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Manga

Heaven’s Design Team, Vol. 1

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Do you remember that moment in your manga-reading journey when you discovered that there was a manga about golf? Or pachinko? Or train station bento boxes? I do: I’d just read an entry in Shaenon Garrity’s Overlooked Manga Festival, and was astonished to discover that someone had written manga about Cup Noodle and 7-Eleven. I hadn’t been curious about the origins of either instant ramen or convenience stores, but the possibility of learning about them from manga was so irresistible that I tracked down copies. Neither manga were good, exactly, but I found them oddly compelling, both for their sincerity and their attention to small but interesting details.

I had a similar experience with Heaven’s Design Team, a new edu-manga that explains how different animal species are uniquely adapted to their environments. Its creative team has taken a bolder approach to their subject than Project X‘s, opting for humor over straightforward dramatization. The basic mode of storytelling, however, reminded me of Cup Noodle and 7-Eleven, relying heavily on talking heads to impart information.

Heaven’s Design Team has a faintly blasphemous premise: God is so busy running the world that He’s outsourced the creation of new animal and plant species to a crack team of designers. God still has a hand in deciding whether unicorns go into production or not, but He’s largely an invisible presence in the story, while the motley crew of consultants take center stage. Each designer has a signature animal — a horse, a cow, a snake, a bird — that he or she is trying to improve, and one well-defined personality trait — say, a fondness for lethal predators — that puts him or her into conflict with other team members.

That’s an imaginative strategy for teaching readers about the quirks of animal anatomy, but Heaven’s Design Team never quite finds its groove. Part of the problem lies with the authors’ dogged adherence to formula; at the beginning of every story, the design team fields an order from the Big Guy for an “adorably uncute animal” or “an animal that can eat tall plants,” then bickers their way to creating an actual species like the common egg snake, the giraffe, the armadillo, or the narwhal. Their design process yields nuggets of information about the creatures they’re envisioning that, at chapter’s end, turn out to be real attributes of real animals. So many of these factual tidbits are related through talking-head panels, however, that the manga often feels more like a PowerPoint presentation than a story, despite the authors’ attempts to make these info-dump conversations more animated with facial close-ups and dramatic poses.

From time to time, however, Heaven’s Design Team drops a joke that’s so weird or so well executed it earns a real laugh. In one scene, for example, two unicorns accidentally bump into one another, prompting a terse exchange straight out of Goodfellas. In another sight gag, Shimoda, the team’s most straight-laced member, visits the Insect Department, a division populated entirely by young men with identical haircuts and glasses–the ultimate worker bees. These moments last only a panel or two, but they hint at what the series might have been if the authors hadn’t suffered the same repetition compulsion as their characters. Your milage may vary. 

Heaven’s Design Team, Vol. 1
Written by Hebi-Zou and Tsuta Suzuki, Art by Tarako
Translated by
Kodansha Comics, 142 pp.
Rated E, for Everyone

Again!!, Vol. 2

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The phenomenal success of Yuri!!! On ICE turned out to be a boon for manga fans, too, as American publishers snapped up two of Mitsurou Kubo’s better-known comics: Moteki: Love Strikes!, a seinen romance about a thirty-something loser who reconnects with women from his past, and Again!!, a time-travel comedy about two teenagers who get a second chance at high school. I won’t lie: Again!! was my hands-down favorite of the two, both for its raw honesty and its sharply observed characters.

Again!! avoids the sophomore slump by briskly advancing the plot without sacrificing the humor or heart that made the first chapters so appealing. Kinichiro and Fujieda both get a turn in the spotlight, with Kinichiro discovering the pleasures of cheering, and Fujieda experiencing loneliness for the first time. Volume two also introduces three new characters, all of whom used to belong to the ouendan: Okuma, the drummer; Masaki, the vice-captain; and Suga, the cheer sergeant. Although the trio’s ostensible role is comic relief, their real function is helping us understand why the ouendan failed, revealing the degree to which their unwanted advances, passivity, and flagrant sexism undermined Usami’s authority as captain and poisoned group morale.

While this information is crucial to the story, it also points to Again!!‘s biggest problem: Usami. Mitsurou Kubo is frank about why Usami resorts to shouting, scolding, and shaming to prove that she’s “man” enough to lead the ouendan — a compassionate insight into a character who often seems more harridan than human. Yet Usami’s actual personality remains a mystery. Everything we learn about her is revealed through other characters, whether they’re discussing her beef with Abe, the head cheerleader, or describing the flurry of media interest in Usami when she first joined the ouendan. We don’t know how Usami feels about her teammates, or why she’s so passionately interested in cheering — two questions that need to be addressed if she’s to become a full-fledged character.

Despite these flaws, Again!! manages to wring fresh laughs from its time-travel premise while depicting high school in all its unpleasantness. Fujieda, for example, vacillates between trying to profit from her knowledge of the future and lamenting her lack of friends. Kinichiro also is caught between past and present: he’s angry that his first kiss didn’t go as planned, and deeply self-conscious after a loud, public declaration of how miserable he feels — an exquisitely awful scene that acknowledges the depth of his pain while recognizing that his brusque behavior directly contributes to his sense of isolation and victimhood. It’s this kind of insight that makes Again!! such a compelling story, reminding us that our memories of being shunned, wronged, or ridiculed can be so one-sided that we’d make the same mistakes if given the opportunity to relive our teenage years. Recommended.

