Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Manga

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.

Toppu GP, Vol. 2

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For two decades, Kosuke Fujishima’s Oh! My Goddess was a veritable institution in the US. It arrived in comic book stores in 1994 and finished its run in 2015, along the way introducing several generations of manga fans to the fraught relationship between the nebbishy Keiichi Morisato and his otherworldly companion Belldandy. Fujishima’s current project Toppu GP debuted last year with little attention from critics, but this sports manga might just be the better of the two series; as I noted in my review of volume one, the characters are types and the drama predictable, but the motorcycle races are thrilling, funny, and surprisingly educational, helping the novice appreciate the skill necessary to ride at an elite level.

The latest installment of Toppu GP does all the things you’d expect the second volume of a sports manga to do: it introduces new rivals for the principal characters, expands the supporting cast, and features several lengthier, riskier races. Not all of these gambits work. Toppu’s new fanclub — which includes Billy Izumo, a tow-headed bike enthusiast, and Itsuki Nagoya, a nerdy girl with a crush on Toppu — provides the weakest sort of comic relief by making Nagoya and Myne compete for Toppu’s attention. (“Who is this old lady?” Nagoya sniffs when introduced to Myne.) When the action shifts to the race track, however, the story roars to life, offering Fujishima a unique opportunity to explain the physics and strategy of moto GP through imaginative visual metaphors. In one sequence, for example, Toppu compares the components of his bike to instruments in a rock band — a neat way to suggest the sound and function of each — while in another, Fujishima represents Toppu’s anxiety as a giant, coiled rattlesnake. These metaphors are corny, to be sure, but they enliven the racing sequences, breaking the relentless stream of speedlines, facial close-ups, and banked turns.

Though Toppu gets top billing, Myne also gets a turn in the spotlight in a fiercely competitive race against Daiya Ishibashi, the reigning champ at the Course 2000. Their race is a genuine nail-biter, with Ishibashi and Myne aggressively vying for the lead. By the end of the volume, it’s not clear if Myne will prevail over Ishibashi, but her tenacity and cunning have made that outcome a real possibility. Readers who want to know whether Myne wins have two choices: wait until August for volume three, or purchase chapters 15 and 16 right now. (The digital serialization is up to chapter 23.) Me? I’m going to tough it out until August, since Toppu GP is one of the few series I’m actively collecting. Recommended.

Toppu GP, Vol. 2
By Kosuke Fujishima
Translated by Stephen Paul
Kodansha Comics, 192 pp.
Rated T, for Teen (13+)

Lovesick Ellie, Vols. 1-3

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By Fujimomo | Published digitally by Kodansha Comics

I admit that I was initially attracted to Lovesick Ellie because of the covers, which are adorable. My favorite is the third, because it perfectly captures Ohmi-kun’s personality.

So, imagine you’re an awkward boy who doesn’t express himself well, only you’ve been born exceedingly handsome. You’re placed on a pedestal, and instead of getting to play a tree in the school play, the role of the prince is thrust upon you. At kindergarten graduation you’re completely confused when the girls ambush you for souvenirs and end up in tears. In middle school, you end up alienating your best friend who grows envious of your good fortune and disappointing people when you let your true personality show. That’s the plight facing Akira Ohmi, and when he gets to high school he decides to adopt a princely facade to go along with his looks so that he can keep his distance and avoid hurting anyone else.

Eriko Ichimura is a plain girl whom nobody notices. (Yes, this is one of those Dessert manga where the friendless girl attracts the notice of the most popular boy in school.) In lieu of real relationships, Eriko entertains herself by writing fantasies about Ohmi-kun on an anonymous Twitter account under the name Lovesick Ellie. One day, she accidentally catches a glimpse of the real Ohmi-kun. Shocked, she leaves her cellphone behind, enabling Ohmi to read her tweets about him. Rather than be mad, he thinks they’re hilarious. In exchange for her keeping his secret, he offers to fulfill her fantasies, then laughs when she’s, like, “Okay!” In the end, he decides to trust her.

After this encounter, they gradually come to know each other. Ohmi is derisive toward the other girls who’ve fallen for the false persona he’s created, but Eriko is different. Not only is she not disappointed by his true personality, she continues to lust after him openly. Ultimately, this is a story about really being seen and loved for your true self. Nobody noticed Eriko until Ohmi did, and while everyone noticed him, they never saw the real him.

As they navigate their new relationship, there are various firsts, and a lot of blushing, and some misunderstandings, and some mean girls who disapprove of Ohmi dating someone (though they mistakenly think he’s dating Sara, the friend Eriko eventually acquires). None of this is new shoujo manga territory, but the characters are refreshing. Ohmi is seriously endearing, especially once his bratty attitude subsides and he allows himself to be sweet and vulnerable. He’s apologetic for the things he gets wrong, and encourages Eriko not to give up on him. For her part, Eriko is kind of a spaz, but shoujo heroines are not typically this horny, so that’s a unique aspect, for sure. It certainly makes for some snerkworthy declarations, like when she proclaims, “I like you sexually!”

So far, I really like this series a lot, and I look forward to continuing it.

Lovesick Ellie is ongoing in Japan. Its sixth volume comes out there on March 13th, which is the same day the fourth will be available in English.

