Manga Bookshelf

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Manga

Gate 7, Vol. 1

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I have good news and bad news for CLAMP fans. The good news is that Gate 7 is one of the best-looking manga the quartet has produced, on par with Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles and xxxHolic. The bad news is that Gate 7‘s first volume is very bumpy, with long passages of expository dialogue and several false starts. Whether you’ll want to ride out the first three chapters will depend largely on your reaction to the artwork: if you love it, you may find enough visual stimulation to sustain to your interest while the plot and characters take shape; if you don’t, you may find the harried pacing and repetitive jokes a high hurdle to clear.

Art-wise, Gate 7 most closely resembles Tsubasa. The character designs are elegantly stylized, rendered in delicate lines; though their proportions have been gently elongated, their physiques are less giraffe-like than the principle characters in Legal Drug and xxxHolic. The same sensibility informs the action scenes as well, where CLAMP uses thin, sensual linework to suggest the energy unleashed during magical combat. (Readers familiar with Magic Knight Rayearth will see affinities between the two series, especially in the fight sequences.) Perhaps the most striking thing about the artwork is its imaginative use of water and light to evoke the supernatural. As Zack Davisson observes in his review of Gate 7, CLAMP uses a subtle but lovely image to shift the action from present-day Kyoto to the spirit realm, depicting the characters as stones in the water, with soft ripples radiating outward from each figure.

The story, however, is less satisfying. The plot revolves around high school student Chikahito Takamoto, a timid dreamer who’s obsessed with Kyoto as a place of “history, ancient arts, temples, and shrines.” While exploring the Kitano Tenmangu Shrine, Chikahito is transported to an alternate dimension, where he encounters three warriors: Sakura, Tachibana, and Hana, an androgynously beautiful, child-like figure who possesses even greater spiritual power than the other two. Chikahito watches the trio dismantle a ribbon-like serpent, but before he can question what he’s seen, poof! he finds himself eating noodles with them in a Kyoto apartment as Sakura and Tachibana debate the ethics of erasing Chikahito’s memory.

Hana astonishes Chikahito with an awesome display of power.

The biggest problem with this introductory section is that the subsequent chapter traces a nearly identical trajectory: Chikahito returns to Kyoto, encounters Hana in the streets, then is whisked onto the spirit-plane for another round of magical combat. As soon as the monster is defeated, Chikahito once again finds himself eating a meal with Hana, Sakura, and Tachibana. (This time around, however, they gang-press him into cooking and cleaning for them.) CLAMP even recycles the same gags from the prelude: Hana’s fragile appearance belies a monstrous appetite for noodles, an incongruity CLAMP mines for humor long past the point of being funny.

Other problems prevent Gate 7 from taking flight in its early pages. As we begin to learn more about the Kitano Tenmagu Shrine, for example, various characters take turns explaining its history. These narratives are clearly intended to set the table for a more complex plotline, but have the unintended consequence of stopping the story dead in its tracks. The script also makes some maddening detours into mystical clap-trap; in trying to understand how the seemingly ordinary Chikahito can enter the supernatural realm, characters lapse into Yoda-speak. “We’re alike,” Hana informs Chikahito. When asked, “In what areas?” Hana cheerfully replies, “In areas that are… ‘not.’ Where he’s the same is… ‘not.'”

The most disappointing aspect of Gate 7 is the flimsiness of the characterizations. CLAMP seems to be relying on readers’ familiarity with other titles — Cardcaptor Sakura, Chobits, Tsuaba, xxxHolic — in establishing each character’s personality and role in the drama. Hana, for example, slots into the Mokona role: Hana refers to himself (herself?) in the third person, repeats pet phrases, and behaves like a glutton, yet proves surprisingly powerful. Chikahito, on the other hand, is a carbon copy of xxxHolic‘s Watanuki, a nervous, bespectacled everyman who unwittingly becomes the housekeeper and magical errand-boy for more supernaturally gifted beings. The frantic pace and abrupt transitions between the mundane and supernatural world further complicate the process of establishing Hana and Chikahito as individuals; with so much material stuffed into the first two hundred pages, CLAMP leans too heavily on tics and mannerisms to carry the burden of the characterization. (Cute finger-wagging does not a character make.)

The dramatic introduction of a new character in the volume’s final pages suggests that CLAMP may finally be hitting its stride in chapter four. As promising as this development may be, I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m reading a Potemkin manga, all surface detail and no depth. Let’s hope volume two proves me wrong.

GATE 7, VOL. 1 • BY CLAMP • DARK HORSE • 192 pp. • NO RATING

X, Vol. 1

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As a child of the 1970s, I appreciate a good disaster flick, whether the devastation is local or global, natural or man-made. There’s something immensely satisfying about watching the world go up in flames, only to walk outside the theater and be reassured by the presence of stop lights, busses, coffee shops, and pedestrians going about their business. Small wonder, then, that I adored CLAMP’s X back in 2003. Not only did it have an impossibly large cast of attractive characters, it also boasted awesome scenes of destruction — scenes worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster.

When VIZ announced that it would be reissuing X in a deluxe edition, however, I had misgivings about the project: would the apocalypse be as good the second time around?

In 2003, I’d swooned over the illustrations, re-read favorite scenes, and marveled at the fact that all the characters dressed like refugees from a 1980s music video. Though my inner snob normally disdained anything so purple, I secretly loved the all-caps dialogue, the swirling lines and wind-swept hairdos, and the melodramatic death scenes, not to mention the eerie, post-apocalyptic dream sequences that were sprinkled throughout the series. X read like a hybrid of The Seventh Sign (not to be confused with The Seventh Seal, a much classier flick), Götterdämmerung, and Captain EO, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

At the time I was collecting X, I hadn’t read much else, save a handful of manga by CLAMP and Rumiko Takahashi. The very qualities that drew me to X — angstful conversations, tortured characters — soon had the opposite effect on me: I started to avoid comics in which the emotional volume was cranked up to eleven on every page, as I found them exhausting, the manga equivalent of Tristan and Isolde. Re-reading Tokyo Babylon, for example, I was mortified by my initial enthusiasm for the story, which now seemed hopelessly overripe to me; not since I’d re-read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe had I been so disappointed by a favorite text.

Revisiting X proved a more rewarding experience, though the series’ structural flaws were more readily apparent on a second reading. The dialogue, for example, is often unintentionally hilarious: bystanders comment on the main characters, helpfully telling us how wonderful they are (“Last week, he saved my son from drowning in the river,” one anonymous mother says of Fuma), while the main characters introduce themselves to one another as if they’re networking, not preparing to kill each other. (Sample: “The name’s Sorata Arisugawa! A cute ‘n’ fun-lovin’ high school senior!” “Allow me to return the favor. I am Yuto Kigai. A humble public servant in the local ward office.”) Kotori, the first major female character to be introduced, embodies the Mary Sue concept to a tee; not only is she beautiful, kind, and long of hair, but she’s also very delicate, beset with a heart so weak that she collapses whenever someone frowns. More amusing still are the characters who materialize at the very moment they’re needed: witness the introduction of Tokiko Magami, a school nurse who just so happens to be Kamui’s sole surviving relative, and a fount of information about Kamui’s mother.

