Reviews

By Kyousuke Motomi. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialization ongoing in the magazine Bessatsu Comic (“Betsucomi”). Released in North America by Viz.

I was a big fan of Dengeki Daisy, Motomi’s previous series, which ended up being a technological thriller as much as it was a shoujo romance. Thus I was quite excited to learn of the license of her new series. There are certain similarities between the two titles – the comedy is much the same, our heroine is a spunky orphan, and there seems to be a lot of janitorial work. But whereas Daisy was grounded in tech, QQ Sweeper looks to be more of a fantasy, with owl familiars, doors leading into people’s inner hearts, and creepy black thoughts turning into bugs. It’s a solid first volume, though, and we also have a hero who seems more stoic than Kurosaki was, which leads to a different vibe between the lead couple.

Actually, I’m wondering if the lead couple will actually be the focus of the series, as this has the potential to be something of an anthology, with our heroes solving the personal problems of various classmates. The first volume gives us Sakaguchi, a baseball star who was injured and now takes his self-loathing out on everyone around him, including his childhood friend who also feels inadequate. This is the sort of series that makes you want to invite these sweepers into your own life, to be honest, as despite the disturbing mental imagery, things seem to work out for the best – and it’s also shown that it’s not just the “cleaning” that did it, but the affected parties also have to make an effort. I look forward to seeing more of these sorts of stories.

As for Fumi, it’s quite refreshing seeing a girl who is honest and upfront about wanting to date a guy solely for his money – the catch is that she’s ALSO searching for a Prince Charming, and won’t actually get in the way of true love. Her love dreams of rich handsome young men are a comedic high point to this series. Her mysterious past, though, is what will likely carry over to future volumes. Well, I say “mysterious”, but I will be very surprised if there’s not a connection between Kyutaro’s tragic past with Fuyu and Fumi – betcha Fuyumi us her real first name, in fact. Kyutaro himself is the brooding sort, but not in a grumpy or overly sadistic way like a lot of other shoujo manga – though he does admit to Fumi going to far when she overwhelms him with how happy she is at the end of Volume 1. Oh, and his obsession with cleaning provides his own comedic highs – I bet he’d get along great with Levi from Attack on Titan.

This is a new series that could go in several directions, but the first volume is strong enough that the reader is willing to go along with any of them. I look forward to seeing how it develops.

Story by Ryukishi07; Art by Akitaka. Released in Japan in two separate volumes as “Umineko no Naku Koro ni: End of the Golden Witch” by Square Enix, serialized in the magazine Gangan Joker. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Umineko has a problem that Higurashi never really had, which is the fact that it is far more of an intellectual exercise. With Higurashi you had the mystery aspect of it you were trying to solve, but the primary focus was “oh my God, these poor kids, how will they avoid a tragic fate?”. Umineko has made it increasingly clear that there is no avoiding of any tragic fates, but more importantly, it’s become clearer that so much of what we’re seeing – all the meta, the increasingly ludicrous fantasy creatures and special effects shonen battles – is completely and totally bogus. Not just the “is it really witches” question, but the entire narrative.

The end of this omnibus features the witches in charge, Lambdadelta and Bernkastel, sweeping all the ‘pieces’ off the board entirely, to do the rest of the arc as a mock trial to show off how guilty Natsuhi is. The cast sits there like robots (with the exception of Battler, Natsuhi, and the witches), not really caring much about anything till they have to. It can be… hard to get invested in a plot like this. This is probably why Natsuhi made the best focus for this arc. Given choices of the other adult women we’ve seen, Rosa is a child abuser, Eva is also a child abuser (see: Ange), and Kyrie, aside from being a yakuza daughter, simply isn’t the sort who has emotional collapses. Natsuhi, who came into the Ushiromiya household as a fragile flower and has had every single one of her nerves shredded over the years, can give us realistic hysteria.

As you might gather from the cover, we get a few more new characters this time around as well. I love Dlanor – her name is a reversal of Ronald Knox, a classic mystery writer who gave us Knox’s Decalogue, a list of 10 rules that must be obeyed in mystery stories. (Yen does not explain either of those points, a shame as this series does have endnotes.) Dlanor, though, is a tiny, haughty minister of justice, here to make sure that everyone follows the RULES. Ah yes, she also has an odd Japanese verbal TIC. I was pleased to see that the official translation stuck with what Witch Hunt had done in the VN translation and gave her ending words CAPITALIZATION (or, given that comic fonts are always capitalized, BOLDNESS). It’s an excellent way to show off her ODDITY.