Review copies provided by the publisher.

Again!!, Vol. 1

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There are no second chances in life, but there are in manga — think A Distant Neighborhood, Erased, and orange. The latest entry in the second-chance sweepstakes is Again!!, a dramedy about Imamura Kinichirou, a loner who tumbles down a flight on stairs at his high school graduation and wakes up on the first day of freshman year. Doomed to repeat the worst three years of his life, Imamura impulsively signs up for the school’s ouendan, but quickly runs afoul of prickly captain Yoshiko Usami, whose dedication to the struggling club proves more deterrent than draw for would-be members.

Imamura isn’t the only time-traveler; joining him on his temporal odyssey is Akira Fujieda, a perky classmate who also tumbles down a flight of stairs at graduation. Unlike Imamura, Akira greets this development with enthusiasm, but her fond memories of high school make her too quick to assume that everything will unfold the same way twice: she propositions her not-yet-boyfriend too boldly (he turns her down) and dismisses a would-be friend’s taste in music. (“It’s too bad Cara Mana broke up so soon,” Akira declares. “It didn’t take me long to get sick of them, though, since all their songs sort of sound the same.”) Crushed by the double rejection, Akira becomes Imamura’s reluctant ally in the quest to restore the ouendan to its former glory.

Whether you cotton to Again!! depends on how you react to the principal characters. I found Usami’s fierce commitment to tradition exhausting; she bellows, belittles, complains, accuses, and sobs, but seems fundamentally unable to have a normal conversation. Her bluster is meant to suggest her sincerity and vulnerability, I think, but has the opposite effect, reducing her to a one-note character. More convincing is Imamura, who decides that a do-over isn’t as terrible as he’d imagined. (I particularly enjoyed his nonchalant turn at the board in his math class; his classmates’ reaction to his display of mathematical acumen is priceless.) Imamura even flirts with the possibility of a social life: when the girls’ cheer squad mobilizes against Usami, for example, Imamura conspires with Akira and Reo, a pretty classmate, to undermine the cheerleaders’ plan.

Akira, too, is a pleasant surprise, a busybody who’s suddenly relegated to the margins of freshman life. Though her sense of the school’s pecking order remains unchanged, she can’t resist the opportunity to advise the once-lowly Imamura on how best to manipulate the cheerleading squad — it’s her chance to demonstrate her expertise, and perhaps to reclaim her former Queen Bee status by engineering a major social coup. As one might expect, Akira gets the sauciest lines, but she also learns the hardest lesson of the three principal characters: serendipity plays as big a role in popularity as personality and looks.

Mitsurou Kubo’s art plays a vital role in helping us understand Imamura and Akira’s predicament. In the first two chapters, Kubo does an excellent job of distinguishing past from present with subtle details: Imamura’s mom, for example, is a little plumper, while Akira is shorter and less physically developed. (Akira realizes something is amiss when she realizes that her breasts are smaller.) Equally impressive is the care with which Kubo reconstructs the same sequence of events that precede the time jump, showing us Imamura’s memories of the day and then Akira’s. Here again, it’s the little details — a snippet of conversation, a minor change in hairstyle — that convey whose perspective is represented, and how that character’s personality influences what we’re seeing and hearing.

Kubo’s facial drawings show the same degree of meticulousness as her handling of the time travel sequences. Her reaction shots do more than just capture a character’s immediate response to a new development; they convey the emotions and experiences that underlie that reaction. Consider this split-screen image of Imamura:

This panel appears at the end of chapter one, as Imamura stands at a temporal and figurative crossroads: he can change his future by joining the ouendan, or recede into the background and be a loner once again. Imamura’s furrowed, sweaty brow and crestfallen expression capture his sense of helplessness; he has the look of someone who’s actively reliving a terrible experience moment by moment, contemplating the real possibility that nothing will change the second time around.

It’s this level of nuance that makes Again!! worth reading, even when the plot mechanics are creaky and the characters too strident. Watching Imamura forge new connections on his own terms is both funny and poignant, a reminder that we always have the potential to change our destiny, even when it seems preordained. I’m curious to see how Imamura and Akira grow and change, and how their behavior influences the future. Count me in for volume two.

AGAIN!!, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY MITSUROU KUBO • TRANSLATED BY ROSE PADGETT • KODANSHA COMICS • 208 pp. • RATED TEEN (13+)

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 2

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The first volume of The Promised Neverland was a masterclass in how to launch a series: the plotting was intricate but the brisk pacing and well-timed twists prevented an exposition-heavy story from sagging under the weight of its own ambition. Of necessity, volume two unfurls at a slower clip than the first, as the principal trio of Emma, Ray, and Norman work through the logistics of escaping Gracefield Manor, weighing the pros and cons of each element in their intricate plan. Kaiu Shirai also expands the cast to include other stakeholders, dedicating several chapters to Krone, Mother’s new subordinate, and Don and Gilda, two high-achieving students who haven’t yet learned the true purpose of Gracefield Manor.