Again!!, Vol. 2
By Mitsurou Kobu
Translated by Rose Padgett
Rated OT, for Older Teens (16+)
Kodansha Comics

Star Wars: Lost Stars, Vol. 1

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Remember the good ol’ days when a new Star Wars movie took three years to make, and no one was certain that George Lucas was going to get around to Episodes I, II, and III? I miss those days; new installments felt like a cause for celebration and not a dutiful obligation, and the films were an irresistible mixture of bad acting, thrilling space battles, and earnest conversations about the Force. When I’ve felt a twinge of nostalgia for my childhood Star Wars experience, I’ve found the manga adaptations of the original trilogy much more satisfying than the current batch of Disneyfied films. So I was curious to see what an original Star Wars manga might look like: would it explore new territory, or simply recycle the same plot points, a la The Force Awakens, Rogue One, and The Last Jedi?

Turns out that Lost Stars is to Star Wars what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is to Hamlet, a retelling of an iconic story from the perspective of two peripheral characters. Many of the most famous moments from George Lucas’ original trilogy appear in Lost Stars — the capture of Princess Leia, the annihilation of Alderaan, the ice battle on Hoth — though the framing of these events is new, seen through the eyes of two young Imperial pilots: Thane Kyrell and Ciena Ree, both of whom enrolled in the Imperial Academy hoping for adventure and a better way of life.

The inclusion of these famous scenes is a double-edged sword; they provide a handy point of reference for the Star Wars greenhorn while simultaneously pandering to the hardcore fan by faithfully recreating iconic images, characters, and dialogue from A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. There’s a dot-the-i quality to them that suggests that Yusaku Komiyuma was more concerned with nailing down the original details than imagining how Thane or Ciena would perceive — or participate — in these events. The other problem with these scenes is that they’re more dramatically interesting than Komiyuma’s brisk but flavorless adaptation of Claudia Gray’s novel. The most thoughtful elements of Gray’s work — particularly the class politics on Thane and Ciena’s home planet Jelucan — are presented in a bald fashion that reads more like CliffNotes than honest-to-goodness fiction, while important scenes of character development are too compressed to give us a sense of who these star-crossed lovers really are. The net result is a comic that successfully bridges the aesthetic worlds of Shonen Jump and Star Wars without achieving its own distinct identity as a manga or a Star Wars story. Your mileage may vary.

Star Wars: Lost Stars, Vol. 1
Original Story by Claudia Gray
Art and Adaptation by Yusaku Komiyuma
Yen Press, 192 pp.
Rated T, for teens

Happiness, Vols. 4-7

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This review contains a few spoilers for later volumes of Happiness, and discusses one character’s efforts to cope with PTSD after a violent attack. Proceed with caution. 

The first three volumes of Shuzo Oshimi’s Happiness explore familiar terrain, using vampirism as a metaphor for the ravages of puberty, that moment when hormonal urges overwhelm the rational mind and the body morphs into its adult form. And while these early volumes contained some well-rehearsed scenes of bullying and bloodlust, Oshimi’s artwork — at once raw and refined, primitive and expressionist — made these moments feel strange, fresh, and specific to his story. One could feel fourteen-year-old Makoto Okazaki’s palpable anguish over being trapped in a body and a life he could no longer control, and wondered how he might escape his fate.

Volume four was a turning point in the series, culminating in a scene of frenzied violence in which a major character was killed, another forced into hiding, and a third — Gosho — badly wounded. The violence was grotesque in the Romantic sense of the word, a scene so horrific that it filled with reader with a strong sense of revulsion and pity. But a curious thing happened in the next installment: in the aftermath of this bloody cataclysm, Happiness became Gosho’s story. A time jump advanced the plot ten years into the future, showing us Gosho’s efforts to rebuild her life, one temp job at a time.

Though Gosho seems outwardly calm and self-possessed, her carefully constructed facade is shattered in volume six by a sensational newspaper headline: “Vampire Boy: Where Is He Now?” Oshimi captures Gosho’s experience of being triggered in all its nauseous horror; we can see a painful memory well up in Gosho, causing her to double over and fall to her knees as if she were trying to purge her body of all the fear and shame she’d experienced on that fateful night ten years ago. What makes this moment even more powerful is the skill with which Oshimi captures Gosho’s mounting terror through a series of closeups — first her face, then her eye, then the article itself, as her gaze darts across the page, lingering on a striking image or a suggestive snippet of text.

For all the emotional intensity of this moment, however, volume six is largely uneventful, focusing primarily on the tenative relationship between Gosho and Sudo, her co-worker. Much of their courtship unfolds in brief, wordless scenes depicting everyday activities: eating out, walking home from the train station, buying groceries. The normalcy of these vignettes suggests that Gosho has recovered from her anxiety attack — that is, until Gosho glimpses a boy who might be a vampire:

What makes this image so potent is its ambiguity: is it a figment of Gosho’s imagination, a flashback, or an actual vampire? We’re left feeling as unsettled as Gosho, and wonder what this bloody omen might mean.

That brings me to the hardest part of my review.

Despite the consummate skill and sensitivity with which volumes five and six explore Gosho’s psychic wounds, volume seven may be my last, primarily because I’m dismayed by Oshimi’s decision to further brutalize Gosho. In volume five, Gosho nearly died at the hands of a knife-wielding psychopath, an event that left her with an angry scar on her neck. The terror she felt, and the violence of the scene, seemed necessary at that juncture in the story, revealing the extent to which Gosho’s naivete, determination, and caring could be ruthlessly exploited by someone older and more experienced.