Dlanor is also far more sympathetic to us than Erika, despite being on her side. Of course, having spent most of the first volume letting us hate her guts, we see Erika start to lose it here. as Battler runs rings around her logic (arguably this is Lambda using Battler as her mouthpiece, but let’s let him have his fun), and many of her theories are smashed into bits. This allows her to be abused by Bernkastel, who is truly terrifying here, possibly as Erika is supposed to be her own self-insert there in Rokkenjima, and she’s humiliating the author. Erika then takes it out on Dlanor’s subordinates, of course, because where would Umineko be without cycles of abuse?

As for the standard murder mystery, it’s still not solved as of the cliffhanger, though I can give you some pretty good guesses. One thing for sure, it’s not Natsuhi, who everyone is gleefully setting up to look as guilty as possible. Not that Natsuhi is totally innocent – she has been faking Kinzo’s death for the last two years, after all, and the whole “Man from 19 Years Ago” thing does not sound done to me either despite supposedly only being Natsuhi’s guilt for wishing a baby dead followed by it happening. Assuming you don’t mind that the characters you’re invested in are frequently revealed to be the fiction they actually are, this remains an excellent series.

Story by Ryukishi07; Art by Soichiro. Released in Japan by Square Enix, serialized in the magazine Gangan Joker. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Fans of Ryukishi07’s work know that he is very fond of moments of what can best be termed ‘shonen drama’, which features all the characters being as cool as possible. The difficulty is that he’s rarely able to take full advantage of that, as his stories have involved murder mysteries and psychological horror first and foremost, so the cool moments have had to be undercut. Now, with his first series that isn’t a mystery and isn’t part of the When They Cry style, he can allow himself to open the throttle and just do a straight up action adventure which consists, seemingly, of nothing *but* cool people being cool. The result is highly variable, but it certainly has style.

The premise of this book is that, due to a natural disaster during WWII, Japan has been taken over by America and China, with the Japanese still living in cities second-class citizens who mostly join yakuza groups in order to avoid starvation. Our hero, Leo, is a former soldier who’s arrived back in Japan after a long exile. He finds himself saving the madam of a high-class brothel, Primavera, and after a few more adventures she takes him on as a bodyguard. The rest of the book is about Primavera’s attempts to avoid getting taken over by the mob, and various fighting sequences. Oh yes, and like Tezuka’s ‘star system’, Ryukishi is reusing characters again – Meryl will remind many people of Satoko/Lambdadelta, and Stella might be a lot taller and bustier than Rika will ever be, but she makes it clear when she starts rubbing heads and pitying people where her origins really lie.

It’s refreshing reading a Ryukishi07 book where you don’t have to pay close attention to try to figure out little bits of the mystery, a la Umineko. Rose Guns Days is very straightforward, sometimes to a fault. Yen Press decided not to omnibus this series, so we only have the one normal volume to go on, and so we haven’t quite hit the ‘character depth’ point of the series yet. Leo and Rose particularly suffer from this – Leo is cool and smug, and can back up that smugness with his fists, but his tragic past that was hinted at in the visual novel hasn’t shown up here yet. As for Rose, what a girl as innocent as her is doing as the head of a group o prostitutes is baffling, given she’s so shiny and pure it’s possible she can be seen from space. Soichiro’s art also doesn’t help – this time around the character designs for the VN were by the manga artist, rather than Ryukishi07 himself, but that means that the manga itself tends to get stuck in a lot of ‘default sprite expression’ poses.

I suspect this is the sort of series where we won’t really have a feel of how it’s going to go till a few books in. Still, if you like fistfights and cool posing, and enjoy Ryukishi’s writing with the ‘irony’ filter turned off, Rose Guns Days is a lot of fun.

By Jin (Shinzen no Teki-P) and Sidu. Released in Japan by Enterbrain. Released in North America by Yen On.

I had talked a bit last time about trying to balance a series based on something else – be it a game, visual novel, or in this case a series of music videos – between fans who already had a grasp of the story and new readers who didn’t really know what was going on. After reading this second volume, I feel it safe to say that the Kagerou Daze series is very much biased in favor of the former. I was confused after the first novel, and so decided to spoil myself a bit on what’s actually going on. (Those who know me will be surprised I waited that long.) It definitely helped, and I was able to make a few connections I might not have, but it’s still a fact that the Kagerou Daze light novels will appeal most to hardcore Kagerou Daze fans.