These character moments are one of the great strengths of volume two. Krone, for example, turns out to be more resourceful than we might have guessed from her brief introduction in volume one; Shirai and Posuka Demizu use a woodland game of tag to reveal Krone’s formidable strength, speed, and cunning, establishing her as yet another major obstacle to escape. In other passages, Shirai peels away the outer layers of her principal characters, complicating the reader’s understanding of who they are, what motivates them to escape, and with whom their true allegiance lies — a necessary corrective to the first volume, which portrayed Emma, Ray, and Norman as just a little too smart, too capable, and too thoughtful to fully register as twelve-year-olds.

Volume two hits an occasional speed bump when characters discuss the escape plan. One overly deliberate scene, for example, finds Roy and Norman in full Scooby Doo mode, explaining how they figured out there was a mole among the residents. And volume two’s physical depiction of Krone is, frankly, uncomfortable, as some of her facial features have been exaggerated in ways that recall the iconography of blackface minstrelsy. Despite these lapses, The Promised Neverland remains suspenseful thanks, in no small part, to Demizu’s brief but horrific dream sequences; these suggestive images — a swirl of bodies, teeth, and monstrous eyes — provide a potent reminder of what’s at stake if the kids don’t escape Mother’s clutches.

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 2
Story by Kaiu Shirai, Art by Posuka Demizu
Translated by Satsuki Yamashita
VIZ Media; 192 pp.
Rated T, for Teen

Beasts of Abigaile, Vols. 1-2

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By Spica Aoki | Published by Seven Seas

After having been bullied in school back home in Japan, Tsukishiro Nina comes to live with her uncle in the tiny principality of Ruberia, famous for its roses. Outwardly, it’s an affluent place, but Nina soon learns—after being bitten by a luga and taking on some of their characteristics—that wolf-like people known as luga serve as slave labor for the humans in Ruberia, and that young luga are all rounded up and sent to an island prison/school called Abigaile, where they learn how to serve humans. Nina is sent there after her transformation and must try to blend in, because if the other luga find out she’s human, they’ll turn on her.

I wasn’t sure I would like this at first because Nina’s character blurb contains the phrase “sometimes lets her emotions drive her to dangerous behavior,” which is definitely not my favorite personality type. And, it’s true, she does require a bit of rescuing due to her impulsive actions, usually by handsome luga named Gilles (who’s on the student council and seemingly devoted to its mysterious president) and Dario (the effeminate alpha who dreams of becoming a fashion designer). However, I like that, because she comes from a place where teenagers are able to pursue their aspirations, she becomes determined that the luga should have the same right, and thus wants to unite them and get them out of there.

That said, Nina is actually the least interesting character to me. I probably shouldn’t like Roy, the luga who bit her and who is the alpha of the most dangerous “home” (basically a pack) in Abigaile. He enjoys tormenting Nina but he’s definitely the most fascinating character so far, especially when we learn at the end of volume two that he himself had hoped to unite the luga but couldn’t. Nina and Roy actually remind me of Clarke and Bellamy in The 100—two teens who emerged as leaders from among a disenfranchised group of youth who disagree with each other’s methods, but if they could trust each other and become a team, then they might really have a chance. (Granted, I haven’t seen more than a handful of episodes at this point.) I like that dynamic between them and look forward to Roy eventually coming to trust Nina.

Meanwhile, Roy’s “beta,” Eva, is possessive of him in the extreme and jealous of Nina, so contrives to attack and/or expose her at every turn. She’s a great antagonist because her motives are so strong, and by the end of volume two she’s convinced Poe, a lowly “omega” whom Nina has been trying hard to protect, to turn on Nina and deliver unto her the rose perfume that disguises Nina’s human scent. Dun dun dun!

In addition to hoping Roy and Nina team up and successfully escape Abigaile, there are some other plot points I hope get fleshed out. What’s the deal with the student council president? Why is the chief instructor such a bishounen? Surely the mangaka wouldn’t waste such a character design on someone who wasn’t going to be significant down the road. And, perhaps most importantly, why did being bit by Roy cause Nina to take on luga characteristics, when that never happened to any of the other humans he’s bitten?

I’m glad I took a chance on this one.

Beasts of Abigaile is ongoing in Japan, where three volumes have been released so far. The third comes out in English on Tuesday.

Review copy for volume one provided by the publisher.

The Best Manga You’re Not Reading: Venice

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Venice — one of the last projects Jiro Taniguchi completed before his death in 2017 — is perhaps the most beautiful work he produced, a paean not only to the great Italian city, but to his own superb command of light, color, and line. Rendered in watercolor and ink, Venice‘s subtle palette and expansive treatment of the page are reminiscent of Taniguchi’s Guardians of the Louvre, while its premise recalls The Walking Man, Furari, and The Solitary Gourmet, three manga in which an unnamed male character strolls through the thoroughfares and byways of a major city, stopping to admire a blossoming tree or duck into an unassuming noodle shop.

Taniguchi makes an agreeable guide to Venice, frequently pausing to luxuriate in the very places that a visitor would find most charming: an outdoor marketplace filled with fruit and vegetable vendors, a moonlit promenade dotted with strolling couples, a faded but elegant hotel. Though Taniguchi renders these locations with the utmost precision, his most striking images are of canals and harbors. He captures the play of light on water with the same authority as a great maritime painter like Homer Winslow, using a watercolor palette of greens, blues, grays, blacks, and pinks to pinpoint the time of day and weather, as well as the tide — a small but potent reminder of Venice’s precarious relationship with the sea.

