytime soon, so Vertical has just licensed the first ‘arc’. If sales do well, they may get more. I’d like to see more, this is a fun title, if very typical of its genre.

X, Vol. 1

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As a child of the 1970s, I appreciate a good disaster flick, whether the devastation is local or global, natural or man-made. There’s something immensely satisfying about watching the world go up in flames, only to walk outside the theater and be reassured by the presence of stop lights, busses, coffee shops, and pedestrians going about their business. Small wonder, then, that I adored CLAMP’s X back in 2003. Not only did it have an impossibly large cast of attractive characters, it also boasted awesome scenes of destruction — scenes worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster.

When VIZ announced that it would be reissuing X in a deluxe edition, however, I had misgivings about the project: would the apocalypse be as good the second time around?

In 2003, I’d swooned over the illustrations, re-read favorite scenes, and marveled at the fact that all the characters dressed like refugees from a 1980s music video. Though my inner snob normally disdained anything so purple, I secretly loved the all-caps dialogue, the swirling lines and wind-swept hairdos, and the melodramatic death scenes, not to mention the eerie, post-apocalyptic dream sequences that were sprinkled throughout the series. X read like a hybrid of The Seventh Sign (not to be confused with The Seventh Seal, a much classier flick), Götterdämmerung, and Captain EO, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

At the time I was collecting X, I hadn’t read much else, save a handful of manga by CLAMP and Rumiko Takahashi. The very qualities that drew me to X — angstful conversations, tortured characters — soon had the opposite effect on me: I started to avoid comics in which the emotional volume was cranked up to eleven on every page, as I found them exhausting, the manga equivalent of Tristan and Isolde. Re-reading Tokyo Babylon, for example, I was mortified by my initial enthusiasm for the story, which now seemed hopelessly overripe to me; not since I’d re-read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe had I been so disappointed by a favorite text.

Revisiting X proved a more rewarding experience, though the series’ structural flaws were more readily apparent on a second reading. The dialogue, for example, is often unintentionally hilarious: bystanders comment on the main characters, helpfully telling us how wonderful they are (“Last week, he saved my son from drowning in the river,” one anonymous mother says of Fuma), while the main characters introduce themselves to one another as if they’re networking, not preparing to kill each other. (Sample: “The name’s Sorata Arisugawa! A cute ‘n’ fun-lovin’ high school senior!” “Allow me to return the favor. I am Yuto Kigai. A humble public servant in the local ward office.”) Kotori, the first major female character to be introduced, embodies the Mary Sue concept to a tee; not only is she beautiful, kind, and long of hair, but she’s also very delicate, beset with a heart so weak that she collapses whenever someone frowns. More amusing still are the characters who materialize at the very moment they’re needed: witness the introduction of Tokiko Magami, a school nurse who just so happens to be Kamui’s sole surviving relative, and a fount of information about Kamui’s mother.

Yet these moments of narrative clumsiness are overpowered by the sheer force of the imagery. The battle scenes are kinetic and violent, as characters leap across rooftops, level buildings, and plunge their swords into one another; few licensed shojo or shonen titles can match the gory zest with which CLAMP executes these moments of hand-to-hand combat. The dream sequences, too, are shockingly graphic: characters are dismembered, crucified, impaled, and engulfed in flames, often right before their loved ones’ eyes. Though these images teeter on the brink of kitsch — in one dream, Kamui cradles Kotori’s severed head in his arms — they underscore one of the series’ most important points: sacrifice and loss are a fundamental part of becoming an adult, whether that sacrifice means leaving one’s family (as Sorata and Lady Arashi have done) or losing them (as Kamui, Fuma, and Kotori do in the early chapters of the manga).

The series’ other major theme — that humans are poor stewards of Mother Earth — is less successfully illustrated; three volumes in, it still isn’t clear what, exactly, the Seven Seals are charged with doing: preventing nuclear war? staving off pollution? protecting spotted owls? What will happen if the Seals fail, however, is evocatively rendered; CLAMP draws a post-apocalyptic Tokyo worthy of Katsuhiro Otomo, a landscape of twisted skyscrapers and rotting corpses slowly engulfed by sand dunes.

The fact that these images appeared in Monthly Asuka and not Young Magazine is what makes X so remarkable: it may not be the best shojo fantasy ever written, but it certainly is one of the bloodiest, a fierce, angry blast of emotion that scorches everything in its path. I hesitate to suggest that X‘s body count is an achievement, but it is sharp and welcome rebuke to the idea that female readers strongly prefer conversation and character development to butt-kicking and carnage. Count me in for volume two.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media, LLC.