Honestly, I think the biggest problem I have with the second book is the story order. After the last volume ends on a vague cliffhanger, we get 120 pages of what appears at first to be a completely different story, involving a grumpy, introverted girl and the guy that she can’t really admit she likes making a homebrew video game for the school festival. It’s only when Kido and Kano show up to play and Kido uses her “out of sight, out of mind” cheat that we realize this is actually taking place a year or two before the first book. This is helped further when we see Shintaro, the supposed hero, show up… and he’s a horrible jerk, even worse than the histrionic but basically harmless shut in we’re used to. We now want to see what led to him shutting himself away.

The most interesting parts of the book are Ayano, Shintaro’s scarf-wearing not-girlfriend who appears to have no self-worth at all, and of course Takane Enomoto, who actually does turn out to have been in the first book after all. This is what I was talking about when I said that it felt like this book came out in the wrong order. I think it would have a much stronger, more devastating ending if the amusement park fluff had come first and then we’d seen Ene’s backstory. After 3/4 of a book where nothing really happens, there’s a series of horrible events starting with Haruka’s collapse that take the reader down a well-earned path of ‘what the hell? No seriously, what the hell???’.

Aside from the devastating bits, there really isn’t much happening here beyond character development, but that is what these novels are for. They’re taking the characters from the music videos and showing us what their hopes, dreams, and motivations are. And, of course, spelling out what’s hard to say in a video. The “Headphone Actor” in the original video was Takane, but in the novel it appears to be Haruka as well, and I have a sneaking suspicion his fate is going to be as dark as hers is. I’m still pretty confused, but I’ll definitely be reading the third volume early next year.

By Gakuto Mikumo and Manyako. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks. Released in North America by Yen Press.

The author of Strike the Blood has been doing this sort of thing for a while. He started off with a series called Asura Cryin’ that spawned two anime series, and another, Dantalion no Shoka, that also was made into an anime. And indeed Strike the Blood has met the same fate. This is not particularly surprising after reading the first novel – it’s a book that seems tailor made to be turned into a manga and anime. The heavy supernatural element, cool hero and heroine with vampiric powers and big honking magic spear respectively, cute younger sisters who are more than they seem, aloof best friends who secretly are in love, and even a genki younger sister with a secret to hide. Everything you read here will make you think of how it will play out on the the screen. Which is a problem in some ways.

To be fair to the book, it handles everything well, as you’d expect from a seasoned writer with a large number of books under his belt. The hero and heroine are both very likeable, and while they have a few standard anime traits, they’re both subdued enough so that you don’t really get irritated by it. Yukina in particular is intriguing – she seems like your standard tsundere who would get mad at the hero constantly, but this is warring with her aloof, stoic, and overly serious personality, making her far more interesting. She also makes a fairly fast judgement about Kojou, the vampire she’s been sent to watch/deal with, realizing that he’s really not out to rule the world, but just to have a normal high school life. Indeed, Kojou just gaining his immortal vampire powers a few months ago is the backstory here, and I’m sure we’ll hear more about it later on.

This being a light novel, there’s some fanservice, but it’s the kind that actually flows out of the text and the genre (there is a harem element here). I could have done without the standard ‘note what color her panties are’ gag, though, especially as, also typical with recent light novels, our heroine is about 3-4 years younger than she should be. The hero does suffer some physical and psychological abuse from girls thinking he’s a pervert (he’s not), but if this bothers you, remind me why you read Japanese light novels or manga at all?

So in the end I read a solid novel with decent characterization and good action scenes, yet still came away from it feeling unsatisfied. And I think the reason is that it all felt far too calculated. There is not one thing in this first volume that I didn’t guess or suspect would happen, not one honest element of surprise. I’ve been reading a lot of unoriginal light novels lately, but most of those have at least been allowed to have ambition or a purpose to their prose, a sense that the author has something he needs to share with you. With Strike the Blood that purpose seems to be ‘here’s my new series, go buy the manga and anime as well’, and that saddens me. I’m hoping a second volume will prove me wrong.

By ONE and Yusuke Murata. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialization ongoing online at Tonari no Young Jump. Released in North America by Viz.

