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Ill-Fated Relationship

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Originally hosted at Manhwa Bookshelf.

Ill-Fated Relationship | By Hwang Joon-Ho | Published by iSeeToon | Platform: iOS (iPhone only) – A man and woman meet in the big city, brought together by chance and undefinable desire. While this is not an uncommon premise in any kind of fiction, what distinguishes their story from others is what the two have in common. They’re both serial killers.

There are so many ways in which a story like this could go wrong. It could try too hard to be funny or sympathetic, trivializing both the characters’ mental illness and the suffering of their victims, all in the name of entertainment. It could also lean to the other extreme, reveling in a level of “realism” that ultimately borders on sick voyeurism. Or, more unfortunately, it could simply be dull, wrapped up in clinical analysis that engages no one, save a few idle academics. Thankfully, Ill-Fated Relationship avoids all of these traps, studying its characters with interest that steers safely clear of both fetishization and cold objectivity.

Hwang introduces his characters simply, avoiding coy humor or cheap surprises. A serial killer boards a public bus, looking for his next victim. He observes his surroundings quietly, even dispassionately, a sense enhanced by the comic’s drab color palette of blues, blacks, and grays (with the occasional red for emphasis). After leaving the bus, he’s confronted by a lost boy looking for his mother. “Should I feel pity for this child?” the killer asks himself. “Maybe not,” he finally determines, walking away from the scene. The boy turns then to a woman in the crowd, who takes him home to kill him. This brief chain of events, beginning with the first killer’s decision not to help the boy, serves as the catalyst for bringing the two killers together, ultimately leading them to their fate as described in the story’s title.

Though the plot of the story revolves around the two “helping” each other in various ways, the real point of the series has little to do with plot at all. All in all, there’s nothing new here, and certainly nothing unexpected. After all, the title alone pretty much gives away the ending, if in somewhat vague terms. And likewise, though the story’s philosophical and psychological trajectory is well-trodden ground (How does childhood trauma contribute to antisocial behavior? Are people essentially cruel and amoral beings?), again that’s hardly the point. For, despite its starkly unsentimental tone and ambivalent POV, Ill-Fated Relationship is, at its core, an intensely personal story.

The real heart of this manhwa lies in the personal journeys of its characters, how they became what they are, and how their experience with each other influences the way they view themselves and what they do. And though it is their differences that, in many ways, cause them to seek each other out (he’s drawn to her care-free worldview, while she’s drawn to his emotional vulnerability), it is the way in which they most closely connect that ultimately seals their fate, and perhaps even gives them meaning, something that Hwang manages to explore with surprising subtlety.

Hwang’s style is sparse, both visually and narratively, creating an environment that feels both intimate and detached at the same time. While the limited use of color suggests a similarly subdued emotional palette, the lack of detail (both background and foreground) brings each emotional beat into sharp focus. With just the sparest detail gracing the page, every small shift becomes significant, both in movement and expression. And with narration and dialogue used even more sparingly, it is these carefully-executed visual cues that do most of the heavy lifting.

With its clear, simple art style and minimal dialogue, this series is unusually well-suited to the iPhone’s small screen, but to limit its reach that way really does seem a shame. I’d love to see this manhwa on the iPad as well, and even more so on the web, which would substantially increase its potential for an English-speaking audience. In the English-language manhwa market, currently dominated by conventional romance and action series, Ill-Fated Relationship provides a welcome alternative for fans of indie comics and manga who are interested in exploring the largely untapped wealth of Korean webcomics.

Complete in twenty chapters (with a short parody comic as an extra), Ill-Fated Relationship‘s compelling characters and well-crafted narrative provide an exceptionally satisfying, compact read. Recommended.

Advance copy provided by the publisher. Editing not yet final. Short previews from the publisher available here.

Fanservice Friday: The sleeve’s the thing

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Earlier this week in our Off the Shelf column, Michelle and I reviewed Kazue Kato’s Blue Exorcist, at which time the following exchange occurred:

MICHELLE: … While I do like the art style, particularly the looks of Rin and Yukio, I must say that the quirky-just-to-be-quirky garb of the academy’s president puts me off quite a bit. Usually I take characters with a bizarre sense of fashion in stride, but this guy’s outfit just seems extra pointless to me.

MJ: I’m on the fence regarding the president’s odd outfit. It’s definitely “quirky-just-to-be-quirky,” just as you say, but it contains a particular element that tends to be bullet-proof costuming for me (giant cuffs on sleeves), which is almost enough to win me over all by itself. There’s a reason I’m obsessed with the artwork in Pandora Hearts.

MICHELLE: That is an oddly specific costuming kink! I haven’t paused to consider whether I have anything similar. Maybe I like long coats, because I really like the outfit Yukio wears while teaching his class.

MJ: Long coats are delicious. I can completely get behind that!

With this in mind, I’d like to dedicate this month’s Fanservice Friday to my bullet-proof costuming kink, CUFFED SLEEVES. Oh, the beauty of it all!

Since I mentioned Pandora Hearts specifically in the conversation with Michelle, I’ll use that manga as my prime example here. Clearly, Jun Mochizuki understands the power of the cuffed sleeve, as she’s filled up her manga with it. Furthermore, most of these sleeves occur on long coats, combining the deliciousness of both to substantial effect.

Raven does particularly well in the coat department, as you can see from the illustrations below. This is a long, flowing coat with a kind of bad-ass vibe, enhanced by the boots and hat. Note how Mochizuki accents the length and fullness of the cuffed sleeves with her choice of camera angle and poses. These illustrations are absolutely gorgeous, and they’re exactly the thing to satisfy my personal costuming desires. For the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone wants to see attractive manga characters nude or scantily clad, when they could be seeing them in a scrumptious coat. Everyone looks beautiful in a coat like this.

Break is also a winner in Mochizuki’s cuffed sleeve department, with a special feature that seems to belong only to him. In the scene below, you’ll see that Break’s overcoat is designed to sit perpetually off his shoulders (I’m not even sure it’s a separate piece of clothing). This has the effect of giving him over-long sleeves (another personal kink of mine), but it also actually creates the illusion of his sleeves being cuffed at the top as well as the bottom, for extra cuff-a-licious goodness.

Though this is an action scene with plenty of important stuff going on, I can’t help it, I’m looking at the sleeves.

On the left below, you’ll see a particularly nice example of Break’s behavior as concerns his over-long sleeves (Mochizuki obviously has a thing for this, and so do I), but it’s not just the men who get good sleeve action in this manga. Sharon’s lacy cuff reveals another just below it, an interestingly dainty look for a character who’s really only dainty on the outside. Echo gets cuffs on the top of her sleeves (similar to Break’s), and even on her boots, attractively framing the thigh area for those who are into that. But the best cuffs really belong to Alice, based on sheer size alone, gracefully matching in scale the large bow at the front of her coat.

Not that Mochizuki is alone in her appreciation of the cuffed sleeve.