Yet these moments of narrative clumsiness are overpowered by the sheer force of the imagery. The battle scenes are kinetic and violent, as characters leap across rooftops, level buildings, and plunge their swords into one another; few licensed shojo or shonen titles can match the gory zest with which CLAMP executes these moments of hand-to-hand combat. The dream sequences, too, are shockingly graphic: characters are dismembered, crucified, impaled, and engulfed in flames, often right before their loved ones’ eyes. Though these images teeter on the brink of kitsch — in one dream, Kamui cradles Kotori’s severed head in his arms — they underscore one of the series’ most important points: sacrifice and loss are a fundamental part of becoming an adult, whether that sacrifice means leaving one’s family (as Sorata and Lady Arashi have done) or losing them (as Kamui, Fuma, and Kotori do in the early chapters of the manga).

The series’ other major theme — that humans are poor stewards of Mother Earth — is less successfully illustrated; three volumes in, it still isn’t clear what, exactly, the Seven Seals are charged with doing: preventing nuclear war? staving off pollution? protecting spotted owls? What will happen if the Seals fail, however, is evocatively rendered; CLAMP draws a post-apocalyptic Tokyo worthy of Katsuhiro Otomo, a landscape of twisted skyscrapers and rotting corpses slowly engulfed by sand dunes.

The fact that these images appeared in Monthly Asuka and not Young Magazine is what makes X so remarkable: it may not be the best shojo fantasy ever written, but it certainly is one of the bloodiest, a fierce, angry blast of emotion that scorches everything in its path. I hesitate to suggest that X‘s body count is an achievement, but it is sharp and welcome rebuke to the idea that female readers strongly prefer conversation and character development to butt-kicking and carnage. Count me in for volume two.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media, LLC.

X, VOL. 1 • BY CLAMP • VIZ MEDIA • 580 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Codename: Sailor V, Vol. 1

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Do you remember Wonder Woman? From an adult perspective, the show was dreadful, marred by ham-fisted scripts, low-budget special effects, campy plotlines, and wooden performances. From a child’s perspective, however, Wonder Woman was magical: the heroine had a secret identity, wore a cool crime-fighting outfit complete with nifty, crime-fighting accessories, and fought bad buys. Better still, she could transform from civilian to superhero by extending her arms and twirling a few times, a transformation made even more dramatic by a blinding flash of light and a musical flourish on the soundtrack.

Codename: Sailor V irresistibly reminded me of the old Wonder Woman show. Judged by adult standards, it’s repetitive, hokey, and poorly drawn; judged by a child’s standards, however, it’s an appealing fantasy in which an ordinary girl can assume a new, powerful identity in order to defeat bullies, robbers, and aliens who like to impersonate idols. (More on that in a minute.)

Sailor V follows a well-established shojo template in which a seemingly ordinary girl discovers her true identity as a soldier, priestess, or princess. For perky tomboy Minako Aino, her alter ego is Sailor Venus, a glamorous, sailor-suited warrior tasked with protecting the Earth from the Dark Agency, a nefarious band of aliens using the entertainment industry to enslave humanity. With the aid of Artemis, a talking cat, Minako begins mastering her two secret weapons: a magical pen and a crescent-shaped compact, both of which enable her to overwhelm opponents with the light of truth.

What distinguishes Sailor V from other magical girl manga is Minako’s can-do spirit. Minako may flunk math quizzes and miss homeroom, but when the fate of the Earth hangs in the balance, she embraces her responsibility with cheerful resolve. “I feel liberated! I’m overflowing with power!” she declares after her first successful mission. Even when the missions fall into a predictable pattern, Minako’s enthusiasm and competence prove irresistible: she delivers high-flying kicks with graceful precision, discovers new powers in the heat of battle, scolds evil-doers for evading the tax code (no, really), and experiments with different personae. (In one story, she transforms into a handsome male idol; in another, she poses as a military commando.)

Put simply, Minako kicks butt and has fun doing it.

I’m less enthusiastic about the artwork, which is a riot of busy screentones, arm-flapping chibis, and noseless characters. The visual flow is often choppy, with abrupt shifts in perspective and setting that can disorient the reader. The character designs, too, leave something to be desired, as the villains all have blank, doll-like faces and enormous foreheads, while Minako and her friends have saucer-shaped eyes. Only the fight scenes are well executed; using undulating lines and balletic poses, Takeuchi does a fine job of distinguishing Minako from Sailor V, showing us how a plucky teen transforms into a strong young woman.

And therein lies the key Codename: Sailor V‘s appeal: the series allows young girls to try on a grown-up persona, to imagine what it might be to like to be a strong, smart, and capable woman who’s free to realize her full potential. At the same time, however, Sailor V honors a young girl’s ideas of femininity, recognizing that it’s perfectly possible to save the day while wearing a cute outfit. Small wonder, then, that the Sailor Moon franchise proved so popular among young girls on both sides of the Pacific: who wouldn’t want to be a princess and a warrior?

CODENAME: SAILOR V, VOL. 1 • BY NAOKO TAKEUCHI • KODANSHA COMICS USA • 272 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Manga Artifacts: The Legend of Mother Sarah

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Most American manga fans know Katsuhiro Otomo as the creative force behind AKIRA and Domu: A Child’s Dream, but Otomo’s catalog also includes works like The Legend of Mother Sarah, in which Otomo penned the script but relinquished the illustration duties to another manga-ka. And while Mother Sarah isn’t quite as visually dazzling as AKIRA or Domu, this post-apocalyptic adventure is every bit as fun to read, thanks to its vivid characterizations and dynamic action sequences.

Set in the not-too-distant future, Mother Sarah begins in space — or, more accurately, space stations, where the survivors of a nuclear holocaust have sought refuge from the Earth’s extreme climate changes. When riots threaten the peace aboard these floating cities, the military evacuates civilians back to the surface, in the process separating thousands of children from their parents. Sarah, the story’s eponymous heroine, is on a quest to find her own family, all of whom disappeared in the chaos aboard the space stations. Traveling with Tsue, a trader, she wanders a desolate landscape of crumbling cities, slave-labor camps, religious compounds, and hardscrabble farms, karate-chopping anyone who threatens the honest folk she meets along the way.

