Reviews

By Fujino Omori and Suzuhito Yasuda. Released in Japan as “Dungeon ni Deai o Motomeru no wa Machigatte Iru Darou ka?” by Softbank Creative. Released in North America by Yen On.

This volume of Bell Cranel and his ongoing adventures has the main story only take up 2/3 of the book, the rest being filled in by two character developing short stories. While both stories are enjoyable, and I did like the main tale, it does feel a bit like the author wanted to hold off on the next big twist till Vol. 5, but could not quite come up with enough material to squeeze into this volume to pad it out. Welf Crozzo’s backstory is mostly given in an infodump, and his issues are resolved simply by having Bell be who he is – Bell is the sort to not go after someone for his own personal gain, and Welf has had nothing but that most of his career.

Welf adds a needed dynamic to Bell’s group, though, especially given this is essentially a shonen manga in light novel form. He adds the loud, brash type who rushes in first, which complements Bell’s extremely skilled but self-loathing personality and Lilly’s savvy yet cynical not-a-hobbit-honest girl. Which is good, as it’s also made apparent in this volume that in order to delve further into the dungeons they’ll need more people – don’t be surprised if Vol. 5 brings us another regular, and I bet she’s female. As usual, the story is presented smoothly and with a minimum of fuss, showing off an amusing sequence where the gods give Bell a nickname (and remind us of Freya, otherwise absent from this book) and a brief look at Aiz, who is trying to go beyond the impossible as Bell has and finds it’s not as easy as he’s making it seem.

The two short stories both have large amounts of Hestia in them, which makes up for – once again – a fairly small part in the main book. Hestia can’t go dungeon crawling with Bell, which given that’s the main thrust of the book means she’s always going to be getting the beginning, the end and not much else. The better short story was the second one, a simple character piece showing us Hestia three days after taking Bell in, and how she starts to fall in love with him. The other piece develops a small house that specializes in potions, and how unfortunate circumstances have led them to try to put one over on easy suckers – meaning Bell, who luckily has Lilly with him to be genre savvy. The best part of this story had Hestia and Lilly describing how oblivious Bell is and how the two of them are delegated to ‘goddess who isn’t even female’ and ‘cute little sister’ in his eyes. Given the ‘rivalry’ scene in the last volume, I’m pleased to see them bonding over lack of affection.

While not as strong as the other volumes of the series, this is still a very easy read, and I suspect we’re due for a major crisis point soon. Also, for fans of the anime, they adapted this into a single episode, so pick it up to see how much was cut out.

By Shiden Kanzaki and Saki Ukai. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Tempting as it may be, I can’t simply point to my review of the first volume of Black Bullet and say “Exactly what I said before, only with an added loli.” And it is tempting. Black Bullet’s strengths – its action scenes and politics – are still very strong, and its weaknesses – all of its anime cliches – are still there and pandering. There were mercifully a few less pedophilia jokes this time around, but that was made up for by added harem and boob jokes. But its strengths are quite strong, and given that this is a text medium and the illustrations aren’t too bad, it’s easier for me to ignore the service and focus on the grim dystopia of this world and the shiny, shiny young woman attempting to change things despite everything.

We get far more of what makes Seitenshi tick in this volume, and like Rentaro, I can appreciate what she’s doing while worrying about her good sense. People like her tend to have low survival rates in crapsack worlds like this one, and when she’s up against a stronger politician like the leader of Osaka, she doesn’t give in but does seem to be working from a weaker position. It’s very telling that Rentaro tells her to her face that her main force of bodyguards are basically goons, and by the end of the book… they’re still her bodyguards, they just got yelled at for trying to kill a who had, admittedly, tried to kill Seitenshi numerous times.) As I did with Kisara in the first novel, I wish we could get more from Seitenshi’s POV, but I know better than to expect something like that.