Though the look is most common in manga set in the west or in heavy fantasy settings like Blue Exorcist, mangaka like CLAMP, for instance, have demonstrated some love for large, lovely cuffs. In xxxHolic, Watanuki and Doumeki’s winter uniform includes a long, slim coat (nicely matched to CLAMP’s long, slim character designs) with elegant buttons and a substantial cuffed sleeve. And in Tokyo Babylon, doting sister Hokuto is seen dressing up twin brother Subaru in some beautifully cuffed outfits, including this flowing shirt from volume three. Here again we have a large cuff that extends slightly past the wrist, which is a favorite look for me.

The allure of the cuffed sleeve is not limited to fantasy manga, either, nor to manga set in any particular period. Even modern gag series can be found sporting substantial cuffs, as seen here in Kōji Kumeta’s Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei. While Nozomu’s no-nonsense shirtsleeves provide a humorous contrast, peeking out from under his otherwise traditional garb (though of course, I wish they were wider!), student Kafuka’s coat is simply pretty and timeless. And no, those aren’t cuffs, of course, but they create a similar look that I’m very fond of, accenting the end of the sleeve by making it wider just before the wrist.

Why do I like this effect so much? I simply have no idea. I only know that it pleases my eye immediately, improving my impression of the outfit as a whole.

And though large, wide cuffs can often be used to accentuate the delicacy of smaller hands, they aren’t any less attractive when paired with large hands. Nor do I associate over-long sleeves with infantilizing characters, though I suspect they may sometimes be used specifically for this effect.

Looking for magical girl manga featuring cuffed sleeves? Look no further than Shugo Chara!‘s Amu Hinamori, cool and spicy, and sporting fantastic cuffs!

So, readers, do you have your own bullet-proof costuming elements? What piece of clothing makes you feel serviced as a fan?

All illustrations from English-language releases of Pandora Hearts (Yen Press), xxxHolic (Del Rey Manga), Tokyo Babylon (TOKYOPOP), Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (Del Rey Manga), & Shugo Chara! (Del Rey Manga). Buy these books for more beautiful cuff action!

License request day: Fore!

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I heard this lovely story on NPR about a professional golfer, 19-year-old Ryo Ishikawa, who’s planning on donating his 2011 earnings to disaster relief in Japan. Okay, it’s kind of annoying when the sports correspondent feigns shock that a 19-year-old could adopt a charitable world view, since some of the most generous people I know are kids. But all the same, it actually made me care a tiny bit about the outcome of professional golf matches. I don’t play golf myself because, while I like taking long walks outside followed by gin and tonics, I don’t like paying to do so or inconveniencing people with my incompetence. Still…

Ishikawa’s nickname (“Bashful Prince”) is just so manga, isn’t it? And he looks so manga in that photo on Wikipedia. It made me wonder if there hasn’t been a surge in golf manga debuting during his ascendance in the sport, which then made me wonder about existing titles about golf. So while it’s entirely possible I have room in my heart for only one sports manga, I thought it might be interesting to hit the links.

Before we move forward, the answer to the question you’re probably asking yourself is, “Yes, there is a shôjo title about golf.” It’s called Super Shot, written and illustrated by Kouko Itamoto. It ran for two volumes and was originally published by Kodansha. I don’t really know much about it, but I assume it’s about a young woman who likes to golf. That seems safe, doesn’t it? Of course, it could also be about a young woman who hates to golf but is really good at it. One never knows.

Speaking of young people who come to golf by accident, there’s the protagonist of Nakaba Suzuki’s Rising Impact, which ran for 17 volumes in Shueisha’s Shônen Jump. It tells the tale of a young baseball fan whose life is changed when he meets a traveler who converts him to the good walk spoiled. Then, it’s off to Tokyo to become the very best golfer he can be! (You have to use exclamation points when talking about sports shônen.)

Doesn’t anyone go into golf for the fabulous prizes? Thanks be to Dan Doh! for exploring this motive in a 29-volume series, written by Nobuhiro Sakata and illustrated by Daichi Banjo for Shogakukan’s Shônen Sunday. Like his Rising Impact peer, our hero here switches from baseball to golf when he learns he can earn millions a year on the pro circuit. He’s not as mercenary as he sounds; the money will help him reunite with his mother. I’m not sure why that is, and it sounds like a plan fraught with potential pitfalls, but the cover is cute, and the anime has been licensed and released.

But where’s the love? Surely there are few places as romantic as the rolling hills of a golf course, right? Sakata and Eiji Kazama have you covered with Kaze no Daichi, which is over 50 volumes long and still running in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Original. It’s about a promising golfer, Okita, and his talented caddie, Lily, who work their way to the top and fall in love in the process. It won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 1994.

But… but… ridiculous outfits, you cry! What’s golf without at least one person in a ridiculous outfit? Oh, faithful readers, manga provides, as always. In Suu Minazuki’s He-nshin!! – Sonata Birdie Rush, a young woman golfer faces a challenging issue: she finds a sponsor who’ll only bankroll her if she does cosplay during her matches. Honestly, how much more ridiculous can she look than some high-profile players? This five-volume series originally ran in Shueisha’s Young Jump.

So there’s a sampler of titles from this surprisingly robust genre. I’m a bit disappointed that I didn’t find any josei, yaoi or yuri to add to the mix, but I suspect they’re out there somewhere, or will be soon.

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Kekkaishi

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I have a challenge for all you Shonen Jump readers: pick up a copy of Kekkaishi. It may not be as sexy as Death Note, or as goofy as One Piece, or as battle-focused as Bleach, but what it lacks in flash, it makes up in heart, humor, and good old-fashioned storytelling.

The premise of Kekkaishi is simple: Yoshimori Sumimura, a seemingly unremarkable fourteen-year-old boy, is a kekkaishi, or barrier-master. When he isn’t consuming unhealthy amounts of coffee-flavored milk, dozing off in class, or baking architecturally magnificent cakes (one of his pet obsessions), he’s patrolling the grounds of his school, which sits atop the Karasumori, a locus of magical energy that proves irresistible to ayakashi (demons) looking to augment their power. Yoshimori traps unwanted visitors within cube-shaped barriers, then vaporizes them, barrier and all.

Joining him on patrol are his sixteen-year-old neighbor Tokine Yukimura—a more disciplined kekkaishi whom Yoshimori secretly adores—and a small complement of demons that includes two dog spirits, Madarao and Hakubi, and a half-human, half-ayakashi, Gen Shishio. Further complicating matters are the families themselves: the Sumimuras and Yukimuras detest one another. Though their clans have been tasked with protecting the Karasumori for nearly 500 years, the oldest generation carries on an energetic feud, making it difficult for Yoshimori and Tokine to work together harmoniously. In short, Kekkaishi reads like an entertaining mash-up of Bleach, InuYasha, and Romeo and Juliet. (Or maybe Romeo Must Die. Take your pick.)

Each volume unfurls at a brisk clip, in part because Tanabe doesn’t feel the need to explain the entire mythology of the Karasumori site all at once. Nor does she resort to the kind of lazy, expository dialogue found in many shonen series with complicated backstories. (You know the kind: “As you know, Tokine, we’ve been combating ayakashi together for almost a year, and our faithful demon dog sidekicks have played an indispensable role in helping us rid the site of ayakashi. Don’t you think, childhood friend and neighbor of mine?”) Instead, Tanabe reveals details about the Karasumori site’s past gradually as she introduces new characters and confronts her principal cast members with new demonic challenges. In fact, the kekkaishis’ greatest adversaries—the Kokuburo, a group of powerful demons whose plan for world domination involves taking over the Karasumori site—don’t even appear in the first volume of the series.