Though framed as a travelogue, Venice also explores similar thematic terrain as Taniguchi’s A Distant Neighborhood. Like the protagonist of Neighborhood, the Venetian wanderer is a middle-aged man making sense of his family’s past, a quest triggered by the discovery of a small lacquer box among his late mother’s possessions. A single image — a photo of a dapper Japanese couple feeding pigeons at the San Marco Piazza — leads him to Venice, where he retraces the couple’s steps. Taniguchi handles the mystery in an elegant fashion, eschewing pointed dialogue or voice-overs in favor of evocative imagery: a sepia-toned portrait of a family, a hand-drawn postcard of the Grand Canal. By focusing on these artifacts, Taniguchi provides just enough information for the reader to figure out who this young couple was without baldly explaining what drove them apart; only a brief inscription on the back of a postcard suggests the length and anguish of the couple’s separation.

These temporal shifts in the narrative are echoed in the way Taniguchi draws Venice itself. On several pages, for example, Taniguchi shows us familiar Venetian streetscapes as they looked in the 1930s, when the mystery couple lived there. On other pages, Taniguchi achieves a similar effect through the juxtaposition of the traditional with the modern: kayakers bob alongside gondoliers, floating past Renaissance merchants’ grand homes, while the mouth of the Canal de la Galeazze frames the arrival of a giant cruise ship. (In a nice touch, Taniguchi tracks the ocean liner’s stately progress over several panels, allowing us to appreciate its enormous size and sleek lines.) Even the most prosaic scenes emphasize the degree to which Venetians’ daily routines are shaped by its lengthy history; we see young children in baseball jackets sipping water from a fountain built in the 17th century and dog walkers chatting in the shadow of Venice’s great Campanille, unawed or unaware of these landmarks’ significance.

And while such sensuous images are fundamental to Venice‘s appeal, Taniguchi does more than recreate Venice’s great architecture; he conveys the rhythms and emotions of a journey, the experience of savoring new places while realizing in the moment that the place where you stand will be different the next time you visit. He evokes the curious sensation of déjà vu you experience in an unfamiliar city, as you see small elements of your own life reflected in the way that strangers live theirs. And he conveys the profound sense of discovery that comes from visiting a place that holds significance for a parent, lover, or friend, as you see the landscape through their eyes for the first time. That Taniguchi evokes these emotions primarily through the artful use of color and detail, rather than character development or dialogue, is testament to the depth of his artistry. Highly recommended.

For more insight into Venice, I encourage you to watch this brief video in which Taniguchi discusses the genesis of the story, and how he created some of the book’s most arresting images:

VENICE • BY JIRO TANIGUCHI • FANFARE/PONENT MON • NO RATING • 128 pp. 

Giant Spider & Me, Vol. 1

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Giant Spider & Me is a gentle fantasy that’s tinged with whimsy and rue. The story focuses on Nagi, a perky tween who lives by herself in a well-appointed cottage, awaiting the return of her father from a mysterious trip. In his absence, she’s proved remarkably self-sufficient, growing and foraging for her own food and preparing delicious meals for herself. Our first hint that something is amiss occurs early in chapter one, when she stumbles across a mastiff-sized spider in the woods. Their initial encounter doesn’t go well — Nagi is understandably terrified — but her apprehension soon gives way to a unique interspecies friendship when she discovers Asa (her name for the spider) shares her passion for pumpkin dumplings and leisurely picnics.

What inoculates Giant Spider & Me from a terminal case of the cutes is the specificity of Kikori Morino’s vision. On a superficial level, Giant Spider & Me is a culinary manga that walks the reader through the process of making turnip soup and miso ratatouille while conveying the joy of sharing food with others. (And yes, recipes appear at the end of each chapter.) On a deeper level, however, Giant Spider & Me is a thoughtful reflection on what it means to share your home with an intelligent creature, recognizing the pleasures of such an arrangement while acknowledging the communication gap between species. Asa proves a lively and willful guest in Nagi’s house, scaling walls and punching a hole in the roof in its quest for greater freedom — a detail that frustrated cat owners will appreciate.

The other secret to Morino’s success is her artwork, which strikes an elegant balance between clarity and detail. She never explains what caused the apocalypse of the title, but hints at its devastation with small but important clues: a partially submerged city, a vigilante in a gas mask and military-issue poncho. Morino applies that same mixture of restraint and exactitude to her character designs; Asa is both menacing and cute, an eight-eyed, eight-legged creature whose terrible mandibles are balanced by a feather-soft abdomen and a puppy-like demeanor. By emphasizing Asa’s duality as pet and monster, Morino helps us see Asa as Nagi does while also helping us understand why other survivors take a dimmer view of Asa. Something tells me I might need a tissue or two before the series finishes its run. Recommended.

