Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

Manga

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

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

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

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

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

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

VIZ provided a review copy of volume two.

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

Otherworld Barbara, Vols. 1-2

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By Moto Hagio | Published by Fantagraphics

otherworldIt’s 2052 and Tokio Watarai, a dream pilot, is coming home to Japan for the first time in three years. Although his ex-wife and son are in Japan, he’s actually returning for a job involving a girl who’s been sleeping for seven years since being found with her parents’ hearts in her stomach. Her name is Aoba, and when Tokio enters her dream it’s all about an island called Barbara in which kids can fly and cannibalism factors in to funeral rites. Soon, he learns that his son, Kiriya, actually invented Barbara. So how is Aoba able to dream about it?

That introductory paragraph actually simplifies the story greatly. There’s also Tokio’s horrid ex-wife Akemi and the creepy priest Johannes whom she loves and who could possibly be Aoba’s grandfather but also head of an American orphanage in which cloned children were created, including one called Paris who comes to Japan and believes Kiriya might be a boy he knew called Taka. There’s Kiriya’s massive angst, his dreams of Mars, his dream conversations with Aoba, the girl Laika who fancies him, a psychiatrist who treated Aoba who is killed by a tornado she created, his identity-swapping and cross-dressing fraternal twin children, anti-aging research (potentially conducted upon the residents of Barbara) including a suit that turns Aoba’s grandma into a young woman who calls herself Marienbad and has a fling with Tokio, Daikoku’s ominous hinting that Kiriya will kill Tokio someday, parental regrets, etc.

By the end of the first volume, so very many plot threads are in the air that I was not at all sure that Hagio-sensei would be able to make everything make sense in the end. To use just one example: If Barbara is just a dream—and, indeed, no such island actually exists—then how is it possible that the blood of its residents is used for anti-aging medicine? And yet we see evidence that such advances are already in the works. And because of all this plot stuff, there’s not a lot of time for building solid relationships. There is angst aplenty, especially courtesy of Kiriya, but the whole Marienbad/Tokio hookup, for example, is just extremely random. The strongest bond, though, is definitely the love Tokio feels for his son and his regret over having been a crappy father.

Happily, the second volume does make with the answers, starting almost immediately. Not everything is answered with absolute certainty—one particular narrative thread takes a completely unexpected and surprisingly poignant turn. Even 90% of the way through, I would’ve said there was no way Otherworld Barbara would be able to make me cry, and yet it did. I won’t reveal how, but I loved the devastating consequences of a desperate act on Tokio’s part, and how it led him to have faith that Aoba’s dream of Barbara really could be shaping a vision of the future. That ending makes everything else worthwhile. Too, I enjoyed the contrast between Hagio’s uncomplicated, light-filled artwork and the dark and weird story she told.

Ultimately, Otherworld Barbara is definitely worth reading. Thank you, Fantagraphics, for releasing it!

Otherworld Barbara is complete in two 2-in-1 editions.

Review copies provided by the publisher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melody of Iron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kakegurui: Compulsive Gambler, Vol. 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love’s Reach, Vol. 1

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By Rin Mikimoto | Published digitally by Kodansha Comics

I am an enormous fan of Kodansha’s digital offerings, so it pains me to admit that I can’t find anything to recommend about Love’s Reach.

Sixteen-year-old Yuni Kururugi, a “genius ice queen,” excels in every subject except for English, which is taught by her 24-year-old, supposed-to-be temporary homeroom teacher, Haruka Sakurai. He’s flirty and unprofessional with his students, and though Kururugi likes the way he looks, she finds everything else about him unpleasant. When he calls her to his office after school one day, he creepily backs her against a wall and says, “Have you been getting answers wrong on purpose? Maybe you’re really just trying to get my attention.” The briefly gratifying fact that Kururugi smacks him and says, “Let me be perfectly clear. I hate you” is undercut by her reflections upon how cute he looks in that moment. Sakurai ends up requiring Kururugi to attend daily tutoring sessions and, inevitably, they fall in love.

This is one of those cases where, even setting aside the problematic student-teacher relationship aspect, I just don’t see why these characters like each other. Sakurai flip-flops between manipulative mind games and minimal acts of kindness (oh boy, he left her some patches for her sore ankle!), and allows other teenage girls to hang all over him. What’s to like about that jerk? For her part, although we are told several times that Kururugi is a genius, she sure doesn’t act like one. Some of her behavior might be excused as romantic inexperience, but not the fact that after insisting on a date with Sakurai, it never occurs to her that someone might see them out together until someone does. Eyeroll.

None of the relationship drama is interesting and by the halfway point, I was thinking, “When can this be over?” and that was before the predatory lesbian teacher showed up to blackmail the happy couple! Too, the art style is really weird. The space between a character’s eyebrows and the top of their head occupies as much space as their entire face!

So, to sum up. Weird art. Unlikeable characters. Inexplicable and icky romance. I won’t be continuing this series.

Love’s Reach is complete in ten volumes. One volume is available in English now and the second comes out next week.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card, Vol. 1

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By CLAMP | Published by Kodansha Comics

It’s been a long time since I read anything by CLAMP. After failing to love Kobato. and Gate 7, I just sort of drifted away from paying attention to what they were doing. When a beloved favorite got a new arc, however, my interest was piqued. And when Kodansha Comics not only licensed it, but released the first volume digitally months ahead of the print release, I might’ve squeed.