The other new character is Tina Sprout, a Cursed Child whose character arc, while heartwarming, is almost entirely predictable. She befriends Rentaro without either of them knowing who the other one is, and he becomes the one person who doesn’t treat her horribly. She’s also very broken, as all the Children are, and tries to avoid killing when she doesn’t have to (though she manages to take out Enju enough that she’s absent from the 2nd half of the book – which allows her and Rentaro to have a one on one battle). And naturally, he is able to see the good inside of her and decides to save her. As I said, there’s nothing particularly bad about her story as it’s written, it’s just that if I described the character and asked a reader to tell me what happens to her, most could do so without even looking.

This is still a grim book series, and the humor that it has tends to revolve around a) people thinking Rentaro is a lolicon, or b) Kisara and her rival, the student council president girl introduced here, getting furious with each other and attempting to seduce a deliberately oblivious Rentaro. That said, I did laugh out loud at one passage, possibly my favorite in the book, where Seitenshi and Rentaro are preparing to meet with the leader of the Osaka area. Rentaro has met him before when he was a child and being trained to rule the world (or at least that’s what his training seems like from flashbacks). Seitenshi asks him nicely not to get angry or say rude things. He then walks in and is even ruder than I expected him to be, gets even angrier, and never even bothers to apologize. It’s possibly the most emotion he shows all book, and I hope we get more of this sort of thing next time around.

By Shigeru Mizuki. Released in Japan as “Gekiga Hitler”by Jitsugyou no Nihonsha, serialized in the magazine Manga Sunday. Released in North America by Drawn and Quarterly.

It saddens me to be writing this review now that Mizuki has passed on, but I am pleased that his work is still coming out to entertain and fascinate us all. Showa just completed, we have this new Hitler volume, and Kitaro finally gets a broader release in 2016. He spent his life creating works that will remain behind long after his death. And that includes this book, which was called something like Hitler: The Graphic Novel in Japan, but has been retitled here. And it fits, as the Hitler we’re seeing here feels more like Mizuki’s than it does history’s. This isn’t to say that Mizuki hasn’t done his research: everything is carefully couched in the history that we know (which is not as much as we’d like to). But as the book goes on and we dig deeper and deeper into the darkness of Hitler and the Nazi party, he becomes his own caricature.

We start off with Hitler as a starving artist, not looking unlike what Kitaro might look if he grew up. Those familiar with Showa will know what we’re getting here, though he did this work first: a combination of historical textbook mixed with dramatized scenes. The dialogue not taken directly from Hitler’s speeches is very perfunctory and drab, deliberately so, I believe: these are real human beings deciding to commit all these atrocities in the name of power, and it wouldn’t do to make their evil more grandiose than it needs to be. As the book goes on, we continue to see Hitler’s rise to power and eventual realization, during World War II, that he’s on the losing side. Most of the major points are kept: his disturbing relationship with his niece, his failing health towards the end, his power of rhetoric swaying opinions – and when that doesn’t work, killing anyone who opposes him.

The introduction notes that Western readers might be surprised at how little the Holocaust was mentioned. I was *very* surprised – it gets one page, right near the end, but other than that and Hitler ranting about Jews a few times in the first half of the book, we get almost nothing about concentration camps or anything else – most of the WWII history is confined to troop movements and leadership positions. To be fair, there are a LOT of famous people in this book, and Mizuki wants to keep it simple by focusing on the politicians he’s sure Japanese readers will know. Still, it’s a startling gap in the book.

The best reason to read this book is Mizuki’s art, in particular his facial expressions. This has always been a strong point of Mizuki’s, but it’s almost sublime here, as his Hitler’s desperate, snorting face gives the pent-up emotion that the dry dialogue can’t necessarily carry. (Some of the funniest moments have Hitler reacting to horrible events with a simple “gyah!”.) Goebbels in particular is amazing, as Mizuki decides about 3 pages after his introduction to try to draw him like some sort of twisted Picasso face, attempting to slide off the page every time we look at it. It’s so fitting for Goebbels that I can’t help but laugh. Each caricature looks like the man portrayed, yes also exaggerates them to ridiculous heights.