X, VOL. 1 • BY CLAMP • VIZ MEDIA • 580 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Coming soon

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We’re in a phase when there’s more occasion for license requests than license news, so it seems appropriate to take a break and celebrate some very exciting announcements. Leave it to Vertical to keep giving manga fans reasons for joy.



Now, how did I go through all those license requests without ever hitting upon Moyoco (Hataraki Man) Anno’s Sakuran? Looking back, the one-volume title from Kodansha’s Evening received only a scant mention in The Seinen Alphabet. Let’s pretend that I’ve been begging for it all along, because it certainly feels like a request fulfilled.

Once upon a time, Viz published Osamu Tezuka’s Adolf. Vertical will pull the title from limbo under the title Message to Adolf. It’s a seinen murdery mystery set in pre-World War II Germany featuring a bunch of guys named Adolf, including the obvious. Crazy Tezuka noir and a license rescue all in one joyous package!

For our wild-card entry, Vertical offers the two-volume 5 Centimeters Per Second, Yukiko Seike’s adaptation of Makoto Shinkai’s animated motion picture. Under normal circumstances, an adaptation of this nature isn’t an especially promising prospect. This case is slightly different, as it ran in Kodansha’s Afternoon, which is a reliable source of quality, often ambitious manga (though not as reliable as Kodansha’s Morning). There’s also Vertical’s taste level to consider: 7 Billion Needles was one of the most pleasantly surprising unknown quantities of the last couple of years, so there’s no reason this should be different. Plus, that cover positively oozes mono no aware. (Could it just be Ed Chavez’s plot to have vertical dominate the numerical entry in The Favorites Alphabet? I wouldn’t put it past him.)

 

 

 

Manga Bestsellers: 2011, Week Ending 09 October

by 2 Comments

Comparative Rankings Based on Consolidated Online Sales

last week’s charts
about the charts

##

Manga Bestsellers

1. ↔0 (1) : Sailor Moon 1 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [469.1] ::
2. ↔0 (2) : Sailor Moon 2 – Kodansha Comics, Nov 2011 [438.8] ::
3. ↔0 (3) : Naruto 52 – Viz Shonen Jump, Jul 2011 [436.3] ::
4. ↑2 (6) : Sailor Moon Codename: Sailor V 1 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [405.5] ::
5. ↑19 (24) : Vampire Knight 13 – Viz Shojo Beat, Oct 2011 [383.4] ::
6. ↑7 (13) : Negima! 31 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [365.5] ::
7. ↑28 (35) : Skip Beat! 25 – Viz Shojo Beat, Oct 2011 [356.0] ::
8. ↑20 (28) : Blue Exorcist 4 – Viz Shonen Jump Advanced, Oct 2011 [351.1] ::
9. ↑18 (27) : Rosario+Vampire Season II 6 – Viz Shonen Jump Advanced, Oct 2011 [340.8] ::
10. ↓-6 (4) : Fullmetal Alchemist 26 – Viz, Sep 2011 [323.8] ::

[more]

Top Imprints
Number of volumes ranking in the Top 500:

Viz Shojo Beat 78
Yen Press 76
Viz Shonen Jump 72
Kodansha Comics 39
Viz Shonen Jump Advanced 35
Vizkids 34
HC/Tokyopop 23
DMP Juné 18
Tokyopop 18
Viz 14

[more]

Series/Property

1. ↔0 (1) : Sailor Moon – Kodansha Comics [1,055.5] ::
2. ↔0 (2) : Naruto – Viz Shonen Jump [758.6] ::
3. ↑4 (7) : Vampire Knight – Viz Shojo Beat [728.6] ::
4. ↓-1 (3) : Maximum Ride – Yen Press [674.8] ::
5. ↔0 (5) : Negima! – Del Rey/Kodansha Comics [649.3] ::
6. ↔0 (6) : Black Butler – Yen Press [601.7] ::
7. ↑8 (15) : Blue Exorcist – Viz Shonen Jump Advanced [554.7] ::
8. ↑1 (9) : Pokemon – Vizkids [546.0] ::
9. ↓-5 (4) : Fullmetal Alchemist – Viz [544.8] ::
10. ↔0 (10) : Black Bird – Viz Shojo Beat [498.9] ::

[more]

New Releases
(Titles releasing/released This Month & Last)