Giant Spider & Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale, Vol. 1
Story & Art by Kikori Morino
Translation by Adrienne Beck; Adaptation by Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane
Seven Seas, 180 pp.
Rating: Teen

Takane & Hana, Vol. 1

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The opening pages of Takane & Hana offer a uniquely Japanese twist on the meet cute: the couple in question are set up by a marriage broker who thinks she’s introducing a twenty-three year old beauty to a twenty-six-year-old bachelor. The bride-to-be, however, is a sixteen-year-old high school student who’s posing as her older sister — don’t ask — while the potential groom is an impossibly handsome jerk who’s angry that his family is pressuring him to settle down. Guess what happens next? If you said, “Opposites attract!”, you wouldn’t be wrong, though the course of true love hits a few potholes along the way.

I’m of two minds about Takane & Hana. My fifteen-year-old self adores Hana for being so smart and sassy, the kind of girl who says devastatingly true things and still manages to stay in other people’s good graces. My forty-five-year-old self, however, feels uncomfortable with the ten-year age gap between its lead characters. While Yuki Shiwasu cheerfully acknowledges the troubling power dynamic between Takane and Hana, she wants to eat her cake and have it, too: Hana’s incisive comments are supposed to level the playing field with the older, more experienced Takane, making it OK for the two to flirt, date, and kiss. At the end of the day, however, the economic and educational gulf between Hana and Takane still seems vast, making Takane seem like a predatory creep for preferring the company of a mature sixteen-year-old over a woman his age.

I know, I know: I’m humorless. A killjoy. A big ol’ capital-F feminist. But in a moment when we’re having serious conversations about power and consent, I’m having difficulty getting caught up in Takane and Hana’s romantic shenanigans, however much Hana sounds like a teenaged Rosalind Russell, or how wonderfully elastic Takane and Hana’s faces may be. Takane & Hana is unquestionably someone’s guilty pleasure — just not mine.

Takane & Hana, Vol. 1
Story and Art by Yuki Shiwasu
Adaptation by Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane
VIZ Media, 200 pp.
Rated T, for Teens

Baccano!, Vol. 1

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There are two things you need to know before you read this review. First, I’m a ride-or-die Godfather II fan, the kind of person who’s obsessively watched Robert DeNiro’s performance as the young Don Corleone more times than I can count. Second, I am not a Light Novel Person, despite my repeated efforts to embrace the format.

I disclose this information because Baccano! is a manga adaptation of a light novel series set in Prohibition-era New York, where rival families — one from Sicily, one from Naples — run guns, booze, and card games. That meant there was a 50% chance I’d love this series, since the premise screams “Manga Godfather!”, and a 50% chance I’d hate Baccano!, since the manga was conceived as a tie-in product for the novels’ hardcore fans. What I didn’t expect, however, was just how inept the adaptation would be; I assumed that my objections would be to content or characterization, not a sloppy, hole-filled (holy?) narrative. Shinta Fujimoto’s storytelling, however, is serviceable at best and amateurish at worst, cramming too many events and characters into volume one. The result is a jumbled mess of introductions, reunions, and exposition masquerading as conversation; I spent as much time backtracking two or three pages as I did moving forward, relying on the Wikipedia to demystify poorly explained plot twists, not the least of which is that some characters are immortal. 

Superficially, the artwork seems more polished than the narrative, but a close examination reveals just how perfunctory Fujimoto and Katsumi Enami’s character designs really are. The Martillos and Gandors are so blandly drawn that nothing about them reveals about the characters’ ethnicity, social standing, or profession, let alone the time period in which the story unfolds. The same is true for the physical environment. A few establishing shots depict fire escapes and brick buildings, but Fujimoto seldom provides much in the way of period detail, nor does he convey just how densely settled Little Italy was in the 1920s.

His lazy world-building is most evident in chapters two and three, when Firo Prochainezo, a foot soldier in the Martillo Camorra, tracks an assassin through the tumult of the San Gennaro Festival in much the same fashion as Don Corleone pursues Don Fanucci in The Godfather II. In Coppola’s hands, these scenes are bursting with the activity of brass bands and puppeteers re-enacting San Gennaro’s martyrdom, a vibrant pageant of Sicilian Catholic tradition. In Fujimoto’s version, however, the festival looks about as exciting as a high school pep band rehearsal, with a few token shots of musicians and festival goers. Worse still, Fujimoto has difficulty making these scenes an organic part of the story, inserting them into a potentially suspenseful cat-and-mouse game that unfolds in the alleyways of … well, it’s supposed to be Little Italy, but honestly, it looks as much like Sesame Street as any real city.

About the best I can say for Baccano! is that it clocks in at a mere 160 pages; anything longer would seem as eternal as the characters themselves. I know I’m not the intended audience for this manga, but the series’ die-hard fans — those who read the novels and watched the anime — surely deserve a more artful tie-in than this disastro totale.

BACCANO!, VOL. 1 • ORIGINAL STORY BY RYOHGO NARITA, ART BY SHINTA FUJIMOTO, CHARACTER DESIGN BY KATSUMI ENAMI • TRANSLATION BY TAYLOR ENGEL • YEN PRESS • 160 pp. • RATED T, FOR TEEN (LANGUAGE, VIOLENCE)

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 1

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Story by Kaiu Shirai, Art by Posuka Demizu | Published by VIZ Media

First off: The Promised Neverland is amazing and you should go buy it. I’d heard good things about it, but hadn’t expected this degree of exhilarating awesomeness. Secondly: I will do my best to avoid major spoilers, but a few are unavoidably required to describe (and compliment) the plot. Take heed!

