Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Manga Critic

A First Look at Shojo FIGHT!

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We’re in the middle of a sports-manga renaissance in the US, with publishers offering an unprecedented range of titles from Kurokuro’s Basketball and Haikyu!! to Yowamushi Pedal and Welcome to the Ballroom. Leading the pack is Kodansha Comics, which is making an astonishing range of titles available through their digital-only and digital-first initiatives. And astonishing it is: alongside obvious choices like the baseball-centric Ace of the Diamond, you’ll also find soccer manga (Days, Giant Killing, Sayanora, Football), rugby manga (All Out!!), mixed-martial arts manga (All-Rounder Meguru), and card game manga (Chihayafuru). Kodansha’s latest acquisition is Shojo FIGHT!, a volleyball series that reads like Dynasty with knee pads.

I mean that as a compliment.

The first chapter briskly introduces us to the three principle members of the Hakuumzan Private Academy Middle School volleyball team: Neri, a talented but difficult personality who has trouble playing well with others (literally and figuratively); Koyuki, a telegenic setter who moonlights on the Junior National team; and Chiyo, a jealous teammate who slots into the Joan Collins role of Queen Bitch. As we learn in the opening pages, Neri’s temper frequently relegates her to the bench, even though her teammates firmly believe that she’s in a league of her own as both a setter and a hitter — a point that Chiyo lords over the emotionally vulnerable Koyuki. Koyuki, for her part, feels isolated from her teammates who say nice things to her face but trash her playing when she’s not around. Though Chiyo bluntly dismisses Neri as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Koyuki makes a concerted effort to befriend Neri, whom she views as a peer on the court.

The dynamic between these three players would be enough for an entire series, but Yoko Nihonbashi surrounds them with a boisterous cast of supporting characters who run the gamut from Odagiri, a shy Neri fangirl, to the Shikisama brothers, two gifted volleyball players who are, of course, handsome, sharp-witted, and fiercely loyal to their childhood friend… well, I’ll let you figure out that particular triangle on your own, though it’s not hard to guess who she is. While these figures are sketched more hastily than the principle trio, Nihonbashi offers tantalizing clues about how they will figure into the conflict between Neri and her teammates.

What will make or break this series for most readers is the art. As numerous folks have observed, Nihonbashi’s thick lines, wide-eyed characters, and computer-generated fills more closely conform to Americans’ perception of what OEL manga looks like — think Peach Fuzz or Van Von Hunter — than a licensed seinen or shojo title. I think that’s a valid observation, though it’s worth noting that Nihonbashi is a Japanese artist writing for Evening magazine, not a Tokyopop Rising Star of Manga. The boldness of Nihonbashi’s linework, and her dense but well structured layouts, aren’t the least bit amateurish or unpolished. If anything, they demonstrate a good understanding of game mechanics and a flair for drawing expressive, animated faces that telegraph the characters’ emotional states; the malicious twinkle in Chiyo’s eye speaks more loudly than her poisonous words — and that’s saying something.

My suggestion: try before you buy! The first 50 pages of Shojo FIGHT! can be viewed for free at the Kodansha Comics website. There’s enough drama packed into that opening chapter to hook any soap opera fan or sports enthusiast, and if the sudsy plotting isn’t enough to pique your interest, Neri will be: she’s prickly and complicated but appealing, not least because she seems like a real teenage athlete struggling to reconcile her desire to dominate the court with her desire to be part of the team.

The entire first volume goes on sale today (September 26th) via Amazon, B&N, ComiXology, and other digital book platforms.

After Hours and My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

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After Hours and My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness epitomize a small but growing trend in yuri manga licensing: both focus on women in their twenties exploring their sexuality, rather than depicting middle- or high-school aged girls crushing on each other.

After Hours is the more upbeat of the two, a sympathetic portrait of twenty-three-year-old Emi, a recent college graduate who’s just quit her job and is struggling to figure out what comes next. A chance encounter with Kei, a twenty-nine-year-old deejay, is a turning point in Emi’s young adult life: not only is she drawn to Kei’s confidence, she’s also intrigued by Kei’s passion for spinning records. As their connection deepens, Emi takes a more active role in supporting Kei’s career, joining Kei’s circle of friends and trying her hand at “veejaying,” selecting videos to complement Kei’s set lists.

One of the most striking aspects of After Hours is Yuhta Nishio’s sensitive depiction of Emi and Kei’s sexual encounters. He uses a handful of discrete signifiers — a pile of clothing on the floor, a tender embrace, a flirtatious post-coital chat — rather than explicit or provocative imagery. That’s a wise choice, I think, as it allows Nishio to portray Emi and Kei as grown women with healthy sexual urges without reducing them to sexualized objects. Nishio’s restrained approach also emphasizes the aspects of Emi and Kei’s bodily intimacy that foster a mutual sense of trust, familiarity, and affection — a dimension of sexual experience that’s often missing from straight romance manga.

Though the first chapters are largely uneventful, future volumes promise dramatic complications. Emi has yet to disclose her relationship to her friends or her not-quite-ex-boyfriend, with whom she’s still sharing an apartment. More interestingly, Emi hasn’t really thought about what it means to be in a relationship with another woman; she’s initially surprised by her attraction to Kei, but resists labeling those feelings as lesbian, bisexual, or queer, choosing instead to savor the sense of purpose and joy that being with Kei brings to her life. The ease with which Emi embraces her new love is a refreshing development, a quiet rebuttal of the idea that sexual orientation is absolute or easily defined.

By contrast, Nagata Kabi’s My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is a more complex story, a confessional comic documenting the author’s sexual awakening in her late twenties. Nagata narrates her odyssey with candor, acknowledging the degree to which mental illness dictated her adult life. She describes the bodily ravages of disordered eating — she vacillated between anoxeria and bulimia — and the emotional toll of disordered thinking, noting the degree to which both depression and body dysmorphia prevented her from holding down a job, maintaining friendships, or thinking about herself as a sexual person. She also ruminates on her chilly relationship with her parents, and her profound sense of shame in disappointing them by not becoming a “real” adult with a conventional office job.

After hitting rock bottom, Nagata realizes the degree to which she’s suppressed her sexuality. In an effort to reassert control over her life, Nagata decides to hire a female escort for her first sexual experience. Nagata documents this encounter in an almost clinical fashion, contrasting her feverish anticipation with her stiff, detached response to being touched. For all of her progress towards mental health and self-acceptance, she realizes that she cannot yet surrender to the bodily sensations of desire — a tension that remains unresolved at the end of her narrative, even though Nagata’s final panels suggest her sense of relief and pride for taking such a bold step.

That Nagata’s journey is more inspiring than depressing is a testament to her writing skills (and, I might add, Jocelyne Allen’s artfully wry translation). Though Nagata never shies away from describing uncomfortable thoughts or self-destructive behavior, she finds moments of grace and humor in even the darkest situations, especially as she begins to contemplate what it means to be a sexual person. In three sharp, economical panels, for example, she explores her profound discomfort with binary gender labels, even as she begins to recognize her sexual attraction to women:

It feels churlish to criticize such a personal work, and yet I found myself wishing that Nagata’s art felt more essential to the story she was telling. Writing for The Comics Journal, critic Katie Skelly voiced similar concerns, arguing that Nagata’s tendency to mix big blocks of text with cute drawings keeps the reader at arm’s length when Nagata discloses intimate, sometimes disturbing, details of her eating disorders and self-mutilation. “Nagata can’t find a suitable bridge to mend the gap between the story of her experience and aesthetic,” Skelly notes. “[H]er style can read as generic and her tone never quite finds its mark.” I admit to feeling the same way about Nagata’s work: I admired her raw honesty, but felt that My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness could have been a book, a movie, or a Moth Radio Hour segment just as easily as a comic; nothing about the way Nagata related her experiences felt like it was uniquely suited to manga, as her drawings were more illustrative of what she felt than genuinely revelatory about why she felt such profound self-loathing.