Given its classic premise and cool, resourceful heroine, it’s curious that Mother Sarah had such a short shelf life here in the United States. As tempting as it may be to chalk up fan indifference to sexism, or antipathy towards Otomo’s other (read: not AKIRA) projects, I think the real reason lies with the way Mother Sarah was released. Dark Horse published the series from 1995-98, but only collected the first eight issues into a trade paperback. When read in thirty-page installments, The Legend of Mother Sarah: Tunnel Town is engaging but frustrating. Otomo and artist Takumi Nagayasu’s sense of pacing, in particular, is too leisurely for a stand-alone booklet: they establish a new setting with a dozen wordless panels, luxuriate in an explosion, or depict a fist-fight over five or six pages, gobbling up real estate that might otherwise be advancing the story. Contrast an issue of Tunnel Town with that of a long-running American series and the incompatibility of format and story becomes more apparent. In each issue of The Walking Dead, for example, one important event is dramatized: the characters make a critical discovery about their zombie foes or confront a troublemaker within their ranks. Though the issue may end on a cliffhanger, there’s a sense of closure that’s missing from an issue of Mother Sarah, even though both stories are clearly intended to extend beyond the confines of a single pamphlet.

When read in trade paperback form, however, Tunnel Town has a more satisfying rhythm. Those establishing shots and slow-mo fight scenes draw the reader deeper into the story; we feel like we’re actually part of the scene, rather than passive witnesses to the action. The continuity between events is easier to appreciate as well. Sarah’s skirmishes with authority no longer seem like a string of isolated incidents, but a steadily escalating pattern of violence that demands resolution. And what a finale! Coming at the end of two hundred pages, the denouement is less a cool stunt than a thrilling affirmation of Sarah’s courage and smarts, an emphatic punctuation mark at the end of a long but well-reasoned paragraph.

I’m guessing that someone at Dark Horse must have thought Mother Sarah was ill-served by the thirty-page format, as the next two arcs — City of the Children and City of the Angels — were published in forty-eight page installments, a development highlighted on the front covers of each issue:

As a result, the later mini-series are more engaging; we’re treated to a larger, more satisfying chunk of story in each installment, a chunk that I suspect corresponds more closely to the way the manga was serialized in Young Magazine. Alas, neither Children nor Angels were collected in bound form, making it harder for a new generation of manga fans to discover the series for themselves.

For all my grumbling about format and scarcity, however, all three story arcs are worth owning, both for the art and the story. Takumi Nagayasu’s crisp visuals are pleasingly reminiscent of Otomo’s. Nagayasu’s characters are drawn in a naturalistic fashion, with plenty of attention given to hands, facial hair, posture, wrinkles, and muscles; even the most inconsequential soldier or civilian is given a unique face and a thoughtfully constructed costume. Nagayasu also shares Otomo’s love of vehicles and decaying urban landscapes, rendering both in a fine, evocative fashion; one can almost hear the steel structures rusting from neglect.

Otomo’s writing is as strong as Nagayasu’s artwork. Though Sarah is a certifiable bad-ass, capable of kicking and stabbing her way out of a tight situation, she relies on her wits just as frequently as her fists. Her maternal instincts, too, inform much of her decision-making; throughout the series, Sarah is drawn to conflicts involving exploited or abused children, offering her a chance to symbolically “save” the family she lost ten years earlier. In short, Sarah is a woman warrior in the Lt. Ellen Ripley/Sarah Connor mold: fierce, strong, principled, and, above all else, a mama grizzly who sides with the young and the helpless. Oh, and she looks good while dispensing justice, too. Now that’s my kind of escapism, no matter how it’s packaged.

THE LEGEND OF MOTHER SARAH • STORY BY KATSUHIRO OTOMO, ART BY TAKUMI NAGAYASU • DARK HORSE • NO RATING

Gandhi: A Manga Biography

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British historian Phillip Guedalla famously described biography as “a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.” Were I to locate Gandhi: A Manga Biography on Guedalla’s map, its longest borders would be to the south and west: it’s both contrived and dull, a series of historical tableaux that do little to reveal Gandhi’s true humanity.

Most of the book’s problems stem from its scope, as author Kazuki Ebine attempts to cover Gandhi’s entire life in a mere 192 pages. Ebine treats us to brief glimpses of Gandhi’s childhood, when Gandhi was first exposed to the injustices of India’s caste system; his time in England, where he studied law; his time in South Africa, where he challenged the government’s classification of Indians as second-class citizens; and his time in India, where he used strikes, boycotts, and other forms of non-violent resistance to protest English rule.

Though Ebine carefully inserts major historical figures into the narrative, none of them are treated as individuals. Some are straw men, representing unenlightened points of view, while others are apostles, converted to the cause through the power of Gandhi’s words. Even Gandhi’s wife is relegated to a minor supporting role; her primary function within the narrative is to patiently reflect on her husband’s inherent courage and goodness, rather than interact with him as a partner, friend, confidante, or lover. (“Your duty is to lead people in a right direction,” she solemnly informs Gandhi.) Ebine attempts to portray her as the one person who truly knew Gandhi, but the relentless pace of the story prevents him from showing the natural evolution of their relationship.

The script is equally problematic, abounding in typos and grammatical errors. (“Pease enjoy this humble farewell party for you,” one character tells Gandhi.) The problems extend beyond mere editorial sloppiness: the dialogue would have benefited from a vigorous re-write, as it sounds more like a poorly translated Power Point presentation than natural conversation. In one crucial scene, for example, a young South African man confronts Gandhi with what amounts to an eighth grader’s gloss on the crisis in South Africa. “When I first heard your speech, I was so inspired as if you boiled in my blood!” he declares. “No one else has tried to rise up against the whites. As Indians, we have decided to fight together beyond the differences in religions.” Another character tells Gandhi, “By revoking Indians’ right to vote, they try to shut our mouth up regarding sovereignty” — an indignity up with which he will not put.

The biggest disappointment, however, is that Ebine makes such uninspired use of the comics medium. The artwork is plain and lifeless, relying too heavily on computer shortcuts and pre-fab backgrounds to create a genuine sense of place or time. Though Ebine depicts numerous violent confrontations, most of the layouts are an unvaried parade of talking heads addressing assemblies and conducting back-room negotiations. To judge from the characters’ facial expressions, these scenes are meant to be as dramatic as the brawls and massacres, but the monotony of the presentation robs these scenes of specificity and urgency.

The bottom line: readers who want an overview of Gandhi’s life and work may find this slim volume helpful, but readers hoping to move beyond what Mark Twain called the “clothes and the buttons of the man” will be sorely disappointed.

Review copy provided by Penguin Books.

GANDHI: A MANGA BIOGRAPHY • BY KAZUKI EBINE • PENGUIN BOOKS • 192 pp. • NO RATING

Bloody Monday, Vol. 1

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To judge from all the shonen manga I’ve read, the fate of the world rests in teenage boys’ hands: not only do they have the power to kill demons and thwart alien invasions, they’re also blessed with the kind of superior intelligence that makes them natural partners with law enforcement. Bloody Monday is a textbook example of the teen-genius genre: high school student Fujimaru Takagi dabbles in crime-solving, hacking into secure networks and decoding encrypted files on behalf of the Public Security Intelligence Agency. (Naturally, he works for the PSIA’s super-secret “Third-I” division, which is “comprised solely of elites.”) Fujimaru’s deductive skills are put to the ultimate test when his father is falsely implicated in a murder. To find the real killer, Fujimaru must uncover the connection between his father and the “Christmas Massacre,” a terrorist attack that left thousands of Russian civilians dead, their bodies covered in boils.

