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Manga Bookshelf

Discussion, Resources, Roundtables, & Reviews

VIZ

The Manga Review, 11/18/22

November 18, 2022 by Katherine Dacey 1 Comment

Last week, ICv2 publisher Milton Griepp sat down for a lengthy conversation with Dark Horse Comics’ CEO Mike Richardson. The two discussed the company’s history–particularly its early investment in manga–as well as current trends in graphic novel sales. Among Richardson’s most interesting revelations was that a significant portion of Dark Horse’s business is happening outside of comic book stores. “85% of our sales are found in traditional bookstores,” he notes. “We’ve been told by PRH (Penguin Random House) that we consistently outsell Marvel and DC in bookstores and it’s bookstores that have pushed Dark Horse sales over nine figures.” Richardson also expressed his frustration with the media’s tendency to report Diamond Distributor figures as an accurate indicator of comic book sales. “Last I checked, we had sold almost five million copies of Berserk,” he notes. “Yes, that’s what I said, and we have a number of books that have sold seven figures.  None of them are included in the Diamond market share because we don’t distribute our books through Diamond.”

NEWS AND VIEWS

Jocelyne Allen explains the appeal of Asada Nemui’s Sleeping Dead, a new entry in the growing sub-genre of zombie BL. “I honestly love every page of this,” she notes. “There’s really not a wasted panel, and while I’m not one hundred percent on board with the explanation for the zombie effect, I am here for the actual zombie action. The developing relationship between mad scientist and zombie is fascinating, especially with the bumps in the road as they each discover things about themselves, and I seriously can’t wait to see how this story resolves in the second volume, which came out only recently.” [Brain vs. Book]

VIZ has just added a new Shonen Jump title to its line-up: The Ichinose Family’s Deadly Sins. The story focuses on a middle-school student who’s reunited with his family after an accident wipes his memory. The catch? His family seems to harboring some big secrets from him! The first chapter is available online. [VIZ]

On the fifteenth anniversary of its original publication, Kara Dennison revisits the first volume of Takashi Okazaki’s Afro-Samurai. [Otaku USA]

Congratulations to SKJAM! Reviews for ten years of thoughtful manga, movie, television, and book reviews; that’s a milestone worth celebrating! [SKJAM! Reviews]

Morgana Santilli leads a spirited roundtable discussion of three shojo titles: MARS, Midnight Secretary, and Ouran High School Host Club. [Manga Machinations]

In the latest installment of Multiversity Manga Club, Walt Richardson, Emily Myers, and Zach Wilkerson recap chapters 956-981 of One Piece. [Multiversity Manga Club]

ICYMI: Hagai Palevsky deconstructs Yuichi Yokoyama’s Plaza. “Such a project is perfect for Yokoyama, as a cartoonist who is interested in the temporality and kinesis of comics and completely uninterested in narrative components such as emotion and character development,” Palevsky observes. “It is elevated by his careful balance between the overall simplicity of lines and the density of objects: he does not bother with overwrought rendering, making do with economic recognizability of objects and putting most of his efforts into a ‘clutter’ both tangible and sensory. There is a lot going on in every single panel, but there is always an order to it, a clarity that rearranges the space in the eyes of the cooperative reader.” [Solrad]

REVIEWS

Over at Okazu, Erica Friedman explains how you should read Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Look Back. “Read it slowly. Pay attention to the details,” she advises. “It’s a slim volume, and not terribly complicated in terms of concept. In fact, I’d call this a very typical ‘the second story a manga artist does after their series goes mega-hit and they need to write about creating manga’ manga. But it is loaded to the gills with feels.” Also worth a look: Sarah offers a frank (and fair!) assessment of The Poe Clan‘s second volume, while Bradathon Nu critiques Tatsuki Fujimoto’s newest one-shot Just Listen to the Song. On the capsule review front, Masha Zhdanova looks at three new VIZ titles, while the gang at Beneath the Tangles offer short-n-sweet assessments of Rooster Fighter, The Remarried Empress, and Tower of God.

  • Aria the Masterpiece, Vol. 4 (HWR, Anime UK News)
  • Avant-Garde Yumeko (Demelza, Anime UK News)
  • The Beginning After the End, Vol. 1 (Sara Smith, The Graphic Library)
  • Call of the Night, Vol. 9 (King Baby Duck, Boston Bastard Brigade)
  • The Fiancée Chosen By the Ring, Vol. 2 (Krystallina, The OASG)
  • A Galaxy Next Door, Vol. 3 (Josh Piedra, The Outerhaven)
  • Getter Robo Devolution (Megan D., The Manga Report)
  • The Hunter’s Guild: Red Hood, Vol. 1 (Sara Smith, The Graphic Library)
  • Josee, The Tiger and the Fish (Harry, Honey’s Anime)
  • Kaiju Girl Carmelise, Vol. 6 (Krystallina, The OASG)
  • Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible, Vol. 4 (Josh Piedra, The Outerhaven)
  • Magu-chan: God of Destruction, Vol. 5 (King Baby Duck, Boston Bastard Brigade)
  • Nana & Kaoru, Vol. 1 (Jean-Karlo Lemus, Anime News Network)
  • A Sign of Affection, Vol. 3 (Sara Smith, The Graphic Library)
  • SHOKU-KING, Vols. 1-5 (Krystallina, Daiyamanga)
  • The Summer You Were There, Vol. 1 (Eleanor W., Okazu)
  • Wandance, Vol. 2 (Sarah, Anime UK News)
  • Watamote, Vol. 20 (Josh Piedra, The Outerhaven)

Filed Under: FEATURES, Manga Review Tagged With: Dark Horse, Manga Sales Analysis, shojo, Shonen Jump, VIZ

The Manga Review, 8/19/22

August 19, 2022 by Katherine Dacey Leave a Comment

Attention manga shoppers! Kodansha is currently holding a blow-out sale on digital manga. And when I say “blow out,” I mean it: they’re offering deep discounts on over 3,000 titles, with first volumes priced as low as 99 cents, and later volumes discounted 50%. It’s a great opportunity to try a buzz-worthy series such as Blue Period, Boys Run the Riot, Knight of the Ice, PTSD Radio, or Witch Hat Atelier; to catch up on long-running favorites; or to check out classic titles such as Black Jack and Princess Knight. Don’t wait, though; the sale ends on Monday, August 22nd.