For all the things that go unsaid in My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, however, there’s much wisdom in Nagata’s story, especially for people struggling with what it means to be healthy, whole, and sexual. Nagata’s recovery is a testament to the human capacity for resilience, and her willingness to share her most vulnerable moments with strangers an act of genuine courage. Here’s hoping that she continues to document her journey of self-discovery.

VIZ Media provided a complimentary review copy of After Hours.

AFTER HOURS • STORY AND ART BY YUHTA NISHIO • TRANSLATION BY ABBY LEHRKE • 160 pp. • RATED TEEN+ (for older teens)

MY LESBIAN EXPERIENCE WITH LONELINESS • STORY AND ART BY NAGATA KABI • TRANSLATED BY JOCELYNE ALLEN • SEVEN SEAS • 152 pp. • RATED OT (for older teens)

Elegant Yokai Apartment Life, Vol. 1

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Elegant Yokai Apartment Life suffers from multiple personality disorder, lurching awkwardly from one situation to the next without comfortably settling into one storytelling mode long enough for the reader to decide if it’s a sitcom, a soap opera, or a horror show.

In fairness to creators Hinowa Kouzuki and Waka Miyama, few stories purely embody a single genre; the labels that the publishing and entertainment industries have coined — rom-com, dramedy — give ample proof that hybridization is a common strategy for enlivening familar plots. For such hybrid forms to work, however, the tonal shifts must be intrinsic to the story, arising naturally from the interactions between the characters and their environment. Elegant Yokai‘s narrative swerves, however, feel more like a desperate attempt to appeal to as many different constituencies as possible: there’s fanservice for guys (a female ghost who wears only panties and a well-placed towel) and girls (a hot onmyoji with a ponytail and a silver fox with an eye patch), yokai drawn from folklore and urban myth, a potential love interest for the hero, a raft of comic-relief characters who get brief turns in the spotlight, a subplot borrowed from a 1983 Afterschool Special, and tragic backstories for several characters just in case the idea of a “ghostly boarding house” doesn’t tickle your funny bone.

The most frustrating part of this narrative abundance is that so much of it feels… extra. Any one of these elements could be excised from the story without fundamentally changing the premise, making room for more character development. That point is crucial: Elegant Yokai‘s lead is less a person than a reader surrogate, walking from one situation to another in a state of mild befuddlement about his supernatural neighbors. Author Hinowa Kouzuki has saddled Inaba with motivations that explain how he ended up rooming with yokai, but hasn’t actually given him any discernible personality traits. Kouzuki and Miyama’s few attempts to flesh out Inaba’s character are clumsy and, frankly, illogical: what well-adjusted person marks his middle school graduation by fighting his BFF in an abandoned lot because he’s “always wanted to do that”? (Shouldn’t Inaba quote one of the rules of Fight Club or something?)

The artwork suffers from a similarly overdetermined quality. The human characters are less drawn than assembled from bits and pieces of other artists’ work — a dash of CLAMP here, a bit of Yuu Watase there — while the yokai have been shamelessly copied from Rumiko Takahashi and Hayao Miyazaki’s oeuvre. Making deliberate allusions to other artists’ work is, of course, a time-honored tradition, but here, these nods feel less like tribute and more like theft; readers tempted to compare Miyama’s art with Miyazaki’s are bound to find hers a poor substitute.

It’s only in the final chapter of volume one that we get a glimpse of what Elegant Yokai might have been. The story trains the spotlight on Inaba’s fellow apartment dwellers Kuga and Shiro, a boy and his dog who were murdered by Kuga’s mother. Once a month, Kuga’s mother — also a ghost — shows up at the apartment building to reclaim her son. Over time, however, her human form has deteriorated and memories have faded, reducing her to a pitiful demonic state, more scribble monster than angry wraith. The frankness with which Kouzuki and Miyama depict her crime prevents these scenes from descending into bathos; these moments are the only ones that elicit an authentic emotional response from the reader, not least because Kuga and Shiro’s predicament has a demonstrable effect on the other characters. Too bad the rest of volume one is such a frantic, disjointed mess.

ELEGANT YOKAI APARTMENT LIFE, VOL. 1 • STORY BY HINOWA KOUZUKI, ART BY WAKA MIYAMA • TRANSLATED BY ADAM HIRSCH • 206 pp. • RATED T (13+)

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Vols. 1-2

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Can someone who’s never played a Legend of Zelda video game still enjoy the manga adaptations? That’s the question I set out to answer by reading the first two volumes of the Twilight Princess saga.

The short answer to the question is a qualified yes — if by “enjoy” you mean, “get a handle on what’s happening.” Akira Himekawa, a pseudonym for the two-woman team of A. Honda and S. Nagano, pack a considerable amount of exposition into the first two chapters, making it easy for the uninitiated to grasp the premise. Honda and Nagano also use these introductory pages to introduce us to the residents of Ordon Village — the hero’s home — treating us to idyllic scenes of farmers tending their crops, shepherds minding their flocks, and barefoot children cavorting. Though these tableaux are as cornpone as anything John Ford ever committed to screen, they’re rendered in a crisp, readable style that helps the reader understand what’s at stake if Link fails in his quest to restore the balance between light and darkness.

But if you equate “enjoyment” with “feeling a spark of pleasure or surprise while reading,” then the answer to my initial question is a resounding no. There’s a labored quality to the storytelling that prevents Twilight Princess from coming alive on the page; Honda and Nagano try too hard to nail down every narrative detail, producing a story that often reads more like an overly scripted PowerPoint presentation on Twilight Princess than an organic work of fiction. In the first volume, for example, we’re introduced to the obviously pregnant wife of an important supporting character. Just a few pages later, however, another villager helpfully mentions that Uli’s wife is… pregnant. A similar round of no-shit statements accompany Link’s volume two transformation into a wolf, a development that prompts Link — and other characters — to repeatedly observe that he’s no longer human; you could play a decent drinking game by taking a swig of whiskey whenever someone registered surprise at Link’s lupine form. At least he looks cool.

The plot developments are equally obvious. As soon as Honda and Nagano introduced a tremulous teenage girl and her snot-faced little brother, for example, I knew it was only a matter of 30-40 pages before they’d be snatched, giving Link a compelling reason to enter the Twilight Realm. This predictable turn of events wouldn’t be frustrating if we cared about Ilia and Colin’s fate, but they’re such generic characters that they never transcend their function as plot devices. Even the combat feels more like a sprinkling of “adult spice” than a real attempt to tell a darker or more complex story; Twilight Princess is so devoid of ambiguity or suspense that even the most intense, violent sequences seem largely inconsequential.

