Reviews

By Bisco Hatori. Released in Japan as “Urakata!!” by Hakusensha, serialization ongoing in the magazine LaLa. Released in North America by Viz.

It can be hard to find a balance between trying new things and doing what you know you do best. This is particularly true for manga authors, as they have a popular style or way of writing, and fans who get their new series expect more of the same, only different. As do editors. And Bisco Hatori has earned her reputation from the insanely popular series Ouran High School Host Club, which ran for almost 10 years. As a result, it’s not really a surprise that her new series, Behind the Scenes!!, also features a school club filled with eccentrics where the new character is dragged around and slowly learns what the people are really like.

The main difference is in the main character. Hatori no doubt wanted a contrast from the blunt, deadpan Haruhi of Ouran, who could get frustrated at the antics of those around her but was, for the most part, rather quiet and matter of fact. Ranmaru, on the other hand, is a new student from a fishing family who is trying to be shy and retiring, mostly due to his past school life where he ended up, for one reason or another, being the scapegoat. It’s left him with a low opinion of himself, which informs his character during the entire first volume. That said, when the chips are down he proves to be a wonderful improviser, something that the club he’s accidentally gotten involved with notes right away.

The club, on the other hand, is filled with extroverted eccentrics. They provide costumes, props and special effects for the college’s four varied film clubs, and the clubs are of course all egotistical impresarios, so they’re always changing things at the last minute. It is, unfortunately, the sort of club where the reader will need several volumes to get them all straight, with the exception of Ryuji, who is the manipulative but with a good heart sort who bullies Ranmaru into joining the club for his own good. There’s a nice balance shown between the various functions of the club and the need for last minute changes – as well as the pettiness of your typical director with a vision.

The drawback, of course, is that this all feels a bit more-of-the-same. As I said, that’s what readers and editors want, and it’s great to see more of Hatori’s standard humor, but there’s less room for experimentation, such as the sort we saw in her earlier series Millennium Snow. Nothing really surprises you, and the plot beats roll out exactly as you’d expect. There is, perhaps, less of the BL tease that was found all over Ouran, but given how much of it turned out to be simply tease, that’s likely not a bad thing. Fans of Bisco Hatori will enjoy this, but I would wait a volume or two before making judgment – I think it’s a slow burner, and so far it’s merely simmering.

By Gen Urobuchi, Type-Moon, and Shinjiro. Released in Japan by Kadokawa Shoten, serialization ongoing in the magazine Young Ace. Released in North America by Dark Horse.

I find myself somewhat relieved that I am familiar with Fate/Stay Night, the original visual novel that this is a prequel to. Admittedly, it makes it hard to judge whether this work can stand on its own for someone who was unfamiliar with this world till they picked it up. My guess is that no, it would be hopelessly confusing, which is why I am relieved. This reads like a prequel everyone wants to see to the game/manga/anime they’ve already experienced, and so it delivers a lot of cool things, but the explanations are to a degree taken as read, or at least glossed over lightly in smug monologues. That said, it’s pretty good at delivering the cool things.

Fate/Stay Night’s manga was never finished here due to Tokyopop’s abandonment of their manga division, so I’m assuming most of the audience here is one that’s seen the various Fate anime versions. Including Fate/Zero, for that matter, which has also been an anime (which I haven’t seen) and which was originally a light novel (which I haven’t read, and isn’t licensed). This prequel takes place during the Fourth Grail War, and features the parents or relations of a great deal of the cast – Shirou’s adoptive father Kiritsugu, his wife Irisviel and their daughter Illya, Rin’s father (who is only briefly seen, and who Rin seems to have inherited her smugness from), and a young Kotomine Kirei, who has not yet been completely horrible but give him time. Thankfully, a few of the servants are the same ones we’ve seen before. Saber is still the King Arturia Saber we know and love, and Archer is Gilgamesh, as the original Fate had made clear.

It does shake up a few things, though. Kiritsugu and Emiya are meant to contrast, and they certainly do, with Kiritsugu’s adaptation of the “needs of the many” maxim meaning he tries to find the most happiness for others by killing those who get in its way – he realizes that you can’t simply save everyone, unlike Shirou later on. And Kotomine’s father seems to be pulling strings for the Church, which is as “unbiased” as ever. The most interesting part of the manga, however, is of the whiny, seemingly bullied Waver Velvet and his servant Rider. This Rider is not the Medusa we’re familiar with, though – it’s Alexander the Great, known here as Iskandar, and he is the main reason to get this volume, as he is awesome. You’d expect him to be contemptuous of his rather whiny master, and you’d be right, but he seems to be training Waver Velvet to be a better person instead of writing him off. They have a wonderful dynamic.