What makes Kekkaishi such a joy to read is Yellow Tanabe’s consummate skill as both an illustrator and storyteller. Her artwork is clean and attractive, with bold lines and nicely composed pictures. Though her character designs are immensely appealing—and seem ready-made for the inevitable assortment of lunchboxes, t-shirts, shijikis, and coffee milk drinks that the series inspired—it’s her action sequences that really shine. Kekkaishi is one of the few shonen series where the fight scenes are (a) dynamic (b) thrilling (c) easy to follow (d) essential to the plot and (e) just the right length. There’s also a wonderful sense of play in Tanabe’s combat. Yoshimori and Tokine use kekkaishi not only as traps, but also as aerial stepping-stones that allow them to pursue demons mid-air.

There’s another appealing—and slyly didactic—aspect to these fight scenes as well. Though Yoshimori possesses greater spiritual powers than Tokine, it’s Tokine who frequently saves the day. Why? Because she practices creating barriers with the same diligence as she does her homework. Yoshimori, on the other hand, struggles to master his powers, sometimes embarking on marathon training sessions and other times neglecting to practice at all.

Kekkaishi offers readers more modest pleasures as well. Tanabe creates a colorful cast of supporting characters that include Yoshimori and Tokine’s sparring grandparents, who prove surprisingly spry for a couple of sexagenarians; Yoshimori’s father, who reminds me of James Dean’s apron-clad dad in Rebel Without a Cause; Masahiko Tsukijigaoka, a genial ghost who was a baker in life; Heisuke Matsudo, a nattily-dressed friend of Yoshimori’s grandfather with a specialty in weird science; and Mamezo, the grouchy guardian spirit of the Karasumori site who looks a bit like Kermit the Frog on a bender. Tanabe’s villains are a less colorful and distinctive bunch than, say, Naraku’s various incarnations, but I find that refreshing. For once the hero—and pals—are as vivid and appealing as the bad guys without having sordid or unnecessarily complicated backstories.

Like all shonen series, Kekkaishi suffers from an occasional dry spell. In volumes seven and eight, for example, the series seemed to have lost its mojo; I found the fight scenes tedious and felt Tanabe had fumbled in her depiction of Tokine, who went from being an appealing, competent character to a mere tag-along. But Tanabe quickly righted the ship in volume nine, introducing new characters, fleshing out the Kokoburo’s motives for capturing the Karasumori, staging some ecological intrigue at the Colorless Marsh, and revealing that Yoshimori’s dad has some demon-busting skills of his own. Though volume nine features two dramatic fight scenes, it’s the quieter, character-building moments that really shine, raising the emotional stakes by revealing unexpected facets of the heroes’ personalities; what happens in volume ten is all the more devastating because Tanabe makes us care deeply about her characters’ welfare.

If I still haven’t persuaded you that Kekkaishi is more fun than a barrel of demon monkeys, let me sing the praises of Yellow Tanabe’s omake. I don’t usually read sidebars or gag strips for reasons that David Welsh so aptly summarized in a memorable blog entry:

The content is generally pretty repetitive. They’re working really hard, and they’re sorry they’re behind on their fan mail. This volume isn’t as good as they’d have liked, but they’re trying, and reader support keeps them going. They wish they had a kitty. That sort of thing.

Tanabe’s omake steer clear of the usual bowing and scraping before the fandom. Instead, she depicts herself as a slightly tubby penguin with a perpetual scowl and an implacable panda for an editor. Not much happens in a typical strip, but the back-and-forth between penguin and panda is amusing and, for anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of editorial criticism, all too true. She also has a lot of fun explaining her creative decisions:

And if you’re still on the fence, let me pull out my trump card: Kekkaishi is complete. Done. Finished. Finito.

After a successful eight-year run in Weekly Shonen Sunday, the series wrapped on April 6th with the publication of its 334th chapter. And by successful, I mean successful in Japan, where the series inspired a 52-episode television series and a robust assortment of video games, and nabbed nabbed the 2007 Shogakukan Award for Best Shonen Series. Here in the US, however, Kekkaishi has barely made a ripple. VIZ has been making a concerted effort to promote the series, featuring sample chapters on its Shonen Sunday website, licensing broadcasting rights to Cartoon Network, and releasing two budget editions: one digital (for the iPad), and one print. (Look for the first three-in-one edition on May 3, 2011.) I’m not sure why Kekkaishi hasn’t caught on with American audiences yet, but now is a great time to jump into this addictive series. I dare you not to like it!

This is a revised version of an essay that originally appeared at PopCultureShock on 5/14/07.

3 Things Thursday: tl;dr

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It happens to everyone at some point or another, for some reason or another. Sooner or later, every manga fan will drop a series they previously liked–maybe even loved–out of boredom, disappointment, or just plain oversight. And though a significant part of what draws me particularly to manga is its tendency towards long-form storytelling, it’s happened to me too.

Though as Kate Dacey recently stated, breaking up is hard to do, sometimes making up is even harder. Once you’ve let a few volumes pass for this reason or that, even if your intention is to pick a series back up, the catch-up can be daunting. So on this 3 Things Thursday, I’ve decided to take a look at 3 series I’ve dropped, intentionally or not, why I dropped them, and what my chances are of returning to the fold.

3 series MJhas failed to continue:

1. Bleach | Tite Kubo | Viz Media – At this point, I suppose I know more fans who have stopped reading Tite Kubo’s shounen battle epic than those who have kept on, but for my part, I’m actually a little surprised. While it’s absolutely true that I tend to find its long battle sequences tragically uninteresting, the point at which I dropped the series (after volume 28) feels a bit sad. Yes, the series was headed into a (likely) long stretch of battles, none of which I was keen on sitting through, but it had also just produced two of my favorite volumes of the entire series. With such riches so recently offered up, why did I stop reading?

I think it’s possible that $9.99 a volume just felt like too much to spend to wade through another swath of battles, waiting for the next bit of juicy characterization to finally materialize. Now I’m more than five volumes behind. Return? Unlikely.

2. Otomen | Aya Kanno | Viz Media – Otomen is a series that has left me tormented. On one hand, it’s absolutely brilliant. I mean really, truly, a gorgeous piece of work. But much like one of Kate’s drop-ees, Detroit Metal City, a person could die waiting for something to actually happen. These series are like old-school television sitcoms. Though at any moment it might seem like something significant could happen, changing its characters’ lives in truly dramatic ways, everything is back to normal by the end of the episode, with everyone safely returned to exactly where they started. As brilliant as the series’ premise is, it’s failed for me as long-form storytelling, and unless there’s going to be some genuine forward motion in plot or characterization, I’m loathe to give it more of my time.

I stopped reading this series after volume five, though on some level, it broke my heart to do so. It’s such a smart, funny series. But what’s an epic-loving girl to do?