1. ↔0 (1) : Sailor Moon 1 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [469.1] ::
4. ↑2 (6) : Sailor Moon Codename: Sailor V 1 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [405.5] ::
5. ↑19 (24) : Vampire Knight 13 – Viz Shojo Beat, Oct 2011 [383.4] ::
6. ↑7 (13) : Negima! 31 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [365.5] ::
7. ↑28 (35) : Skip Beat! 25 – Viz Shojo Beat, Oct 2011 [356.0] ::
8. ↑20 (28) : Blue Exorcist 4 – Viz Shonen Jump Advanced, Oct 2011 [351.1] ::
9. ↑18 (27) : Rosario+Vampire Season II 6 – Viz Shonen Jump Advanced, Oct 2011 [340.8] ::
10. ↓-6 (4) : Fullmetal Alchemist 26 – Viz, Sep 2011 [323.8] ::
11. ↑5 (16) : xxxHolic 17 – Kodansha Comics, Sep 2011 [318.2] ::
14. ↓-9 (5) : Black Bird 10 – Viz Shojo Beat, Sep 2011 [304.9] ::

[more]

Preorders

2. ↔0 (2) : Sailor Moon 2 – Kodansha Comics, Nov 2011 [438.8] ::
12. ↓-5 (7) : Sailor Moon Codename: Sailor V 2 – Kodansha Comics, Nov 2011 [317.9] ::
20. ↓-9 (11) : Sailor Moon 3 – Kodansha Comics, Jan 2012 [278.3] ::
27. ↑13 (40) : Sailor Moon 5 – Kodansha Comics, Apr 2012 [239.0] ::
28. ↓-2 (26) : Sailor Moon 4 – Kodansha Comics, Mar 2012 [230.9] ::
59. ↑3 (62) : Negima! 32 – Kodansha Comics, Nov 2011 [144.4] ::
84. ↑20 (104) : xxxHolic 18 – Kodansha Comics, Dec 2011 [115.4] ::
94. ↓-3 (91) : Negima! 33 – Kodansha Comics, Jan 2012 [109.7] ::
105. ↓-31 (74) : Finder Series 5 Truth in the View Finder – DMP Juné, Dec 2011 [95.5] ::
119. ↓-47 (72) : An Even More Beautiful Lie – DMP Juné, Jan 2012 [86.1] ::

[more]

Manhwa

286. ↑381 (667) : Pig Bride 5 – Yen Press, Jul 2010 [38.5] ::
329. ↓-55 (274) : Evyione: Ocean Fantasy 2 – Udon, Sep 2008 [33.6] ::
448. ↑32 (480) : Goong 12 – Yen Press, Sep 2011 [22.1] ::
632. ↓-186 (446) : Heavenly Executioner Chiwoo 3 – Yen Press, Nov 2006 [14.0] ::
640. ↓-184 (456) : Heavenly Executioner Chiwoo 2 – Yen Press, Jul 2006 [13.8] ::
653. ↓-186 (467) : Heavenly Executioner Chiwoo 4 – Yen Press, May 2008 [13.3] ::
692. ↓-513 (179) : Jack Frost 4 – Yen Press, Dec 2010 [11.8] ::
706. ↑178 (884) : Priest vols 1-3 collection – Tokyopop, Jun 2011 [11.5] ::
748. ↓-181 (567) : Comic 3 – Yen Press, Aug 2008 [10.1] ::
753. ↓-257 (496) : Bride of the Water God 8 – Dark Horse, May 2011 [10.0] ::

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BL/Yaoi

29. ↓-20 (9) : Finder Series 4 Prisoner in the View Finder – DMP Juné, Aug 2011 [225.3] ::
77. ↑9 (86) : Maelstrom (Kindle ebook) 1 – Yaoi Press, Jun 2011 [124.5] ::
105. ↓-31 (74) : Finder Series 5 Truth in the View Finder – DMP Juné, Dec 2011 [95.5] ::
119. ↓-47 (72) : An Even More Beautiful Lie – DMP Juné, Jan 2012 [86.1] ::
123. ↑3 (126) : About Love – DMP Juné, Nov 2011 [84.4] ::
149. ↓-8 (141) : Secrecy of the Shivering Night – DMP Juné, Dec 2011 [72.5] ::
150. ↓-2 (148) : Mr. Convenience – DMP Juné, Nov 2011 [70.8] ::
211. ↑17 (228) : Maelstrom (Kindle ebook) 4 – Yaoi Press, Jul 2011 [52.5] ::
237. ↑12 (249) : Only Serious about You 2 – DMP Juné, Dec 2011 [47.4] ::
238. ↓-1 (237) : Private Teacher 2 – DMP Juné, Jan 2012 [47.3] ::

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