Features & Reviews

By Ken Akamatsu. Released in Japan as “Mahou Sensei Negima!” by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

With this second omnibus of Negima, Ken Akamatsu is starting to make his move. He’s obeyed his corporate masters and written in a giant harem cast, with tons of fanservice and blushing tsundere heroine, just like his last title. Indeed, this omnibus contains a mini-arc where the cast fight a battle to get a kiss from Negi. However, bigger things are afoot, and this omnibus is also where Akamatsu lets us know that there will be adventure and pure shonen fighting here as well – and that eventually it will be the main thrust of the plotline.

The most obvious thing we get out of this re-read of Volumes 4-6 is we see another of the main cast introduced – Setsuna Sakurazaki. Just as Asuna bears similarity to Naru from Love Hina, and Nodoka is like Shinobu, Setsuna is clearly meant to be the Motoko of this series, right down to the flustered panicking whenever love is mentioned. (Indeed, the connection to the Aoyama family is later made explicit, about 20-odd volumes later). Setsuna is briefly introduced as a potential villain, but that doesn’t last long, and soon we’re finding out about her loyalty to her friends, her amazing sword powers, her yokai heritage, and of course her repressed yearnings for her Konoka-ojosama, which manages to be played for laughs *and* taken seriously at the same time.

The other thing I noticed here was how casually we’re introduced to two of the major villains of the entire work. Fate and Tsukuyomi both appear as supposed ‘mid-level bosses’ of the villain of this arc, Chigusa. However, Chigusa proves to be mostly useless (Akamatsu lampshades this by having her defeated by Chachazero, Evangeline’s two-foot-tall puppet creature), so Fate quickly takes over, and proves to be more than a match for Negi, who is powerful but inexperienced. Fate is mostly drawn as a blank here, though I did like some of his dry humor when he muses about the water spells he’s using on Asuna, and how they interact with her magic cancel abilities. And Tsukuyomi is cute and adorable, and only wants to fight her sempai in a sword battle! Except for one panel, she is not at all the terrifying lunatic we will see later on.

Akamatsu is still feeling around how to work in all 31 girls in his plot without making the whole thing too unwieldy – he never did quite master that, though he got close. The popularity poll included at the end shows that Makie is the most popular of all the girls for two polls running, so perhaps she is the character that is most disappointing – despite a late run, Ken hasn’t really worked out her potential. On the other hand, he’s also realizing which girls *do* work well as a main cast member. Setsuna arrives and is immediately one of the crew, as I mentioned, and Nodoka is the second girl to get a pactio with Negi (and oh what a pactio it is). As for Evangeline, let’s just say I think her skyrocketing popularity caused both Shonen Magazine and Akamatsu to go “Whoah,” and after being casually disposed of by Negi in the first omnibus, she’s back to full strength here, going toe to toe with Fate, taking out huge building-sized ancient demons, and laughing all the while.

The translation here is new, as with the first one, with the Nibley twins replacing the work of Peter David (Vols. 4-5) and Trish Ledoux (Vol. 6). A replacement of David’s very loose adaptation was quite welcome. The extras have the preliminary sketches included at the end, but lack the ‘character bios’ and cover art sketches we get with individual releases.

Overall, if you’re going to be getting into Negima, this is likely where you’ll hop on. Vol. 5-6 have a great arc that shows the series finally escaping its harem roots, and even though there will always be fanservice, it’s a gamechanger. Fans want magical battles, and Akamatsu is here to provide them.

By Ken Akamatsu. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Weekly Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

Everyone has those titles. You know, the ones you were obsessed with 10-15 years ago. The ones you still enjoy, even though in the back of your mind you know you can never revisit it ever, because if you do you will be mature enough to see all the flaws you missed in the first rush of fandom. The mid-late 90s are a particularly strong time for me in that regard. Ranma, Oh My Goddess, Tenchi Muyo, and (a bit later) Love Hina. Four titles that in your early 20s are AMAZINGLY AWESOME, especially if you then get involved in fanfics, mailing lists, etc. And then you read them and you realize what you glossed over earlier annoys you now, and the plot you enjoyed has now been used by 80 other series to the point that you grow weary of it. Would Love Hina, now being re-released nine years after Tokyopop put it out, suffer the same fate?