3. Pluto | Naoki Urasawa/Osamu Tezuka | Viz Media – This dropped series is the saddest of them all, because I had no intention of dropping it at all. And though I understand how it happened, I’m not sure how to get back on track. Back in July of 2009, I wrote an entry called Tears and Manga, inspired by my experience with volume four of Pluto, which had so affected me with the death of a mechanical dog in its first chapter, that I was unable to continue reading at the time. Now, any regular reader of this blog will know that I love to be hurt by fiction. Really I do. I love to feel deeply about what I’m reading, even if those feelings are difficult to handle. I fully expected to jump right back into Pluto, one of my very favorite series at the time, once I’d recovered from the hurt, and I expected to read it eagerly to the end. But the truth is, I haven’t. In fact, I don’t even own past volume five.

How do I return, now that I’ve failed to buy the rest of the series? Can my heart or my pocketbook ever manage it? I sincerely hope so.

Readers, what beloved series have you dropped and why?

From the stack: Tokyo Is My Garden

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Let me start by saying that Tokyo Is My Garden (Fanfare/Ponent Mon) has clearly been created with talent and professionalism. It’s attractive to look at, thanks to Frédéric Boilet, and it’s got a readable script by Boilet and Benoît Peeters. It paints a vivid picture of urban life in Tokyo. It’s even got “gray tones” by Jiro Taniguchi, whatever that means.

On the down side, it’s got one of those male protagonists I find grating: the lazy schlub who dates way out of his league. This isn’t always an implausible proposition, but you have to work a lot harder than Boilet and Peeters have to sell it. Maybe that’s my problem rather than a serious flaw in the comic, but we can’t help how we engage a work, and as I’ve tried to draft this review in my head, I keep constructing, not an assessment of the work’s value, but a conversation with a theoretical straight woman friend (TSWF).

So here we go:

TSWF: Who’s that?

ME: (Looking. Grimacing.) Oh, that’s David. He’s from France.

TSWF: Really? That’s kind of… interesting.

ME: (After a moment.) Oh, honey, no.

TSWF: What? It’s just an observation.

ME: It’s a fraught observation.

TSWF: Well, what’s wrong with him?

ME: He’s one of those types that assume things will work out without any effort on his part.

TSWF: What, romantically? Professionally?

ME: In every way. And the worst part is that things do work out for him.

TSWF: Is he dating anyone?

ME: Of course he is. He’s dating this hot fashion publicist named Kimie, who he started dating about five minutes after he got dumped by a hot model.

TSWF: What’s next? Techno enka cabaret singer?

ME: Probably.

TSWF: What does he do for a living?

ME: He claims he’s really a novelist.

TSWF: Has he written anything?

ME: Probably title pages and future reviews of his works.

TSWF: (Snorts.) Ow. Gin burns when it comes out through your nose. What does he really do?

ME: A cognac company is paying him to open up the Japanese market for their brand.

TSWF: That sounds fabulous.

ME: Doesn’t it? But he doesn’t do anything related to that. He dates, and he works at a fish market.

TSWF: Seriously? Like a shop, or one of those warehouse things?

ME: Warehouse things. I’m sure it’s all part of some literary scheme to inform his future prose with the working person’s perspective.

TSWF: So he could be hanging out in clubs and giving people free booze for a living, but he’d rather haul dead fish?

ME: Isn’t that deep?

TSWF: Until you think about it for eight seconds. Can I have his real job?

ME: Me first. Apparently, his boss is coming to Tokyo, and he’s all worried that his Bérnaise train is about to go off the rails.

TSWF: All because he’s never done a lick of the work he’s supposed to be doing. That’s so unfair.

ME: I know! And then he’ll have to go back to France. Can you imagine?

TSWF: God. This economy is cruel.

ME: Don’t worry too much. He got dumped by a beautiful woman only to wind up with a beautiful, smart woman. I’m sure he’ll end up accidentally getting a promotion before his boss goes back to France.

TSWF: Okay, so the down side is he’s a big pile of slack, but at least he’s an extremely lucky pile of slack. A woman could do worse.

ME: Or better. Much, much better.

The end.

 

Off the Shelf: Ranting & Hoping

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MICHELLE: Hey, MJ! What’s brown and sticky?

MJ: Um.

MICHELLE: A stick!

MJ: Ba-dum-dum *chick*

MICHELLE: That is seriously my favorite joke. Anyways! Want to get us started this week?

MJ: I will do that, though I warn you, it won’t be pretty.

MICHELLE: I’m a big girl; I can take it.

MJ: So here’s the thing. For a number of reasons (notably the “I get the message” incident) I haven’t read any of Kanoko Sakurakoji’s Black Bird since its second volume. But somehow last night, in a moment of true madness, I found myself picking up volumes six and seven from my review shelf, determined to give the series another chance. I’d genuinely liked the first volume, after all. Was not that alone reason enough to grant a second chance?

This was a mistake.

“I wanted to see this look on your face,” says super-Tengu Kyo to Misao, his helpless bride. Well, apparently that’s all anyone wants to see because she looks like that pretty much the entire time. It would not be an exaggeration to say that throughout the whole of these two volumes, there are maybe ten pages total in which she is not visibly flushed, either from terror, humiliation, or sexual arousal.

Furthermore, any hopes that Misao might have reclaimed even some small amount of the agency she appeared to possess in the series’ first volume have been utterly dashed by this point. She’s completely submissive to her demon lover, and though volume six opens with her going out on her own to try to stop Kyo’s brutal brother Sho from claiming leadership of the Tengu clan, practically the first thing she says to Kyo when she’s returned from the ordeal is, “I know you’re going to scold me. I’ll accept any punishment you give me,” at which point Kyo admits that what she did probably helped his cause but then adds, “All you had to do was stay in my arms and be protected. You’ve sure turned into a troublesome bride.”

Volume seven revolves around Misao and Kyo’s desperate struggle not to have sexual intercourse (featuring flushed, aroused Misao in an array of flustered poses), which is more tedious than it is genuinely offensive, but man, it was rough to get through.

I realize that I’m basically ranting here, but really, Michelle, I just don’t get it. And I mean that with all sincerity. I can accept that many girls and women enjoy fantasizing about being subservient to a stern, controlling lover. It’s obvious that they do, based on the popularity of this series alone. But it’s just so not my fantasy, to the point of making me feel alternately angry and ill as I attempt to read this series. I just can’t enjoy it, even when I try.

MICHELLE: I haven’t read beyond volume two, either, but I also have later volumes sitting around, waiting for their turn at a second chance. I guess it’s the sales figures and the feeling that popularity must somehow reflect quality that makes us feel compelled to try it again, even if it isn’t our cup of tea. If only it weren’t so skeevy, it could really be trashy fun! It’s not as if Kyo is hard on the eyes or anything.

MJ: I can often appreciate a trashy romance! I have done so many times! But there’s something about this one, Michelle… oh, it just makes me furious on pretty much every other page. And though I’m really quite fond of the adorable little Tengu, Taro, he doesn’t appear often enough in these volumes to sufficiently quell my rage.

So how about you? Anything less maddening to share with us this week?

MICHELLE: Well, though it does have its own shades of “average girl in love with a stern guy,” Itazura Na Kiss still continues to generally delight me.

The fifth volume is no exception. Brilliant Naoki Irie, who rivals Ash Lynx in the ability to do anything and do it awesomely, has finally decided that he wants to be a doctor. Even though he claims to be disinterested in Kotoko Aihara, the girl who has devotedly loved him for five years now, she is the only one he tells about his decision, knowing that it will upset his father to learn that Naoki won’t be taking over for him at his company.