The blandness of the manga’s execution prompts me to ask a second question: who is Twilight Princess for? Book sales indicate that there’s a large audience of Zelda fanatics who are enjoying this series, so my guess is that the manga appeals to players’ nostalgia for the original games. For the rest of us, however, Twilight Princess is neither interesting nor imaginative enough to compete with One Piece, Naruto, Fairy Tail, or Fullmetal Alchemist on its own terms, nor does it offer any clues why the Zelda games have been a global, thirty-year phenomenon that’s captivated two generations of gamers.

VIZ provided a review copy of volume two.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TWILIGHT PRINCESS, VOLS. 1-2 • BY AKIRA HIMEKAWA • TRANSLATED BY JOHN WERRY • RATED T, FOR TEEN

That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime, Vol. 1

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I’m a sucker for a great title, a tendency that’s yielded a bumper crop of disappointments through the years; I still haven’t purged the memory of a Screaming Broccoli album I purchased in 1988, or the 90 minutes I spent watching So I Married an Axe Murderer. I’m pleased to report That Time I Got Reincarnated As a Slime proved a better gamble than punk-rock vegetables, offering enough solid jokes and weird plot developments to sustain this reader’s interest. What surprised me the most about Reincarnated, however, wasn’t the premise — that’s clearly advertised in the title — nor the hero’s appearance — again, see title — but the story’s fundamentally optimistic message: there are always second chances in life.

The first chapter introduces us to Mikami, a 37-year-old virgin trapped in a lousy job. On a fateful afternoon, he impulsively saves a junior colleague from a knife-wielding attacker, an act of heroism that costs Mikami his life — as a human being, at least — and leads to his reincarnation in a fantasy realm that looks remarkably like World of Warcraft, Game of Thrones, and a hundred MMORPGs. Guided by an unseen dungeon master, Mikami reinvents himself as Rimuru, a slime monster who absorbs his enemies’ powers by eating them — a trick that quickly enables Rimuru to do remarkable things from healing the wounded to spinning thread.

What’s more remarkable about Rimuru is that he immediately puts his powers to work — for other people. (Well, monsters, really.) In chapter two, for example, he teaches a community of goblins how to defend themselves against a numerically superior opponent, helping them build sophisticated fortifications that repel a snarling pack of direwolves. (Paging George R.R. Martin!) Rimuru also bestows names on each member of the tribe, an act that transforms the once small and homely goblins into strapping specimens. That would be a good joke in and of itself, but it lands with greater impact because Rimuru’s act of generosity is consistent with what we saw of his human self, both in the prologue and in a brief flashback to his interactions with colleagues.

And speaking of jokes, Stephen Paul’s crisp translation plays an instrumental role in bridging the gap between the original novels and their manga adaptation by creating a distinctive, sardonic voice for Rimuru that situates him somewhere between audience surrogate and hero. The tone of Rimuru’s monologues captures the mixture of enthusiasm, wonder, and bewilderment with which he approaches new situations, great and small. After bestowing the names Gobta, Gobchi, Gobstu, Gobte, and Gobto on a family of goblins, for example, Rimuru heads off criticism from the reader by declaring, “I didn’t claim I was some kind of naming virtuoso!”, while a fortune teller’s romantic predictions prompt him to ask the same questions we’re thinking: “Do slimes even have genders? How do they multiply? Cell division?”

What Paul’s translation can’t do is goose the pacing. Manga-kaTaiki Kawakami makes a game effort to handle the first volume’s exposition as efficiently as possible, which results in many static panels of Rimuru learning the rules of play from the unseen dungeon master. Though the dialogue is punchy, the story unfolds in fits and starts, seesawing between short, intense bursts of action and leisurely scenes of Rimuru chatting with other characters, pondering one of his new-found abilities, or describing something that happened off camera. These info-dump passages are all the more tedious because Rimuru lacks the limbs, eyes, or mouth to adequately register surprise or awe at what he learns; what features he has — two pencil-line eyebrows — are frozen in a perma-scowl.

The other disappointing element of the manga adaptation is the paucity of female characters in volume one, a problem that series creator Fuse cheerfully acknowledges. “It’s quite possible not to have a heroine in a traditional sense,” he opines in the manga’s epilogue, “but not having any female characters whatsoever is a problem. There’s no beauty in the manga.” Kawakami’s strategy for addressing this issue is not to introduce an important character a little sooner than she appeared in the novels, or expand one of the minor female characters into a more essential figure, but to pile on the fan service by turning any gathering of female characters into a harem scene; I’m still scrubbing my eyeballs after reading a chapter in which an attractive elfling uses Rimuru as a boob shelf. (Worse still: someone cracks wise about E.I.L.F.s, a quip that wouldn’t have been funny in 2003, let alone 2017.)

For all its flaws, however, Reincarnated has its heart in the right place, using Rimuru’s adventures to demonstrate that it’s possible to make the most of any situation, no matter how improbable or unpromising it may seem at the outset. Better still, Reincarnated imparts its moral with tongue firmly in cheek, never lapsing into sappy earnestness about doing one’s best, or sacrificing yourself for the greater good. Of course, we haven’t seen what will happen if and when Rimuru stumbles into a second chance at romance, though volume one offers a few tantalizing clues about a future love interest. Here’s hoping that Rimuru begins his second — and potentially more terrifying — journey of romantic self-discovery without losing his wit or his wits.

THAT TIME I GOT REINCARNATED AS A SLIME, VOL. 1 • CREATED BY FUSE • MANGA BY TAIKI KAWAKAMI • CHARACTER DESIGNS BY MITZ VAH • TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN PAUL • KODANSHA COMICS • RATED: TEEN (13+) • 240 pp.

Melody of Iron

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Osamu Teuka hit rock bottom in 1973. Mushi Production, the animation studio he’d launched to great fanfare in 1961, had just declared bankruptcy. Although Tezuka had parted ways with Mushi in 1968, he was still linked to his old company in the public imagination — Mushi was, after all, the studio that had introduced Tetsuwan Atom to television viewers around the globe, and made Kimba the White Lion a household figure in Japan. Tezuka also faced a creative crisis: his work was out of step with emerging trends in what he called “young adult manga,” a point he plaintively addressed in the afterword to the 1974 short story collection Melody of Iron:

The media was whispering that I’d hit my wall… With a broken heart, but also rebellious determination, I blindly tackled magazine jobs …These are examples of my Young Adult Manga write during times when I was mentally hungry. There were many more. Ranging from pieces that were too dark and hopeless, to really harsh pieces that, in today’s day and age, would immediately receive protest from all sorts of organizations. All of my pieces then had really emotionless themes and I don’t remember enjoying writing most of them.

Manga publishers agreed with Tezuka’s glum self-assessment. In 1973, Weekly Shonen Champion offered Tezuka an opportunity to write a limited five-week series with the implicit assumption that Tezuka was publishing his final work. That series turned out to be the opening salvo in a new stage of Tezuka’s career, however, as Black Jack became one of Tezuka’s best-known, best-loved titles, a mixture of bold, expressive cartooning, crazy plot lines, and gut-punch endings all held together by one of the most memorable characters Tezuka ever created.

Not all of Tezuka’s work from the 1970s walks this melodramatic tightrope as effectively as Black Jack, a point underscored by Melody of Iron. The title story, for example, is a three-act mish-mash of gangster movie cliches and seventies pseudo-science. In the first act, a young man runs afoul of the mafia, ratting out one their assassins in court; as punishment, the Albanis cut off his arms and leave him to die. In the second act, Dan holes up in a mad scientist’s laboratory where he learns to use a set of psychokinetic prosthetic arms. And in the final act, Dan’s ability to harness PK proves a mixed blessing when the arms exact revenge against the Albanis… without him.