In the right hands, Bloody Monday might have been good, silly fun, 24 for the under-twenty-four crowd. The script, however, is pointed and obvious, explaining hacker culture and internet technology to an audience that has grown up on the world-wide web: are there any fifteen-year-olds who don’t grasp the basics of computer viruses? The characters, too, seem impossibly dim, thinking out loud, missing obvious connections, and reminding each other how they’re related, whether they’re fellow reporters for the school newspaper or siblings. Small wonder they don’t realize that their school has been infiltrated by an enemy agent.

The art is more skillful than the script, with polished character designs and detailed backgrounds. The adults actually look like adults, not teenagers with unfortunate laugh lines, while the scenes aboard the Transsiberian Railroad convey the harshness of the Russian landscape. Though artist Kouji Megumi nevers misses an opportunity to show us an attractive woman in her underwear — and really, what well-trained assassin doesn’t snuff a target or two while wearing only a matching bra-and-panty set? — the fanservice never overwhelms the plot. The action sequences, too, are well-staged, using swift cross-cuts and imaginative camera angles to heighten the suspense.

In the end, however, the slick visuals aren’t enough to compensate for the flat-footed storytelling. A plot as potentially interesting and complex as Bloody Monday‘s should challenge the reader to arrive the solution independently, not spoon-feed it; too often, the story seems to have been written in boldface, depriving the reader of an opportunity to guess the outcome of the story for herself.

BLOODY MONDAY, VOL. 1 • STORY BY RYOU RYUMON, ART BY KOUJI MEGUMI • KODANSHA COMICS USA • 200 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Cage of Eden, Vol. 1

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a trans-Pacific flight encounters turbulence, and before any of the passengers can shout “J.J. Abrams!” — or “William Golding!” for that matter — the plane crash-lands an uninhabited tropical island, far from civilization’s reach. In some variations of the story, the island itself poses the greatest danger to survivors, harboring monsters or malevolent spirits. In other versions, the survivors’ own fear and narcissism proves more deadly than any jungle-dwelling creatures, as the rude wilderness strips away the survivors’ veneer of humanity.

In Cage of Eden, Yoshinobu Yamada combines these two survival narratives to tell the story of a high school holiday gone horribly wrong. Cage’s teen heroes crash-land in a prehistoric forest populated by long-extinct animals: saber-toothed tigers, horse-sized birds. These big, hungry predators aren’t the only threat to the students’ safety, however. Yarai, the class delinquent, seizes the opportunity to act on his darkest impulses, terrorizing his peers and the doomed flight’s captain. Only Akira, a small, self-described loser, and Mariya, a bespectacled, anti-social genius, have the skills and the smarts to outwit both enemies.

Though the story unfurls at a good clip, the execution is a little creaky. The opening chapter is a choppy information dump, as Yamada introduces the principal characters, delineates their relationships, and reveals the purpose of their plane trip. Once on the island, Mariya’s computer proves shockingly durable — it boots up without protest, despite plunging 35,000 feet — and helpfully equipped with a searchable database of extinct animals. (“Even without internet, I can still access program files,” Mariya solemnly informs an incredulous Akira.) The characters speak fluent exposition, frequently explaining things to one another that are readily obvious from Yamada’s crisply executed drawings. Worse still, the intelligent dialogue is reserved for the male characters; the few female characters’ primary role is to be menaced, rescued, and ogled, though not necessarily in that order.

However obvious the script or ubiquitous the cheesecake — and yes, the fanservice is executed with all the subtlety of a tap-dancing hippopotamus — Cage of Eden has a cheerful, B-movie vibe that’s hard to resist. The monsters are rendered in loving detail, down to their sinews and feathers and claws; as they tear across the page, it’s not hard to imagine how terrified the characters must be, or how fast they need to run in order to escape. The setting, too, is a boon, offering Yamada numerous places to conceal a dangerous animal or booby trap. Even the characters are effective. Though drawn in broad strokes, Akira is a sympathetic lead; he’s prone to self-doubt after years of being a bench warmer, an academic failure, a mama’s boy, and a second banana to the most popular student in his class. That the island provides him a chance to prove his worth isn’t surprising — that’s de rigeur for the genre — but Akira’s mixture of humility and bravery is refreshing, helping distract the reader from the absurdity of his action-movie heroics.

I won’t make any grand claims for Cage of Eden: on many levels, it’s dumber than a peroxide blonde, with characters doing and saying things that defy common sense. Yet Yoshinobu Yamada demonstrates a genuine flair for writing popcorn-movie manga, populating the island with scary-looking monsters and staging thrilling action sequences that temporarily erase the memory of the clumsy dialogue and panty shots. Cage of Eden is the perfect beach read for the final days of August: it’s fun and fast-paced, placing few demands on the sun-addled reader.

CAGE OF EDEN, VOL. 1 • BY YOSHINOBU YAMADA • KODANSHA COMICS USA • 200 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Velveteen & Mandala

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Jiro Matsumoto’s Velveteen & Mandala, a phantasmagoria of zombie-slaying, nudity, and poop, seems calibrated to shock readers into nervous laughter, though it’s never entirely clear if Matsumoto has a greater point to make. Like many of the shorts in the AX anthology, Velveteen & Mandala lacks any overarching sense of narrative direction or social commentary. The volume consists of fourteen loosely connected vignettes starring Velveteen, a ditzy blonde, and Mandala, her frenemy. Both are living on the outskirts of Tokyo, though the time is left to the reader’s imagination; all we know is that a war has ravaged the city, reducing it to a weedy sprawl of corpses, tanks, and abandoned buildings. In some of the stories, the two wield pistols and patrol their territory, shooting anything in sight; in others, they forage for food; and in others, their girlish horseplay shades in sadism or sexual violence.

The first three chapters are relatively innocuous, documenting the minutiae of the girls’ day-to-day existence. Velveteen lives in an amnesiac fog, snapping to consciousness only when she devises a new technique for torturing Mandala. Mandala, too, delights in annoying her friend, adopting verbal mannerisms that drive Velveteen to violent distraction. Neither seems particularly bright; their dialogue and destructive behavior make them seem like a pair of mean-spirited ko-gals.

The series takes a turn for the ugly in “The Super,” a brief story introducing a nameless, pantsless man to whom Velveteen administers a sharp crack on the head. (She wants to keys to his secret stash of weapons. And taxidermy animals. Yes, we’re in Underground Comix territory, folks.) From there on, Matsumoto begins playing up the scatological angle; we’re treated to numerous scenes of Velveteen defecating and vomiting, as well as images of her exposing herself.