If you’re looking for a good overview of Hitler’s rise to power, I think there are better books. But for a book showing us Shigeru Mizuki’s unique take on Hitler, and his ability to show off the man’s unique evil in his own style, this is a great choice. Also for amusement, try to add up the times we see Hitler doing the standard “Mizuki snort of rage” pose.

By Makoto Yukimura. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Weekly Morning. Released in North America by Dark Horse Comics.

This title has been a fan favorite ever since Tokyopop first released it back in 2003. Now it’s rescued, with a new translation, color artwork throughout, and a larger trim size as two omnibuses. This first one covers the first 12 chapters, ending with Hachimaki’s vision quest, which is an excellent cliffhanger. Rereading it, I was reminded why I found the series so enthralling – it combines interesting and flawed characters, a political thriller plot, and of course the beauty of space exploration, and why people want to go to space, though it makes sure to note that sometimes what people do to get to space can be morally questionable.

Like many titles, the series starts off feeling like a series of one-shots, possibly as it was – many titles are given a chapter or two before they get picked up, which also explains such glitches as Hachimaki’s hair. From the start, though, we have the basical – Hachimaki, Yuri and Fee command a debris collecting ship, making sure that the worst of the objects that litter space are removed so that there’s less risk of an accident. We open on one such accident, which weights heavily on Yuri, the first of our cast we really meet. Ironically, his character arc pretty much finishes in this volume, as he is able to let go of his wife’s death and move on. Likewise, Fee is a wife and mother whose biggest issues are trying to find a place to have a smoke in peace – she’s more of a mentor figure, as well as providing comedy through physical and verbal violence and in her spare time saving all of Earth from cosmic disasters.

No, it’s clearly Hachimaki, and later Tanabe, who are going to be the stars of our show. Hachi is really irritating in that “I am 23 and therefore know better than anyone else” sort of way, and spends much of his time angry at the world, his colleagues, and himself, not in that order. He wants to control his own destiny, but his idea of doing whatever it takes to achieve it feels wrong, especially since we get to contrast it with the creepy villain Locksmith, who is able to write off the death of hundreds in an explosion as good data for his next attempt. In contrast, Tanabe is all heart, and while she’s just as angry and headstrong as Hachi the narrative seems to be on her side most of the time. The two of them are also falling for each other hard, though Hachi finds this idea irritating more than anything else.

This is an expansive series that is not afraid to shift its focus and open up its cast. We meet Hachi’s eccentric father, down-to-earth mother and determined brother; a young girl who’s lived her whole life on the moon due to health issues; and of course various terrorists, who pepper the entire book trying to destroy everything Locksmith and Hachi are working on. No one is presented as totally right or wrong here, though certainly violence is shown to be the wrong answer in general. Towards the end of the book Hachi finally gets onto the crew headed to Jupiter, but a combination of three near-death experiences over the course of the first volume have him questioning everything about himself and what he’s doing. This reaches a point of ridiculousness at the end, when he’s able to somehow stay alive for a week in his spacesuit while having a vision quest.

Planetes is simply a great manga. It has an interesting plot, character growth and depth (Hachi is far less hotheaded by the end), and some gorgeous art. It also rewards us by showing the joys and sorrows of space travel, and why we should still strive to achieve it, despite everything. Even if you’ve already got the Tokyopop volumes, I recommended getting this spiffed up new edition. You can fall in love with it all over again.

By Kaoru Mori. Released in Japan as “Otoyomegatari” by Enterbrain, serialization ongoing in the magazine fellows!. Released in North America by Yen Press.