The finale exemplifies what’s good and bad about Tezuka’s crank-it-to-eleven approach. On the one hand, Tezuka has the cartooning chops to make the arms look sufficiently animated, a necessary condition for selling us on his Stephen King-meets-Mario Puzo concept. On the other hand, Tezuka’s own distinctive style works against the potential horror of the killer limbs; the arms aren’t menacing enough to be a convincing embodiment of Dan’s fierce anger, looking more like the Tin Man’s costume than instruments of death. The arms’ efficacy is further neutered by the staging of their grand murder spree, a string of over-the-top deaths that re-enact Dan’s initial humiliation in the most baldly literal fashion: look, Ma, no arms!

The story also stumbles in its efforts to depict American racial dynamics. Shortly after Dan’s bloody encounter with the Albani’s goons, for example, a mob of African American teenagers harasses Dan, pelting him with stones and mocking him for his missing arms. The way these characters are rendered — with thick lips and maliciously gleeful expressions — creates a profoundly uncomfortable moment for the modern Western reader, resurrecting the visual iconography of minstrel shows to dehumanize these unnamed teens. Dan is rescued by Birdie, a black Vietnam vet who counsels Dan to abandon his murderous plans. Birdie looks more recognizably human than the rock-throwing teens, but he’s more a construct than a character, a noble voice of reason whose primary purpose is to advance the plot by introducing Dan to the mad Dr. Macintosh.

The third strike against “Melody” — and, by extension, the entire anthology — is that the edgier content feels like a self-conscious effort to dress up the material in adult themes, rather than a vehicle for exploring the darker corners of the human psyche. This problem is most pronounced in “Revolution,” a short story about Yasue, a housewife who wakes up from a coma convinced that she’s a young radical named Minako Hotta. In an effort to prove to her husband that she is, in fact, Minako, Yasue describes Minako’s sexual encounters with a wounded revolutionary, explaining how Minako’s tender ministrations brought him back from death’s door. We’re clearly supposed to sympathize with Yasue’s husband — he’s disgusted by Yasue’s “memory” — but his boorish, violent behavior in previous scenes makes it hard for the reader to sympathize with his predicament. Worse still, Minako’s sacrifices are presented as a sign of her dedication to the cause, a notion so risible it seems more like a lame joke from Woody Allen’s Bananas than a credible character motivation.

As with Tezuka’s other work from the period, the principal characters in Melody of Iron are generically attractive types whose personalities emerge primarily through what they say, while the supporting cast members are vividly drawn caricatures whose personalities are established through how they look. Such visual shortcuts are a standard manga technique, of course, but in Tezuka’s hands these aesthetic decisions are effective since they’re rendered with flair and specificity; you know exactly what kind of person Dr. Macintosh is from the shape of his nose, the tousle of his hair, and the hunch of his shoulders. Tezuka also scatters a few Easter eggs through the collection, including a sequence modeled on The Godfather‘s iconic wedding scene, and a panel depicting Broadway’s signature jumble of lights and signs; look closely and you’ll see the names of several Tezuka titles gracing the marquees.

For all the flashes of imagination in Melody of Iron, however, Tezuka was onto something when he characterized his “young adult” stories as “less approachable” than his other work from the early 1970s. Even the most over-the-top scenes feel a little labored and dour, lacking the visual exuberance or emotional oomph that makes “Dingoes” and “Teratoid Cystoma” such memorable entries in the Black Jack canon. Readers looking for an introduction to Tezuka’s late work may find Melody of Iron a good point of entry, but anyone with dog-eared copies of Black Jack or Ode to Kirihito may be underwhelmed by this more workmanlike collection.

THE MELODY OF IRON • BY OSAMU TEZUKA • TRANSLATED BY ADAM SECORD • DIGITAL MANGA, INC. • RATED YOUNG ADULT (16+) FOR VIOLENCE AND SEXUAL CONTENT • 214 pp.

Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler, Vol. 1

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Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler resists easy labels, combining elements of a tournament manga, high school drama, and instructional comic. The plot focuses on Yumeko Jabami, a wealthy girl who transfers to Hyakkaou Private Academy, one of those only-in-manga institutions where the curriculum emphasizes poker and roulette instead of reading and writing. Although Jabami seems demure, her pleasant demeanor turns to maniacal resolve at the first mention of gambling. Within hours of arriving at Hyakkaou, she’s engaged in a high-stakes game of rock, paper, scissors with another student, betting ¥10,000,000 on the outcome. (When in Rome, I guess?)

To make the contest more exciting, author Homura Kawamoto adds a few novel rules, transforming a simple set of challenges into a complex game of chance involving cards, ballot boxes, and voting. He also raises the dramatic stakes by initially portraying Jabami as impulsive — even foolish — in her decision to stake ¥500,000 on a single face-off. By the end of the game, however, we realize just how cunning and observant Jabami really is, as she not only triumphs over her snotty opponent Saotome, but does so by figuring out how Saotome was cheating and using that information against her.

What really puts this chapter over the top is the artwork. Toru Naomura stages the contest like an extreme sporting event, using her entire bag of tricks to convey the contestants’ intense effort — sweatdrops, speedlines, split screens, sound effects — and mimicking the kind of camera work that ESPN trots out for the X Games. The fluid, inventive layouts are also key to making these betting matches come to life, artfully illustrating the rules of play without too much speechifying; even the most inexperienced Go Fish player could follow the game and calculate Jabami’s odds of winning. Naomura’s most effective gambit, however, is the way she draws Jabami’s face. When Jabami is playing her cards close to the vest, her eyes resemble dark, placid pools, but when she’s trouncing the competition, her eyes go supernova, turning into a set of concentric, fiery rings that mimic the line work in Saul Bass’ iconic Vertigo poster:

For all the swagger with which Jabami’s first match is staged, it’s clear that Kawamoto is more interested in the mechanics of gameplay than in the development of three-dimensional characters or the introduction of new plot twists. Each of the subsequent chapters follows the same basic pattern as the first, with Jabami besting her opponent after blowing the whistle on her for cheating. Then there’s the fanservice: Naomura never misses an opportunity to draw an extreme mammary close-up or a glimpse of underwear. And ugly underwear, I might add; Naomura’s artwork is solid, but her application of plaid screentone is so clumsy that it screams MacPaint.

Despite these shortcomings, volume one of Kakegurui is a fun, trashy read that has the good graces not to take itself too seriously. I’m not sure if the premise is strong enough to sustain my interest for more than a few volumes, as the series’ cast of schemers, cheaters, and sadists seem doomed to repeat the same patterns of behavior from chapter to chapter. I put my odds of continuing with Kakegurui at 3 to 1, but other readers may find the psychological combat between Jabami and her opponents enough to persevere through seven or ten installments.

KAKEGURUI: COMPULSIVE GAMBLER, VOL. 1 • STORY BY HOMURA KAWAMOTO, ART BY TORU NAOMURA • TRANSLATED BY MATTHEW ALBERTS • YEN PRESS • 240 pp. • RATING: OT, FOR OLDER TEENS (16+)

Ravina the Witch?