MANGA NEWS

The July NPD Bookscan Numbers are in, with My Hero Academia, Spy x Family, and Kaiju No. 8 topping the list. Also making a strong showing on this month’s bestseller list are Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba and Chainsaw Man. [ICv2]

Have you completed this month’s Seven Seas Reader Survey? If not, don’t miss your opportunity to make licensing requests and give feedback on new and upcoming releases. [Seven Seas]

Coming soon to the Azuki platform: Red Riding Hood’s Apprentice: Final Testament to the Moon (Glacier Bay Books) and Doomsday Cleaning (Star Fruit Books). [Azuki]

Job alert: VIZ Media is currently looking for a Copy Editor. [VIZ Media]

Help Erica Friedman celebrate the 20th anniversary of Okazu by participating in a treasure hunt! The winner will receive a t-shirt of their choice from the Yuricon store. [Okazu]

And speaking of Erica Friedman, she and Rica Takashima (Rica ‘tte Kanji?!) will both be guests at Flame Con this weekend. [Anime News Network]

Blood on the Tracks, Blue Period, and Cat + Gamer are among the titles competing for Best Manga at this year’s Harvey Awards. Also making the cut are Chainsaw Man, Red Flowers, and Spy x Family. [ICv2]

Cartoon Crossroad Columbus (CXC) announced that manga scholar Frederik L. Schodt will be the recipient of the second annual Tom Spurgeon Award, which “honors those who have made substantial contributions to the field of comics, but are not primarily cartoonists.” Schodt is author of three books: Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983), Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (1996), and The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the Manga/Anime Revolution (2007). In addition, he has translated a number of manga into English, including Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy and Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga. [CXC 2022]

FEATURES, PODCASTS AND INTERVIEWS

If you’re a parent, teacher, or librarian in search of STEM-friendly comics, look no further than this helpful list compiled by the experts at No Flying No Tights. [No Flying No Tights]

Brigid Alverson posts a brief but thoughtful tribute to illustrator Sho Murase, who passed away earlier this month. [ICv2]

It’s Witch Week at Mangasplaining! Join the crew for lively discussions of Witch Hat Atelier, Witchcraft Works, and Witches, then stay for the bonus discussions of Fuyumi Soryo’s MARS and Yayoi Ogawa’s You’re My Pet (originally published in English as Tramps Like Us). [Mangasplaining]

The latest Manga Machinations podcast focuses on Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou as well as two manga/Marvel crossovers: Wolverine: SNIKT! and Secret Reverse. [Manga Machinations]

What did David and Jordan think of Monster Hunter Orage? Tune in to the latest Shonen Flop episode for their thoughts on Hiro Mashima’s other battle manga. [Shonen Flop]

ICYMI: Ashley and Loyola Rankin dissect the first eight volumes of Love*Com (Lovely Complex). [Shojo & Tell]

In honor of Sailor Moon‘s thirtieth anniversary, Christopher Chiu-Tabet revisits the first eight issues of Codename: Sailor V. [Multiversity Comics]

Jocelyne Allen flips through the pages of Keiko Takemiya’s Kokuhaku. “The takeaway for this volume… is pure vibes,” she notes. “The seven stories in the  collection technically have plots, but these tales are mostly about the feels. Because the stories themselves inspire questions like ‘how?’ and ‘why is this happening?’, and the smaller details of what is going on aren’t really relevant. Takemiya is using science fiction to dig deep into psyches and emotions and relationships because this is shojo before it’s SF, and shojo demands feels.” Someone license this, please! [Brain vs. Book]

Elias Rosner interviews Ryan Holmberg about translating Yamada Murasaki’s Talk to My Back. [Multiversity Comics]

Over at TCJ, John Holt and Chikuma Teppei  translate Natsume Fusanosuke’s essay “The Transgenerational Manga Sazae-san and Its Meaning.” In their preface, Holt and Teppei attribute the enduring cultural appeal of Hasegawa Machiko’s series to its long-running anime adaptation. “Like The Simpsons, the animated Sazae-san has been a fixture of Japanese television for decades,” they observe, “but unlike Matt Groening’s creation, Sazae-san has been a wholesome staple of family life, still operating by the terms of 1950s and 1960s culture in new episodes today. Therefore, although it lacks a Simpsons-level criticality, Sazae-san is still a mirror of society. As Natsume argues, the manga and anime create a kind of touchstone to what was good about Japan in the late 20th century. In this way, Sazae-san not only entertains, but also it curates a way of life that may be now remote or even alien to the lived experience of contemporary viewers in Japan.” [The Comics Journal]

REVIEWS

Scott Cederlund reflects on the radical empathy of Gengoroh Tagame’s Our Colors, while Eric Alex Cline explains why he won’t be picking up volume two of Rooster Fighter. “Whether one finds the series worth following will largely depend on if they share its ridiculous sense of humor, and if they’re willing to overlook incredibly blatant bigotry in character design,” Cline observes. “The major con is that some of the monster designs are lackluster, and the last one in particular tanks the fun vibes with a sudden veer into blatant transphobia.” You’ll also find new capsule reviews at Women Write About Comics, where Masha Zhdanova looks at three new VIZ titles, and right here at Manga Bookshelf, where Sean Gaffney, Michelle Smith, and I tackle Rooster Fighter, Shadow House, and Wandance.

New and Noteworthy

  • The Abandoned Empress, Vols. 1-2 (Noemi10, Anime UK News)
  • Bleach: 20th Anniversary Edition, Vol. 1 (Tony Yao, Drop-In to Manga)
  • Blue Lock, Vol. 1 (Renee Scott, Good Comics for Kids)
  • Box of Light, Vol. 1 (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network)
  • Dandadan, Vol. 1 (Brett Michael Orr, Honey’s Anime)
  • The Elusive Samurai, Vol. 1 (King Baby Duck, Boston Bastard Brigade)
  • GAME: Between the Suits, Vol. 1 (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network)
  • I Am a Cat Barista, Vol. 1 (Johanna Draper Carlson, Comics Worth Reading)
  • Kowloon Generic Romance, Vol. 1 (Sarah, Anime UK News)
  • Lost Lad London, Vol. 1 (Johanna Draper Carlson, Comics Worth Reading)
  • New York, New York, Vol. 1 (Al, Al’s Manga Blog)
  • The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter, Vol. 1 (Sarah, Anime UK News)
  • Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: Naoko Takeuchi Collection, Vol. 1 (SKJAM, SKJAM! Reviews)
  • Romantic Killer, Vol. 1 (Brett Michael Orr, Honey’s Anime)
  • Talk to My Back (Lindsay Pereira, Broken Frontier)
  • To Strip the Flesh (Seth Smith, Women Write About Comics]
  • The Town of Pigs (Danica Davidson, Otaku USA)
  • Vampeerz, Vol. 1 (Danica Davidson, Otaku USA)
  • Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke’s Mansion, Vol. 1 (Noemi10, Anime UK News)
  • The Wolf Never Sleeps, Vol. 1 (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network)