Naoki’s right, but no one expected the father to have chest pains that require hospitalization. Putting his own plans on hold, Naoki steps in to lead his father’s company in his absence, realizes they’re in a pretty dire financial situation, and appears poised to go along with an arranged marriage that would make an in-law of a wealthy potential investor.

Of course, this brings much drama for our poor heroine, as well as many nice moments between the lead couple. While everyone else has their own vision of what Naoki should be, for example, Kotoko’s the only one who grieves the loss of his dream when he decides to put it aside for the sake of the family.

It’s too bad, though, that many other moments in the volume repeatedly drive home the point that Kotoko is thoroughly incompetent at anything she attempts. She’s worthless helping at the office, she can’t knit a decent scarf, she can’t cook… It’s frustrating, because I want to see her find that thing she is really good at. Happily, it seems that she might be poised to figure that out, since she’s realized everyone else has a dream and that all she’s been doing is revolving around Naoki.

Despite the occasional frustration, every time I finish a volume of this series I really wish I had the next. I’d say that’s pretty high praise!

MJ: That’s certainly high praise, maybe even more so since you can recognize the things that frustrate you about the series, yet still feel that way. Of course I’m famous for loving flawed books, but I really think it often comes down to the very *personal* needs we have as readers, and whether a book fulfills them. Yeah, I’d be frustrated, too, with the heroine who is terrible at everything. That trope is really unpleasant for me, and obviously it is for you too. But the series still fulfills your basic needs as a reader and leaves you wanting more.

I suspect my problem with Black Bird is that it simply doesn’t fulfill my needs, so there’s nothing to balance the things that frustrate me about it. Based on your assessment here, I have greater hopes for Itazura Na Kiss!

MICHELLE: I certainly hope you’d find it more to your liking. One major difference is that Naoki’s not trying to quell Kotoko’s personal ambition; in fact, he’d probably like her more if she found something else to do with her life than just moon about over him. I admit that he’s frequently dismissive of her, but there are also things about her that he obviously values, as well.

Now, our final pick of the night is one that we both read. Care to do the summarizing honors this time?

MJ: Ouch! The summarizing! Me? Why?????? (insert dramatic weeping)

Okay, I’ll try. So, the manga we’ve both brought to the table tonight is volume one of Kazue Kato’s Blue Exorcist, out just this week from Viz Media. It’s the story of Rin, a rowdy teen who just happens to be the son of Satan, born to a human woman and raised (along with his frail twin brother) by local priest and well-known exorcist Father Fujimoto. As the series opens, Rin is just becoming aware of his demonic ancestry, the shock of which sends him into a teenaged temper tantrum capable of (accidentally) causing the death of his beloved father figure. Bereft and fueled by vengeance, Rin vows to become an exorcist himself, only to discover that his supposedly innocent brother must be the one to teach him!

How’d I do?

MICHELLE: You did quite well! Now, I will go out on a limb here and guess that you didn’t care much about exorcisms or Satan or demonic powers sealed by a sword, but that you did enjoy the relationship between the brothers once we discover that Yukio, Rin’s brother, is actually a fairly badass exorcist in his own right!

MJ: You are very smart indeed! Yes, that was definitely my reaction, and I suspect it was yours too! I’m actually really glad that David made a point of repeating, when he named Blue Exorcist his Pick of the Week, that the first chapter is exceptionally weak, because if I hadn’t known that it was going to get better, I might not have soldiered on. There really was nothing there to draw me in, aside from a vague fondness for the art style. How about you?

MICHELLE: David’s words definitely were in my mind as I read. At first, I was wondering what was really so awful. Boring, yes, but awful? But then came the thoroughly cheesy scene in which Father Fujimoto is possessed by Satan and I went, “Oh.” Things improve very much when Rin gets to True Cross Academy, however. While I do like the art style, particularly the looks of Rin and Yukio, I must say that the quirky-just-to-be-quirky garb of the academy’s president puts me off quite a bit. Usually I take characters with a bizarre sense of fashion in stride, but this guy’s outfit just seems extra pointless to me.

MJ: I’m on the fence regarding the president’s odd outfit. It’s definitely “quirky-just-to-be-quirky,” just as you say, but it contains a particular element that tends to be bullet-proof costuming for me (giant cuffs on sleeves), which is almost enough to win me over all by itself. There’s a reason I’m obsessed with the artwork in Pandora Hearts.

MICHELLE: That is an oddly specific costuming kink! I haven’t paused to consider whether I have anything similar. Maybe I like long coats, because I really like the outfit Yukio wears while teaching his class.

Which leads us back ’round full circle to the brothers and their relationship. I have to wonder where the story is going to go from here, because while I like the boys and find their interaction interesting—Yukio initially blames Rin for Father Fujimoto’s death but comes around to deciding to protect his brother in Fujimoto’s place—if the whole series is going to be them tackling cases like the girl whose legs were affected by a garden spirit, I can’t say my interest is going to stay put for long.

MJ: Long coats are delicious. I can completely get behind that!

I enjoyed the episode with the girl in the garden, but yes, I agree that format would not be compelling for long. I’d like to see more of the two of them in the classroom, with Rin actually learning the craft under Yukio’s tutelage, because watching the two of them together is the most compelling aspect of the story so far. I’d like to get to know both of them more, both as their present selves and the little boys they once were. I feel like there could be a lot there.

MICHELLE: I think that’s unquestionably the area in which the series shows the most potential, particularly in the character of Yukio, whose perspective of events we haven’t been privy to. I definitely plan to continue reading it; I just hope I don’t wind up disappointed.

MJ: Given how dramatically the series improved between its first two chapters, at least things have already shifted in a positive direction. I have high hopes!

MICHELLE: I have… modest hopes.

MJ: Always the smart one. ;)

A Kid’s View: Yotsuba&!, Vol. 1

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Yotsuba&!, Vol. 1 | By Kiyohiko Azuma | Published by Yen Press – This book is about a little girl and her dad. They have just moved to a new place in Japan. The little girl meets her neighbors, loves to shop, and gets into a lot of trouble.

I liked Yotsuba&!. My favorite part about this book is when Yotsuba, one of her neighbors and Jumbo go cicada-catching. I didn’t like when Yotsuba lets all the bugs go and they get all over her neighbor’s house. One of the neighbors sprays the bugs and the bugs aren’t strong anymore. The bugs were very sad and weak and did not like it.

My favorite characters were Yotsuba and Ena. Both characters were really fun. Yotsuba and I are both little girls and we both like shopping. Ena reminds me of my older sister so I could relate to both characters.

The book was pretty funny. The funniest part was when the bathroom lock gets broken and the people who climb out the window get stuck.

There was nothing I did not understand except for the “&!” at the end of the title. What is that? I did not like it when the people in the book were excited and the illustration made them look really mad and yelling loudly. If I was just looking at the pictures and not reading the story I would think the people in the book were really mean.

I liked the book a lot so I would recommend this book to little girls like me!