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Cute characters behaving badly — that’s been Junko Mizuno’s MO since her professional debut twenty years ago. Her latest work, Ravina the Witch?, is more picture book than manga, eschewing panels and word balloons for glossy, full-color illustrations, but the story it tells is pure Mizuno: a young woman meets a witch, inherits her wand, and then wanders the countryside meeting depraved men whose hobbies run the gamut from S&M to binge-drinking.

There’s a little more to the story, of course, since Mizuno loves to embroider a simple narrative with odd details. Ravina, we learn, was raised by crows in a junkyard, impervious to human custom and language. Once exiled from her home — by eminent domain, no less! — Ravina uses her new-found powers to cure disease, embarrass a cruel tyrant, and make mushrooms dance. She also finds time to work as a dominatrix and do crossword puzzles with an enormous owl. Oh, and she’s almost burned at the stake for being a witch.

As the plot suggests, Ravina sits somewhere between fractured fairytale and feminist rumination. Mizuno clearly recognizes the way in which female healers are viewed as both powerful and subversive; why else flirt with the idea that Ravina might be a witch, the quintessential symbol of dangerous femininity? Yet Mizuno’s obsession with food complicates any understanding of Ravina as a feminist text. In almost all of her works, from Pure Trance to Ravina the Witch?, Mizuno’s female characters binge, purge, and pop diet pills with ferocious abandon. Mizuno plays these scenes for uncomfortable laughs, blurring the line between criticism of the characters’ self-destructive behavior and critique of the cultural attitudes that fuel it. Ravina, for example, doesn’t just eat a meal; she gorges herself on animals, pies, and bottles of wine, with Cabernet-stained drool seeping down her chin. It’s not clear if Mizuno is showing us how the other characters see Ravina — as a repulsive, unstoppable force of nature — or if Mizuno is celebrating Ravina’s obvious pleasure in eating, defying social expectations that she be restrained, demure, or self-abnegating — in short, refusing to be lady-like in the presence of food.

The ambiguity of these binge-eating scenes stems, in part, from Mizuno’s trademark Gothic kawaii style, which subverts the true horror of what’s she depicting; even the most ruthless characters have soft, round faces that belie their rotten natures. (Heck, her maggots are cute.) Her illustrations are framed by a pleasing assortment of pastel doodles, with flowers, ravens, curlicues, and smiley-faced cabbages filling the nooks and crannies of every page. Although Mizuno is no stranger to full-color comics — all three of her VIZ titles are printed in color — Ravina is printed on glossy paper stock that enables Mizuno to exploit the natural shine and texture of metallic paints to striking effect, mitigating the flatness of her character designs and backgrounds with tactile accents.

Though Ravina the Witch? feels like a step forward for Mizuno’s artistry, story-wise it reads more like a remix of Cinderalla and Princess Mermaid. There’s nothing wrong with mining the same vein of inspiration to produce new works, but when your storytelling approach is this mannered, there are only so many times you can rehearse the same schtick before it feels tired. I’m not sure where Mizuno goes from here, but a gonzo sci-fi adventure, a crime procedural, or even a high-school comedy might give her fresh opportunities to stretch herself without rehashing the same Grimm plotline.

RAVINA THE WITCH? • BY JUNKO MIZUNO • TITAN COMICS • NO RATING (MATURE THEMES) • 48 pp.

Land of the Lustrous, Vol. 1

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Land of the Lustrous is a gorgeous trainwreck, the kind of manga that doesn’t make sense on a panel-by-panel basis, but ravishes you with artwork so beautiful and strange it’s hard to look away.

I’ll be honest: I read the first volume three times, and found it almost impenetrable. As best I could tell, Land of the Lustrous depicts an interplanetary war between two races: the Gems, whose androgynous, humanoid appearance belies their true, rock-like nature, and the Lunarians, who frequently raid Earth, hoping to capture Gems for decorative purposes. (What kind of decorations remains a mystery; my vote is for bedazzled jeans and hoodies.) Since there are only 28 Gems, they’ve organized themselves into “fighter-medic” pairs to defend Earth from the Lunarians. One Gem — Phosphophyllite, who registers only 3.5 on the Mohs scale — is too weak to perform either task, so the group’s leader pronounces Phos their official naturalist, and tasks Phos with writing a history of Earth.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Land of the Lustrous was a satire on the dissertation-writing process, given how much time Phos spends procrastinating and grumbling about the book, but these scenes are interspersed with awkward flirtations, violent combat, and a brief episode in which Phos turns into a cute, sentient space slug. These abrupt shifts in tone frustrate the reader’s ability to get a handle on what, if anything, Land of the Lustrous is trying to say — a problem compounded by the dialogue, which is sometimes so windy that it’s a drag on the story, and sometimes so burdened with exposition that it barely passes for conversation.

When the characters stop talking and start doing things, however, Land of the Lustrous is a show-stopper, a testament to the richness of Haruko Ichikawa’s imagination. The Lunarians’ first appearance, for example, establishes them as an inscrutable menace. Their soldiers glide silently above the ground, led by an enormous, stone-faced Bodhissattva who’s flanked by undulating lines of archers with bows drawn, their arms and arrows criss-crossing the horizon to form a graceful lattice. (Busby Berkeley would have approved of the Lunarians’ formation.)

What happens next is even more astonishing:

In this sequence, a Gem slices through the general’s head, only to reveal a lotus pod filled with lethal “seeds” — a beautiful but unsettling moment reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley’s work in its commingling of the sensual and the grotesque; we’re not certain if the Lunarians are animal, vegetable, or mineral. Making this sequence even more disorienting is the dramatic shift in perspective: we see the impending attack from the general’s point of view, then shift to the attackers’ for the moment of contact and its aftermath. The eerie stillness of the final two panels reveals the extent to which the Lunarian general’s transformation has confounded the Gems, who are transfixed by the viscous flow of blood — or is that sap? — from his head.

Looking at these images, I wonder what a more assertive editor might have done to reign in Ichikawa’s worst storytelling tendencies: would the tone and pacing have been more even? The world-building more coherent? The dialogue more revelatory? In the absence of such editorial interventions, however, the most original aspects of Ichikawa’s work sink beneath a torrent of banal conversation and stale comic bits that pass for character development. A few moments of unnerving imagery interrupt the tedium long enough to make an impression on the reader, but are too brief and scattered to yield a truly satisfying experience.

LAND OF THE LUSTROUS, VOL. 1 • BY HARUKO ICHIKAWA • TRANSLATED BY ALETHEA AND ATHENA NIBLEY • KODANSHA COMICS • RATED: TEEN (13+) • 192 pp.

The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up: A Magical Story

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First published in 2011, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing became an international phenomenon, selling over seven million copies in 40 languages. The book inspired a two-part television drama, a follow-up called Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Tidying Up, and a veritable tsunami of related products and experiences including apps, seminars, and journals for documenting “what brings you joy every day.” In an effort to bring her message to even more readers, Kondo recently collaborated with artist Yuko Uramoto (Kanojo no Curve, Hanayome Miman) to create the most quintessentially Japanese tie-in product of all: a manga version of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

Uramoto’s strategy for transforming a how-to book into a manga is simple: she turns the decluttering process into a narrative, using a fictional character, Chiaki, to lead us through the process step-by-step. When we first meet Chiaki, she’s a single, 29-year-old career woman living in a filthy apartment strewn with clothing, papers, sports equipment, dirty dishes, and bric-a-brac of every description. After her handsome next-door neighbor chastises her for leaving garbage on the balcony, Chiaki vows to change her life by calling — who else? — Marie Kondo herself.