Ongoing and Complete Series

  • Beastars, Vols. 18-19 (King Baby Duck, Boston Bastard Brigade)
  • Beauty and the Feast, Vols. 2-3 (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network)
  • Can’t Stop Cursing You, Vols. 2-3 (Demelza, Anime UK News)
  • Cheeky Brat, Vol. 3 (Krystallina and Justin, The OASG)
  • Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?!, Vol. 3 (Johanna Draper Carlson, Comics Worth Reading)
  • Daytime Shooting Star, Vol. 11 (Jaime, Yuri Stargirl)
  • Deadpool: Samurai, Vol. 2 (King Baby Duck, Boston Bastard Brigade)
  • Fly Me to the Moon, Vol. 12 (Josh Piedra, The Outerhaven)
  • Magu-chan: God of Destruction, Vol. 4 (King Baby Duck, Boston Bastard Brigade)
  • Minami Nanami Wants to Shine, Vol. 2 (Demelza, Anime UK News)
  • My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, Vol. 12 (King Baby Duck, Boston Bastard Brigade)
  • My Love Mix-Up!, Vol. 4 (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network)
  • Rebel Sword (Megan D., The Manga Test Drive)
  • Superwomen in Love: Honey Trap and Rapid Rabbit, Vol. 4 (Erica Friedman, Okazu)
  • Whisper Me a Love Song, Vol. 5 (Erica Friedman, Okazu)
  • Witch Hat Atelier, Vols. 8-9 (Sarah, Anime UK News)
  • Witch Hat Atelier, Vol. 9 (Helen and Justin, The OASG)

Filed Under: FEATURES Tagged With: Azuki, Frederik L. Schodt, Gengoroh Tagame, Harvey Awards, Hiro Mashima, Kodansha Comics, Manga Industry Jobs, Okazu, Rica Takashima, sailor moon, Sazae-chan, Sho Murase, VIZ, yuri

Ima Koi: Now I’m in Love, Vols 1 and 2

July 19, 2022 by Anna N

Ima Koi: Now I’m in Love Volumes 1 and 2 by Ayuko Hatta

In today’s stressful times, reading determinedly uncomplicated romance can be quite soothing, which is why I’m enjoying the angst free and sometimes silly series Ima Koi. Satomi was too shy to confess her feelings to a crush in middle school, so she’s determined to be different in high school and seize her next chance for love. When stoic, incredibly tall Yagyu saves her from a train groper and she finds out that he goes to her school she follows through on her vow and asks him out. He says yes, and thus their romance begins.

Ima Koi

Satomi is cute, with her quick entry into dating she’s fulfilled her main goal, but she’s still figuring out what to do now that she’s in a relationship. Yagyu is a bit more enigmatic, but he’s won over by Satomi’s forthright nature and her tendency to fling herself on top of him from the subway stairs. He’s interested in getting to know her, and they soon start dating. They deal with complications that beset any new couple as Satomi has to navigate around Yagyu’s suspicious best friend and his obsessed younger sister. While this manga doesn’t reach the hilarity of My Love Story!! there are plenty of funny situations, such as when Yagyu and Satomi go on a date to the zoo and his younger sister Juri tags along. Juri becomes more and more enraged as Satomi keeps not reacting to her attempts to undermine the date, until she transforms into a menacing side character from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Ima Koi is a fun escape, and the way most issues get resolved by the end of every volume makes for a relaxing shoujo series.

Filed Under: Manga Reviews, REVIEWS Tagged With: ima koi, shojo beat, shoujo, VIZ

The Manga Review, 7/1/22

July 1, 2022 by Katherine Dacey Leave a Comment

Good news: The United Workers of Seven Seas (UW7S) achieved a major victory this week when the company agreed to recognize their union. Though management has not yet spoken to the press, the UW7S Twitter feed posted the following statement on June 24th: “This decision by Seven Seas eliminates the need for an NLRB conducted election and will pave the way for a more expedited path to bargaining a first contract. At a time when many employers continue to fight the unionization of their employees, we appreciate that Seven Seas decided to respect the voices of the majority of staff and recognize us. We look forward to developing a mutually beneficial relationship and reaching a collective bargaining agreement in the near future.” The path to a better contract and better working conditions, however, is a long one. As OASG contributor Krystallina notes, “Bloomberg Law estimates the average length of time for initial negotiations to be 409 days — in other words, 1 year, 1 month, and 2 weeks. One analyst says there’s only about a 50-50 chance of reaching an agreement in a year, with additional estimates calculating it will take about a year and a half.”

NEWS

After 247 chapters, Yuki Suegetsu will bring Chihayafuru to an end. The series, which has been running in Be Love since 2007, proved so popular with Japanese readers that it spawned three live-action films and three anime series. [Anime News Network]

Looking for a manga industry job? VIZ is currently advertising four positions in its publishing division: Copy Editor, Editor, Editor of Original Graphic Novels, and Publishing Production Assistant. [VIZ]

The American comics market is booming, according to industry experts Milton Griepp and John Jackson Miller. They report that “total comics and graphic novel sales to consumers in the U.S. and Canada were approximately $2.075 billion, a 62% increase over sales in 2020.” Comics performed well at many types of retail outlets as well. As Griepp observes, “Sales through comic stores were up 60% vs. last year and 34% vs. 2019; sales through the book channel, including book fairs (which were back in operation) grew at a blistering 81% pace. Digital growth, while slower, was coming off a gangbuster year in 2020 during the shutdowns.” [ICv2]

FEATURES, INTERVIEWS, AND PODCASTS

As Pride Month comes to a close, Okazu reader Meru explains how reading yuri manga played an important role in their decision to come out as transgender. “When I look at Yuri, I see myself: I see the soft butches that could, in another series, be they/them or even they/he,” they note. “I see bodies and ideals and identities that mirror myself. I feel less alone. I feel natural in a country that would rather me turn my back on playing at soft masculinity and gender ambivalence in exchange for kitten heels, a lack of body hair, and legs crossed at the ankle. When I crack open a volume of Yuri and see tomboys and boyish girls and girls straddling the lines of socially acceptable gender and being themselves.” [Okazu]

If you’re a fan of Daytime Shooting star, Deb Aoki thinks you might like Mika Yamamori’s latest series, In the Clear Moonlit Dusk. [Mangasplaining]

On the newest installment of Manga Mavericks, Colton and Lum check in with ongoing series Haikyu!! and Magu-Chan!, and look at new offerings from VIZ, Manga Plus, and Azuki. [Manga Mavericks]

The Manga Machinations crew discuss three series that explore different facets of the LBGTQ experience: New York, New York; Catch These Hands!; and I Want to Be a Wall. [Manga Machinations]

Kory, Helen, and Apryll dedicate the latest Manga In Your Ears podcast to My Solo Exchange Diary and Yuri Is My Job! [Taiiku Podcast]

Paul Semel and Anne Ishii interview Gengoroh Tagame about Our Colours, a coming-of-age story that centers on a queer teen artist. “It’s something I’d wanted to read as a middle and high schooler myself, so decided to write for my own self,” Tagame explains. As I’m now in my 50s, I think of it as a gift to myself 40 years ago.” [Paul Semel]

Also of interest: Cayla Coates talks to Okura about I Think Our Son Is Gay, a gentle comedy about a woman who begins questioning her son’s sexual orientation. “I’ve always felt that gay people in manga and drama are often portrayed as either comic relief or someone with struggles and hardship.,” Okura observes. “I wanted to draw what I consider to be natural, ordinary gay people.” [Crunchyroll]

REVIEWS

Erica Friedman delves into the latest installment of Even Though We’re Adults, singling out the translation and lettering for special praise. “Jocelyne Allen’s translation is outstanding, in providing the nuance and ‘adultness’ this series needs,” she notes, while the “lettering and retouch by Rina Mapa lets’ me feel in the story in exactly the same way as I do when I’m reading the Japanese.” Meanwhile, Megan D. explores the forgotten corners of Tokyopop’s BL catalog with a look at Innocent Bird, “a limp, shallow romance… illustrated with an indifferent and murky hand,” and Christopher Chiu-Tabet continues his retrospective on Sailor Moon with a look at issues 15-20.