The Josei Alphabet: J

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“J” is for…

Jazz-Tango, written and illustrated by Wakuni Akisato, originally serialized in Shogakukan’s Petit Flower, one volume. This yaoi-themed tale features a surfer whose life takes a dark turn when a virtual double shows up in his world.

Jinsei Jojo na no da, written and illustrated by Ai Ueno, originally published by Shueisha, one volume. A young couple elopes and plans to live on love, until the harsh realities of life smack them around a bit. Will their relationship endure?


Jotei Ecatherina, written and illustrated by Riyoko (The Rose of Versailles) Ikeda, five volumes. This series uses the life story of Russian-born author and historian Henri Troyat to examine the biography of Catherine the Great. The notion of Ikeda examining czarist Russia makes me drool, as do the page samples on Amazon.

Jounetsu no Game, based on a novel by Helen Brooks, written and illustrated by Keiko Ishimoto, originally published by Ohzora Shuppan, one volume. This one sounds like Two Weeks Notice, featuring a hard-working young woman slaving away for a selfish jerk. Of course, this jerk’s name is “Matt de Capistrano,” so it certainly gets points for that.

Juunji no Kane ga Naru made, based on a novel by Elizabeth Harbison, written and illustrated by Junko Sasaki, originally published by Harlequinsha, one volume. The most striking thing about this book, aside from the heroine’s apparently disastrous home perm, is her career: she’s a hotel concierge, which would make a great subject for an episodic seinen or josei series. Career concerns aside, our concierge must deal with the advances of the Prince of Beloria. Ah, Beloria… how I tread your soil someday.

What starts with “J” in you josei alphabet?

 

 

So Much to Tell You by John Marsden

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From the back cover:
Fourteen-year-old Marina didn’t know why she was sent away to school. Actually, that wasn’t completely true. She knew it had something to do with the progress she hadn’t made in the hospital. After all, she still didn’t talk. And Marina knew her mother didn’t want her at home.

Then Marina started writing in a journal for English class. Bit by bit the trauma of her silence began to unfold as a shocking nightmare that continued to haunt her. But Marina refused to talk about it or to feel anything. Still, before she realized it, Marina began to feel a little—to reach out to some of the girls at school, to her favorite teacher, to her family—if only she could find the words…

Review:
I have been in a serious John Marsden mood lately, and this is the first of several of his books that will be coming down the pipeline in the near future. This was his first novel, published in 1987, and it’s set in Australia.

It’s February 6, the start of a new term, and an unnamed fourteen-year-old girl has just been assigned journal-writing as homework by the English teacher at Warrington, the boarding school she’s been sent to to learn to talk again. She promises herself that she won’t write in it, but almost immediately begins saying more than she intended to.

As the girl describes life at school and chronicles her observations of her fellow boarders, we begin to pick up hints about what has happened to her. Her face is terribly scarred, for one thing, and she’s spent time in the psych ward of a hospital without much improvement. As she gradually learns to trust her classmates and makes tentative efforts at communication, the truth of what happened to her becomes more clear.

What I really like about So Much to Tell You is that it isn’t a suspense novel. One’s not (or at least I wasn’t) on the edge of one’s seat, frothing to know exactly what happened to the girl (whom we learn at the very end of the novel is called Marina). Instead, what we’re really witnessing is her beginning to heal. Scarred mentally and physically by the family she happened to be born into, with a workaholic father who snapped when his materialistic wife tried to take everything he’d worked so hard for, she begins to realize that most people are fundamentally good, and are more acquainted with feelings of loneliness and ostracism than she expected.

Gradually, Marina finds herself wanting to reach out to her classmates, toward whom she feels no bitterness. Indeed, she is able to praise them quite freely. This, in turn, helps her to reach out to her father, who more than anyone could understand what she’s been going through. Although we aren’t privy to her full recovery, the novel concludes at a point where Marina is clearly going to be okay. Still, I was sorry it was over. Happily, my copy of the companion novel—the journal of one of Marina’s classmates—arrived yesterday, so I will be devouring that promptly.

Lastly, a word of praise for narrator Kate Hosking. I listened to an unabridged recording, and Hosking’s narration really elevated the book for me. She brings Marina to life—and has a cool Australian accent to boot!—and sells Marsden’s prose, which is occasionally a bit too on-the-nose, beautifully. I would happily listen to her read anything.

The Red Snake

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The Red Snake isn’t the most disturbing manga I’ve read — that honor belongs to Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, a book so intent on celebrating taboo behavior that I was certain I’d be arrested for having a copy in my house. But The Red Snake earns a special place on my manga-reading list for being one weirdest horror stories I’ve read, a grim fable about a family obsessed with bugs, boils, chickens, and snakes.

The book opens with the narrator wandering the halls of a sprawling house. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to get away from this house,” he explains. “Something evil lurks within these walls.” As lugubrious as the corridors and empty rooms may be, the inhabitants are even scarier: the grandfather is a tyrant who lavishes more attention on his poultry than on his family; the grandmother believes she’s a chicken and sits on a gigantic nest, attacking anyone who threatens her “territory”; the sister has an almost erotic fascination with insects; and the mother is a virtual slave, forced each day to massage and drain the pus from an enormous boil on the grandfather’s face. (Perhaps they’re the kind of people Tolstoy had in mind when he famously opined that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”?)

What follows the prologue is hard to classify as a story; it’s more a string of loosely connected vignettes, all increasingly horrific, in which:

  • Snakes violate the sister in almost every way imaginable;
  • The sister kills chickens and drinks their blood — straight from their dripping necks;
  • The grandmother transforms into a chicken with a human head;
  • The mother gives birth to a monstrous creature that looks like a Garbage Pail Kid; and
  • The narrator goes mano-a-mano with a flotilla of zombie infants.

After nearly one hundred pages of blood-soaked insanity, we find ourselves right back where we started: the narrator begins his soliloquy about the house again, using the same words and wandering the same corridors as he did in the book’s opening pages.

Hino’s artwork resembles a scratchboard drawing or a woodblock print, characterized by large patches of black ink pierced by thin, white lines. In the opening pages, for example, there’s no visible light source anywhere in the house or the surrounding woods — no sky, no candles or lamps — creating an atmosphere of almost unbearable claustrophobia; the shadows are palpable, pressing in on the narrator just as surely as the demons he unwittingly frees later in the story.

Character-wise, Hino’s designs belong to the same genotype as Kazuo Umezu and Kanako Inuki’s. Hino draws young girls and mothers as beautiful, glassy-eyed dolls and old women, fathers, and boys as grotesques. The narrator, for example, wears his worry like a shirt; he has enormous eyes rimmed in circles and is almost bald, even though his behavior and height peg him as a child of about ten or twelve. The grandparents, by contrast, resemble animals: the grandfather looks like a toad, with a bumpy hide, wide-set eyes, and a broad, leering mouth filled with rotting teeth, while the grandmother increasingly resembles the object of her delusion:

I feel like chicken tonight?

For all Hino’s ability to provoke and amuse, I’m not sure how I feel about The Red Snake. The story unfolds with the feverish logic of a dream, yielding some suitably creepy and bizarre images; I’ve never pictured the Sanzu River as alive with flesh-eating zombie babies, but it’s an arresting idea. The ending, too, is surprisingly effective. It’s not clear if the narrator realizes that he’s trapped in a cycle of unending horror, or is simply puzzled that all of the house’s nameless inhabitants have reverted to their “normal” state; either way, it’s a nasty punchline that subverts our desire — and the narrator’s — for closure.