Saber doesn’t get as much to do here, though she does rock a fantastic bodyguard suit, and is as empathic as she was in the original. I like her conversations with Iris, who reveals she’s literally never left the castle where she lives until just now. I’m not sure how long Iris will last in this manga – Fate/Stay Night reminds us she’s dead, and even if it didn’t this prequel is written by Gen Urobuchi, who created Madoka Magica and Psycho Pass. But it has characters we wanted to see doing cool things, and the art is decent (the artist also does the Taboo Tattoo manga), and is definitely worth getting for fans of Fate.

By Kenjiro Hata. Released in Japan as “Hayate no Gotoku!” by Shogakukan, serialization ongoing in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz.

One of the stranger running plots we’ve had in Hayate the Combat Butler has been 13-year-old Nagi’s insistence on being a brilliant manga artist, an insistence that is counterbalanced by her actual manga, which is strange to the point of incoherence. This mas mostly been played for humor, focusing on Hayate and Maria’s attempts to not tsukkomi Nagi when reading her stuff, and pretend that it’s totally going to sell. Here, though, Nagi’s manga becomes the point of this next arc, as she runs into a genuine manga artist – mostly through the machinations of Ayumu – and discovers what a leap forward it would take for her work to achieve what a professional artist’s does.

We briefly saw this artist several volumes ago, but now we get a name – Ashibashi-sensei – and we see what the life of a manga artist actually entails. This also includes an assistant, who turns out to be Azumamiya, one of the many minor characters who littered the early volumes and have now mostly been forgotten. He’s here to be annoyed that they’re doing this for Nagi at all. In any case, Ashibashi-sensei is clearly based on Hata’s former mentor Koji Kumeta, author of Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei. There’s not quite as much despair this time around, but we do get to see how totally exhausted a manga author can get, the dangers of procrastination, and most importantly, how Nagi’s work just isn’t cutting it.

Nagi can’t even bring herself to show it to him – she runs off devastated, having received actual criticism she’ll listen to for the first time ever, as opposed to people trying to be nice (Hayate, Maria), or people with the same warped worldview as she has (Isumi). This leads to a serious crisis of confidence, particularly since, when Nagi decides to simply concentrate on school work, she notices her grades are slipping as well (though she’s still in the Top 10). Nagi’s maturity, or lack thereof, has been a source of frustration for many of the Western fans of Hayate. Honestly, I suspect for those fans the solution is so eliminate her entirely – character development is not what they want. But it’s what they see here.

Luckily, Chiharu comes to the rescue, asking Nagi to help her sell doujinshi at a local event. This allows Hata to throw in a couple of chapters praising the idea of doujinshi (here clearly referring to original works, not the parodies and porn most people associate the word with), and allowing Nagi to get her groove back, mostly as she reads a dolphin-based manga that’s even screwier than hers is. I like the idea that “I can do better than THIS!” is a motivating factor. We also see what I believe is the author of that particular manga, though why she’s in disguise is something that is likely left for the next volume. Hayate the Combat Butler continues to be lots of fun, and it’s good to see Nagi finally growing.

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

I’m still a big fan of One Piece, but there’s no getting around it: this arc has dragged, and it shows. The chaos that is Dressrosa is starting to be harder and harder to follow, and while that’s clearly meant to mirror what’s going on with the actual participants, it doesn’t make things any easier. Half the Straw Hat crew have been absent for several volumes now. Oda’s constant scene shifting means we barely get to remind ourselves who’s fighting who before we move on to another location. Rebecca continues to be a thing to be protected, with even Nico Robin getting into the mix, much to my chagrin. Worst of all, a lot of things here, particularly the backstory, are things that have been done before and better in earlier volumes. One Piece is 77 volumes now, and I’m afraid it’s starting to repeat itself.

A good example of this is the entire flashback with Corazon and young Law. It’s supposed to be heartwrenching, and there are moments where you are truly horrified by how cynical and awful people in this world can be (I’m thinking of the hospitals Corazon visits to try to cure Law), but it’s hard not to be reminded of other backstories we’ve had before. Other backstories we see to explain silly characters are either too tragic for the silliness (why Senor Pink wears a baby bonnet) or reinforce negative behavior (literally everything about Baby 5, which may be the nadir of this arc). Again, this is the sort of thing that you’ll only see in a long-running series like this, especially one where the ‘tragic backstory’ part of the arc comes regularly like clockwork.