Over the next nine chapters, Kondo gently but firmly helps Chiaki get control of her apartment. Before they tackle the clutter, however, Kondo asks Chiaki, “What kind of life would you like to live here?” Chiaki is taken aback by the question, but this visualization exercise is a cornerstone of the KonMari system, encouraging the client to think about decluttering not as a one-time effort but a first step towards living a more joyful, less harried life. Kondo then shepherds Chiaki through the discard process, helping Chiaki systematically assess all of her belongings, starting with the three biggest sources of clutter — clothing, books, and paper — before moving on to komono (odds and ends) and sentimental objects. Guiding all of Chiaki’s decision-making are two questions: “Does this item give me joy?” and “Am I using this item right now?”

As an adaptation, The Life-Changing Manga largely succeeds in teaching the KonMari method without recourse to talking-head panels. The graphic format allows Uramoto to show the reader how to store things, arrange a closet, and fold items into small rectangles that can stand upright in a drawer — one of Kondo’s signature organizational techniques. As befits a manga about decluttering, the artwork is both simple and cute. Though the character designs lack strong personality, they’re winsome enough to carry to the story and convey the emotional impact of using the KonMari method; by the story’s end, we appreciate just how elated Chiaki feels after liberating herself from the Tyranny of Stuff.

The manga’s most glaring fault lies not with the adaptation but the source material. Kondo frames de-cluttering as a one-size-fits-all remedy for life’s biggest problems, a point reinforced by the fictional Kondo’s conversations with Chiaki. As we learn in chapter two, Chiaki has a bad habit of falling for guys with hobbies, buying snowboards and tea sets so that she can get to know them better. Every time she breaks up with someone, however, she can’t bear to get rid of her newly acquired gear, developing elaborate rationales for keeping it. Kondo counsels Chiaki to get rid of these items, telling her, “If you hang onto things because you can’t forget an old love, you’ll never find a new love.”

There’s unquestionable value in Kondo’s insight that clutter accumulates when we’re not fully invested in the present, yet her philosophy is too reductive. A messy apartment might be a sign that you need to reconsider your approach to dating, but it could also be symptomatic of working such long hours that cleaning and organizing feel like a second, unpaid job. There’s also a whiff of sexism in the way Chiaki is depicted as a failure for being disorganized, messy, and single; it’s hard to imagine a salaryman character attributing his romantic shortcomings to a sinkful of dirty coffee cups or a jumbled closet, or viewing the KonMari method as the key to living a better, more fulfilling life.

That lingering note of sexism makes it hard for me to unequivocally endorse The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up. I think Kondo’s basic advice is sound, but I can’t quite shake the feeling that perfectly folded undies are being held up as a badge of true womanhood, rather than an artful way to organize your drawers.

THE LIFE-CHANGING MANGA OF TIDYING UP: A MAGICAL STORY • BY MARIE KONDO, ILLUSTRATED BY YUKO URAMOTO • TRANSLATED BY CATHY HIRANO • TEN SPEED PRESS • NO RATING • 192 pp.

Master Keaton, Vol. 11

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If you’re a connoisseur of British crime procedurals, you’ve undoubtedly watched Midsomer Murders, England’s answer to Murder, She Wrote. It isn’t the edgiest or smartest mystery series on television, but it is among the most consistently enjoyable, delivering a satisfying answer to the question, “Whodunnit?” at the end of every episode. Much of the series’ appeal lies with its formula: someone commits a ghastly murder, prompting DCI Barnaby to scrutinize the crime scene, interrogate reluctant witnesses, and suss out hidden clues before assembling the suspects to reveal the killer’s identity and motives. This formula is flexible enough to offer a new murder scenario every week, yet predictable enough to reassure viewers that there’s a payoff for keeping track of the subplots and false leads that frustrate Barnaby’s efforts to solve the mystery.

Master Keaton — a joint effort by Hokusai Katsushika and Naoki Urasawa — offers the same kind of experience in manga form. Every volume features an assortment of mysteries, all solved by the brilliant investigator Taichi Hiraga Keaton. (In an original touch, Keaton works for an insurance agency, though he frequently moonlights as a private eye.) Though the stories’ denouements occasionally veer into Scooby Doo territory — more on that later — Katsushika and Urasawa have a knack for spinning a good yarn, whether the story involves lost Nazi gold or a conscience-stricken assassin.

One key to Katsushika and Urasawa’s success is that they carefully adhere to the same basic rules as Midsomer Murders, setting each mystery in a community where resentments fester, secrets abound, and strong personalities clash. Katsushika and Urasawa put a fresh spin on this storytelling technique by choosing a new locale for each story, rather than limiting the action to a fictional English county, a la Midsomer. In volume eleven, for example, Keaton flits from East Germany to the Scottish highlands to a haunted London mansion. As disparate as these settings may be, each is as much “a cauldron” or “microcosm” as a country village — to borrow a phrase from Midsomer creator Anthony Horowitz — thus creating the right setting “for something unpleasant — a murder, for example — to take place.”

Consider “The Lost Genius Director,” one of the shortest, most tightly plotted stories in volume 11. In just two pages, Katsushika and Urasawa create a virtual “village” populated with vivid characters: a perfectionist director, his devoted wife, a vain leading man, and a nervous producer who’s caught between the director’s vision and the bottom line. All of these characters are living and working in close proximity on the set, clashing over the director’s insistence that the cast re-shoot several key scenes. When the director is found dangling from a noose, Keaton discovers a video of the victim’s final moments, a video that first implicates, then exonerates, the most obvious suspect. This narrative feint makes the actual “reveal” more satisfying, as we come away from the story feeling as if we were just a step or two behind Keaton in solving the crime.

The few stories that falter do so because Katsushika and Urasawa violate this second unspoken rule of whodunnits. In “Love from the Otherworld” and “Lost Beyond the Wall,” the endings feel arbitrary; there simply aren’t enough clues to justify the outcome of the story. The problem is especially acute in “Otherworld,” a supernatural mystery that plays out like a classic Scooby Doo episode: a book publisher hires Keaton to investigate a ghost who’s been roaming the halls of his mansion. Though it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to realize that one of the household members is, in fact, “the ghost,” the story is so compressed that we don’t learn enough about the characters to independently arrive at the same conclusion as Keaton. More frustrating still, the denouement is handled in such a bald, clumsy fashion that the culprit all but declares, “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids and that darn dog!”

It’s easy to overlook the few clunkers, however, as Katsushika and Urasawa clearly have a deep love for the mystery genre. Nowhere is that more evident in “Return of the Super Sleuth?!” and “Pact on Ben-Tan Mountain,” two stories that knowingly borrow elements from Rear Window and Strangers on a Train. Both stories honor the spirit of the source material, preserving the most important details while finding new and surprising ways to resolve these famous plotlines. Equally important, Katsushika and Urasawa don’t take any narrative shortcuts on the way to revealing whodunnit, granting the reader the same delicious sense of closure characteristic of Midsomer Murders — or, I might add, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Recommended.

A review copy was provided by VIZ Media.