At the same time, however, Hino has a juvenile fixation with blood, pus, and bugs, relishing every opportunity to draw a close-up of the grandfather’s boil or fill the page with a squirm of insects. Though some of these images merit an appreciative eewww, they’re too broadly cartoonish to really spook us; the grandfather’s ailments reminded me of an old George Carlin routine about the perverse delight humans take in studying their hangnails and pimples, rather than the disturbing metamorphoses found in Junji Ito and David Croenberg’s work. Maybe that’s Hino’s point: that we’re weirdly — almost comically — obsessed with our own bodily existence, but The Red Snake is so packed with ideas and sight gags and detours into the ludicrous that it’s hard to know what, exactly, Hino is trying to do besides mess with our heads.

THE RED SNAKE • BY HIDESHI HINO • DH PUBLISHING • 200 pp. • NO RATING (APPROPRIATE FOR OLDER TEENS AND MATURE AUDIENCES; SEXUAL CONTENT AND DISTURBING IMAGERY)

Manhwa Monday: April Showers

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Welcome to another Manhwa Monday, now in our new monthly format! Here’s a sprinkling of news and reviews from around the blogosphere last month.

First, a look at this month’s upcoming releases. With nothing on the docket from Dark Horse or Tokyopop, and NETCOMICS still dormant since its last online updates in February, we look to Yen Press for our manhwa this month, though even from that source the new releases are slim. From creators Hyun You and YoungBin Kim, we’ll see volume five of Laon, the story of a nine-tailed fox in human form. Yen also brings us the fifth volume of horror manhwa Jack Frost from creator JinHo Ko.

Not quite manhwa, but Korean-created, Viz also releases the second volume of horror/fantasy comic March Story, due out later this month.

In licensing news, Anime News Network reports that Seven Seas is getting in the manhwa game, with Han Yu-Rang’s My Boyfriend is a Vampire slated to begin release in September of this year.

Another new Priest trailer has been released into the world. Eric Eisenberg has the info at Cinema Blend. And MovieViral.com offers up a podcast of cast interviews from last weekend’s Wondercon.

A couple of small manhwa mentions online: The Korea Creative Content Agency’s website got some recent press from PR Newswire. And in an interview with RSC Publishing deputy editor Jane Hordern, Korean scientist Seong Keun Kim talks about having been inspired by a character from a 1960s comic.

Korean cartoonists are doing what they can to help raise money for relief in Japan, according to this recent article from JoongAng Daily. “Three major groups representing Korea’s cartoon world, the Korea Cartoonist Association together with the Cartoon and Animation Society in Korea and the Korea Manhwa Contents Agency, are collecting donations along with cartoons bearing messages of condolences and sympathy. The proceeds will be sent to the Japan Cartoonists’ Association. ”

This month in reviews, at Mania.com, Kate O’Neil takes a look at volume five of Time and Again (Yen Press), while the Manga Bookshelf bloggers include that volume in as recent Pick of the Week. At Comics-and-more, Dave Ferraro checks out volume one of Goong (Yen Press). Connie reviews volume one of March Story (Viz Media) at Slightly Biased Manga, while I take on volume two at Manga Bookshelf. Also at Manga Bookshelf, Kate Dacey opens today’s Bookshelf Briefs with a look at volume five of Laon (Yen Press).

That’s all for this month! Coming up later this week at Manhwa Bookshelf, look forward to an advance review of iSeeToon’s new series, Ill-Fated Relationship!

Is there something I’ve missed? Leave your manhwa-related links in comments!

Bookshelf Briefs 4/4/11

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This week, MJ, Kate, David, & Michelle take a look at seven ongoing series from Viz Media and Yen Press.

Bakuman, vol. 4 | Story by Tsugumi Ohba, Art by Takeshi Obata | Viz Media – After an unsatisfying summer, Mashiro and Takagi call it quits, only to discover that they’re more suited to each other than they thought. Meanwhile, girlfriends Azuki and Miyoshi make their own choices about how best to move forward in their careers and relationships. Though this series’ two leads are its least sympathetic characters, a bit of petty jealousy between friends goes a long way towards making them into people we can care about, or at least understand. Azuki and Miyoshi become more fully realized too, and if Miyoshi’s decision to chuck her own plans in favor of her man is depressing as hell, it’s depressingly realistic. Though the series’ inside look at Jump is still its most compelling aspect, it’s nice to feel that characterization is beginning to catch up. Gender politics aside, Bakuman is still the most interesting new shounen series I’ve read in the past year. Oddly recommended. – MJ

Laon, vol. 5 | Story by YoungBin Kim, Art by Hyun You | Yen Press – By all rights, Laon should be awesome: it’s the story of a tabloid reporter who gets the scoop of his life when he accidentally stumbles across a gumiho, or fox demon, who’s living among humans as she tries to collect her missing tails. Unfortunately, Laon tries to be too many things at once — a horror story, a journalism satire, a mystery, a romance — resulting in a narrative hodgepodge. Artist Hyun You shows a remarkable gameness for drawing whatever crazy scenarios dreamed up by YoungBin Kim, but struggles to make these scenarios feel like an organic part of the narrative; an underwater fight scene involving sea monsters and demonic piranha is undeniably cool, but serves little dramatic purpose. The frenetic pacing is a further detriment, making it hard for the reader to develop an affinity for any of the characters. File under “Unrealized Potential.” -Katherine Dacey

Library Wars: Love & War, Vol. 4 | by Hiro Arikawa and Kiiro Yumi| Viz Media – SLibrary Wars: Love & War is the story of Iku Kasahara, a corporal in a military task force set up to protect libraries from government censorship. In its purest essence, the series can be perfectly summed up with this line from the back cover of volume four: “What Iku lacks in training she more than makes up for in gumption.” In this latest installment, Iku has been taken hostage by a group protesting the transfer of sensitive materials from a private museum to library custody. While I’m still disappointed that Iku isn’t at least a little bit smarter, she’s definitely courageous, and when her commanding officer expresses absolute confidence in her ability to emerge from the situation unscathed, I found it easier to buy into their burgeoning romance. Too bad I can’t buy any of the characters as actual soldiers! – Michelle Smith

Natsume’s Book of Friends, vol. 4 | by Yuki Midorikawa | Viz Media – The fourth volume of Natsume’s Book of Friends finds Natsume and Nyanko assisting a pair of guardian spirits, one of whom has been so corrupted by her deep anger towards the local villagers that she’s destroying the woods and fields she once protected. The story is eerie and poignant, a sobering reminder of how quickly faith can curdle into despair. The subsequent chapters prove nearly as good as the first, with Natsume falling victim to a demonic painting, and Nyanko reluctantly aiding a child who falls down a well. For all the heart and imagination behind these stories, however, Natsume’s Book of Friends could be better. The art is sometimes flat and lifeless, and the dialogue too pointedly obvious for readers who want to draw their own conclusions about how they’re supposed to feel — in short, it’s perfectly respectable comfort food, but lacks a truly distinctive flavor. – Katherine Dacey