I have reached the point in this series where I genuinely do enjoy the adventures of Amir, Karluk, and their family, and I’m pleased to see we’ll be headed back there for Vol. 8. But I will admit that my top 3 volumes of this series have all been the ones that venture away from the ‘main’ characters and focus on English researcher Mr. Smith… or rather, focus on where he ends up in his travels, as he also barely figures in this volume. Instead, we get a different kind of wedding, as two already married wives with young children find each other and we are introduced to a marriage ceremony between two women who vow to be Avowed Sisters, a concept that reminds me of Anne Shirley’s bosom friends.

Our heroine this volume is Anis, a young merchant’s wife who is married to a caring husband and has a young child, but still feels there’s something lacking in her life – she *is* happy, but knows she could be happier. After talking with her maidservant, she decides to start going to the public baths, and there meets up with the shy Sherine, who is also married, and bonds with her immediate.y And by ‘bonds’, I mean ‘falls in love with’, as we see immediately that Anis is physically and emotionally attracted to the reserved Sherine. They bond really fast – something remarked on by everyone – and eventually agree to become Avowed Sisters, with a ceremony led by one of the female elders. Of course, this being a dramatic story rather than a history, the moment the ceremony is over, Sherine’s husband drops dead.

I’ve talked before about how most of Kaoru Mori’s titles deal with repressed emotions, and that’s true here as well, even though by comparison Anis is open and obvious. Sherine’s husband was poor, and with him now gone it’s clear that she may be reduced to begging. This leads to Anis asking her husband to take Sherine as a second wife – something acceptable in these times and places – and his stunned reaction. Her husband’s been presented as a good guy throughout, who has trouble reading his wife but clearly loves her. He never took another wife as he was worried Anis wouldn’t like it, and Anis agrees that is absolutely true – except for Sherine. And so the volume ends with the two Avowed Sisters living together as co-wives, planning a trip, and feeding the birds by an ornamental pond.

The mood throughout is beautiful – after the last volume’s battles and deaths, Mori wanted to have a more peaceful story, though she jokes this just led to a lot of nudity. Indeed, the bath scenes take up a large part of the book, and there’s a fold-out color illustration with even more. For all that fashion is her first drawing love, Mori adores drawing the naked female form. But overall this is about Anis and Sherine, and another example of nontraditional brides in what is thought to be a very traditional period in time. It’s well worth your time.

Bloody Mary Volume 1 by Akaza Samamiya

Vampires! There have been plenty of options available for the manga fan who enjoys vampires, and these series are obviously popular, because it seems like most publishers have at least one or two current series featuring those who walk the night. How is Bloody Mary different from all the other shoujo vampire series out there?

Bloody Mary is a bit different because there are no clumsy high school girls who unwittingly find themselves the target of a vampire’s affections. Instead in this series the reader gets a cranky and mysterious priest and a vampire with a death wish. Mary is a vampire who has been on a quest to find a priest who can actually kill him. Maria is a priest who is the target of vampires due to his family’s position as prominent exorcists. Maria knows how to brandish a mystical cross, but he doesn’t yet have the ability to combat vampires the same way his ancestors did.

Mary rescues Maria from a vampire attack and brings him home to the church. Maria promptly kicks him out, because he’s tired of vampires constantly showing up and demanding his delicious blood. Mary explains that he only wants Maria to kill him. Eventually the duo strike up an uneasy truce – Maria will give Mary blood, in return for protection against vampire attacks. When Maria is able to gain his true powers as an exorcist, he promises to put Mary out of his misery. While Mary is over 400 years old, he’s drawn as a mischievous teenager, skulking around in a cat-head hoodie. Maria is tall, blond, imposing, and has attitude issues. There are plenty of opportunities for odd couple shenanigans ahead.

There’s also plenty of mystery to explore. Mary has amnesia issues. He’s probably the vampire boogieman known as Bloody Mary, but he seems to have patchy memories of his past. He doesn’t have the same vulnerabilities that other vampires do. On Maria’s side, his lack of access to his family’s traditional power, and the knowledge that his hidden from him hint that he has the potential to become a destructive force in his own right as well.