MASTER KEATON, VOL. 11 • STORY BY HOKUSAI KATSUSHIKA AND NAOKI URASAWA, ART BY NAOKI URASAWA • TRANSLATED BY JOHN WERRY • VIZ MEDIA • RATING: TEEN+ (OLDER TEENS) • 318 pp.

Golden Kamuy, Vol. 1

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If you have a strong constitution and a healthy appetite for adventure, you’ll cotton to Golden Kamuy, a solid, if sometimes workmanlike, manga that reads like a mash-up of The Revenant and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Set on the Hokkaido frontier in 1905, Golden Kamuy tells the story of Saichi “Immortal” Sugimoto, a battle-scarred veteran of the Russo-Japanese War who’s desperately trying to raise money for a fallen comrade’s widow. After a chance encounter with a chatty ex-con, Sugimoto learns about a hidden treasure worth millions. Sugimoto then sets off to find the gold — no mean feat, as the map pinpointing its location has been tattooed onto the backs of a dozen prisoners, each with his own design on the loot.

Sugimoto faces another major obstacle to success: the harsh Hokkaido winter. A second fortuitous meeting — this time with an Ainu teenager — furnishes Sugimoto with a expert guide to wilderness survival. Like Sugimoto, Asirpa is searching for the treasure, albeit for a different reason: the men in her village died to prevent it from falling into Japanese hands. Though Asirpa slots into the common and often stereotyped role of “native sidekick,” she’s not just a repository of useful skills and earthy wisdom; she’s an individual with the courage to challenge Sugimoto when his determination shades into ruthlessness, and the tenacity to fight her way out of difficult situations by improvising traps, creating smokescreens, and throwing punches. Oh, and she brings down a hungry bear with a single well-placed arrow. She’s a baller, and one of the best reasons to read Golden Kamuy.

As skillful as Noda may be in establishing his setting and characters, the script suffers from frequent — if brief — patches of clumsy dialogue and narration. One of the most egregious examples occurs in chapter four, when Sugimoto goes mano-a-mano with another soldier. The artwork makes it plain that Sugimoto’s opponent gets the best of him by grabbing and disabling his rifle, but Noda interrupts the scene to inform us, “The moment they moved away from each other, the man depressed the bolt stop and pulled out the bolt, rendering Sugimoto’s rifle useless.” Such intrusions are all the more puzzling because Noda’s draftsmanship is crisp, stylish, and easy to parse; even when Noda indulges in an extreme close-up or odd camera angle, we’re never in doubt about what’s happening.

Speaking of Noda’s artwork, he draws guts, wounds, and scars with a surgeon’s precision, offering a nightmarish vision of bodies torn apart by bullets — and bears. Though a few sequences skirt the line between dramatic necessity and cinematic flourish, these horrific images play an essential role in conveying the brutality of frontier experience and the horrors of trench warfare. Anything tamer would rob the story of its urgency, and reduce Sugimoto to a simple opportunist, rather than a fierce survivor who’s cheated death dozens of times.

So if you can soldier past the tin-eared dialogue and frequent arterial spray, you’ll be rewarded with a briskly paced thriller that transports you to another time and place, capturing the Hokkaido wilderness in all its squalor, beauty, and promise. Recommended.

A copy of volume one was provided by the publisher. Golden Kamuy will be available on June 20, 2017.

GOLDEN KAMUY, VOL. 1 • ART AND STORY BY SATORU NODA • TRANSLATION BY EIJI YASUDA • VIZ MEDIA • RATING: M FOR MATURE (FOR READERS 18+) • 192 pp.

Girls’ Last Tour, Vol. 1

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Was Tsukumizu an architect in a previous life? That question lingered with me as I read volume one of Girls’ Last Tour, a sci-fi manga that unfolds in a not-too-distant future filled with crumbling infrastructure and empty cities. Tsukumizu details the physical environment with precision, from sagging girders and abandoned cranes to pockmarked skyscrapers, broken trestles, and rusting water tanks. The sense of loss is palpable on every page, whether the principal characters are surveying an airplane “graveyard” filled with rusting turboprops, or searching for safe passage through a partially flooded city. Though we don’t learn what caused the devastation, Tsukumizu’s vivid illustrations suggest that the world we’re seeing was torn apart by violence.

If only the characters were rendered with such specificity! Yuuri and Chito — the “girls” of the title — are opposites: Yuuri is the brawn, Chito the brain. Both are so focused on their own survival that we have little sense of who they were before the apocalypse, or what brought them together. That in itself isn’t a fatal flaw; Robert Redford’s character in All Is Lost, for example, had no obvious backstory to explain why he was sailing by himself, or who might miss him if he drowned at sea. Yet the movie was compelling, as Redford’s character was painfully aware of his own vulnerability, and the unlikeliness of being rescued. In Girls’ Last Tour, by contrast, the dramatic stakes are low; many chapters revolve around simple activities — jerry building a hot tub, finding a place to sleep — that don’t reveal much about either girl’s personality, or the dangers they face.

The one exception is a story arc spanning chapters six, seven, and eight, in which Yuuri and Chito meet a cartographer who’s been diligently mapping an unnamed city. When an accident scatters Kanazawa’s maps to the wind, his anguish at their loss generates a visceral jolt of emotion. “I may as well fall with them,” he declares, a statement that Chito and Yuuri forcefully reject before dragging Kanazawa to safety atop a tower. As they peer out over the city, their bodies dwarfed by sky and buildings, the darkness gives way to a brilliant patchwork of lights that illuminate their faces and the rooftops around them — a potent reminder that the city once teemed with life.

Tsukumizu frustrates the reader’s efforts to make sense of the characters, however, by drawing Chito and Yuuri as a pair of affectless automatons. Yuuri’s comments about the lights indicate that she’s genuinely moved, but her face and her body don’t register any emotion; she might as well be discussing what she had for dinner, or whether railroad ties make good firewood. Perhaps the flatness of her delivery is meant to convey just how weary she is, or how pragmatic she must be to survive, but the banality of her conversations with Chito suggest that Tsukumizu had some difficulty creating characters as sharp and memorable as the world they inhabit.

The bottom line: Your mileage will vary: some people may appreciate the series’ absence of dramatic conflict, while others may find it a little too measured to be engrossing. I’m on the fence about this one; on the strength of the final story arc, however, I’ll be picking up volume two.

GIRLS’ LAST TOUR, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY TSUKUMIZU • TRANSLATION BY AMANDA HALEY • YEN PRESS • RATED T, FOR TEEN (13+) • 162 pp.

 

Delicious in Dungeon, Vol. 1

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Food manga comes in two flavors: the tournament series, in which a brash young baker or chef enters cook-offs that stretch his culinary skills to the limit, and the food-is-life series, in which family, friends, or colleagues prepare food together, resolving their differences over tasty dishes. Delicious in Dungeon straddles the fence between these two types by combining elements of a role-playing game, cooking show, and workplace comedy. Expressed as a recipe, the formula for volume one might look something like this:

2 cups Dungeons & Dragons
1 cup Iron Wok Jan
1/2 cup Toriko
1/2 cup Oishinbo
1/2 cup What Did You Eat Yesterday?
2 tbsp. Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma
2 tbsp. Not Love But Delicious Foods Makes Me Happy!
Dash of Sweetness & Lightning

Though that recipe sounds unappetizing — the manga equivalent of a herring-and-banana smoothie — Delicious in Dungeon is surprisingly good.