The nadir is a gang rape scene in which Velveteen narrowly escapes her captors thanks to an explosive bout of indigestion. I’m guessing — perhaps wrongly — that Matsumoto intended this episode as a particularly nasty joke, designed to an elicit an appreciative “Dude! That’s so gross!” from readers. But as a feminist, it’s impossible not to find this passage yet another tiresome example of a male artist using sexual violence to titillate and shock the reader. (The loving way in which he draws a semi-naked Velveteen only confirms the pornographic impression.) Making things worse is that Matsumoto doesn’t just suggest that Velveteen is dirty, he literally covers her and her would-be assailants in her own filth. Nothing about the character or the story suggests that Matsumoto is trying to make a greater point about sexual violence, or level the playing between victim and attacker, or make the reader uncomfortably aware of his arousal at the scene; if anything, the cruelly unflattering way in which Matsumoto portrays Velveteen suggests a deep contempt for teenage girls.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Velveteen & Mandala is that Matsumoto is a genuinely good artist. His linework is superb, reminiscent of Taiyo Matsumoto and Daisuke Igurashi; it’s scratchy and energetic, well-suited to depicting the urban wasteland in which the story unfolds. His characters’ faces are superbly animated, too; few artists can draw malicious glee or surprise with such precision, even if that skill is put in service of drawing a thoroughly repellent cast.

Yet for all the obvious artistry behind Velveteen & Mandala, it’s a stretch to call this book a Hobbesian meditation on survival. Matsumoto’s dialogue is too stylized to register as genuine communication, while his fixation on the most bodily aspects of existence comes off as coprophilia, not meaningful commentary on the human condition. A more thoughtful artist might have found a way to put an intelligent or funny spin on the schoolgirls-slay-zombies premise, but in Matsumoto’s hands, the underlying message seems to be that teenage girls are just as nasty and despicable as the rest of us, as evidenced by the fact that they poop and puke, too.

Review copy provided by Vertical, Inc. Velveteen & Mandala will be released on August 30, 2011.

VELVETEEN & MANDALA • BY JIRO MATSUMOTO • VERTICAL, INC. • 344 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

Magic Knight Rayearth, Vol. 1

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Shonen manga in drag — that’s my quick-and-dirty assessment of CLAMP’s Magic Knight Rayearth, a fantasy-adventure that adheres so closely to the friendship-effort-victory template that it’s easy to forget it ran in the pages of Nakayoshi. A closer examination reveals that Rayearth is, in fact, a complex, unique fusion of shojo and shonen storytelling practices.

If you missed Rayearth when it was first released by Tokyopop, the story goes something like this: three schoolgirls are summoned to defend the kingdom of Cefiro from the wicked priest Zagato, who’s imprisoned Cefiro’s regent, Princess Emeraude, in a watery dungeon. In order to rescue Emeraude, Fuu, Umi, and Hikaru must endure a series of trials that will reveal whether the girls are equal to the task. As the girls advance towards their goal of becoming Magic Knights, however, they begin to realize that Clef Guru, their guide and protector, has misrepresented the true nature of their assignment.

On a moment-to-moment basis, Rayearth reads like shojo. The girls bicker and complain about school; they chibify whenever they’re flustered or frustrated; they cluck and fuss over cute animals; and they share a collective swoon over the series’ one and only cute boy. (He makes a brief but memorable cameo early in the story, as the girls struggle to escape The Forest of Silence.) The girls’ fights, too, are tempered by shojo sentiment; “heart” and compassion play as important a role in defeating many of their enemies as strength and speed.

What sets Rayearth apart from so many other shojo fantasies, however, are the lengthy battle scenes. Fuu, Umi, and Hikaru prove just as adept at repelling surprise attacks and killing monsters as their shonen manga counterparts; though all three girls experience pangs of self-doubt, they show the same steely resolve in combat that Naruto, Ichigo, and InuYasha do. Equally striking is their fierce loyalty to one another; each girl is willing to sacrifice herself so that her friends might live to complete their mission. Though shojo manga can and does stress the importance of female friendship, Rayearth places unusual emphasis on the girls’ shared sense of purpose and commitment to one another. From the very earliest pages of the story, Fuu, Umi, and Hikaru characterize their bond as “sisterhood,” and believe that their love for one another is crucial to their success — a belief that’s systematically tested and proven throughout their journey.

And if you need further proof of Rayearth‘s shonen manga influence, look no further than the Mashins, a trio of anthropomorphic battle robots that Fuu, Umi, and Hikaru awaken in their quest to become Magic Knights. The Mashin are towering, sleek, and lupine, reminiscent of Yoshiyuki Tamino’s iconic mecha designs. Most importantly, the Mashin are fundamental to the story; they’re not an afterthought, but an essential element of the third act, providing the girls with the firepower necessary to combat Zagato.

Yet for all its shonen swagger, Rayearth has some of the most graceful, feminine artwork in the CLAMP canon. The girls’ physical transformations have the same sensual quality as Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Theresa, while their magical spells are depicted as undulating waves of energy that envelop their enemies, rather than jagged bolts of light that pierce and slice. Even small, seemingly inconsequential details — Princess Emeraude’s hair, Zagato’s robes — are infused with this same graceful sensibility — the visual antithesis of the spiky, angular aesthetic that prevails in shonen manga.

I only wish Rayearth was as satisfying to read as it is to critique. For all its genre-bending bravado, the script is so painfully earnest that it verges on self-parody. (Sample: “In Cefiro, the heart controls everything. The power of my belief can change the future!”) The girls, too, lack distinctive personalities. Fuu, Umi, and Hikaru are defined primarily by their magical powers and hairstyles, with only superficial differences in behavior and attitude to help readers distinguish them from one another. Perhaps most disappointing is the conclusion, in which we finally grasp the true cause of Emeraude’s imprisonment. For a brief moment, Emeraude seems poised to break free of an onerous responsibility that demands her complete self-abnegation to fulfill. Yet CLAMP’s desire for a dramatic ending demands that Emeraude be punished for even desiring her freedom, making Emeraude the umpteenth female character to be taken out to the woodshed for resisting such a fate.

That said, Magic Knight Rayearth‘s historical importance can’t be denied. Not only was it CLAMP’s first big commercial hit, it was also the title that demonstrated just how effortlessly they could cross genre boundaries. The resulting hybrid of shonen and shojo, sci-fi and fantasy, RPG and classic adventure story is as unique today as it was when it first appeared in the pages of Nakayoshi eighteen years ago, even if some of the visual details and dialogue haven’t aged well. Recommended.

MAGIC KNIGHT RAYEARTH, VOL. 1 • BY CLAMP • DARK HORSE • 640 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Samurai Crusader

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Whenever I see Ryoichi Ikegami’s name attached to a project, I know two things: first, that the manga will be beautifully illustrated, and second, that the plot will be completely nuts. Samurai Crusader, a globe-trotting, name-dropping adventure from the early 1990s, provides an instructive example. The story revolves around a young martial artist who teams up with struggling novelist Ernest Hemingway — yes, that Ernest Hemingway — to prevent an unscrupulous Japanese general from invading Shanghai with Nazi assistance. And if the thought of Hemingway as a butt-kicking action hero isn’t crazy enough, Ikeda and writer Hiroi Oji populate the story with such colorful bit players as a sadistic female military general, a bare-breasted priestess, an axe-wielding Aryan warrior, a demon whisperer, and a ninja with razor-sharp teeth. Ikeda and Oji don’t skimp on the cameos, either; Pablo Picasso, Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Goering all have brief but memorable walk-on roles, as do Hitler and Emperor Akihito.