This first volume packs a bunch of story elements in to just a few chapters, as Mary and Maria’s relationship is established, hints of everyone’s secret past are alluded to, and Maria also has to deal with a handsome student council president who knows more about exorcism than he initially lets on. The character designs are attractive, and the fatalistic humor combined with plenty of vampire angst makes Bloody Mary a solid addition to the Shojo Beat lineup.

By Reki Kawahara and Hima. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks. Released in North America by Yen Press.

My last review mentioned that I was more interested in the worldbuilding than the characters with this series, and it’s possible the author heard me, as this fifth novel, the first to not yet be animated, is filled with character development. Haruyuki’s personal issues still exist, but we are reminded that he’s not the only one having a bad time, and Kuroyukihime and Fuko are both dealing with devastating traumas, both involving Brain Burst and the real world, though we get minimal information on the latter. Luckily, this book isn’t simply piling up the angst – there’s a lot of fights going on here, and a race to the top of a brand new level which has a lot to offer everyone.

And there’s also that cover, as you are reminded yet again that this is a series filled with very young teens. That said, it fits well with the plot, as the overly dramatic ‘everything is terrible’ mood swings that kids get when they’re between 11 and 15 allows for dramatic speeches and loud screaming without feeling like you’ve stepped onto the cover of Shonen Jump too much. We get more development of the ‘Incarnate’ powerups, and they’re public now, so that’s a new worry. But the biggest worry is with our hero, who (as was becoming obvious) is not quite free of the killer possessive armor from Book 2, and one way that you can tell this is going to be a long-running series is that the volume is content to leave most everything up in the air.

It also resolves issues left over from the previous book about Fuko, who is at last doing something with the team, but really isn’t using her full potential due to her latent trauma over what she did to her legs in the game. I’d wanted more with her and Kuroyukihime, and I got it here, as it’s clear that both of them take the blame for the pain that each one suffered, and it’s up to Haruyuki to demonstrate that they are not a horrible person (Kuroyukihime) or to show off what her powers and avatar really is used for (Fuko). Haruyuki is very empathic, and (except of course for the increasing number of girls crushing on him, which he doesn’t get mostly for plot reasons) understands almost unconsciously what needs to be done to help people achieve their potential.

Brian Burst, for all its drama, twisted revenge antics, and continued suggestions of a dark evil villain side using it for bad things, is a game, and a fun one at that. The battles featured here are probably the best writing in the book, as they’re fast, exciting, dramatic, and uncertain. Yes, you could predict that our heroes would win, but how they won was certainly not expected, and I loved that it also required an assist from Blood Leopard and Ash Roller – breaking apart the boundaries of the ‘teams’. Given what happens near the end of this book, Haruyuki and company are going to need all the allies they can get. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next volume.

By Satoshi Mizukami. Released in Japan by Shonen Gahosha, serialized in the magazine Young King Ours. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

This final volume has a lot of fighting and backstory in it – in fact, a good 4/5 of the book could be described as fighting and backstory, even the epilogue with Akane. But it’s a credit to the author that the backstory always feels natural and not like an infodump, and the fights never wear out their welcome, even when they’re supposed to. We get the villain’s main motivation (delusions of godhood), the relationship between him and Anima, and why Samidare is so desperate to smash the world. And, spoiler, the world is not smashed, which means that we also find out what happens afterwards – we hear in an afterword that Mizukammi always wanted to find out what happened to characters after the final battle ends, and that’s what we see here. It’s heartwarming as heck.

With the exception of Nagumo, our cast have for the most part been from middle-school to early college age, and their mindset and problems have stemmed from that – immaturity, frustration, pent-up emotions, and budding sexuality. We now see that Animus and Anima’s battle has remained what it is again due to a very childish reason – Animus has psychic powers, as does his sister, and when a doctor calls him a god, Animus gets one of the most creepy ‘insane grin’ faces I’ve seen in manga, and proceeds to prove his godhood by destroying first the space station they’re on, then the Earth. Anima, who was trying to convince him that powers or no he’s still a human, is desperate to stop him.