There are a few things you will have to come to terms with as a reader if you are going to enjoy Love Hina. It is a harem manga. Worse, it is a harem manga where the outcome is never in doubt – thus if you like a girl who isn’t Naru, you know you’re doomed and spend 13 more volumes getting progressively more annoyed. It is filled with blatant and obvious fanservice, mostly involving girls under the age of 18. This never goes away. It is filled with what has been commonly dubbed ‘comedic sociopathy’ – which is to say characters are angry and hit each other all the time because the author thinks it’s funnier that way. In the 550 pages of this omnibus, I believe Naru punches Keitaro almost 50 times, and I may be underestimating that. And this doesn’t even count Su kicking him, or Motoko trying to slice him in two with her katana. It’s a comedy. Keitaro recovers 2 panels later. Learn to roll with it.

If you can get past all that… this is a fun, heartwarming title. Admittedly, it takes a while to get going. As with Negima, Volume 1 of Love Hina is pretty obviously the nadir. Keitaro was a highly influential harem lead, but for all the *wrong* reasons. Ataru was after the girls himself, Tenchi had actual superpowers to bust out, and Ranma was a martial arts master. Keiichi Morisato comes closest, and is certainly unlucky, but lacks the patheticness Keitaro Urashima has at the start. We see him as a 2nd year ronin, having failed to get into the prestigious Todai university. Again. He also notes that he’s not handsome, and has no real friends, and has never had a girlfriend. What does he have? Well, he has the bad luck to always walk in on women naked, and tends to fall over clutching their breasts. Oh yes, and he’s NICE. Keitaro was first, so I won’t get on his case as much, but he was the prototype for many harem leads who literally have no redeeming qualities except their ability to be extra super nice. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Added to this, we have a cross-section of girls that end up living in the inn his grandmother leaves to him in the introductory chapter. Tsundere Naru, aka the second most polarizing female in all of anime (Akane Tendo being first) tends to lash out with her fists when angry, embarrassed, or scared, which, around Keitaro, is all the time. Luckily, like most tsundere characters, this is only half of her persona, and we do over the course of these three volumes see Naru’s softer, more caring side. She also starts to see that Keitaro means well, and begins to realize that she might even be falling for him. Which… makes her angry, embarrassed, and scared. Cue fists, repeat as needed. If you leave out all the scenes when she’s hitting him, what you’re left with is quite a sweet relationship between two people who are a lot more alike than Naru would like to admit.

As for the others, like most ‘date sim’ or harem mangas they’re designed to provide a selection of different female leads to appeal to the reader. Cute and shy Shinobu, who’s 7 years younger than Keitaro – and can cook to boot! Hyperactive Su, who is foreign but not from India, and runs through each scene she’s in on pure energy. Stoic Motoko, the young kendo swordswoman who worries she may be dealing with those pesky feelings of love. Trickster Mitsune, who enjoys alcohol and teasing Keitaro and Naru, probably not in that order. Motoko and Shinobu will get far more focus in future volumes (indeed, Motoko seems rather out of character here, and won’t come into her own till she gets just as flustered and blush-ridden as Naru currently gets), Su slightly less so. Mitsune gets virtually no page time of her own, it needs to be said, and the anime deepened her friendship with Naru quite a bit.

Then there’s Mutsumi, a.k.a. my favorite character. Again, this is for purely irrational reasons – she only appears sporadically through the series, and is never one of the main cast. Of all the cast, she probably comes closest to winning Keitaro’s heart – except she’s nowhere near it either, and knows it – the man only has eyes for Naru. Mostly I think I like her because of my penchant for, if you’ll pardon the expression, ‘dizzy dames’. Mutsumi is the type who will get a perfect score on a test and forget to write her name; or will end up on a desert island without realizing that if she walks back into it 50 yards she’ll find her house. She is, however, savvy enough to pick up on Keitaro and Naru’s relationship almost immediately – certainly before either of them do. (She also kisses Keitaro, and then to make up for it kisses Naru. When I first read the series, this was VERY IMPORTANT to my young self.) I am always happy when Mutsumi’s around in this series.

I should take some time to talk about the re-release. If you’re a fan of the old manga, and are wondering if the upgrade is worth it – yes, it is. The artwork is much clearer, the translation retains honorifics and last name usage (important in a series like this where so much could depend on Keitaro saying Naru rather than Narusegawa – he doesn’t, in the entire omnibus, call her by her first name). The lettering is professional and looks neat – a far cry from Tokyopop’s… um, enthusiastic lettering job of old. The old ‘bonus pages’ are retained, and we get the usual Kodansha endnotes, detailing things such as Naru namechecking Doraemon.