This motley assortment of characters are all chasing Kusanagi, a Japanese sword so expertly crafted that it can sever a canon in two. But Kusanagi isn’t just an elegant weapon; it’s a mystical object, capable of bestowing great power on its owner. The Nazis and the Japanese military alike believe that Kusanagi is the key to world domination, and double-cross each other in hopes of stealing it from the Oritsuin clan, a noble Japanese family. Kumomaru, the youngest member of the Oritsuins, is determined to stop both parties from abusing Kusanagi’s power, racing from Paris to Shanghai in a valiant effort to foil Japanese imperial ambitions in China. Along the way Kumomaru befriends Hemingway, beds a sexy French cat burglar, and falls in with a gang of Chinese warriors who disguise themselves as cooks. (As a sign of just how badass these cook-warriors are, each high-ranking solider in the organization has a dragon tattoo… on his tongue.)

As awesomely silly as the plot may be, the real attraction of Samurai Crusader is the art. The period settings provide Ikegami a swell excuse to draw zeppelins and biplanes, Nazi uniforms and samurai formal wear, French ballrooms and Chinese dives. No detail goes overlooked; even the most inconsequential characters’ clothing is meticulously rendered, and the street lamps in every city are drawn with such care as to distinguish a Parisian boulevard from a Shanghai corner.

The character designs, too, are arresting in their specificity; Ikegami’s great strength as an artist is his ability to convey character through odd facial features and posture, whether he’s drawing a crooked industrialist or a street urchin. Though his lead characters are impossibly attractive, Ikegami’s best creation, by far, is Juzo, a stealthy martial artist with the most distinctive set of choppers since James Bond crossed paths with Jaws. Juzo’s shark-like teeth, wild hair, and demonic squint make him an excellent foil for the handsome Kumomaru; Juzo moves with the lethal precision of a cobra, twisting his body into extraordinary positions to better deploy his arsenal of knives, wires, words, and pistols. Oh, and those teeth? They make swell weapons, too.

The only downside to Samurai Crusader is the dialogue. Though the story unfurls at a furious pace, the story grinds to a halt whenever Kumomaru crosses paths with his arch-nemesis, the deluded General Kamishima. Their all-caps exchanges feel more like policy discussions than real arguments, despite Ikegami’s best efforts to stage the scenes as dramatically as possible. Sweat drops bead, veins pulse and pop, but Ikegami can’t disguise the fact that these speeches are kind of a drag. (Sample: “Independence for all of Asia should be the way of Japan! We need national self-determination!”) What redeems these windy passages are the shoot-outs, tank fights, and sword play that proceed and follow them; aside from John Woo and Andrew Lau, few people can make bloodletting look as elegant as Ikegami does.

Perhaps the best way to summarize Samurai Crusader‘s appeal is to say that it has all the virtues of Crying Freeman and Wounded Man — crazy action scenes, sexy leads, mustache-twirling villains — without the copious nudity and sexual violence that can give even the most committed manga fan pause. Readers interested in tracking down copies should note that all three volumes of Samurai Crusader are out of print, though reasonably priced copies are readily available on Amazon and eBay. Highly recommended.

SAMURAI CRUSADER: THE KUMOMARU CHRONICLES, VOLS. 1-3 • STORY BY HIROI OJI, ART BY RYOICHI IKEGAMI • VIZ COMMUNICATIONS, INC. • NO RATING

Monster Hunter Orage, Vol. 1

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As a critic, few words fill me with more trepidation than “inspired by the popular video game.” I’ve read my share of video game manga, most of which were thin on plot and characterization but heavy on explanation. Every so often, however, I run across a series like Monster Hunter Orage, which manages to stay true to its roots while offering something to readers who’ve never played the game.

What makes Monster Hunter work is Hiro Mashima’s script, which does a solid job of translating game play into genuine plot. In the original game, players answered to a town guild, accepting orders to hunt or capture a variety of monsters. Players could fly solo or team up with one, two, or three other gamers to bring down bigger monsters and boost their skill rating. (The ultimate object of the game was to attain the highest skill level, rather than accumulate the greatest number of points.)

In the manga, Mashima builds a story around Shiki, a hunter on a quest to find Myo Galuna, a.k.a. the Thunder Dragon. Shiki is a Seal Hunter, a special category of monster-slayer who’s free to pursue game without interference from town guilds. Though he’s strong and skilled, his brash behavior and social cluelessness prove serious barriers to finding comrades — that is, until he meets Ailee, a fiercely independent hunter who shares Shiki’s desire to find the Thunder Dragon, and Sakya, a gunner who wants to avenge her father’s death.

Shiki and Ailee’s peppery rapport provides a welcome jolt of comic energy, whether they’re arguing about how to kill a monster or how to catch dinner. Like many of Mashima’s heroines, Ailee has little tolerance for teenage male foolishness, and frequently dismisses Shiki with a withering comment. (When they first meet, for example, Shiki blurts out, “Say, haven’t we met before?”, to which Ailee replies, “It’s been forever since I heard that stale pick-up line. Wait. Don’t respond. Just go somewhere else.”) Other supporting characters play a similar role in keeping the tone breezy: the Prince, a preening, foolish hunter, is font of malapropisms, while Maru, the Prince’s sidekick, provides an energetic stream of patter whenever the two appear together.

The art is as nimble as the script, relying heavily on Mashima’s crisp linework to give definition to his characters, monsters, and landscapes; he’s as sparing with screentone as Arina Tanemura is with white space. Though the characters have marvelous, elastic faces, capable of registering fifteen degrees of surprise and indignation, the monsters are unimpressive; they look a lot like dinosaurs with extra feathers and appendages. Put the men and the monsters together, however, and the results are terrific: the fights are graceful and swift, allowing the main characters to demonstrate their martial arts acumen without dragging out the conflict over three or four chapters.

If I had any complaint about Monster Hunter Orage, it’s that the story quickly falls into a predictable pattern. The outcome of the fights is never in question, nor is Shiki’s role as the hunter who will ultimately be the one to outsmart the monster. Even efforts to introduce subplots only go so far; by the end of volume one, it’s clear that the Prince will do anything to destroy Shiki, but his buffoonish behavior and general incompetence make him a less-than-credible threat to the heroes.

But if Monster Hunter isn’t as deep as it could be, it’s still a lot of fun, propelled by a goofy, anything-for-a-laugh script, appealing characters, and plenty of man-on-monster action. And at four volumes, the series won’t overstay its welcome. A good beach read.