Some stuff worked better. Robin, Cavendish, and Bartolomeo were probably the funniest part of the volume. Robin is a Straw Hat, therefore Oda has exempted her from any romantic issues such as Baby 5 has. She’s therefore able to simply sit back and stare balefully at these two morons trying either to impress her. Cavendish’s multiple personalities come somewhat out of nowhere, but they lead to some amusing situations and don’t feel quite as repetitive as some of the other things we see here. Luffy’s concern about Bellamy, who is pretty much ready to throw away his own life at this point. Characters rarely die in One Piece, so I doubt Bellamy will, but the fact that Luffy is worried shows how desperate the situation is. Oh yes, and Doflamingo remains a thoroughly evil little snake.

There’s a few other things I could mention, such as Oda’s hilariously awful attempts at writing a tsundere character. But for the most part, I really want this arc to be over and the crew to move on. I want to see Nami and Sanji and Chopper and Brook again. I want Luffy to defeat Doflamingo so that I don’t have to keep staring at his face all the time. Most of all, I want something new. Dressrosa is filled with the angry ghosts of One Piece plots of old, and they’re merely pale shrouds of what we know Oda can really do.

By Katsuhisa Kigitsu. Released in Japan by Akita Shoten, serialized in the magazine Champion Red. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

This has been one of the long-awaited licenses, and it’s easy to see why with this first omnibus. Franken Fran is terrific. That said, one or two caveats. I feel, once again, Seven Seas’ rating is lower than it really should be. Also, this is absolutely not for anyone easily creeped out by body horror. Not for nothing has it been nicknamed ‘Squick: The Manga’. If you don’t like insects, gore, horrific scientific human/animal hybrids… again, not a manga for you. But if you have enjoyed the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, or yearn for a return to some of the weirder Black Jack stories, then Franken Fran is right up your alley.

As the cover might demonstrate, there is some theoretically salacious nudity. I say theoretically because every time you see a naked breast in this series, it’s immediately offset by something horrible happening to its owner. The premise is that there is a mad scientist known throughout the world for his incredible medical skills and ability to save anyone even after death. This is not his story – he’s absent. But he’s left behind his daughter Fran, who seems to be more ‘built’ than ‘conceived’, and she too has amazing medical skills and can do anything. The stories in Franken Fran, much like Black Jack (which the series admits it’s indebted to), involve people coming to Fran asking for operations, her performing these, and the unforeseen consequences that arise.

Because make no mistake about it, there are consequences. Unlike Black Jack, or even Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Fran has no real identifiable sense of morality beyond ‘life must be preserved at all costs’. Yes, even if it means that the person whose life has been saved is living on in agony as some kind of monstrous hybrid. They’re alive, so it’s OK, right? Fran also has a tendency to do things because she wants to see what will happen, which has led to a girl’s entire body being rebuilt so she can live as just a head, giving a man who is losing his sight eyes that can see ANYTHING, including other dimensional beings, and experimenting on cockroaches for the lulz, and then ending up taking their side after realizing she’s lost the war against them. Fran is usually impossible to understand.

She’s hilarious though. The reason that this series is so popular is not just the monstrous horror, but the combination of it with a truly black as pitch comedy. High school students get their every whim catered to by Fran (I want to be taller, I want bigger eyes, etc.) and the results are hysterical. A crime syndicate’s insane leader has to go up against his increasingly difficult to handle clones, and the chaos is glorious. And then there’s Kuho, the unfortunate detective who is misfortunate enough to be the only normal character in the series… or at last she is until Fran gets a hold of her. People suffer horribly in this book, and it’s funny. Trust me on this.

This omnibus gives us the first two Japanese volumes, ending with the introduction of Fran’s assassin sister Veronica, who looks to be psychotic and dangerous but turns out to be nothing next to Fran’s ‘hey, it’s for science’ mentality. In the meantime, if you enjoy any of the titles I mentioned above, or stuff like Dorohedoro, absolutely give Franken Fran a try. Don’t mind the salacious covers. This ran in Champion Red, which is only read by horrible people. They had to throw them a bone.

By Nobuaki Enoko and Takeshi Obata. Released in Japan as “Gakkyu Hotei” by Shueisha, serialized in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. Released in North America by Viz Media.