In volume seven, however, Gosho is captured by a cult leader who tortures her, mutilating her body and smearing it with her own menstrual blood. The violence in this scene is fundamentally sexual and, frankly, disgusting. One might argue that Oshimi is deliberately provoking the reader, making us complicit in Gosho’s exploitation, but nothing in Oshimi’s other work — Drifting Net Cafe, The Flowers of Evil — suggests that level of critical engagement with tropes. Instead, it feels as if Oshimi is using this violence as a shortcut, a way of revealing the cult leader’s depravity while providing Sudo motivation to seek revenge on behalf of his girlfriend. The scene also undermines Gosho’s agency — she broke into the cult’s compound looking for Okazaki — and dehumanizes her, reducing her womanhood to breasts and blood rather than her courage, intelligence, and determination to save a friend she hasn’t seen in a decade.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of reading and watching scenes like these, whether they serve a legitimate dramatic purpose or not. Oshimi’s undeniable artistry makes quitting Happiness an even more difficult decision for me, as I found his artwork and storytelling in the first six volumes compelling. (Hell, I’m quoted in the promotional literature for Happiness.) I don’t have the stomach for another scene of Gosho’s degradation, however, so I don’t think I’ll be reading volume eight.

HAPPINESS, VOLS. 3-7 • BY SHUZO OSHIMI • KODANSHA COMICS • RATED OT, FOR OLDER TEENS (VIOLENCE, PARTIAL NUDITY, SEXUALITY)

Cutie Honey A Go-Go

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Cutie Honey a Go Go! is not a conventionally good manga: the plot is riddled with holes, the story lacks a proper conclusion, and the characters are paper-thin. Yet for all its obvious limitations, Cutie Honey a Go Go! is cheeky fun in the manner of an Austin Powers movie; it’s a cartoon of a cartoon, an irreverent send-up of the source material that simultaneously captures the original manga’s naughty tone while updating the plot and characters for contemporary readers.

Cutie Honey a Go Go! borrows liberally from Hideaki Anno’s 2004 film and Go Nagai’s original 1973 manga, mixing elements of both with a few new flourishes. In Cutie Honey a Go Go!, for example, Aki Natsuko is no longer a blushing school girl with a crush on her android sempai, but a hard-charging special agent who faces down danger with the brash confidence of a Harrison Ford character. Aki and Cutie’s arch nemesis Sister Jill has likewise gotten a makeover, from whip-wielding bad girl to wicked android intent on world domination. The signature elements of Nagai’s original story remain intact, however: Cutie Honey is still an impossibly innocent, cheerful android whose clothing dissolves to tatters every time she powers up, and her main opponents are the Panther Claw ladies, a group of monstrous beauties who work for Sister Jill.

Though manga-ka Shimpei Itoh’s action scenes are clumsy, his character designs are a playful nod to the era that begat Cutie Honey, straddling the fence between retro and modern. The Panther Claw gang look like Betty Paige cosplayers, busty gals in barely-there costumes that feature leopard spots and extra arms, while Cutie Honey rocks her signature pixie cut and a backless jumpsuit that David Lee Roth might have worn in 1984. It’s hard to be offended by the T&A, though, since Cutie Honey a Go Go! resembles a 1962 issue of Playboy more than a volume of Air Gear; there’s a pin-up coyness about Itoh’s cheesecake that renders these images benign. It’s also difficult to be offended by a manga that works so hard to entertain the reader with its anything-for-a-laugh jokes, over-the-top battle sequences, and campy dialogue. I found its unironic goofiness charming — costume failures and all — and think you might, too. Recommended.

Cutie Honey a Go Go!
Original Story by Go Nagai; Story & Art by Shimpei Itoh; Planning Cooperation by Hideaki Anno
Translated by Zack Davisson and Adrienne Beck
Seven Seas, 400 pp.
Rated T, for Teen (Nudity and bloodless violence)

The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún, Vol. 4

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The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún was one of 2017’s surprise hits, an emotionally wrenching fantasy manga about a demon who rescues an orphan girl from a plague-ridden world. Nagabe’s art — with its graceful linework and unique character designs — was enough to distinguish Girl from the Other Side from virtually any other series licensed by a major American publisher. But it was the characters and the poignancy of their relationship that truly captivated readers, as the bond between Teacher (the demon) and Shiva (the girl) was tested by Shiva’s ties to the human world, particularly her attachment to the aunt who raised her — and then abandoned her in the woods. Four volumes in, Girl from the Other Side is still casting a powerful spell, even as the story takes another grim turn.

As the volume opens, Teacher, Shiva, and Auntie have formed an uneasy family unit, with Shiva desperate to broker the peace between her adoptive parents. Nagabe does a fine job of dramatizing the conflict between Teacher and Auntie without spoiling the quiet mood of the story, using small gestures to convey how desperately each wants to protect Shiva from the human world. Nagabe also includes a handful of scenes that chart the progress of Auntie’s disease, showing us how quickly the curse erases a victim’s memory and personality — a development that raises the interesting question of who Teacher was before he assumed his demonic form.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of volume four is how much of the characters’ interior lives are revealed through the artwork. In the first chapter, for example, Teacher and Auntie slip into the woods for a nighttime conference about Shiva. Each carries a lantern as they walk and talk — two pinpoints of light against a scrim of trees — their conversation ending when Auntie’s lantern flickers out, leaving her and Teacher side by side in darkness. What makes this sequence so effective is the deliberate placement of the characters on the page and the meticulous attention to lighting; Nagabe has found an elegant — and wordless — way to demonstrate the characters’ shared resolve to protect Shiva, even though they remain suspicious of one another. Such carefully observed moments are a potent reminder that The Girl from the Other Side is an all-too-rare example of a manga whose story engages the heart and mind by suggesting, rather than saying, what the characters are feeling. Recommended.

The Girl From the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún, Vol. 4
Art and Story by Nagabe
Translated by Adrienne Beck
Seven Seas, 180 pp.