  • Cat + Gamer, Vol. 1 (A.M. Ziebruh, Bloom Reviews)
  • Chainsaw Man, Vols. 10-11 (King Baby Duck, Boston Bastard Brigade)
  • Death Note: Short Stories (Harry, Honey’s Anime)
  • The Elusive Samurai, Vol. 1 (Lesley Aeschliman, Lesley’s Anime and Manga Corner)
  • Fangirl, Vol. 2 (Johanna Draper Carlson, Comics Worth Reading)
  • Hikaru in the Light!, Vol. 1 (Bill Curtis, Yatta-Tachi)
  • Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible, Vol. 2 (Lesley Aeschliman, Lesley’s Anime and Manga Corner)
  • Love After World Domination, Vol. 4 (Justin, The OASG)
  • Magical Artisan Dahlia Wilts No More, Vol. 1 (A.M. Ziebruh, Bloom Reviews)
  • Our Colours (Ron, Game-News24)
  • Sensei’s Pious Lie, Vol. 1 (Joh Piedra, The Outerhaven)
  • Sex Ed 120%, Vol. 3 (Justin, The OASG)
  • Shortcake Cake, Vol. 1 (Kaley Connell, Yatta-Tachi)
  • To Strip the Flesh (Brianna Lawrence, The Mary Sue)
  • To Strip the Flesh (Lesley Aeschliman, Lesley’s Anime and Manga Corner)
  • Uncle From Another World, Vols. 1-2 (Helen, The OASG)
  • Until I Meet My Husband (Danica Davidson, Otaku USA)
  • Welcome Back, Alice, Vol. 1 (Danica Davidson, Otaku USA)
  • Whisper Me a Love Song, Vols. 1-4 (Anson Leung, Broken Frontier)
  • With a Dog AND a Cat, Every Day Is Fun, Vols. 3-4 (Krystallina, The OASG)
  • With You and the Rain, Vols. 1-2 (Justin, The OASG)
  • Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon, Vol. 1 (Renee Scott, Good Comics for Kids)
  • Yuri Espoir, Vol. 1 (Rebecca Silverman, Anime News Network)

Filed Under: FEATURES Tagged With: Gengoroh Tagame, LGBTQ Manga, Manga Industry Jobs, Manga Sales Analysis, Mika Yamamori, Seven Seas, UW7S, VIZ, yuri

The Manga Review, 5/20/22

May 20, 2022 by Katherine Dacey Leave a Comment

This year’s Eisner nominations have just been announced. In the Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia category, VIZ Media garnered five of the six nominations with crowd-pleasers such as Chainsaw Man and Spy x Family, while Seven Seas nabbed one for Robo Sapiens: Tales of Tomorrow. The only other manga nominated for an Eisner was Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, which is competing in the Best Humor Publication category. Also nominated for an Eisner is Eike Exner’s Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History, which was published by Rutgers University Press last year.

MANGA NEWS

Big news from Seven Seas! The company has just launched two imprints: Seven Seas BL, which will publish works in the BL/Boys’ Love genre, and Seven Seas GL, which will publish works in the GL/Girls’ Love (yuri) genre. [Seven Seas]

The final chapter in Wataru Hinekure’s My Love Mix-Up! will run in the June issue of Bessatsu Margaret. [Anime News Network]

Brigid Alverson previews three new shonen titles that debut in July. [ICv2]

Over at Book Riot, Carina Pereira highlights eight of the summer’s most anticipated graphic novels. [Book Riot]

How do librarians respond book challenges in their communities? Shawn, Megan, and Tayla offer a variety of helpful strategies for handling complaints about graphic novels, from setting clear policies about who can bring a formal complaint to using peer-reviewed sites to demonstrate that your collection is, in fact, age-appropriate. [No Flying, No Tights]

FEATURES AND INTERVIEWS

Looking for a good read? The crack team at ANN have just posted their Spring 2022 Manga Guide. Look for daily updates through the end of this week. [Anime News Network]

Tony explores the complex friendship between Kaguya Shinomiya and Ai Hayasaka in Kaguya-sama: Love Is War. [Drop-In to Manga]

On the latest Manga Mavericks podcast, host Siddharth Gupta convenes a roundtable discussion about Yona of the Dawn with panelists from Anime Feminist, But Why Tho?!, and Good Friends Anime Club. [Manga Mavericks]

Geremy and Kevin round up the latest Shonen Jump chapters, then turn their attention to volume thirteen of Haikyu!! [Jump Start Weekly]

Why did Nobuhiro Watsuki’s Gun Blaze West get the axe after just three volumes? David and Jordan investigate. [Shonen Flop]

Did you know that Tokyopop’s Warriors fandom is still going strong after fifteen years? Patrick Kuklinksi shines a light on the fan-made comics that explore “parts of the books that weren’t detailed in canon,” re-write controversial storylines, and introduce original characters. [SOLRAD]

Megan D. jumps in the WABAC machine for a look at Rumiko Takashi’s Rumic Theater, a collection of short stories that VIZ published more than twenty-five years ago. “What caught my notice about this anthology is that they all feature something you don’t see a lot of in American manga releases: adult women,” she observes. “Every lead character is either a currently married woman (be they with or without children) or one who was married in the past.  A lot of their stories are small-scale, focused on their homes and their immediate community of friends and family. True to Takahashi fashion, though, they are also often comical”.” [The Manga Test Drive]

REVIEWS

Are you following Al’s Manga Blog? If not, you should: this review-focused website has been publishing insightful, crisply written essays since 2016. Al’s latest offerings include in-depth reviews of The Music of Marie, a new title by Usamaru Furuya (Short Cuts, Genkaku Picasso); Island in a Puddle, a thriller by Kei Sanabe (Erased); and Sakamoto Days, a new Shonen Jump series by Yutu Suzuki.

Also of note: ANN’s Caitlin Moore draws on her own experiences with ADHD in a thoughtful review of My Brain is Different: Stories of ADHD and Other Developmental Disorders, while Masha Zhdanova posts capsule reviews of three new VIZ titles.