Rosario + Vampire Season II, vol. 4 | by Akihisa Ikeda | Viz Media – This was my introduction to the Rosario + Vampire franchise, and I strongly suspect it will also be my farewell. For those who don’t know, it’s a harem fantasy-adventure about a human boy who ends up going to a school for monsters and has drawn the romantic attention of a bunch of different supernatural girls (the titular vampire, a succubus, a fairy, and a couple of witches). It’s nowhere near as offensive as harem manga can get, but it’s ploddingly average in so many ways that you almost hope it will start offending you to keep your attention. I have no idea why these powerful girls are so smitten with dull Tsukune. Maybe it’s because he’s the only boy in the book. – David Welsh

Slam Dunk, vol. 15 | by Takehiko Inoue | Viz Media – I’m a devoted fan of Inoue’s Real (also from Viz), his saga about wheelchair basketball players. While his illustrations for Slam Dunk are absolutely dazzling, practically charging off the page, this series always strikes me as a sports manga where it’s necessary to be interested in either the sport, sports manga as a genre, or both. It’s an impressive achievement that he manages to stretch 90 seconds of play over six chapters, but I keep wishing I could find out more about these characters as something other than athletes. It’s kind of like yaoi where you don’t see anything but romantic trauma and sex. That said, I don’t think you’re likely to find action sequences that are drawn better in just about any comic from any country. – David Welsh

We Were There, vol. 12 | by Yuki Obata | Viz Media – With Yano’s sudden reappearance in Tokyo, “anxiety” is the real essence of this volume, with no ready relief in sight. And though this is not a bad thing by any means, it certainly left my stomach in knots. Obata’s talent for emotional torture is formidable indeed, but to focus on that would do a great disservice to her real talent, nuance. There is no absolute truth in We Were There, no certainty about right and wrong in the hearts of its characters or its author. Yet Obata proves that “gray” is not the same as “cold,” which is part of what makes this a great shoujo manga. Like the series’ light, wispy artwork, every moment is as fragile as a scrap of antique lace, and every bit as beautiful. Still recommended. – MJ

From the stack: The Sky over the Louvre

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I adored Nicolas de Crécy’s Glacial Period, the first in NBM’s translations of graphic novels created in conjunction with the Louvre. It was funky and imaginative and had interesting things to say about art and the value of cultural history. I keep hoping the subsequent offerings in the series will offer the same feeling of discovery, but none has reached similar heights for me. I don’t regret buying and reading any of them, but I’m not in a rush to read any of them again.

That state of mind persists with The Sky over the Louvre, co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière and Bernar Yslaire and illustrated by Yslaire. It follows key players in the French Revolution during the earliest days of the Louvre’s tenure as a public institution. There’s fascinating potential to explore the intersection of art and politics and individual express in a time of national turmoil. Carrière and Yslaire take advantage of that intermittently, but the story is structured oddly. It veers from intensely personal to dryly polemic without any predictable rhythm or apparent design.

Carrière is a legendary screenwriter (The Tin Drum, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), but it seems his skills as a storyteller aren’t portable to the graphic-novel form. The script he’s developed with Yslaire relies heavily on bits of expository text that open and sometimes close individual chapters. They provide context and valuable information, but they seem less like crafted prose than captions. Dialogue leans toward the weighty and stylized, and individual voices tend to get lost. The angelic young muse sounds very much like Robespierre, which doesn’t seem right.

Yslaire’s art is certainly striking, particularly the limited palette of colors he uses to accent the pages. His characters have a strangely cadaverous look, even looking decayed from time to time. It helps articulate the contradiction between revolutionary ideals and the men who execute them for their own purposes. It’s often delightful to see these corpses talk about the corruption of the aristocracy as they pursue their own contradictory, hypocritical agendas. There are some stunning tableaus, and the panels featuring more sinister, shadowy content are wonderfully expressive. I also admire the way reproductions of art from the period, particularly portraits by Jacques-Louis David, a key player in the narrative. They’re beautiful for their own virtues, and they pop, but they fold in to the overall narrative well.

Undeniably awkward as the historical content is, there are some genuinely gripping sequences, perhaps because they’re mostly invention. David, ordered to create masterworks for events celebrating the new Republic, allows himself to be waylaid by a beautiful young man who challenges David’s revolutionary principles. The boy, Jules, is barely a character, speaking almost exclusively in convenient metaphors, but David’s reaction to him offers the most compelling, charged moments in the comic. Sequences where David tries to force Jules into the posture of a young martyr of the revolution – for purely artistic purposes, surely – have an effective creepiness to them.

Maybe the whole book should have been invented rather than trying to adhere to the specifics of history. Those parts of the book are certainly more successful than the speechifying.

 

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

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From the back cover:
Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Brontë’s novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.

Review:
The Eyre Affair takes place in an alternate version of 1980s England wherein Winston Churchill died as a teen, Wales is a socialist republic, and technology allows for time travel but not recording security-camera footage on anything more advanced than a videotape. (Fforde can dream big but not dream medium, it seems.) Literature is a very big deal in this universe: original manuscripts are kept under armed guard, kids trade Henry Fielding cards, ardent fans of John Milton abound, and literary crime (frauds, forgeries, etc.) is rampant. To combat this last, the Literary Detectives division of the Special Operations Network was formed.

Thursday Next has worked in the London office for eight years, handling mostly routine cases. When the original manuscript of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit is stolen and master criminal Acheron Hades suspected, Thursday is called in because she was once a student of Hades and can identify him. Through a long and winding road that involves a transfer to Swindon, a bizarre detour into vampire-fighting, and attendance at an audience-participation rendition of Richard III, Thursday pursues Acheron, eventually into the pages of Jane Eyre, where their confrontation changes the outcome of the novel (into the version we know).

My list of complaints is longer than my list of compliments. I didn’t like the alternate universe very much, nor the ubiquity of cloned dodos, nor the silly names for some characters, nor the plot about the corrupt weapons dealer attempting to extend the Crimean War (already in its 131st year). The main problem, though, was Thursday herself, who is irritatingly perfect. She’s practically revered by the general public and every man wants her. Her former beau is willing to ditch his new fiancée if Thursday will just give the word. Her new partner is instantly smitten. Acheron Hades is impressed with her and declares her his greatest adversary. Hell, even Edward freakin’ Rochester from Jane Eyre has taken a shine to her!

On the brighter side, parts of the story that seem random do come together in a reasonably clever way (even the supernatural excursion into Slayerdom was eventually relevant) and I found Acheron quite amusing. He’s gleefully, hammily evil, so his appearances are quite fun, though I wonder how Thursday was privy to what was said in meetings at which she was not present (this being a first-person narrative and all). One baffling point is that, once he makes it into Jane Eyre, Acheron sort of sits around docilely for quite some time. It’s puzzling, but by that point in the novel I was just shaking my head and saying “whatever” whenever such things occurred.

Ultimately, I am torn. You’d think that with my general meh feeling about the world and decidedly less positive view of its protagonist, I would be firmly opposed to continuing the series, but that is not, in fact, the case. I’m willing to give it one more shot, at least. Maybe it will grow on me.

Additional reviews of The Eyre Affair can be found at Triple Take.