It can sometimes be difficult, particularly for a Western audience, to remember that Weekly Shonen Jump’s demographic remains young boys in Japan, with the ideal age between 8 and 13 years old. They know the reality of writing for children, which is kids want to read about other kids a few years older than they are, which is why the less fantasy-oriented Jump series feature a bunch of middle and high schoolers. (Speaking of which, when did Bleach last attend high school anyway?) But sometimes there is a series which does give us elementary schoolers, and we have that in School Judgment. There’s a catch, though – some of the students are lawyers, and what follows is, if not exactly a ipoff of the Ace Attorney franchise, at least highly influenced by it.

It becomes fairly clear a few pages into this series that you really have to leave your suspension of disbelief at the door. While true for most Jump series, the combination of 12-year-old lawyers, some of whom are also ex-convicts, and 4-year-old baby judges may make a few people at least raise an eyebrow. But it fits with the manga’s overall mood, which is over the top, a bit loud, and somehow both painfully earnest and deeply cynical at the same time. The main reason that it succeeds is the hero, Abaku, is *not* your standard Jump hero. In fact, he’s more like the cynical, grinning mentor who’s gradually won over by the shiny idealism of the normal hero. No idealism here – Abaku is obnoxious, superior, selfish, and acts refreshingly like a 12-year-old at times.

The cases we see and characters we meet are fairly standard shonen fare – the boy with the pudding bowl haircut is disliked by everyone, who knew? There’s scholastic rivalry, nascent crushes, and intense drama over whether or not to eat the classroom’s pet fish. In the midst of all this, we start to get a bit of a larger ongoing plot – Abaku clearly has a past, and may have at one point been imprisoned in Japan’s maximum security elementary school prison island. (I’m not making this up, you know.) He’s in that classroom for a reason. I was less impressed with the prosecuting attorney, Pine, who seems to be the standard “I pretend to be sweet but am secretly angry all the time” girl, destined to always lose to our heroes. I hope she gains depth in the next volume.

This is not terrific by any means – the mysteries are rather perfunctory, and I’m not sure I agree with using the Japanese word “ronpa” throughout instead of just translating it as “cross-examination” or somesuch. And the baby judges are a hideously stupid idea. Despite Obata’s usual excellent art, this reads like the work of a Jump newbie, and it will not surprise anyone to hear it only has 2 volumes to go. But it held my attention, and is ridiculous in a way that makes you smile wryly, rather than just want to put the book down. Worth a look.

By Fumiaki Maruto and Takeshi Moriki. Released in Japan as “Saenai Kanojo no Sodatekata” by Kadokawa Shoten, serialization ongoing in the magazine Dragon Age. Released in North America by Yen Press.

I think you have to be very careful when part of your work has “boring” in the title. I’m not sure if the original Japanese conveys quite the same meaning, but if the core of the work is that you feature a heroine who is meant to be uninteresting, then you’re already climbing up a larger hill than normal. Now, of course, this is something of a comedy, and the point of the whole exercise is that we have a hero who is surrounded by stereotypes of the standard light novel girl, and yet he decides to take the average, nebbish girl and turn her into heroine material. Unfortunately, at least by the end of this first volume, most of what I get from it is that the other two girls really *are” more interesting.

That is not, of course, the boring girl in the foreground – it’s Eriri, the hero’s tsundere childhood friend who’s a famous doujinshi artist who has at least four different traits for a harem romance. The actual boring girl is sitting in the seat at the back. Our hero’s other close friend is Utaha, who is a bestselling novelist and fills the ‘cool yet snarky’ part of the otaku equation. Naturally, they dislike each other hovering over our hero Tomoya, who is something of an otaku who has grand ideals for a dating sim, but no actual talent to turn them into anything beyond cliches. He needs his two friends to actually do the work and make it good… particularly since his heroine in this dating sim is based on Megumi, who is simply there.

This is one of those series where Yen On did not pick up the light novel it’s based on, and I suspect that it would do better without the manga format. The writer of the original story jokes about the fact that the titular heroine “will never be in the center of the panel frame”, but even a cursory glance can tell you that’s not true – Megumi is present and paid attention to throughout, she’s just dull. This is the sort of series that cries out for exaggeration, and I could see her being drawn in a way like Sunako from The Wallflower, who only appears out of “superdeformed” mode in cool moments. Instead, Megumi’s presence and the delivery of the lines feel like the author explaining a joke that isn’t as good as they think it is. The premise is that we’re meant to wonder why this obvious visual novel hero is pulling away from the two cliched girls to find the ordinary one. But as a reader, I know why – cliched or not, Eriri and Utaha are far more interesting than Megumi is, and I’d like to actually know about *them*. Saekano (not to be confused with apocalyptic romance Saikano) sells its tedium a bit too well.

By Reki Kawahara and Shimeji. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks. Released in North America by Yen On.