Short Takes: Delicious in Dungeon and Golden Kamuy

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Today’s reviews come to you courtesy of Patriot’s Day, my second favorite Massachusetts-only holiday. (The first is Evacuation Day, a thinly-disguised attempt to give Boston’s civil servants permission to skip work on St. Paddy’s.) For your consideration are volume four of D&D cooking extravaganza Delicious in Dungeon, and volumes three and four of everyone’s favorite backwoods culinary adventure Golden Kamuy. Looking back on food manga’s early history in the US, who could have predicted that readers would be feasting on such a wide array of titles in 2018, from Sweetness and Lightning and What Did You Eat Yesterday? to Giant Spider & Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale, Food Wars!! Shokugeki no Soma, and Toriko. Maybe the North American market is finally ready for an Iron Wok Jan renaissance…

Delicious in Dungeon, Vol. 4
Story and Art by Ryoko Kui
Translated by Taylor Engel
Yen Press, 192 pp.
Rated T, for Teens (13+)

If the first volume of Delicious in Dungeon was about assembling a posse, and the second and third about turning monsters into meals, then the fourth is about friendship — specifically, the strong emotional bond between Laois, Marcille, and Falin — and revenge, as the gang finally comes face-to-face with the Red Dragon. The showdown takes place inside a walled city whose narrow, maze-like streets give them a strategic advantage over their Godzilla-sized foe. And as exciting as the fight is, the real payoff is what follows, as Laois and Marcille discover that bringing Falin back from the dead isn’t a simple proposition. It’s in these moments that Ryoko Kui proves a more deft storyteller than we initially realized, effortlessly shifting gears from comedy to drama without mawkishness or cheap jokes. Instead, we’re allowed to contemplate the real horror of being eaten alive — as Falin was — and the real possibility of a character dying for good.

If I’ve made volume four sound like a bummer, rest assured it isn’t. Seshi gets his turn in the spotlight with a weaponized assortment of kitchen tools, while the rest of the gang endures its share of fumbles and miscommunications on the way to catching their dragon adversary. Though I suspect the next volume of Delicious in Dungeon will revert to a monster-of-the-week formula, that’s OK; Kui has firmly established her dramatic and culinary bonafides in volume four, leaving the door open for more character development in the future. Recommended.

Golden Kamuy, Vols. 3-4
Story and Art by Satoru Noda
Translated by Eiji Yasuda
VIZ Media
Rated M, for Mature (18+)

Midway through volume four of Golden Kamuy, Asirpa builds a fox trap in the woods. “Do foxes taste good?” Sugimoto inquires. “No, not really,” Asirpa replies. “Tanuki have more fat in them and taste a lot better.” With a twinkle in her eye, she then asks, “But Sugimoto, don’t you want to try eating a fox?” A mildly exasperated Sugimoto replies, “You know, I’m not out here to try all the delicacies in Hokkaido.”

There are two ways to read this exchange: as a tacit admission that the cooking elements of Golden Kamuy sometimes occupy more real estate than the battles, or a tacit admission that the series is more compelling as a study of Ainu culture than a bloody frontier adventure. I vote for the second interpretation, as the series’ frequent detours into the food, medicine, and mythology of the Ainu are fascinating, offering a window into a culture that has been largely hidden from Western view. Golden Kamuy is on weaker footing, however, when focusing on its secondary characters and subplots. None of the other gold-seekers are fleshed out as carefully as Asirpa and Sugimoto, despite Satoru Noda’s efforts to give each villain a unique motivation for wanting the treasure. The newest baddie — Kazuo Hemni — exemplifies this problem to a tee: though he’s been given a particularly grisly backstory to explain his murderous proclivities, he’s such a textbook sociopath that he barely rises above the preternaturally-calm-and-savage type.

The art, too, sometimes has a perfunctory quality; in several scenes, Noda’s use of a Photoshopped background doesn’t mesh well with the hand-drawn elements, resulting in an awkward collage. Noda’s use of perspective can also be a distraction. He has difficulty drawing bodies to scale, especially when he’s depicting Asirpa and her family, some of whom look more like Smurfs than people in their head-to-body ratio.

Still, the camaraderie between Asirpa and Sugimoto, and the well-staged action scenes more than compensate for the occasional roughness of the execution or flatness of the characterizations. Golden Kamuy continues to entertain, horrify, and educate in equal measure — something I can’t say for any other manly-man manga that’s currently being published in English. Recommended.

Moteki: Love Strikes!, Vol. 1

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By Mitsurou Kubo | Published by Vertical Comics

Although I was originally quite keen to read Moteki, it took me nearly a week to finish this volume. That isn’t due to its length (Vertical is publishing the entire series in two hefty volumes) but to the fact that the protagonist, self-proclaimed loser Yukiyo Fujimoto, is really hard to take in large doses.

The story begins in the summer of Yukiyo’s 29th year, when he experiences a brief flurry of contact from women in his past. Desperate for love and sex, he reconnects with each of them and botches each attempt in one way or another. With Aki Doi, the former coworker who held hands with him at a rock festival until her boyfriend showed up, he’s too passive. With Natsuki, a girl he bombarded with “please fall in love with me” vibes for a year before finally losing his virginity to her older sister, he very nearly scores but can’t perform. It’s with his friend Itsuka, however, that his behavior is the most troubling.

In their first meeting two years ago, their mutual friend Shimada tries to pair them off. Yukiyo is all for this, but Itsuka balks. (We later learn it’s because she was in love with Shimada.) Yukiyo erupts. “Are you one of those girls who acts like a cocktease then plays dumb out of spite, or maybe you act like you’re being generous when you give a guy who just saved you a kiss on the cheek instead of putting out for him?! You are one nasty chick!!” Despite this, they become friends and, in the present day, she invites him on a trip to eat a local delicacy. In their hotel room, they almost have sex before she finds out he’s not a virgin and kicks him out of bed. She promptly falls asleep and his first thought is, “If you don’t resist, that means you want it, right?” Then he realizes that he doesn’t have any condoms. Only after that does it occur to him that she trusts him not to do anything to her. Later, he’s super persistent to the point that Itsuka blocks him from contacting her and calls off the friendship.