Emma is an eleven-year-old with a sunny disposition and boundless energy. She lives at Grace Field House, an orphanage, and is one of the oldest of 38 kids. She loves them all. Everything seems normal to them, including the numbers tattooed on their necks as well as the daily test, which is dramatically revealed in a two-page spread. Emma and her fellow eleven-year-olds Norman and Ray always get perfect scores on the test, and I particularly enjoyed that the ensuing story actually shows their intelligence instead of merely telling readers that they’re smart.

Every now and then one of the kids finds a home, but oddly, none of the children who’ve left have ever sent any letters. The place is comfortable, with plenty of food and a forest to play in, but they’re forbidden from going near the main gate or a fence in the forest. One day, when one of the younger girls who wasn’t doing well on the tests is headed off for her new home, she leaves behind a beloved stuffed rabbit. Emma and Norman decide to break the rules and head toward the gate to return it to her, whereupon they learn something shocking (via another very effective two-page spread) and realize they must escape.

It’s riveting watching the kids try to figure out what’s going on, how much their caretaker (whom they call “Mom,” though we learn she’s named Isabella) knows about what they know, how to defeat the trackers Mom makes sure they know exist, etc. Basically, laying out the rules of their confinement that they’re going to have to overcome. Too, although analytical Ray points out that their chances in the outside world would be far better with just the three of them—and also that it’s 2045 and they don’t have any books published after 2015, so who knows what the outside world is like now—idealistic Emma is insistent that they’re not going to leave any of the kids behind, even including the dozen or so who are three and under.

It’s clear that this story has been carefully thought through, and I love how little things are foreshadowed that later prove significant. For example, in the early scenes, the kids are playing outside and Emma is thinking about how they know the forest around Grace Field House inside and out, including which tree has a hole in its trunk. Later, there’s a nonverbal moment where she and Norman choose that as a hiding place for some table cloths they hope to use to get over the wall surrounding the property. It’s subtle, but ultimately reassuring.

Happily, volume two comes out in five days. After that, I’ll be studiously avoiding spoilers, even though I’m sure the wait for new volumes will be agonizing.

The Promised Neverland is ongoing in Japan, where it is up to seven volumes. The second will be released in English on Tuesday.

Children of the Whales, Vols. 1-2

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Children of the Whales suffers from the same problem as many prestige television shows: it boasts a thought-provoking premise, compelling lead characters, and sophisticated visuals, but is such a relentlessly downbeat experience that you’d be forgiven for abandoning ship after a few chapters.

The story unfolds aboard the Mud Whale, a sentient vessel. Its 513 inhabitants have been exiled from their homeland for over 90 years, drifting across a vast ocean of sand punctuated only by the occasional island or abandoned boat. Fourteen-year-old Chakuro is the community’s archivist, tasked with recording births and deaths, strange encounters, and changes in the Mud Whale’s leadership, events he catalogs with almost fanatical devotion. Making his job more bittersweet is the discrepancy between the “marked” residents, whose ability to wield magic (or “thymia,” in the series’ parlance) dooms them to a short lifespan, and the unmarked residents, whose normal lifespans have forced them into the role of caretakers and governors.

To stave off despair, the Mud Whale’s residents eschew emotional display — a point reinforced in the earliest pages of volume one, when Chakuro sheds a tear at a 29-year-old woman’s funeral. Immediately, his peers enjoin him not to weep, lest “the souls at the bottom of the sea cry out for you.” It’s a simple but effective scene, one that reminds us that the Mud Whale’s inhabitants are caught between the real prospect of extinction and the uncertain possibility of survival; only their fierce commitment to living in the present moment preserves their tenuous existence.

While scavenging for supplies on a seemingly deserted island, Chakuro stumbles across a blank-faced girl about his own age. She attacks him with swords and sorcery, only to collapse, unconscious, from the effort of casting a spell. Chakuro is frightened but intrigued, and brings Lykos back to the Mud Whale where he learns her true identity: she’s an apatheia, an emotionless soldier. “Emotions will destroy the world,” she informs Chakuro. “The outside world you want to know so badly about is ruled by people deficient in feeling, using apatheias who have no heart to fight a war without end.”

The next major plot development — a surprise attack — delivers the series’ first truly grim moments, as the Mud Whale’s inhabitants are beaten, impaled, and gunned down by unknown assailants. Though Chakuro and Lykos have been fleshed out enough to earn the reader’s pity, the sheer size of the cast and the suddenness of the ambush blunt the impact of the carnage; we can see that Chakuro is devastated by the loss of his childhood friend Sami, but Sami is such a stock character — innocent, impetuous, infatuated with Chakuro — that her gruesome death registers as a manipulative attempt to illustrate the truth of Lykos’ earlier comments about the outside world. That same kind of heavy-handed editorializing extends to the villains’ physical appearance as well. They look like Juggalos in chain mail, sporting maniacal grins that scream, “Sadists ahoy!”, a point underscored in the gleeful way in which they violate corpses and taunt sobbing victims.