MONSTER HUNTER ORAGE, VOL. 1 • BY HIRO MASHIMA • KODANSHA COMICS USA • 192 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

The Betrayal Knows My Name, Vol. 1

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For years, Tokyopop specialized in a particular genre — call it “forbidden bromance,” for want of a better term — in which two handsome, impeccably groomed young men teetered on the brink of a relationship. That relationship usually faced a serious obstacle: one might be a demon and the other a human, for example, or one may have killed the other in a previous life. Most of the story was devoted to uncovering the reason that fate united them, providing the heroes ample time for impassioned conversations and meaningful looks.

At their best, titles like Tokyo Bablyon, Silver Diamond, and X-Kai were silly but engrossing, with plot twists as gloriously melodramatic as an episode of Passions; at their worst, they read like bad slash fic, with purple dialogue and an abundance of poorly explained plot details. Yen Press’ latest offering, The Betrayal Knows My Name, has all the requisite elements to be a gas — pretty-boy leads, past-life tragedy, perfectly moussed locks — but never quite rises to the level of a great guilty pleasure.

Not that volume one wants for activity; every chapter is packed with action sequences, murderous demons, dramatic confrontations, and shocking revelations. What Betrayal lacks is the kind of tightly constructed narrative that made the best bromances such a treat to read. The characters barely rise above type, while script flirts with incoherence at every turn, introducing new characters and subplots at such a furious pace that the central love story is often in danger of being overshadowed. Even the dialogue sags; when the characters aren’t explaining things to one another, they’re so wrapped up in their own thoughts that their monologues become tedious. (Sample: “We can’t survive on principles alone. And everyone would like to live without getting tainted at all. But that’s not how things are.”)

That’s a pity, because The Betrayal Knows My Name looks a lot like my favorite bromances. The character designs owe an obvious debt to CLAMP’s high Baroque period, when characters wore trench coats and dog collars and always had windswept hair. And Hotaru Odagiri certainly knows how to draw brooding men; her heroes, Yuki and Zess, spend a great deal of time staring into space while wearing soulful expressions. (They also know how to pop a pose for readers, allowing us to savor the sheer ridiculousness of their outfits, and the artful way in which they leave their shirts unbuttoned to the waist.)

Yet the prettiness of the character designs can’t camouflage the fact that Betrayal is straining too hard for effect; what should be a great, emo-porn pleasure is something of a chore to read, thanks to its relentless pace, clumsy dialogue, and chemistry-free leads. Readers who can’t get enough of the forbidden bromance genre may find Betrayal an adequate fix; others are encouraged to hold out for Tokyo Babylon‘s return this fall.

Review copy provided by Yen Press.

THE BETRAYAL KNOWS MY NAME, VOL. 1 • BY HOTARO ODAGIRI • YEN PRESS • 368 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Grand Guignol Orchestra, Vol. 3

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In his review of TRON: Legacy, critic Andrew O’Hehir made a distinction between movies that are boring because they make the viewer keenly aware of time’s passage — what he calls “intentional and challenging boredom” — and movies that are boring because they overstimulate the viewer — what he calls the boredom of “endless distraction and wall-to-wall entertainment.” Kaori Yuki’s latest effort, Grand Guignol Orchestra, is a prime example of the latter, a relentlessly melodramatic horror story that never pauses to catch its breath. And while that kind of manga can be engrossing, Yuki’s unwillingness to vary the tone or pace robs Grand Guignol Orchestra of its power to shock, amuse, or arouse anything resembling a real human emotion.

In other words, it’s boring.

The third volume isn’t boring for lack of effort. There’s a lengthy set-piece in which Eles, Gwindel, and Lucille engage in hand-to-hand combat with an evil, cross-dressing nun who is, in fact, a castrato; there are several flashbacks to Lucille and Gwindel’s tortured pasts; and there’s a third-act auction in which noblemen bid for the privilege of watching a young woman be transformed into a zombie. And if those plot twists weren’t enough to hold the reader’s attention, Yuki throws in a few more for good measure: characters double- and triple-cross each other, former enemies unite against a common foe, and zombies swarm a castle, chomping on everyone in sight.

For all the sound and fury, volume three is dramatically inert. Every conversation is overwrought to the point of cartoonishness, draining the truly horrific and sad moments of their visceral power. Worse still, Yuki feels the need to include closed captions for the emotionally impaired, a function she’s assigned to the hapless Eles; when Eles isn’t playing the piano or being held hostage by one of Lucille’s enemies, her primary job is to think about the other characters: “Oh, so that’s why so-and-so has been depressed!” or “They don’t hate each other; they just can’t be together!” And so on.

The artwork, like the script, seems calculated to overwhelm rather than seduce. Yuki is a big proponent of the costume-as-character school of manga writing, substituting epaulets, eye patches, and lace for actual personality traits. As a result, every character, no matter how inconsequential to the story, wears a wackadoo outfit of one sort or another: a habit with a plunging neckline, a clown mask and a cock-eyed top hat. Yuki’s artwork is certainly arresting; her linework is very sensual, and her flair for drawing costumes undeniable, but her desire to populate every scene with elaborately dressed nuns, zombies, and masqueraders comes across as numbing excess in a story that lacks any form of narrative restraint.

I realize that many people will read this review and think I’m a killjoy, that I’ve lost my ability to enjoy a manga for what it is and not what I want it to be. And, to some extent, those readers are right; after five years of grinding out manga reviews, I’m no longer enthusiastic about stories that rely on spectacle to command my attention. But what I find more frustrating about Grand Guignol Orchestra is that there’s nothing real or interesting lurking beneath its busy surface; it’s hysteria masquerading as drama, and the constant stimulation of all-caps dialogue, sudden plot reversals, and Baroque murders becomes its own form of tedium to be endured, rather than something to be savored and enjoyed.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media, LLC.

GRAND GUIGNOL ORCHESTRA, VOL. 3 • BY KAORI YUKI • VIZ MEDIA • 196 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

A Certain Scientific Railgun, Vol. 1

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Question: what do you get when you cross Sunshine Sketch with X-Men? Answer: A Certain Scientific Railgun, a story about a quartet of schoolgirl psychics who fight crime, go shopping, and eat parfaits. If that combination sounds like the manga equivalent of a peanut butter and tunafish sandwich, it is; the story see-saws between sci-fi pomposity and 4-koma cuteness, never combining these two very different flavors into an appetizing dish.

The story takes place in Academy City, a metropolis whose entire population consists of psychics and psychics-in-training. After a series of bank robberies and bombings, members of Justification, Academy City’s teen police force, make a disturbing discovery: some psychics — or “espers,” in the series’ parlance — are using an illicit drug called Level Upper to enhance their natural ability. (Level Upper is, in essence, steroids for teleporters and mind-readers.) Though the drug grants them tremendous power, that power comes with a terrible price, causing the user to slip into an irreversible coma. The girls must then track the drug to its source before it can spread through Academy City.