  • All-Out!! (Krystallina, Daiyamanga)
  • All-Rounder Meguru (Krystallina, Daiyamanga)
  • Awkward Silence (Megan D. The Manga Test Drive)
  • Boys Run the Riot, Vol. 1 (Seth Smith, Women Write About Comics)
  • Devil Ecstasy, Vol. 1 (Demelza, Anime UK News)
  • Fly Me to the Moon, Vol. 11 (Josh Piedra, The Outerhaven)
  • A Galaxy Next Door, Vol. 1 (Brett Michael Orr, Honey’s Anime)
  • Giant Spider & Me: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale (Megan D., The Manga Test Drive)
  • Golden Japanesque: A Splendid Yokohama Romance, Vol. 5 (Krystallina, The OASG)
  • The Haunted Bookstore, Vol. 1 (SKJAM, SKJAM! Reviews)
  • Island in a Puddle, Vol. 1 (King Baby Duck, Boston Bastard Brigade)
  • Jujutsu Kaisen, Vols. 14-15 (King Baby Duck, Boston Bastard Brigade)
  • Kubo Won’t Let Me Be Invisible, Vol. 1 (Josh Piedra, The Outerhaven)
  • The Music of Marie (darkstorm, Anime UK News)
  • My Androgynous Boyfriend (Megan D., The Manga Test Drive)
  • The Poe Clan, Vol. 1 (Eric Alex Cline, AiPT!)
  • Record of Ragnarok, Vol. 1 (Danica Davidson, Otaku USA)
  • Rent-A-(Really Shy!)-Girlfriend, Vol. 2 (Demelza, Anime UK News)
  • Sakamoto Days, Vol. 1 (Renee Scott, Good Comics for Kids)
  • Seaside Stranger, Vol. 2: Harukaze no Étranger (Kate Sánchez, But Why Tho?!)
  • Sensei’s Pious Lie, Vol. 1 (Sarah, Anime UK News)
  • Short Sunzen (Megan D. The Manga Test Drive)
  • Stravaganza (Megan D., The Manga Test Drive)
  • To Strip the Flesh (Quinn, But Why Tho?!)
  • Wind Breaker, Vol. 1 (Brett Michael Orr, Honey’s Anime)

Filed Under: FEATURES Tagged With: BL, censorship, Eisner Awards, Rumiko Takahashi, Seven Seas, Shonen Jump, Tokyopop, VIZ, yuri

Sakamoto Days, Vol. 1

May 19, 2022 by Katherine Dacey

The opening pages of Sakamoto Days unfold with ruthless efficiency: in just a handful of panels, author Yuto Suzuki shows us how twenty-two-year-old Taro Sakamoto, once Japan’s most “feared and revered” hit man, became Mr. Sakamoto, twenty-seven-year-old husband, father, and shopkeeper. Though Sakamoto seems content being the neighborhood jack-of-all-trades, his former associates view him as a potential threat, dispatching Shin the Clairvoyant to kill him. Shin appears to have the upper hand in this contest–he’s younger, fitter, and, as his name suggests, telepathic–but Sakamoto quickly subdues Shin with a bag of cough drops and a well-timed kick, leaving Shin gasping for breath–and, oddly, eager to join forces with his old rival.

This initial encounter highlights Suzuki’s strengths and weaknesses as a storyteller. In the plus column is Suzuki’s ability to stage a great sight gag, as evidenced by Sakamoto’s MacGuyver-esque ability to transform ordinary objects into powerful weapons. Suzuki also makes the most of Sakamoto’s sangfroid; no matter how chaotic the scene or ridiculous his opponent, Sakamoto never betrays a hint of emotion, making him an excellent foil for the chatty Shin. In the minus column is Suzuki’s fixation with Sakamoto’s weight. Other characters routinely comment on how “out of shape” Sakamoto is, and express surprise at his speed and agility—Shin, for example, initially dismisses Sakamoto as a threat because “he’s gone all tubby now.” One or two comments in this vein are enough to subvert the idea that a skilled assassin needs to be fit to be lethal, but this “joke” is repeated almost every time Sakamoto mixes it up with a new bad guy. 

Art-wise, Suzuki’s style is pleasingly organic, relying more on linework than screentone to create depth and volume. Suzuki compliments this approach with an imaginative use of perspective and panel shape that suggests the controlled frenzy of Sakamoto’s attacks. In chapter three, for example, Shin and Sakamoto attempt to rescue Officer Nakase, a newly-minted cop who’s been kidnapped by a motorcycle gang. Sakamoto uses a smoke bomb to surprise his opponents, then unleashes a series of kicks, body slams, and upper cuts to overwhelm the gang members:


Suzuki presents the fight in a kaleidoscopic fashion, using panels of varying shapes and sizes to show how quickly Sakamoto dispatches his enemies. The density of the images allows Suzuki to compress the action into just a few pages, creating a reading experience that puts the viewer in the middle of the action, watching the fight unfold in something approximating real time–a welcome antidote the bloated, multi-chapter fights scenes characteristic of so many Shonen Jump titles.

If some of the later chapters aren’t as tightly executed as the first, Sakamoto Days nonetheless achieves a good balance between character development and karate-chopping, affording us enough insight into Shin and Sakamoto’s personalities to make their Laurel and Hardy dynamic amusing. Recommended.

SAKAMOTO DAYS, VOL. 1 • ART AND STORY BY YUTO SUZUKI • TRANSLATED BY CAMILLA NIEH • LETTERING BY EVE GRANDT AND SNIR AHARON • VIZ MEDIA • RATED TEEN PLUS (VIOLENCE AND GORE) • 196 pp.

Filed Under: Manga, REVIEWS Tagged With: Comedy, Shonen Jump, VIZ

My Love Mix-Up! Vol 1

October 16, 2021 by Anna N

My Love Mix-Up Volume 1 by Wataru Hinekure and Aruko

I was curious about My Love Mix-Up since I’m always up for a new shoujo series and Aruko illustrated the astoundingly good My Love Story!!. While this new series doesn’t have the innate hilarity of My Love Story!!, it is a light, warm-hearted unconventional love triangle with protagonists who are all kind to each other.

Aoki has a long-term crush on Hashimoto, the girl who sits next to him in class. On a fateful day he borrows her eraser and sees the name of another boy, Ida, with a heart symbol next to it. When Aoki drops the eraser and Ida picks it up, Ida assumes that Aoki has a crush on him. Aoki plays along with this assumption because he doesn’t want to reveal Hashimoto’s secret. Ida’s reaction to all of this is thoughtful consideration. Ida’s never dated anyone before, so he doesn’t immediately reject Aoki, even though Aoki is encouraging him to! As Aoki gets to know Ida better he starts realizing what a cool guy Ida is. While there is less opportunity for Aruko to engage in the more broad caricature work of My Love Story!!, there are a few great scenes where Aoki looks like a haunted zombie due to the depths of his teenage embarrassment about the confounding situation that he finds himself in.