It’s always very tricky to do a satire of something in Japanese manga, but I’ll give credit to Shueisha, they’re not afraid to let people try. Gintama’s popularity speaks for itself, and Medaka Box’s deconstruction of nearly everything ran far longer than folks expected. Now we have One-Punch Man, based on ONE’s webcomic of the same name. This time it’s superhero tropes, both Western style and Japanese, that are under the microscope. I am amused that this series, which has been running digitally for Viz for some time, is coming out in print right as My Hero Academia, a straighter take on the same sort of genre, is being released in Weekly Jump itself. ONE is not the greatest artist in the world – though you could argue that’s exactly what makes his webcomic work so well – and so they brought in Eyeshield 21’s Murata to do the art. The result is strong, mostly due to the dissonance between that ultra-serious art and ONE’s bald blob of a hero.

The cover is a bit of a joke in and of itself, showing our hero in a dramatic pose and looking exactly like the Dragonball-esque hero he’s meant to be making fun of. Luckily, once we start the manga proper, Saitama is rendered mostly as ONE did in the original webcomic, as a simply-drawn man who looks almost like a stick figure compared to those around him. The flashbacks we see of him as a wannabe salaryman with hair just aren’t as effective – he looks far too normal, like one of Eyeshield’s high school football guys. He also has a personality to go with his art style, as his flat, deadpan delivery of many lines stems from training himself to be the overpowered nightmare that he is now, unable to find a decent fight as he beats everyone – you guessed it – in one punch.

Saitama is also rooted heavily in the real world – hence his despair at missing bargain day at the supermarket. The rest of the cast we see are far more traditional, the better to contrast with our hero. Genos, a cyborg with a tragic past, is pure straight man, and the best joke he has involves his long, text-heavy backstory almost crushing Saitama with the sheer weight of boring words we’ll never remember. In the second volume, we see Sonic, a hero who uses speed to overwhelm his opponents, is a pretty bishonen, and has a bloodthirsty desire for a good fight – again, all played out very straight. So of course Saitama wins by accidentally punching him in the balls. We end by seeing that Saitama, who is a superhero for fun, doesn’t even realize that you need to be registered in order for anyone to know who the hell you are.

Without Saitama, this series is another standard superheroes and punching title. *With* Saitama, you get the humor that makes One-Punch Man a cut above. I look forward to seeing the authors ride that dissonance in future volumes.

By Rumiko Takahashi. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz.

I’ve talked before about how frustrating Ranma can be if you take its characters too seriously. It’s an issue that has carried over to many anime fandoms: if you try to empathize with these characters, and make their actions emotionally realistic, you will find yourself thinking they are all selfish, horrible monsters. It’s not just Ranma, either: Urusei Yatsura and Maison Ikkoku ran on this as well, and to this day most of the one-shot ghosts in Rin-Ne are deeply unlikable. At the same time, though, you have to empathize with them to some extent, you have to like and root for the characters or else why would you be reading the series at all? Between these two poles is the sweet spot of Ranma 1/2, and we see some of that in these two volumes.

As always with Ranma, the best stories are the longest. The longest story here deals with Ryouga, who has found a way to weaponize his depression and use it against Ranma. He’s actually not aware this is what he’s doing until later in the arc, which is what makes his baffling attacks on Ranma more entertaining. But the most entertaining thing is seeing Ranma, who is getting beaten by this new attack, try to depress himself, which… really does not work at all. I was highly impressed with Ranma here, as he doesn’t need Cologne to explain an alternative to him, or find an alternate scroll with a better move, but comes up with the attack based on his own confidence purely on its own. I love seeing Ranma being a smart cookie, and wish it happened more often.

Ranma being a stubborn sullen teen fans will enjoy the arc where Ukyou, suffering a crisis of conscience after a 10-year okonomiyaki sauce she made turns out terrible (thanks to Ranma as a child, so he’s guilty) ends up staying with the Tendos and attempting to worm her way into Ranma’s life further. I’ve never seen much of the anime, which I understand softens Ukyou to a great degree, but Takahashi never bothers softening anyone in her manga, so here we see Ukyou being just as bad as Ranma (stubborn jerk) and Akane (jealous), trying to scheme her way into being Ranma’s real fiancee. It almost reads like an English farce at times, with all sorts of power balances going back and forth and sudden revelations, and also tries to bind up Ukyou’s self image as a woman and her self-image as a chef, which she finally resolves doesn’t have to be separated.

As for the rest of the volume, there’s the usual one-shot gag chapters. There’s also some Happosai here, but I hate him, so let’s skip those. Nabiki shows up more here, Takahashi having fully gotten a handle on her last time, selling pictures, information or anything really to the highest bidder. We even see Gosunkugi, who has been absent for a long time, and find out that he’s still as pathetic as ever. The cast of Ranma may be hard to empathize with, but they sure are funny, and you get a lot of humor in these volumes.