As promising as the plot sounds, it often feels like an afterthought, something that happens in between the principal characters’ trips to the mall, the cafe, and the gym. (There’s an entire scene devoted to one character’s efforts to find the perfect pair of pajamas. No, I’m not kidding.) The lead character, Mikoto, is the strongest and best-defined of the bunch; she’s described as a “level-five esper” capable of channeling up to one billion volts of electricity, a skill she gleefully unleashes on robbers, perverts, and her arch-nemesis, a male psychic named Toma Kamijo. Though Mikoto is an unappealing heroine, she’s the only female character who has a real personality; Mikoto is angry, unpredictable, and stubborn, but she’s also very disciplined, cultivating her skills with practice and study. Kuroko, Ruiko, and Kazari, the remaining members of the quartet, are less developed: each girl has one psychic ability that she uses in combat and one adorable tic that she exhibits while hanging out with friends. (Actually, “adorable” is up for debate; grabbing another girl’s breasts seems more predatory than cute.)

Thin as the characterizations may be, A Certain Scientific Railgun faces an even bigger problem: many important plot elements are poorly explained. Not that the series wants for exposition-dense conversation; the opening ten pages are filled with characters narrating Mikoto’s rise from level-zero nobody to level-five bad-ass. But many other details remain unexplored: who is Toma and why does Mikoto detest him? why do so many characters have supernatural abilities? why has the government created an entire city just for young psychics? Perhaps the most egregious example is Mikoto herself; though we learn a lot about her education, the fact that she’s been cloned is glossed over, as if having six genetic doppelgangers was entirely unremarkable.

Given Railgun‘s origins — it’s a side story within A Certain Magical Index, a long-running light novel series — it’s not surprising that so many of these crucial details remain unexamined; the author might reasonably expect Japanese fans to know the Magical Index universe well enough to jump into Railgun with a minimum of exposition. For a newcomer, however, the experience is frustrating; uninteresting plot points are explored in excruciating detail, while many of the things that seem more fundamental to the story (e.g. the characters’ psychic abilities) are barely addressed at all.

The final chapter suggests that future installments may feature more scenes of crime-solving and fewer scenes of tweenage girls showering, eating desserts, and horsing around. An honest-to-goodness mystery would go a long way towards giving the story some dramatic shape; right now, A Certain Scientific Railgun feels as aimless and airy as a volume of Sunshine Sketch, even if Mikoto and friends have cooler talents than the Sunshine girls.

Review copy provided by Seven Seas. Volume one will be released on June 30, 2011.

A CERTAIN SCIENTIFIC RAILGUN, VOL. 1 • STORY BY KAZUMA KAMACHI, ART BY MOTIO FUYUKAWA • SEVEN SEAS • 192 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Tenjo Tenge: Full Contact Edition, Vol. 1

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When I tell people that I review manga, they often ask me, “Isn’t it all porn and ninjas?” No, I assure them, there are manga about cooking, gambling, dating, teaching, crime solving, alien fighting, computer programming, ghost busting, mind reading, wine tasting, dog training, and just about any other topic you can imagine; if there’s an audience to be served, Japanese publishers will find a way to reach them through comics. “But it seems like every manga I’ve seen has a girl in a short skirt waving a sword,” they reply. I usually offer a counter-example — say, Ouran High School Host Club or What’s Michael? — but I know the kind of manga they have in mind. It’s filled with female characters who have women’s bodies and girls’ faces; schoolgirls who wear their uniforms twenty-four hours a day; fighters who use swords, even though the story is set in the present; and supporting characters who dress like Edo-era refugees, even though their cohorts are wearing sneakers and hoodies. In short, what they’re seeing in their mind’s eye looks a lot like Tenjo Tenge.

Plot-wise, Tenjo Tenge isn’t much more complicated than “girls in skirts waving katanas.” The story takes place at Todo Academy, one of those only-in-manga institutions where students study martial arts technique to the exclusion of anything else. (If anyone attends a math class in Tenjo Tenge, I missed it.) First-year students Soichiro Nagi and Bob Makihara fully expect to rule the roost with their awesome fighting skills, but are quickly disabused of the notion when they run afoul of Todo’s Executive Council. Mindful of their greenhorn status, the boys join the Juken Club, an organization lead by Maya Natsume, a third-year student who’s handy with a sword. In so doing, however, Soichiro and Bob become targets for the Executive Council, which carries on an energetic, bloody feud with Maya and her younger sister.

Flipping through the first volume of VIZ’s “Full Contact” edition, it’s easy to see why DC Comics censored the original English print run. The story abounds in the kind of gratuitous nudity and sexual encounters that make an unadulterated version a tough sell at big chain stores like Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble. DC Comics’ solution was an inelegant one: they re-wrote the script, drew bras and panties on naked girls, and cut some of the most offensive passages. As an advocate of free speech, I can’t condone the bowdlerization of any text, especially in the interest of a more commercially viable age-rating , but as a woman, it’s hard to celebrate the restoration of a graphic rape scene or images of naked girls throwing themselves at the heroes.

Whether those scenes are really necessary to advancing the plot is another issue. The rape, in particular, is an ugly exercise in exploitation, pitting a grown man against a teenager who has a twelve-year-old’s face and a porn star’s body. Though Oh!Great shows us the victim’s terrified expression in several panels, he lavishes far more attention on her anatomy, twisting her body into the kind of grotesque, provocative poses that were a stock-in-trade of Hustler. What makes this passage especially nasty is its underlying intent; we’re not being asked to identify with the victim, or burn with outrage over her violation, but to be aroused by her naked body. In a word: yuck.

From time to time, Oh!Great gives the Natsume sisters a chance to strut their martial arts stuff, suggesting that both girls are as tough and cunning as their male counterparts, but he can’t resist tearing off their clothes, or showing us their panties, especially when they’re in the middle of intense, hand-to-hand combat. And if the characters’ complete objectification wasn’t bad enough, Oh!Great draws such grossly misshapen bodies that it’s hard to imagine who would find them sexy; say what you will about Ryoichi Ikeda and Kazuo Koike’s Wounded Man — and yes, there’s plenty to say about the exploitation of its female characters — but Ikeda knew how to draw beautiful women. Oh!Great’s female characters, on the other hand, look like blow-up dolls, incapable of standing on their own two feet, let alone brandishing a sword or high-kicking an opponent.

Tenjo Tenge fans who were angered by the first English-language edition will be pleased with VIZ’s new translation. Many of the elements that had been eliminated or camouflaged in the first version have been restored; characters drop f-bombs and drop trou without editorial intervention. As an added enticement, VIZ has formatted the story as a series of two-in-one omnibuses, complete with glossy color plates and oversized trim. Given the care with which the new Tenjo Tenge was prepared, I wish I could say that the uncensored version convinced me that I’d unfairly dismissed the genius of Oh!Great the first time around. Alas, the answer is no; the story comes is too perilously close to the porn-and-ninjas stereotype for my taste.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media, LLC. Volume one of Tenjo Tenge will be released on June 7, 2011.

TENJO TENGE: FULL CONTACT EDITION, VOL. 1 • BY OH!GREAT • VIZ MEDIA • 386 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)