I will admit that when I heard this series was going to be part of the Manga Movable Feast, I raised an eyebrow. Love Hina is no deep, meaningful masterpiece, and merely flipping through it can tell you that. But if you want a romantic comedy with a hearty emphasis on the comedy, and don’t find it aggravating when slapstick violence happens every two pages, there’s much to enjoy here. The loud rampaging scenes make the occasional quiet, heartfelt ones sweeter, and it’s there, where Naru is quietly cheering Keitaro on to study harder, or confessing her own worries and fears to him, that we start to see what a good couple they will eventually make.

Eventually. Once we have 11 more volumes of slapstick violence.

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

I can’t critically address Takashi Murakami’s Stargazing Dog (NBM) without first admitting a bias and then describing some personal circumstances.

I freely recognize that I’m overly sensitive to portrayals of the pet-human relationship in any kind of fiction, and I have a huge number of deal-breaking tropes. For instance, I hate when pets are put at risk to prop up an antagonist and show how very, very evil that person is. I also hate shamelessly manipulative portrayals of the loss of a pet, pushing extremely personal buttons because the storyteller knows that it works.

On the personal front, I’ve lost two dogs this year. In January, our beautiful lady finally succumbed to old age at about 18 years. Over the summer, our boy dog (who will always be our boy dog in spite of the fact that he was about 12 years old) was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which was one of the more awful surprises we’ve experienced. (On the bright side, we’ve also adopted a sweet, hilarious little dachshund-Chihuahua mix who is a constant source of joy.)

So that’s the head space I was in when I picked up this book, which is about a man who loses pretty much everything but his beloved dog. When I say that, no matter how sad this story becomes, I never felt manipulated and that I was always reassured that Murakami was coming from the best, most genuine place in his storytelling, I think I have a certain level of authority in that opinion. If you’re like me in that you’re extremely wary when it comes to sad pet stories, be reassured in the case of Stargazing Dog.

Murakami’s human protagonist isn’t in a great place. He’s lost his job, he has health problems, his daughter is in the thicket of adolescent bitchery, and his wife has decided it’s all too much and is filing for divorce. The last remaining bright spot in his life is the family dog, Happie, brought home during the daughter’s more benign years but eventually becoming the father’s most loyal and constant companion (and vice versa).

That development represents the kind of astute choices Murakami makes in crafting the narrative. He shows the evolution of the relationship between man and dog, establishing it in incremental, unexpected ways that make it more persuasive in the long run. Murakami also shares the dog’s point of view, but he takes a very restrained approach to that, keeping the animal’s thoughts on a basic level that still manages to be extremely moving.

The pair embarks on an ultimately ill-fated journey that I really can’t bring myself to describe, mostly because I don’t want to spoil anything. But Murakami uses the trip and its individual events to reassert the foundational loyalty of the human-dog relationship to the point that, no matter the sorrow they may encounter, the uplift provided by that bond is what the reader ultimately takes away at the end. That’s kind of a magnificent accomplishment. (There’s also a sequel story, “Sunflower,” which goes to some less benevolent places using the main story as a framing device. It’s fine stuff too, but its effectiveness is entirely dependent on its grounding in Stargazing Dog.)

I love Murakami’s style of illustration. It straddles that line between stylized cartooning and very human vulnerability, not unlike Fumiyo Kouno’s Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Last Gasp). I could have done without some bits of awkward copy editing. That’s always the case, but it’s particularly true with a story that just begs to flow effortlessly because it’s so finely crafted. The presentation is attractive overall, though.

This is an extraordinarily lovely comic. It’s sad in the best kind of ways, using sadness to make an extremely worthwhile point about a fine and enduring kind of relationship. Given where my head is on the nature of that bond, it could have been devastating, but I ultimately found it wonderfully reassuring.

By John Ford. First published in 1633 (approximately 7-8 years after its first performance) by Nicholas Oakes for Richard Collins. Current edition published by Arden Shakespeare in 2011.

Sometimes I think that the current generation on the internet likes to believe that they were the ones who made incest cool, what with all the squee and the Ouran and Harry Potter fanfics out there. But incest has been around since pretty much the dawn of mankind, and has been written about in the greatest works of literature just as much. Almost every high schooler has to read Oedipus Rex these days, though I suspect their local church likely skips over all the Old Testament fooling around.

Thus, in terms of being a play about incest, John Ford was not breaking exciting new ground. The new ground was in how he dealt with it. This is not the usual wacky comedy uncle lusting after his sweet young niece as we’ve seen in other Jacobean plays, nor are the siblings royalty (incest is always more acceptable when they’re kings, strangely enough). No, we have a merchant family here, and their son, Giovanni, is no slavering neanderthal. Not for him the baseless lust approach. He is madly in love with his sister and so he tries to rationalize it intellectually, coming up with all sorts of arguments he can present to his local friar. The friar’s position can basically be summed up by this ellipsis: “…” Luckily for Giovanni, his sister Annabella has fallen madly for him as well, and they declare, then consummate their love in Act II.