Previously, Itsuka had said that she wishes she could find someone to love, and Yukiyo is baffled as to why she wouldn’t consider him. “Could she still not forget about Shimada?” It’s at this point that I desperately wished for some hallucinatory foodstuffs to appear. Like so:

Thankfully, in the second half Yukiyo seemingly begins to change. Despite getting terrible advice from a girl in his hometown, urging even more persistence (and I do worry what kind of message this manga is sending in that respect), when he meets Itsuka again he manages to actually listen to her romantic woes with empathy, realizing they share problems with low self-esteem, and even be just assertive enough to help her get closure regarding her unrequited feelings for now-married Shimada. He’s serious enough to say “I’m interested in you” without going overboard and insincerely declaring his love, and he isn’t pushy about getting in her pants. Just when you think they might finally make things work, however, he ends up hanging around Aki Doi again and getting jealous when a slovenly, struggling manga artist seems interested in her. Make up your mind, dude!

Ultimately, I just don’t know. I’ll read the second (and final) volume, but I worry I’ll end up grumpy and frustrated once again.

Moteki is complete in Japan with 4.5 volumes. Vertical will release the omnibus containing the second half of the series in July.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

The Ancient Magus’ Bride, Vols. 1-8

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By Kore Yamazaki | Published by Seven Seas

I’d heard good things about The Ancient Magus’ Bride from my Manga Bookshelf compatriots, but I had also heard about a sad fate befalling some cats, so I steered clear. After reading and really enjoying Kore Yamazaki’s Frau Faust, however, I decided to give AMB a try. I’m glad I did, because it turns out the cat stuff wasn’t a deal breaker (it all happened long ago and present-day kitties emerge unscathed) and the series is excellent.

In the opening chapter, fifteen-year-old Japanese teenager Chise Hatori is on sale at a British auction house. She is apparently “the most wondrous tool an alchemist can hope for—a sleigh beggy,” though she knows not what a sleigh beggy is. She only knows that she’s been attracting weird creatures all her life, that her father left with her younger brother, that her mother committed suicide, that her other relatives wouldn’t take her, and that she just wants a place to call home. She doesn’t care whether she lives or dies, but thought that if she could be useful to someone, that would be okay.

She’s purchased by a mage named Elias Ainsworth, who takes her as his apprentice. Elias is not entirely human and not entirely fae, either. Most of the time he assumes the form of a tall human with a head somewhat like a cow’s skull, but his real form is something far stranger. Despite his scary looks, he’s kind to Chise, insisting that she be neither passive nor servile, and she’s soon comfortable in his home in the countryside west of London. Eventually, he tells her that because of her ability to absorb and generate mass quantities of magic, her lifespan is destined to be brief. Part of the reason he bought her was to try to help overcome this while also learning more about humans. And to be his bride, of course.

Here’s a particularly revealing passage from volume two:

”I bought you because you met my requirements. With nothing of your own, you’d have little reason to leave me. I gave you food and shelter, and said things I expected you wished to hear. I thought that raising you myself might enable me to better understand your kind. I’d planned to tell you these things after I was confident you’d never leave.”

For Chise, someone not wanting her to leave is a novel experience, so she stays. Most of the time, anything romantic happening between them is downplayed. Instead, they take on a variety of tasks like investigating the black dog haunting a churchyard (who ultimately becomes Chise’s very, very lovable familiar), or helping a muse-like fae communicate with the man she’s loved for decades, or helping a girl find the brother her parents have inexplicably forgotten. Meanwhile, Chise learns more about magic (and how it differs from alchemy) and becomes passionate about helping others, often to her detriment. While she’s become more attached to the idea of living, she’s also reckless, culminating in an incident at the end of volume seven where, in an attempt to calm a rampaging dragon, she ends up absorbing so much of its magic that she curses herself. A despairing and desperate Elias attempts something awful to cure her, driving her away in the process (and potentially into an alliance with evil alchemist Josef, though I fail to see how Chise could rationalize doing such a thing).

What I’m getting at here is that this is a series rich in story. The plot is interesting, but the real story is Chise and Elias, what they mean to each other and how they might be incompatible despite all that binds them together. Besides the fact that her life was already going to be brief, now Chise has this dragon’s curse to contend with, and it’s really not looking good for her. Sometimes, too, Chise gets warned about Elias’ interest in her, like when his master Lindel says, “It looks as if he’s trying to tame you… and you are allowing him to do it. But you mustn’t.” Even if she were to return to him after what he did, would that be the healthy choice? I’m not sure this is going to have a happy ending, but it’s certain to have a fascinating one. I can’t wait for volume nine!

The Ancient Magus’ Bride is ongoing in Japan, where the ninth volume has just been released. It’ll come out in English in September.

Kenka Bancho Otome: Love’s Battle Royale, Vol. 1

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For a manga based on a dating game, Kenka Bancho Otome is far better than it ought to be. It’s a fast-paced, loose-limbed story that’s both cheerfully stupid and mildly subversive, buoyed by its deliciously queer premise: a girl goes undercover in an all-boys’ high school where her androgynous beauty and lethal karate chops inflame her classmates’ hearts.

The plot is set in motion by an accidental encounter between Hinako Nakayama, an orphan, and her long-lost twin Hikaru, whom she rescues from the path of an oncoming car. In the aftermath of the accident, Hikaru cajoles his sister into impersonating him for a day, lending her his school uniform and dropping her at the campus gates. Hinako soon realizes the folly of her brother’s request, however; Shishiku Academy is more like Rock ’n’ Roll High School than prep school, as its entire curriculum—if one could call it that—centers on fighting. Making matters worse is that everyone wants to fight Hinako because they believe she’s the heir apparent to the Onigumo crime family. She isn’t, of course, but Hikaru is, a detail he conveniently omitted when roping her into his charade. 