The most frustrating thing about these frenetic chapters is that they seem fundamentally at odds with the deliberate pacing and meticulous world-building in volume one. In these introductory pages, Umeda maps every nook and cranny of the Mud Whale, creating an environment as imposing and intimate as Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa. She approaches her character designs with same patience and care, bestowing a semblance of individuality on each resident while establishing their collective identity as a people. Even Chakuro’s frequent voice-overs — presumably read from the Mud Whale’s archives — play an important role in helping us experience time the way the Mud Whale’s residents do; there’s a lyrical quality to Chakuro’s narration that captures the rhythms of their day-to-day existence.

Yet for all Umeda’s world-building skills, Children of the Whales‘ dour tone puts the reader at arm’s length from the characters. Minus the flashes of joy, humor, and warmth that temper Miyazaki’s most downbeat films, Children of the Whales feels more like an episode of The Leftovers or Rectify than Castle in the Sky; it’s so utterly mirthless that it casts a pall over the reader instead of prompting deep thoughts or empathy for the characters. Take my manga, please!

CHILDREN OF THE WHALES, VOLS. 1-2 • BY ABI UMEDA • VIZ • RATED T+ (FOR OLDER TEENS)

Frau Faust, Vols. 1-2

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By Kore Yamazaki | Published by Kodansha Comics

I had heard good things about Frau Faust and figured I would probably like it too, but I wasn’t prepared for the “OMG, I love this!” feeling that overtook me after the first dozen pages or so. I loved it so much, in fact, that the first seven volumes of Yamazaki’s other published-in-English series, The Ancient Magus’ Bride, are currently on their way to my branch of our awesome local library. If Frau Faust is going to be this original and entertaining, clearly I need to read more of Yamazaki’s work!

But let’s back up a little to the premise. Johanna Faust was always an extremely curious child, her quest for knowledge so intense that it led her to dissect animals and do other things that caused her to be ostracized for being creepy. Even her own mother was afraid of her. Because of this greed, the demon Mephistopheles paid Johanna a visit, promising to bestow all of the knowledge she could ever want upon her. Johanna flatly rejected this deal, however, because she’s only interested in knowledge she attains for herself. Mephisto (for short) proceeds to hang around for a few years, in case she changes her mind. Eventually, to help save her only friend from a slavering wolf creature, Johanna agrees to the contract. When she dies, Mephisto gets her soul, but what she wants while she’s alive is actually him. He’ll be her protector, assistant, et cetera.

Of course, we don’t learn all of that right off the bat. Instead, we encounter Johanna as she’s trying to get into a church to retrieve one of Mephisto’s body parts. A curse prevents her from opening the door, so when she protects a young book thief named Marion from the authorities, he seems to be the perfect candidate to solve her problem. While they wait for the new moon to complete the errand, Johanna offers to tutor Marion, whom it turns out was merely stealing his own books back after they were taken by debt collectors. Poverty has also caused him to give up school, which was the only thing he’s good at.

After the errand is complete, Marion refuses to let his memories of the encounter be wiped, and tags along with Johanna on her journey to gather the rest of Mephisto, whom she refers to as “my adorable, detestable, unfathomable idiot of a dog.” As the trail leads Johanna to a town where the church is protecting Mephisto’s leg, we learn more about why the demon has been quartered and his parts kept under guard—his only charge is performing an immortality curse upon the dead—and what this means for Johanna. Whenever she sustains an injury, she is able to heal herself, but has a finite supply of physical material to work with, thus she ends up looking younger each time.

As cool as it was to have an older protagonist, I really don’t mind that she ends up looking younger, since she is demonstrably still the same person. I appreciate that Johanna is decidedly not evil. She never threatens Marion or anything of the sort. And though she might have made some past decisions Marion has a hard time accepting, she only did so after a lot of thought and because it was the best and only option at the time. I also really like how Marion becomes a stronger character in the second volume, as we learn that his motivations for tagging along with Johanna are more than mere curiosity: she’s his ticket out of a town where he has very few prospects.

I haven’t yet touched on the church characters, primarily an inquisitor named Lorenzo (who’s trying to stop Johanna but yet agrees to work with her to expose a corrupt priest) and his friend and assistant Vito, who gets himself captured along with Marion whilst trying to figure out why vagrants keep going missing around the church. They believe humankind will suffer if Mephisto is allowed to return to normal. (Nico, Johanna’s homunculus “daughter,” doesn’t seem fond of him, either.) The players on each side are sympathetic and the story is complex, just how I like ’em. We still don’t know what sort of “game” Johanna and Mephisto are playing and why she doesn’t just take her immortality and run, rather than risk injury trying to put the demon with dibs on her soul back together. Maybe she’s simply fond of him?

Alas, this series is only five volumes long, but I will look on the bright side—we will hopefully get a really satisfying conclusion that much sooner!

Frau Faust is complete in five volumes. The first two volumes are currently available in English and the third will be released on Tuesday.

Review copies provided by the publisher.