There’s a similar sort of love triangle in Blue Flag, and My Love-Mix! up looks like it is going to cover the same territory but without the emotional depth. I don’t think that every series needs to have that degree of pathos, sometimes a relatively angst free love triangle is the perfect diversion. There’s a cliffhanger at the end that promises plenty of more romantic mix-ups ahead.

Filed Under: Manga Reviews, REVIEWS Tagged With: my love mix-up!, shojo beat, shoujo, VIZ

Prince Freya Vol. 1

September 24, 2021 by Phillip Anthony Leave a Comment

Like a well-listened to lullaby, I find myself in front of the keyboard with a manga volume beside me. And so, the song starts again. Fitting that I chose a story set in a fairy-tale world to return with.

Prince Freya is neither a Western style fable nor a Japanese high-fantasy adventure. Rather, it has elements of traditional fairy-tale stories in the Germanic-Franco style. I bet you didn’t know that in the original version, Cinderella’s sisters were beautiful but wretched and doves sent by Cinderella’s dead mother pecked their eyes out? Yeah, brutal. Well, the same kind of logic applies in Prince Freya. Freya, a young girl living with her ailing mother in a village in the Kingdom of Tyr. Nearby Sigurd is threatening to gobble up Tyr. So, secretly, her childhood adoptive brothers come back to the village to make sure a plan in Tyr’s capital doesn’t come to fruition. See, Tyr’s plan is to use Freya to sub in for Prince Edward, the ruler of Tyr. Edward is dying from poison and needs someone to pretend to be him to save the kingdom. So we’ve got elements of Prince and the Pauper, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and a few that I’ve forgotten the name of.

Freya herself is a big crybaby, borne from her constant, unstated, fear that the people she loves will be taken from her. So when Aaron and Alek, her brothers, have to go back to the castle empty handed, she overhears a plot by Sigurd’s officers to kill Aaron as payment for Tyr’s resistance. She volunteers to Edward to take his place, in one hell of a Faustian pact: she becomes the prince, even with her crippling emotional state, but even in saving those she cares for, some of her happiness is destroyed. I found the bulk of the first volume to deal with the unseen threats that she did not foresee: palace intrigue, people who follow the prince’s every orders being thrown off by “his” abrupt change of behaviour, and being a person she could never be in her old life. But underneath, she remains the person back in her home village. When she (literally) leaps into the role of the prince in front of the castle, her sense of justice is now augmented by her new-found power as the regent. So the same girl who reached out for hurt people as a child now wields incredible public power. Some people who distrust her now can be smoothed over, others must be left for another day. Give and take, political pragmatism, and discretion being the better part of valour. All these things she has to learn in hours. All the while, Ishihara keeps the darker side of the fairy tale in play because at every turn, inside and outside the castle, death lies in wait.

The two major male leads in the first volume, Alek and Aaron, are where the volume’s emotional gravity comes from. Aaron’s the older one, the one who had the Prince’s Black Knight bodyguard role, and he comes from the perspective of the practical soldier: yes, childhood was an adventure but there are evils out there, waiting to devour the unwary. He carries himself with the weight of a young man who knows the cost of friendship, family, and love. He’s prepared to pay it but can’t save those around him from heartache. Alek, on the other hand, is the prototypical foot soldier; hard-working but not made in the eyes of the court. Alek could die tomorrow and nobody in the castle will grieve. His cross to bear is that he has to rise to the challenges within and without or everyone he loves will be stolen from him. In many ways, he is his older brother but not a complete clone. Aaron seems to be certain that Freya needs to find her own way, however heart-breaking it is, whereas Alek thinks the same but yet as he sees it, who will protect Freya if they throw their lives away at the first sign of danger? Freya is not so much torn between them as she is trying to make sure they both get different levels of support from her while she battles her fear and terror at her role in this dangerous political play. Her upset is from them risking all for save her when she feels that she should do all she can to balance the scales.

The manga plays with all this and keeps the background machinations going as elements within the castle shift their weight as some know that Freya isn’t Edward and others don’t. These elements will end up colliding with Freya and the boys while she wrestles with her choices and decisions. The story hits hard in several scenes and reminded me that not all fairy tales end with the heroes making it out of every book. I liked how Freya loses more and more of who she and the boys were back in the village as they take on each terrifying moment. Ishihara has made a typical fantasy setting and made it more on what happens to Freya’s state of mind than what the world around her does. As the older stories tell us, there are worst things than death in a high fantasy.

Now, I put down this volume and reach for another. The lullaby goes on, the setting changes. See you next time, readers!

Filed Under: Adventures in the Key of Shoujo Tagged With: manga, shojo beat, shoujo, VIZ

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, Vol. 1

March 2, 2021 by Katherine Dacey

If your chief criticism of King of Eden was “not enough boobs,” have I got the manga for you: Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, a comedy about a corporate drone whose life is transformed by the onset of a zombie plague. Its hero, Akira Tendo, sees opportunity where others see only chaos, and decides to make a bucket list of 100 things he wants to do before he, too, becomes one of the walking dead. His top priorities? Telling his voluptuous co-worker Ohtori how much he likes her—even if she is the “boss’ side piece”—and tracking down a mysterious hottie he encounters in a convenience store.

While Akira’s quest doesn’t sound particularly memorable, his new-found optimism makes him an agreeable guide through a Tokyo overrun by zombies. His palpable joy in quitting a soul-crushing job is infectious—if you’ll pardon the expression—as he finds pleasure in small things: riding a motorcycle for the first time, scavenging for his favorite beer, playing video games during normal business hours. No matter how much carnage he encounters, or how many of his bucket-list errands don’t go according to plan, Akira’s can-do spirit remains undiminished. So, too, is his loyalty to others, as evidenced by his willingness to rescue his childhood friend Tencho from a hotel overrun by zombies.

The hotel scene is indicative of what’s good and not so good about Zom 100. On the one hand, the friends’ shared ordeal leads to a heartfelt exchange in which they discuss why they drifted apart after college. Their dialogue is a little on-the-nose—“I got jealous of how successful you were and took my anger out on you,” Akira confesses in a torrent of tears and snot—but the characters’ sincerity makes Akira and Tencho’s reconciliation feel like a genuine moment of maturity.

On the other hand, the main reason this scene begins in a hotel—specifically, a love hotel—is to offer some good old-fashioned fan service, as Kencho is trapped in a bondage chamber with an irate, naked zombie who’s been chained to the wall. The zombie is drawn in loving detail, right down to her perky breasts, but serves no real dramatic purpose; she exists mainly to make young male readers gawp at Kencho’s predicament. The same goes for several other gratuitous moments of nudity and pin-up posturing, none of which feel necessary or demonstrate artist Kotaro Takata’s skill at drawing attractive, anatomically correct women. (All of his figures seem to have a few extra vertebrae.)