If you’ve read more than one shojo comedy, you know what happens next: Hinako befriends and beguiles the best-looking delinquents at the school, from Totomaru, an earnest cutie who’s prone to nosebleeds and blushing, to Kira, a tousle-haired bishonen with a sensitive side. Author Chie Shimada has the good graces to keep the hot guys and fist-fights coming — the better to distract from the thinness of the plot —and the imagination to add small but delightful quirks to her main characters’ personalities. Her best running gag is Hikaru, who seems more at home impersonating his sister than inhabiting his own skin; though his temper suggests he’d be a ruthless crime boss, his obvious joy in looking pretty and flirting with Miraku, Shinsiku Academy’s resident idol, add a fresh dimension to the identity-swapping formula. 

As you might expect, the artwork is more serviceable than memorable. Shimada proves capable of drawing a variety of familiar bishonen types — lanky guys with ponytails, serious guys with glasses — though the pro forma nature of the character designs occasionally makes it difficult to parse the fight scenes. (All those artfully coiffed young men have the same lanky, spike-haired silhouette.) Then, too, there are riotously busy pages where Shimada’s screentone is so thick and smudgy it’s almost palpable; the phrase “applied with a trowel” comes to mind.

Still, the Shishiku gang’s bonhomie is hard to resist, carrying the reader past the story’s creakier moments. So, too, is Hinako’s sincerity; her journey towards self-actualization is both touching and amusing, as she discovers that she might, in fact, be a more natural bancho than her twin. That she wins her fellow delinquents’ admiration with a mean right hook and a roundhouse kick is less important than the fact they appreciate her for her pluck, kindness, and thirst for justice — a nuance that elevates Kenka Bancho Otome from otome rehash to actual story. Recommended.

KENKA BANCHO OTOME: LOVE’S BATTLE ROYALE, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY CHIE SHIMADA • ORIGINAL CONCEPT BY SPIKE CHUNSOFT • VIZ MEDIA • 194 pp. • RATED T, FOR TEENS (13+)

Again!!, Vol. 1

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By Mitsurou Kubo | Published by Kodansha Comics

Having greatly enjoyed Yuri!!! on Ice, written by Mitsurou Kubo, I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of some of Kubo’s manga in English. (In addition to Again!! from Kodansha, Vertical Comics has just published the first omnibus of Moteki, which I shall be reviewing within the next week or so.) Happily, Again!! did not disappoint.

This shounen series begins on March 14, 2014, when long-haired, scary-looking outcast Kinichiro Imamura is about to graduate from high school. He’s friendless, and despite going to a good school, he has no college or employment plans. The graduation ceremony reminds him of his entrance ceremony three years ago, during which the lone remaining member of the ouendan club (a girl, at that) tried to recruit new members. This spurs him to go check out the now-deserted ouendan club room and, when chasing after a female classmate who gets the wrong idea, he ends up falling down the stairs and three years into the past.

Now it’s April 6, 2011 and Kinichiro has a chance to do it all over again. Will he manage to navigate school this time without scaring people? He decides to actually talk to the ouendan girl this time, and learns her name is Yoshiki Usami. In a neat twist, the girl he was chasing also fell down the stairs and ends up back in the past with him. Her name is Akira Fujieda, and while Kinichiro begins to make small improvements on his high school experience—dispelling notions that he’s in a gang or that his blond hair signifies anything other than a hair stylist’s whim—Akira’s knowledge of the future alienates her classmates and would’ve-been future boyfriend.

Mostly, though, the focus is on the ouendan club and Kinichiro’s attempts to help Usami out. She’s stubborn, however, and resists efforts to draw male membership by featuring her image on recruitment posters. This makes more sense later on, when it’s revealed that she originally got a lot of media attention that led to fallout within the group—stoked by an online smear campaign—leading everyone but her to quit. Complicating matters is the captain of the cheerleading club, Tamaki Abe, who is resentful of having to cooperate with the ouendan, and determined to sabotage them. Happily, the girl she picks to seduce Kinichiro has scruples (and Kinichiro is also not an idiot), so this first volume ends with our heroes savvy to her scheme.

Again!! is a lot of fun. If you’re looking for time travel with a reasonable scientific explanation, then you should probably look elsewhere, but if you just accept the premise and go with it, then it’s kind of like a sports manga and a coming-of-age story rolled into one. I do worry what’s going to happen after Kinichiro reaches his graduation year again. Will these changes stick, and will he be able to go forward in life with more ambition and fewer regrets? I’m confident, though, that these questions will be answered eventually.

Again!! is complete in twelve volumes. The second volume is due out in English next week.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

CITY, Vol. 1

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CITY, Keiichi Arawi’s latest series, charts the misadventures of Midori, a feckless undergrad who’s behind on the rent, in debt to her roommate, and surrounded by “not-quite-ordinary people.” In a last-ditch effort to stay in her apartment, she hatches several get-rich schemes — betting on horses, entering a photography contest — all of which backfire in spectacular fashion. That premise sounded ripe with comic potential, so I decided to pick up a copy of volume one.