The first volume of this series introduced us to Minoru, a broken young man who wishes to live his live with minimal emotional contact with anyone – and has secret suicidal thoughts. In this second book, he seems much better, even if the reason for that is because he hopes to achieve his goal, which is to erase the memory of him from everyone who knows him. Of course, as he finds out, this is not going to be as easy as he thought. Even those who already had their memories erased, such as last volume’s victim Tomomi, still feel drawn to him for reasons other than memory. And, as he grows closer and bonds with the new Superhero Organization he’s a part of, he finds that new emotional experiences are just impossible to avoid.

It’s rather surprising how serious-minded this book is. Sword Art Online has lots of amusing comedy bits sprinkled throughout, and even Accel World throws in some light relief from Haru’s worrying and low self-esteem. The Isolator is grim, though, and even the odd joke or two (such as Olivier’s otaku-ish jokes) highlights how depressing everything here is. We meet the team leader of the troop, and she’s… a fourth-grader whose black gem gave her super analysis powers, so she’s now a scientific genius. Bored as I am of the ‘loli genius with an adult’s mindset’ type in this sort of series, the book does not let you forget that this was still an elementary school girl, and due to the nature of how gem powers work my guess is she was doing badly in school as well. I suspect she’s not a happy camper.

But the winner of the bleakest past here goes to Yumiko, who I had mentioned last time looked like she had hidden depths. Indeed, I think Kawahara overeggs the pudding here, as we get not one but *two* tragic backstories. It does serve to show Minoru, though, that he is not a special tragedy snowflake, and remind him that there are other ways to cope with grief and loss besides isolation. As with the first volume, the villain also gets a well-thought out backstory. Sadly, though, his personality is identical to all of Kawahara’s other psychopaths – you can give depth and tragic history all you want, but when the villain in the end is still laughing madly and going on about fools and his grand plan to destroy the world, it’s still not working.

The best reason to read this series is still the action scenes, which cry out to be animated at some point in the future. I’m not sure where the series is going from here – the book ends very abruptly, as if the author was working to a set page count. But I do know that while it’s gripping and a quick read, I wish it were more fun. I feel like isolating myself after reading it.

By Mamare Touno and Koyuki. Released in Japan by Fujimi Shobo, serialization ongoing in the magazine Dragon Age. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Given that Log Horizon contains a huge cast with at least a dozen named guilds, set over a wide area, it is not particularly surprising that we’re seeing spinoffs about some of those guilds. This also allows the series to show the same events, such as the moment when everyone realized they were in the game, with different viewpoints, and see how crises are solved when the lead is not Shiroe. Most importantly, it also allows us to try out a different genre, as Shiroe, as a harem protagonist, fails miserably. Soujiro, meanwhile, is not only an excellent oblivious harem protagonist, but he even has a guild that has become famous as a “harem guild”.

In many ways this is played absolutely straight. The guild is almost entirely female, with the one non-Soujiro exception appearing to be a gay man (or is he trans? it’s unclear, and I doubt the manga will bother to get into that sort of thing anyway). The girls all have various feelings of love for Soujiro, none of which he acknowledges in the slightest, at least romantically – he’s the sort to charge in, say he will protect everyone, etc. the polar opposite of someone like Shirou, in fact. When they first discover they’re trapped in the game, we see his reaction, and it’s one of complete and total delight, contrasting with almost everyone else. As for the girls, the two that get the most attention are Isami, who is the cute girl with no confidence type, and Nazuna, who is the cool big sis type.

But I doubt readers are reading this for harem antics – or if they are, they’ll be disappointed. Where the series succeeds is in showing off new aspects of Elder Tales, or in giving us different perspectives on the same events. Sometimes this can be chilling – we see Touya and Minori getting taken into the Hamelin guild, with none of our heroes really seeming to notice the danger yet. There’s also a moment when Soujiro, defending his teammate against a guard who’s trying to dole out justice, is killed, and everyone has to frantically rush to the temple to see if they can be revived like they were before.

Mostly it’s what you’d want to see – a band of adventurers bonding like a family and looking out for each other. One of the maid NPCs, Sara, is fleshed out as well, and we see her perspective on things – these adventurers, who used to barely give them the time of day, are suddenly opening up and being friendly and rescuing them from attempted rape. (I am starting to get weary of the hints that attempted rape is rather common in this world, though I agree that this would be depressingly realistic. Thankfully, it is averted here.) If you enjoy Log Horizon and want to see a simpler, more shonen take on the world, this is a very good place to start.