We rejoin Sakura Kinomoto as she begins her first year as a middle-school student. To her surprise and delight, Syaoran Li meets her on her way to school and announces that he’s back from Hong Kong and will henceforth be a permanent resident of Tomoeda. Everything seems to be coming up roses, except Syaoran looks troubled…

Soon, Sakura has a dream in which the cards she’s captured turn transparent and wakes to find it’s true. Her texts (yes, we’ve entered the modern age) seeking advice from Eriol in England go unanswered, and the next night, she dreams she receives the key to a new staff, which also comes to pass in reality. A couple of supernatural attacks follow, and Sakura is able to “Release!” the new key into the Staff of Dreams, with which she acquires two new cards. Kero and Yue are as clueless as Sakura is about what’s going on, but by the end of the volume, it’s clear that Syaoran and Eriol know more than they’re letting on and are probably colluding to keep Sakura in the dark about something.

It’s a cute start—not very different from what we’ve seen before, but it sure is nice to spend time with these characters again. What surprised me most, actually, was how much I loved seeing Kero-chan again. I seriously adore him, especially when he’s being sweet and supportive. Plus, the art is so lovely and familiar. I grew fond of the art style in xxxHOLiC, but this is the kind of art I associate more with CLAMP. I am a little worried this will turn out to be a disappointing sequel, but for now I’m keen to see how it develops.

Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card is ongoing in Japan, where two volumes have been released so far. Kodansha has made the first English edition available now in digital format, but it won’t see a print release until November.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Plum Crazy! Tales of a Tiger-Striped Cat, Vol. 1

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By Natsumi Hoshino | Published by Seven Seas

It is definitely a good time to be a manga fan, particularly if you (like me) are fond of niche genres like food manga, sports manga, and cat manga. The latest entry into that final category is Plum Crazy! Tales of a Tiger-Striped Cat and, predictably, it’s cute.

Plum lives with the Nakarai family, including a woman who teaches traditional Japanese dance and her teenage son, Taku. One day, Plum brings home a kitten in distress, and what follows are her efforts to help take care of the kitten while said kitten (soon named Snowball) is more interested in administering chomps.

With the exception of a few pages of 4-koma comics at the back of the volume, Plum has no internal dialogue, but her actions and expressive face convey her thoughts well. She does typical cat-like things, but she’s far from ordinary. For example, not only does she actually listen to her owner’s directives, but she actually complies. Snowball is more realistically temperamental, only cuddling with Plum when she feels unwell and otherwise tormenting her until another cat shows up, at which point Snowball is jealous of their playtime.

Really, there isn’t a lot of plot here. The only thing that comes close is the Nakarai family learning valuable lessons about keeping a clean litterbox, or the dangers of heatstroke, or the fact that cats don’t like wearing reindeer antlers and posing for pictures. To all of these I give a big “duh!,” and it’s somewhat frustrating to see people so cavalier about these and other topics—they don’t seem to worry about a tiny kitten wandering the neighborhood, for example—but I guess part of the point of the manga was to be educational.

At any rate, this was an enjoyable addition to the roster of cat manga available in English, and I plan to continue with it.

Plum Crazy! is ongoing in Japan, where sixteen volumes have been released. Seven Seas will publish the second volume in English in September.

Ravina the Witch?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Land of the Lustrous, Vol. 1

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

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

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

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

What happens next is even more astonishing:

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

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

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

Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl, Vols. 1-2

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By Canno | Published by Yen Press

I haven’t read a ton of yuri manga, but even I have encountered the “all-girls school with multiple couples” setup before. Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl is another example of the same.

We begin with Ayaka Shiramine and Yurine Kurosawa. Shiramine has always been the perfect student, but she works hard for her grades. Enter Kurosawa, the lazy genius, who shows up and immediately takes the number one spot. Squabbling ensues, with Kurosawa going all sparkly when a furious Shiramine calls her “just a regular person.” It seems she’s been waiting for someone who might beat her. My problem with this couple is that Shiramine is not very likable, even if I sympathize with her frustration. Plus, I ended up comparing her “there’s no way anyone could love me when I’m not perfect” angst with that of Nanami Touko in Bloom into You, where the idea is executed with more depth and originality.

Thankfully, these characters soon rotate into the background as focus shifts onto Shiramine’s cousin, track star Mizuki. Kurosawa also happens to be great at running, and Mizuki is upset when the team manager, Moe, avidly attempts to recruit her. Moe is supposed to watch Mizuki the most, after all. It all turns out to be for a cute reason, and I like the M&M pairing much more.

Volume two introduces still more characters. Ai Uehara doesn’t endear herself to me by whining about the availability of third-year Maya Hoshino—“Mock exams are more important to you than I am!”—and the chapter where she tries to make her friend stay in town rather than going to the university of her dreams and then realizes that this makes her friend sad and then promptly trips and starts blubbering just about had steam coming out of my ears.

But, again, thankfully, we move away from the annoying character to someone more mature. Chiharu Kusakabe is Hoshino’s roommate and is in love with her. Hoshino seems to be aware of this, particularly after a clichéd “locked in the storeroom” incident, but doesn’t return her feelings. While Chiharu is busy pining for a sempai, she encounters a younger girl who begins pining for her. And, again, some cuteness ensues.

I’m definitely on board for volume three, but I wonder… will each volume introduce someone I profoundly dislike in the first half and then give me a couple to really like in the second half? I suppose I can deal with that, and I also want to see more of Mizuki and Chiharu.

Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl is ongoing in Japan, where six volumes have been released so far. The first two volumes are currently available in English; the third will be released in August.

Review copies provided by the publisher.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Master Keaton, Vol. 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review copy was provided by VIZ Media.

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

Golden Kamuy, Vol. 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girls’ Last Tour, Vol. 1

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

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

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

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

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

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