The next three acts are everything going to hell, as you can imagine. This is a tragedy, and there will not be door slamming and talk of sardines here. A lot of modern productions of this play apparently want to focus purely on the main couple, and cut out a lot of the other stuff going on, which mostly involves Annabella’s many suitors and a whole lot of plotting of revenge. Which is a shame, as it helps to show that, despite what many critics have said over the years (usually in the process of condemning the play), Ford is *not* sympathizing with the leads. He does not regard their love as Romeo and Juliet, and the way the production plays out shows this. He does not, however, portray either Giovanni or Annabella as monsters. This is the difference.

Annabella actually shows remorse for her mistakes of passion, right about when she realizes that her troublesome suitor, Soranzo, actually does love her. She is also not the instigator of the relationship (which makes it harder to blame the evil woman seducing the poor innocent man, a common enough reasoning in this time period), and ends up having her heart gouged out of her by a now insane Giovanni. Nevertheless, while the play was very popular at the time it was first written and performed, it was condemned by critics for years afterwards, with the compilers of Ford’s Complete Works choosing to omit the play entirely rather than sully the book with this heathenism. It also was thought unsuitable for the stage and unperformed for about 250 years, only being revived consistently after 1940 or so.

This is not exactly a fun play to read, but I think it’s very well-written. And, as with Shakespeare, I think it’s a lot more ambiguous than usually ends up being presented on the stage in modern productions. Ford is not saying the incestuous lovers are right, but he is saying that they are human, and that we can understand their all too human failings. Thus the title, which aptly sums up those two dichotomies: ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore.

By Kate Beaton. Released in North America by Drawn & Quarterly.

Kate Beaton is a very funny woman. This is the main reason to buy this collection. Her words are funny, her situations are funny, and her art is funny. That’s a triple-funny combo, folks, and it’s rare these days. People have been reading Hark! A Vagrant as an online webcomic for some time now, and I even have her original self-published book Never Learn Anything from History as well. This is the one to get, though, a handsome hardcover with a larger collection of stories, including all of her high points.

You should still go and check out the HAV archives at her website (here), as this is cherry picked to collect the best of her historical and literary humor, rather than the more random strip we see every week. We don’t get the strips about her own life, or a lot of the dashed-off sketches and earlier comics. There’s fun stuff there as well, including punchlines I don’t even have to look up to laugh about again. “It’s okay, you’re upset.” “Sometimes I pretend to be Neptune!” My own personal favorite, where Kate Beaton reads the letters of James Joyce, is also absent here.

But this strip is an excellent collection, and I have no issues with how it was cherry-picked. I mentioned remembering Kate’s punchlines, and that’s because she has an ear for dialogue that almost begs to be read aloud. It’s not necessarily accurate to its period – Dude Watching with the Brontes is funny *because* of the dissonance, and most of the historical sequences are done in modern tones – but its cadences are funny in and of themselves. They stick in your head, like the best kind of humor. “Jam!” is a classic example of a punchline that’s since become a meme.

Of course, this is helped along by the subject matter. Kate’s a smart cookie, and does not stop to explain the joke as she goes along. She trusts that you will know why Pearson vs. Diefenbaker is fun, and that you have already read The Great Gatsby in high school like the rest of us had to. I had worried all the Canadian strips would be gone, but there’s a large chunk of Canada here. Don’t get me wrong, the strips are funny even if you don’t know who Raskolnikov is, but if you *have* read Crime and Punishment it’s even funnier.

Lastly, Kate’s art is funny. This is sometimes forgotten in a medium where it’s frequently OK to just have funny words and have bland talking heads impart them. The art is caricature, but expressions are conveyed easily and succinctly. Anger and rage are particularly fun, as she draws an open mouthed angry moan that just elicits a giggle. Faces are clearly the emphasis here – Kate’s arms sometimes owe their influence to Mickey Mouse cartoons from the early 1930s – and the cartoons wouldn’t work without the words, but the art helps to accentuate each comic and bring out its best.

Drawn and Quarterly has done an excellent job here as well, with a nice handsome hardcover with a fantastic index at the back for the true history nerd in all of us who wants to skip straight to the strip about The Perfect Joy of St. Francis. It even has a sketch of a portly Napoleon on the cover, his attempt to look menacing somewhat undercut by also looking like he will squeak when he hits the ground like a child’s toy. If you haven’t experienced the fun of Hark! A Vagrant, this is the starting point. Go get it.