The fan service is indicative of a deeper problem as well: the zombies—or the boobs, for that matter—don’t feel essential to Akira’s story. Almost any catastrophe or life-altering event could have set the plot in motion, whether it was a devastating medical diagnosis or Earth’s impending collision with a meteor. Equally disappointing is that Akira’s quest feels more like a to-do list than a real emotional journey; even he seems disappointed in his inability to come up with a sufficiently long or imaginative bucket list. As a result, Akira seems like just another standard-issue shonen lead, blessed with an optimism that sometimes makes him seem a little dim, a superhuman ability to escape life-threatening situations, and an uncanny knack for stumbling into situations with hot women. I don’t know about you, but I would have enjoyed this series 100% more if the gender roles had been reversed, if only for the sight of a former office lady cheerfully riding a Harley through a zombie horde on her way to score a few brews.

To read a brief excerpt of Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, click here.

ZOM 100: BUCKET LIST OF THE DEAD, VOL. 1 • STORY BY HARO ASO • ART BY KOTARO TAKATA • TRANSLATION BY NOVA SKIPPER • TOUCH-UP ART & LETTERING BY VANESSA SATONE • EDITED BY KARLA CLARK • VIZ MEDIA • RATED: OLDER TEEN (PARTIAL NUDITY, GORE, VIOLENCE) • 159 pp.

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Comedy, Horror/Supernatural, VIZ, VIZ Signature, Zombies

A First Look at YashaHime: Demon Half-Princess

October 11, 2020 by Katherine Dacey

For a brief moment in the early 2000s, Rumiko Takashashi’s InuYasha was the shonen franchise in America. It was a constant presence on cable television, where it anchored Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim line-up, and a commercial success for VIZ Media, which issued and re-issued the series in formats ranging from flipped floppies to deluxe, three-in-volumes. By the time InuYasha finished its run in 2008, readers had moved on to other franchises, but InuYasha was an important series for the North American comics market, as it helped reveal an underserved population of teens who weren’t particularly interested in Batman or Captain America, but were interested in reading comics about characters their own age.

InuYasha also demonstrated that teen girls were just as enthusiastic about action, adventure, and horror comics as their male counterparts, especially if the series featured well-rounded female characters. To be sure, plenty of shonen manga included at least one Tough Female Character™, but InuYasha’s three female leads were defined as much by their frustrations, insecurities, and smarts as they were their ass-kicking capabilities. Equally important, Kagome, Sango, and Kikyo weren’t drawn for the male gaze; they were depicted as normal young women, making it easier for teen girls to identify with the characters’ struggles and triumphs.

It seems fitting, then, that the new InuYasha spin-off puts girls front and center. YashaHime: Princess Half-Demon is a “next generation” sequel that focuses on the original characters’ offspring—in this case, the teenage daughters of InuYasha and his big brother Sesshomaru. This time around, however, Sesshomaru’s twins Towa and Setsuna are the leads and InuYasha’s kid Moroha is the brash, impetuous foil to her sterner, more reticent cousins.

The good news is that YashaHime faithfully adheres to the spirit of the original series, with its characteristic mixture of romance, slapstick, horror, and action; anyone worried that the new series might try too hard to differentiate itself from InuYasha will be happy to see that the new show keeps the focus on demon-fighting, quests, and camaraderie. The bad news is that the first episode is so compressed that the new heroines barely make an impression on the viewer, as their introductions are overshadowed by clumsy bits of exposition, cameo appearances by the original series’ main characters, and a showdown between a demon and the old gang.

In an effort to create more continuity between the original series and the sequel, the second episode reveals that Towa was raised by Kagome’s younger brother Sota in present-day Tokyo. Towa’s introductory scenes are so focused on explaining her backstory that her distinctive choice of clothing—a schoolboy’s uniform—initially seems like an afterthought: “better for fighting,” Towa tells us in a voice-over. That detail turns out to be an important clue about how Towa sees herself, as she complains that “girls must be feminine and boys must be masculine,” a distinction that Towa finds as restrictive as the clothes she’s expected to wear. Towa’s gender presentation is addressed in a ham-fisted way—her younger sister pleads with Towa to be more “girly” and “cute”—but the writers’ willingness to address Towa’s fierce rejection of gender binaries suggests that YashaHime may explore some interesting new thematic territory.

The only truly disappointing aspect of YashaHime is the animation, a flaw that’s most evident in its stiffly executed fight scenes. The animators never create a persuasive illusion of people jumping, flying, and running through three-dimensional space; all the characters look like paper cut-outs superimposed on unimaginative backgrounds. The flatness of the imagery is even more obvious when YashaHime and InuYasha are viewed side-by-side, as InuYasha’s softer, more nuanced color palette gave the picture plane more depth and the characters’ bodies more weight. The one bright spot is YashaHime‘s character designs: Moroha, Towa, and Setsuna bear just enough resemblance to their parents to make it easy for the viewer to grasp the father-daughter connection, even though each girl has her own unique look. That attention to detail extends beyond their physical appearance, too, influencing the way they move, talk, and twitch their noses when they catch wind of a demon.

If I sound a little ambivalent about YashaHime, I am: it shows considerable promise, but hasn’t quite escaped the long shadow of its parent series or found the right pacing for the kind of stories it wants to tell. I’m reserving final judgment until the relationships between Towa, Setsuna, and Moroha are more clearly delineated—after all, it was the complex web of feelings and friendships that made InuYasha compelling as much as its demon-of-the-week adventures. Here’s hoping the sequel will embrace that approach, too.

Episodes 1-2 of YashaHime: Princess Half-Demon are currently streaming on Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Hulu. New episodes air on Saturdays.

Filed Under: Manga Critic, Movies & TV, REVIEWS Tagged With: anime, inuyasha, VIZ, YashaHime

The Way of the Househusband, Vols. 2-3

July 11, 2020 by Katherine Dacey

The Way of the Househusband has the rhythms of a good sitcom: it has a simple, well-defined premise, a few lead characters with strong personalities, and an episodic formula that’s flexible enough to create endless opportunities to tell the same joke in new and surprising ways. In the first volume, for example, almost every storyline revolved around Tatsu’s fanatical dedication to his role as stay-at-home spouse, whether he was bargain hunting at the grocery store or racing to the train station with his wife’s lunchbox. The mere sight of him in an apron, track suit, and aviator glasses was a good sight gag made better by Tatsu’s sheer cluelessness; he never seemed to realize that people were staring at him in the checkout line and the butcher’s shop.

Volumes two and three find Tatsu in equally incongruous situations. In chapter 10, for example, he joins the neighborhood housewives’ aerobics class, flashing his terrifying yakuza sneer every time the instructor commands her charges to “smile,” while in chapter 16, Tatsu demonstrates a hidden talent for spiking and setting when he joins the ladies’ volleyball team. The volleyball game is a great variation on the series’ best running joke. Though most civilians find him a terrifying oddity, the neighborhood ladies’ association looks at Tatsu as one of their own; they include him in activities, offer him tips on how to run his household more efficiently, and even help him impress a former boss with an impromptu display of culinary prowess.