RWBY

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There was a moment in the early 2000s when Tokyopop slapped the “manga” label on just about anything it published, from licensed Japanese comics to comics made by aspiring American artists who were trying to break into the industry. Looking back on the heated debate over the legitimacy of OEL manga, I wonder how today’s readers will view RWBY, a work that meets the basic definition of manga as “comics created in Japan,” but has a more complicated history than other American properties that have been reimagined for Japanese readers.

RWBY’s path to the Shonen Jump imprint began in 2013 when Rooster Teeth, an American production studio, had a viral hit with an original, anime-influenced show about a team of girls who fight monsters. Over the next four years, interest in RWBY was strong enough to inspire a spin-off series, a video game, four soundtrack albums, and a manga illustrated by Shirow Miwa, creator of Dogs and Dogs: Bullets & Carnage. Like Miwa’s other work, RWBY ran in the pages of Ultra Jump alongside JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Bastard!! before being licensed by VIZ for American readers.

Flipping through its pages, there are hints that RWBY is a slightly different animal than Jiro Kuwata’s Bat-Manga or Kia Asamiya’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. RWBY reads like a skillful imitation of a battle-heavy shonen manga, a riot of flying fists, kicking legs, swinging scythes, and extreme camera angles. Almost every imaginable visual cliche is on display, from a girl with cat-ears (she’s a Faunus, or a “therianthrope”) to a school uniform that consists of a waist-nipping blazer and impossibly short skirt. And while Miwa’s artistic persona is evident in the story’s best pages, RWBY feels less like a manga adaptation of a popular American show than a compendium of things that American fans like about anime and manga.

The story follows a familiar template: four — or three, or five — special teens attend a special school where they learn how to use their special powers to defend the Earth from demons or aliens. Each teen has one unusual gift — say, teleporting or making killer bento boxes — and one well-defined personality trait that dictates the costume she wears, how much she talks, and whether she plays well with others. Though individually effective, the quartet — or trio, or quintet — is more formidable when they team up against their shared enemy, a lesson that’s reinforced early and often in the series both in the outcome of the battle scenes and in the characters’ on-the-nose conversations about friendship and cooperation. In RWBY, the principal team consists of four girls: Ruby Rose, a weapons expert, Weiss Schnee, a rich girl, Blake Belladonna, a former gang member, and Yang Xiao Long, a cheerful spazz who loves a good brawl. All four attend attend Beacon Academy, where teens train to become Hunters, skillful warriors who wield cool weapons and magical spells against the Grimm, a race of “soulless monsters” that threaten humanity’s existence.

On the screen, such a shopworn premise could still work with the addition of snazzy animation, strong voice acting, great sound design, and judicious pacing. On the page, however, RWBY falls flat. Miwa is hamstrung by the pedestrian source material, cranking out a manga whose principal characters are blandly pretty and prone to explaining things to one another. Just a few pages into chapter one, for example, Ruby blithely asks her teammates about Dust, the magical substance that powers their weapons. Without missing a beat, Schnee responds, “It’s a crystallized energy propellant that helps to power our world.” She then launches into a lengthy rumination on Dust that’s supposed to reveal something about her character — her family’s fortune is tied to Dust — but is such a poorly disguised information dump that it never rises to the level of conversation.

Glimpses of Miwa’s signature style — his sharp-featured characters and spidery linework — emerge most clearly in the battle sequences, when Ruby and friends face off with the Grimm. Miwa frames the action in panels whose bold, diagonal boundaries mimic the combatants’ slashing motions and flying leaps. In one of the manga’s most striking sequences, Miwa traces a bullet from the barrel of Ruby’s gun towards its target. This kind of tracking shot is a hackneyed gesture, but Miwa does something playful and surprising with it: he breaks the frame to create the illusion that the bullet is emerging from the page and whizzing past the reader:

The rest of the sequence, however, is a hot mess. Miwa’s relentless shift in perspective makes the fight as incomprehensible as a badly edited car chase; it’s never clear how many monsters are involved, or what makes the Grimm so lethal, despite the fact that Miwa has tried to mimic the show’s swooping camera work to show the carnage from every possible angle.

Miwa’s indifference to the material also manifests itself in the almost total absence of background detail. Though he introduces the fight sequences with an establishing shot or two — a glimpse of trees, an aerial view of a railroad track — the action unfolds in blank space. Plenty of manga-ka take similar shortcuts, but when a manga is 70% combat and 30% character-building, the effect is like looking at a scene from The Last Jedi or Avatar before the special effects were added; in the absence of any objects, buildings, or landmarks that would contextualize their actions and words, the characters look downright silly.

Part of me wishes RWBY were better, as it’s fascinating to see an American program get the manga treatment, especially one that wears its Bleach and Magic Knight Rayearth influences on its sleeve. Ten years ago, fans would have derided such a program as inauthentic; today, it seems, such trans-Pacific exchanges are unremarkable. Too bad RWBY never escapes the prison of Overused Anime and Manga Tropes to become something more original, compelling, or entertaining.

RWBY • MANGA BY SHIROW MIWA • BASED ON THE ROOSTER TEETH SERIES CREATED BY MONTY OUM • TRANSLATED BY JOE YAMAZAKI, ADAPTED BY JEREMY HAUN & JASON HURLEY • VIZ MEDIA • 260 pp. • RATED T, FOR TEENS (Fantasy violence, mild fanservice)