I’ll be honest: I had a hard time reviewing CITY, a manga that seems to be tickling everyone else’s funny bone but mine. Though I could appreciate the skill and imagination behind Keiichi Arawi’s work, I found CITY too frantic to be amusing, thought-provoking, or interesting. My frustration boiled down to two basic observations about Arawi’s methods — first, his unwavering belief that repeating gags is a surefire strategy for laughs, and second, his unwavering belief that certain types of jokes subvert convention when, in fact, they’re just as cliche as the conventions they’re spoofing. Nowhere are those two tendencies more pronounced than in his depiction of Midori’s landlady, a feisty old broad who goes to violent lengths to collect the rent. A karate-chopping grandma sounds hilarious in the abstract, but you’ve seen this gag done better elsewhere, most spectacularly in Kung Fu Hustle, where the regal and ridiculous Yuen Qi steals the show from under Stephen Chow’s nose  — something that can’t be said of Midori’s landlady, whose shouting and punching barely distinguishes her from her equally batshit neighbors.

It’s only in the quieter interludes, when the focus shifts from Midori to her neighbors that Arawi’s flair for the absurd manifests itself. In “Officer,” for example, a neighborhood patrolman finds himself under citizen’s arrest for a theft he was asked to investigate. The officer’s placid expression and deadpan delivery contrast sharply with the physical and emotional indignities of his job, his beatific expression unbroken by the ordeal of being hog-tied by an overzealous mob. Another modestly amusing interlude — “Wako Izumi” — focuses on a control freak who’s distraught by the loss of a restaurant point card. Like the officer, Wako proves an unreliable narrator, her impulsive, weird behavior contradicting the Sgt. Friday-esque tone of her internal monologue. These moments of surrealism aren’t funny, exactly, but they at least feel original, something that can’t be said of the tired slapstick jokes and strenuously unpleasant main characters.

Verdict: Your mileage will vary. See my colleague Sean Gaffney’s review for a different perspective on CITY.

CITY, Vol. 1
Art & Story by Keiichi Arawa
Translated by Jenny McKeon
Vertical, Inc., 166 pp.
No rating

A First Look at Starving Anonymous

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Have you been checking out Kodansha Comics’ digital-only and digital-first releases? I have, and I love this initiative: it lets me sample dozens of series that might otherwise never see the light of day in North America. Rugby manga. Karuta manga. Really weird horror manga. Medical drama. Josei. As you might expect, there’s a good reason why no one was clamoring to bring out print editions of, say, Deathtopia, but lurking among the pedestrian, the awful, and the amateurish are gems such as Dragon Head, PTSD Radio, Shojo FIGHT! and Tokyo Tarareba Girls. This week, I previewed one of Kodansha’s most recent digital offerings, Starving Anonymous, which, according to Kodansha’s editorial staff, is “an intense dystopian horror thriller in the apocalyptic vein of Dragon Head and Attack on Titan, from the team that brought you zombie actioner Fort of Apocalypse.”

That’s not a bad description of Starving Anonymous; if you can imagine an Eli Roth remake of Soylent Green in all its gory, sadistic intensity, you’ll have some idea of what it’s like to read Yuu Kuraishi and Kazu Inabe’s latest effort. Like the 1973 Charlton Heston film, Starving Anonymous takes place in a heat-ravaged future where supplies are scarce, birth rates are plummeting, and people are crowded into fewer and fewer cities. The series’ protagonist is I’e, a normal high school student whose life is violently upended when he’s snatched off a bus and deposited at an enormous industrial facility where the main product is — you guessed it — people.

A concept this potentially repulsive lives or dies by the thoughtfulness of the execution, and it’s here where Kuraishi and Inabe stumble. The writing is efficient but artless, establishing the direness of the world’s condition through news flashes and pointed conversations but revealing little about I’e; he’s more a placeholder than a character, a collection of reaction shots in search of a personality. The artwork, by contrast, varies from slickly generic — Tokyo apparently looks the same 50 years from now — to willfully ugly; once inside the factory, Inabe draws rooms and conveyor belts filled with distended bodies, rendering every roll of fat and bulging eye in fetishistic detail. If Kuraishi and Inabe were trying to make a point about the ethics of factory farming, or the evils of overconsumption, that message is quickly shoved aside in favor of a more conventional escape-from-prison plot in which I’e and a group of young, healthy rebels fight their way to the outside. Nothing in the first chapter suggested that Starving Anonymous has anything on its mind other than characters doing and seeing horrible stuff, so I’ll be passing on this one.

Starving Anonymous, Chapter 1
Story by Yuu Kuraishi, Art by Kazu Inabe, Original Concept by Kengo Mizutani
Kodansha Comics
Rating: OT (Older teen)

Silver Spoon, Vol. 1

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The title of Hiromu Arakwa’s latest series is a pointed reference to Kansuke Naka’s The Silver Spoon: Memoir of a Japanese Boyhood. First serialized in the pages of the Asahi Shimbun in 1913, The Silver Spoon traced Naka’s journey from childhood to adolescence through a series of vignettes that recalled turn-of-the-century Tokyo in vivid detail, describing both the bustle of its modern neighborhoods and the rustic isolation of its western regions, a contrast underscored by one of the book’s most important events: Naka’s move to rural Tokyo. “For me to be born in the midst of Kanda was as inappropriate as for a kāppa to be hatched in a desert,” he declares, viewing the country as a place of rebirth.

Yuugo Hachiken, the fictional protagonist of Arakawa’s Silver Spoon, undertakes a similar journey, moving from Sapporo to the Hokkaido countryside, where he enrolls at at Ooezo Agricultural High. Though his peers chose the school for its curriculum, Hachiken chose it to escape the college prep grind — cram schools and high-stakes tests — and his parents, who seem indifferent to his misery. His competitive streak remains intact, however; he assumes that he’ll be the top student at Ezo AG, sizing up his classmates’ mastery of English and geometry with all the condescension of a prep school boy in a backwoods schoolhouse.