If this sounds vaguely familiar it’s because it’s mirrored in the relationship between Samidare and Yuuhi, who as I predicted is not really going to let her smash the world with her giant projected fist after all. That said, he does pretend he is for some time, which leads to a number of battles where he shows off how much he’s been holding back until now, and basically curbstomps all the other knights bar Mikazuki, who’s still down from the battle against Animus. Samidare goes on like a lovestruck girl (which she is) about how cool Yuuhi has become, and it’s true – his emotional growth in this series has been nothing short of stunning. And now with Samidare, who has discovered that she has something to live for after all, the emotional growth is a catharsis.

The 10 years in the future epilogue is a bit Harry Potter-esque, particularly the part where we find out that Shimaki and Yayoi got married despite very little interaction in the main series at all – Anima’s “Hmm?’ and blank stare reminds me of my own when I heard Luna was marrying some offscreen guy I’d never heard of. But as Yuuhi points out, that’s how life works, and is the nature of ‘where are they now?’ epilogues. More importantly, Samidare is healthy again, and everyone has been moving forward. Even Akane, in many respects the most emotionally broken of the group, gets a separate section to show off how much he’s changed – though the Hawaiian shirt is perhaps a bit much. (He also gets the best “love confession”.) The fighting is dine, our heroes are content, and so am I. This was a great ending to a terrific series, one of the more realistic takes on superhero battles out there. Get someone all of it for Christmas.

By Fujikawa Yuka and Rifuin Na Maganote. Released in Japan as “Mushoku Tensei – Isekai Ittara Honki Dasu” by Media factory, serialization ongoing in the magazine Comic Flapper. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

Never let it be said that companies don’t know their core audience. Someone like Viz might have simply called this ‘Jobless Reincarnation’ and be done with it, but Seven Seas knows that the folks most interested in it also wouldn’t recognize it unless it had its original Japanese title. Hence the hyphenated name. And Media factory knows their audience as well, which is why the front cover stars the cute teenage girl who’s a mere mentor for our hero, with our hero himself in the back. That said, some of the editorial decisions, while I can sort of guess why they happened, baffle me a little bit, the first one being why we have this story’s framing device at all.

Our story starts off with a chubby goateed guy at his computer eating instant ramen. He’s quickly kicked out on the streets by his family, as it turns out he’s a NEET with no job or desire to get one. As he bemoans his useless life, he sees a truck barreling towards an arguing young couple and decides to rescue them, even as it means the truck kills him. He dies with a desire to do his life over properly. We next cut to a standard ‘fantasy’ world, where Rudy, our hero, is a 3-year-old precocious brat learning swordfighting, but he can also do magic. He’s that guy reincarnated, but he still has all his prior memories. Now he buckles down and learns as fast as possible, so that he can live a life he’s proud of.

This is all very well and good, but aside from creepy moments when we see a little kid perving on a young teenage girl, or the odd traumatic reference to his death from the start of the book, there’s no real reason why this had to happen at all. Why not just have it be a story of a bright and precocious young kid in a fantasy universe? I fear the answer may be that ‘ordinary guy gets trapped in a fantasy universe’ is the in thing right now, and the author knew it. It’s based on a series of light novels, so that wouldn’t surprise me. It could also be a way to ward off criticism of his hero, who’s doing things at 3 years old that most folks can’t pull off till their teens.

That niggle aside, this was better than I expected, and shows off Rudy’s boyish young charms (when he’s not being a 34-year-old otaku) very well. His conflict resolution is also based off his prior memories, and while this does give him a vocabulary no little kid should have yet, it does actually resolve the conflicts to some degree. There’s also a suggestion that this might get into some darker areas, not least of which is the cliffhanger. I’ll check out the second volume, but I wish the series had simply dumped the wraparound and been a straight up fantasy.