Volume one plunges us into the action, pitting a team of warriors and spell-casters against an enormous dragon. Though all six fighters are experienced, they’re so compromised by hunger that they make silly mistakes that result in one member getting eaten. When the team regroups, two members defect to another guild, leaving just Laois, a knight, Chilchuck, a “pick-lock,” and Marcille, an elf magician. The three resolve to rescue Laois’ sister from the Red Dragon’s belly, but their chronic lack of funds forces them to adopt a novel cost-saving strategy: foraging for food inside the dungeon instead buying supplies for the mission.

The trio soon learns that catching and cooking monsters is harder than it looks. Despite the astonishing variety of creatures and man-eating plants that inhabit the dungeon, almost none appear to be edible: some have stingers or hard shells, while others are so disgusting that no one can imagine how to prepare them. When Senshi, a dwarf, volunteers his culinary services, the group is pleasantly surprised by his ability to transform the most unpromising specimen into a delicious array of soups, tempuras, and jerkies. Even more impressive is Senshi’s ability to improvise the tools he needs to make gourmet dishes; he’s the D&D answer to Angus MacGyver.

Subsequent chapters follow a similar template: the group enters a new area of the dungeon, encounters new monsters, and devises new ways to cook them. What prevents this basic plotline from growing stale is Ryoko Kui’s imaginative artwork. Every chapter is studded with charts and diagrams illustrating the dietary habits of dungeon crawlers and the unusual anatomy of dungeon dwellers, from slime molds to basilisks. These meticulous drawings provide a natural jumping-off point for Senshi to wax poetic about the flavor of dried slime, or describe the safest method of harvesting mandrakes.

By contrast, the backgrounds resemble the kind of generic settings of early computer RPGs, providing just enough detail — cobblestone hallways, winding staircases — to establish each location. That allows Kui to lavish attention on the monsters and people — a wise decision, I think, since the artwork plays such a vital role in establishing each character’s personality and powers. Marcille, for example, is a worrywart, her semi-permanent frown mirrored by the angle and shape of her ears. Though her peevish monologues suggest that she’s food-phobic, her slumping posture and clumsy attempts at spell-casting tell a different story: Marcille feels superfluous, and longs for an opportunity to demonstrate her usefulness to the group. Chilchuck, by contrast, is small and nimble; his child-like size belies his maturity and skill as a locksmith and minesweeper, while his cat-like movements remind us that he’s not fully human. (The other characters refer to him as a “halfling.”)

If the series’ rhythm is predictable and the jokes sometimes obvious — one character declares that basilisk “tastes like chicken” — the specificity of Kui’s vision keeps Delicious in Dungeon afloat. Every chapter yields a funky new monster and an even funkier recipe from Senshi — all rendered in precise detail — while the script has the rhythm of a great workplace sitcom; it’s a bit like watching The Office or WKRP in Cincinnati, but with jokes about the merits of giant scorpion meat instead of arguments about the annual Christmas party. I don’t know if I’d want to read 10 or 20 volumes of Delicious in Dungeon, but I’m eager to see where the next installment goes.

DELICIOUS IN DUNGEON, VOL. 1 • BY RYOKO KUI • RATING: T, FOR TEEN (13+) • YEN PRESS

Descending Stories: Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju, Vol. 1

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In the opening pages of Descending Stories, we’re introduced to Yotaro, an amiable ex-con with an unusual plan for going straight: he wants to become a rakugoka, or rakugo artist. To learn the ropes of this venerable performing tradition, Yotaro cajoles Yakumo, a rakugo master, into accepting him as an apprentice — something that Yakumo has resisted doing in the past, even when more suitable candidates have presented themselves. Descending Stories then follows Yotaro’s first clumsy efforts at telling stories, making people laugh, and resisting the temptations of his old life.

Rakugo, for the uninitiated, is Japan’s answer to continuous vaudeville. In lieu of acrobats and jugglers, however, yose (venues) offer customers a steady flow of rakugokas who regale the audience with humorous stories, each adhering to a clearly defined format that begins with the makura (prelude), moves to the hondai (main story), and concludes with the ochi (punchline). Unlike a vaudeville artist — or a manzai duo, for that matter — the rakugoka remains seated while delivering his material, using only two simple props — a fan and a cloth — to convey what’s happening.

In theory, rakugo sounds like an ideal topic for a manga: it’s a storytelling genre that relies almost exclusively on facial expressions and physical gestures to bring the story to life, actions that translate well to a silent, static medium like comics. The audible dimension of a rakugo performance also lends itself to graphic depiction, as a well-chosen typeface can suggest the register, volume, gender, and age of the person speaking. Yet the rakugo performances in Descending Stories capture little of the magic that would explain the genre’s enduring appeal in Japan. Too often, Haruko Kumota cross-cuts between a snippet of performance and a snippet of conversation in which audience members praise the rakugoka‘s technique, or comment on how much everyone else seems to be enjoying themselves. The net result feels more like watching a football game on television than attending a theatrical performance; we can see what’s happening, but the relentless stream of chatter and clumsy framing of the action keep us at arm’s length.

The flatness of these performances stand in sharp contrast to the vibrant story that surrounds them. Though the principal cast is small — Yotaro, Yakumo, and Konatsu, Yakumo’s adopted daughter — Kumota squeezes plenty of dramatic juice out of their interactions. In chapter three, for example, Konatsu accuses Yakumo of murdering her biological father, Sukeroku, who was also an accomplished performer. She vows to exact revenge by taking up rakugo herself, a gesture designed to provoke the staunchly traditionalist Yakumo. “Women can’t perform rakugo,” he tells her:

That’s just the way it is. They can’t enjoy stupidity, for one thing. Even if they can, their art doesn’t deepen as they age. And should they somehow master the art… well, there’s nothing more unpleasant than a woman who can do a good impression of a man. There’s just too much to overcome.

Yet Yakumo is no soap opera villain, intent on crushing the spirit of a plucky heroine; he’s a realist who bears deep — and as yet unrevealed — wounds from collaborating with Konatsu’s dad. He recognizes the depth of Konatsu’s pain, and her sincere desire to preserve her father’s legacy by memorizing and performing his material. As a conciliatory gesture, Yakumo begins reciting “The Naughty Three,” one of Sukeroku’s stories. This eight-panel sequence offers a fleeting glimpse of Yakumo’s true artistry, showing us how he twists his face and bends his torso to portray the story’s main characters. Only a solitary panel of Konatsu sobbing, “My father… He’s alive,” undercuts the effectiveness of the scene, baldly stating what’s apparent from the illustrations.

And that, in a nutshell, is what makes Descending Stories simultaneously frustrating and compelling. On the one hand, Kumota tries so hard to persuade us that rakugo is a funny, spellbinding, and vital tradition that the performances never take flight on the page; even the best scenes are marred by comments that feel like a poke in the ribs: “Didja get it?” On the other hand, Kumota creates such passionate, complex characters that it’s fundamentally impossible to dislike Descending Stories; I want to know whether Yotaro becomes a rakugoka, or if Konatsu finds an outlet for her own storytelling gift. My suggestion: read the omake for insights into rakugo, and read the main chapters for the drama.

DESCENDING STORIES: SHOWA GENROKU RAKUGO SHINJO, VOL. 1 • BY HARUKA KUMOTA • KODANSHA COMICS • RATING: YOUNG ADULT (13+)