Hachiken’s path to redemption predictably begins with a rude awakening: there’s no spring break and no sleeping in at Ezo AG, where students rise at 4:00 am to muck stalls and harvest eggs. Adding insult to injury, his cosmopolitan prejudices are challenged by his peers, who are more ambitious, motivated, and knowledgable than he is; in one of the volume’s best scenes, Hachiken’s elation turns to despair when he overhears his classmates discussing the transformative effect of somatic cell cloning on the Japanese beef market. “Are they speaking in tongues!!?” he fumes, rivers of sweat pouring down his ashen face. “Are you guys smart or stupid? Make up your minds!!”

After a series of humiliating trials, Hachiken makes tentative steps towards fitting into the community and finding his purpose. His incentive for trying a little harder is, unsurprisingly, a girl — specifically Aki Mikage, a pragmatic, cheerful soul whose horse-wrangling skills, can-do attitude, and endless patience with dumb questions endear her to Hachiken. Though she’s instrumental in persuading Hachiken to join the equestrian club, her main role in volume one is to help Hachiken overcome his sentimental ideas about farm life, encouraging him to see the farm as a factory or business rather than a collection of cute animals.

This bracing dose of reality is one of the manga’s strengths, preventing the story from devolving into a string of sight gags and super-deformed characters screaming and flapping their arms at the sight of poop. Near the end of volume one, for example, Mikage invites Hachiken and fellow classmate Ichirou Komaba to the Ban’ei Racetrack to watch a draft horse pull, an outing that quickly turns somber when they stumble upon a horse funeral in progress. “Some souls are thrust into a cruel existence where there are only two options, life or death, simply because they happen to be born livestock,” Mikage’s uncle observes — a statement that makes a deep impression on Hachiken, who’s just beginning to realize that many of the piglets and chickens he’s raising will be on someone’s dinner table in a matter of months.

The racetrack episode also highlights Silver Spoon‘s other secret weapon: its terrific supporting cast. Though Hachiken, Komaba and Mikage’s more serious conversations dominate the chapter, one of the series’ most memorable personalities — Nakajima, the equestrian club supervisor — makes a cameo appearance as well. Nakajima exemplifies Arakawa’s gift for creating visually striking characters whose goofy, exaggerated appearances belie their true nature. He looks like a Bodhisattva but acts like a gambler, a tension that plays out almost entirely on his face. When riding a horse or encouraging Hachiken to join the equestrian club, for example, his eyes are half-open, framed by two semi-circular brows that suggest a meditative state, but when he visits the race track, the thrill of betting brings a maniacal gleam to his eyes, pulling his eyebrows into two sharp peaks. He even dresses the part of a Saratoga regular, trading his pristine riding outfit for a trenchcoat — collar popped, of course — and low-slung fedora.

As this comic interludes suggests, the twists and turns of Hachiken’s evolution from sullen teen to happy young man are dictated more by shonen manga convention than fidelity to Naka’s The Silver Spoon — there are 200% more jokes about cow teats and chicken anuses — but the sincerity with which Arakawa captures the emotional highs and lows of adolescence shows affinity with Naka’s writing. Hachiken’s mopey interior monologues and fumbling efforts to connect with his classmates are as authentic as Naka’s own reminiscences; both convey youthful angst without irony, embarrassment, or “the layered remembrances of adulthood” (Kosaka). And for readers more interested in laffs than literary references, there are plenty of those, too; Hachiken spends as much time hanging out with ornery ruminants as he does ruminating, all but ensuring a bumper crop of manure gags in volume two. Highly recommended.

Works Cited:

Arakawa, Hiromu. Silver Spoon, Vol. 1, translated by Amanda Haley, Yen Press, 2018.

Kosaka, Kris. “A misanthropic memoir from Meiji Era Tokyo.” The Japan Times, 26 Sep. 2015, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2015/09/26/books/misanthropic-memoir-meiji-era-tokyo/#.Wres_5PwY1g. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

Voices of a Distant Star

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What would it be like to embark on a deep space voyage, knowing that when you returned, nothing on Earth would be as you remembered it? That’s the question at the heart of Makoto Shinkai and Mizu Sahara’s Voices of a Distant Star, a thoughtful — if sometimes clumsy — rumination on the human toll of interstellar travel.

The story begins in 2046, as sixteen-year-old Noboru Terao anxiously awaits text messages from his childhood friend Mikako Nagamine, who’s enlisted in the military. As we learn through snippets of conversation and text, Nagamine isn’t at a conventional boot camp: she’s been deployed to Mars, where humanity is preparing for a lengthy campaign against an alien race known as the Tharsians. Her early exchanges with Noboru arrive in a matter of days or weeks, but when she’s transferred to the front lines, she realizes that it may be years before Noboru receives her next text; as she ruefully observes, “By the time this message reaches you, everyone will be growing up into people I don’t know.”

The emotional honesty of their epistolary romance is the best reason to read Voices of a Distant Star. Through their brief exchanges, we grasp that Noboru and Nagamine are torn between the desire for a normal relationship and the dawning realization that they may be better off pursuing their own destinies — a realization made more poignant by the sharp contrast between Noboru’s ordinary school life and Nagamine’s extraterrestrial mission. Their dilemma would be more moving, however, if the artwork wasn’t executed in such a desultory fashion. The characters are utterly generic, lacking any semblance of individuality, while the space combat lacks any sense of place; the story could just as easily be unfolding in Phoenix, AZ as on a planet eight light years from Earth. I know — the story is supposed to give me the feels, not the chills — but a little more attention to the dangerous aspects Nagamine’s mission would have raised the emotional temperature of Voices of a Distant Star from mild to muy caliente. In spite of these artistic shortcomings, Noboru and Nagamine’s plight remains powerful, reminding us that our greatest obstacle to space travel isn’t distance — it’s time. Recommended.

Voices of a Distant Star
Story by Makoto Shinkai, Art by Mizu Sahara
Translated by Melissa Tanaka
Vertical Comics, 238 pp.