Perhaps the most important development in volumes two and three, however, is the introduction of Tatsu’s old enemies, all of whom are genuinely bewildered by his retirement from the knee-capping business. These exchanges thrum with the comic energy of a Damon Runyon story as Tatsu schools his fellow yakuza on stain removal and dessert making. That Tatsu discusses his career change without apology or explanation is a nice touch, as it throws his opponents off their game and reinforces the idea that he likes being a stay-at-home husband.

My only concern about The Way of the Househusband is that Tatsu’s wife is more a collection of moods and preferences than a fully persuasive character. Miku is marked by extremes: she has an intense, child-like obsession with Poli-Cure, an anime whose core fanbase is about ten years old, but is also a fierce workaholic whose resists Tatsu’s efforts to pamper her with scented candles and scalp massages. Though the gags built around her personality usually land, it sometimes feels like they’d be funnier if we understood a little more about how Miku and Tatsu met, or what keeps them together. From time to time, author Kousuke Oono hints the two have more in common than meets the eye–Miku is handy with a knife and a bat, too–but a little more attention to her character would be welcome.

That said, The Way of the Househusband remains consistently funny three volumes into its run, offering a fresh take on that most timeless of sitcom premises: the fish out of water. Recommended.

VIZ Media provided a review copy of volume two.

THE WAY OF THE HOUSEHUSBAND, VOLS. 2-3 • STORY AND ART BY KOUSUKE OONO • TRANSLATION BY SHELDON DRZKA AND AMANDA HALEY, ADAPTATION BY JENNIFER LEBLANC • VIZ MEDIA, LLC • RATED T+, FOR OLDER TEENS (SUGGESTED VIOLENCE, YAKUZA JOKES)

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Comedy, VIZ, VIZ Signature, Way of the Househusband, Yakuza

Junji Ito’s No Longer Human

January 2, 2020 by Katherine Dacey

Of all the famous works of literature to get the Classics Illustrated treatment, Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human is an odd choice. Its protagonist is Oba Yozo, a tortured soul who never figures out how to be his authentic self in a society that places tremendous emphasis on hierarchy, self-restraint, and civility. Over the course of the novel, he binges, gambles, seduces a string of women, joins a Communist cell, attempts suicide, and succumbs to heroin addiction, all while donning the mask of “the farcical eccentric” to conceal his “melancholy” and “agitation” from the very people whose lives he ruins.

Though the novel is filled with incident, its unreliable narrator and relentless interiority make it difficult to effectively retell in a comic format, as Junji Ito’s adaptation demonstrates. Ito’s No Longer Human is largely faithful to the events of Dazai’s novel, but takes Dazai’s spare, haunting narrative and transforms it into a phantasmagoria of sex, drugs, and death. In his efforts to show us how Yozo feels, Ito leans so hard into nightmarish imagery that the true horror of Yozo’s story is overshadowed by Ito’s artwork—a mistake, I think, as Ito’s drawings are too literal to convey the nuance of what it means to exist, in Peter Selgin’s words, in a state of “complete dissociation… yet still capable of feeling.”

In Ito’s defense, it’s not hard to see what attracted him to Dazai’s text; Yozo’s narration is peppered with the kind of vivid analogies that, at first glance, seem ideally suited for a visual medium like comics. But a closer examination of the text reveals the extent to which these analogies are part of the narrator’s efforts to beguile the reader; Yozo is, in effect, trying to convince the reader that his mind is filled with such monstrous ideas that he cannot be expected to function like a normal person. There’s a tension between how Yozo describes his own reactions to the ordinary unpleasantness of interacting with other people, and how Yozo describes the impact of his behavior on other people—a point that Ito overlooks in choosing to flesh out some key events in the novel.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Yozo’s brief affair with Tsuneko, a destitute waitress. After hitting rock bottom financially and emotionally, Yozo persuades her to join him in a double suicide pact. Dazai’s summary of what happens is shocking in its brevity and matter-of-factness:

As I stood there hesitating, she got up and looked inside my wallet. ‘‘Is that all you have?” Her voice was innocent, but it cut me to the quick. It was painful as only the voice of the first woman I had ever loved could be painful. “Is that all?” No, even that suggested more money than I had — three copper coins don’t count as money at all. This was a humiliation more strange than any I had tasted before, a humiliation I could not live with. I suppose I had still not managed to extricate myself from the part of the rich man’s son. It was then I myself determined, this time as a reality, to kill myself.

We threw ourselves into the sea at Kamakura that night. She untied her sash, saying she had borrowed it from a friend at the cafe, and left it folded neatly on a rock. I removed my coat and put it in the same spot. We entered the water together.

She died. I was saved.

As Ito recounts this event, however, Tsuneko’s death is caused by a poison so painful to ingest that she collapses in a writhing heap, eyes bulging and tongue wagging as if she were in the throes of becoming a monster herself. Yozo’s reaction to the poison, by contrast, is to plunge into a hallucinatory state in which a parade of ghostly women mock and berate him, an artistic choice that suggests Yozo feels shame and guilt for his actions—and a reading of Dazai’s text that makes Yozo seem more deserving of sympathy than he does in Dazai’s novel:

Throughout this vignette, Yozo’s contempt for Tsuneko creeps into the narrative, even as he assures the reader that she was the first woman he truly loved. Yozo’s disdain is palpable, as is evident in the way he off-handedly introduces her to the reader:

I was waiting at a sushi stall back of the Ginza for Tsuneko (that, as I recall, was her name, but the memory is too blurred for me to be sure: I am the sort of person who can forget even the name of the woman with whom he attempted suicide) to get off from work.

Only a few episodes capture the spirit of Dazai’s original novel, as when Yozo’s father gives an inept speech to a gathering of businessmen and community leaders. Ito skillfully cross-cuts between three separate conversations, allowing us to step into Yozo’s shoes as he eavesdrops on the attendees, servants, and family members, all of whom speak disparagingly about each other, and the speech. By pulling back the curtain on these conversations, Ito helps the reader appreciate the class and power differences among these groups, as well as revealing that this episode was a turning point for Yozo: the moment when he first realized that adults maintain certain masks in public that they discard in private. Though such a moment would undoubtedly trouble a more observant child—one need only think of Holden Caulfield’s obsession with adult “phoniness”—this discovery plunges Yozo into a state of despair, as he cannot imagine how anyone reconciles their public and private selves in a truthful way.

Ito also wisely restores material from Dazai’s novel that other adaptors—most notably Usamaru Furuya—trimmed from their versions. In particular, Ito does an excellent job of exploring the dynamic between Yozo and his classmate Takeichi, the first person who sees through Yozo’s carefully orchestrated buffoonery:

Just when I had begun to relax my guard a bit, fairly confident that I had succeeded by now in concealing completely my true identity, I was stabbed in the back, quite unexpectedly. The assailant, like most people who stab in the back, bordered on being a simpleton — the puniest boy in the class, whose scrofulous face and floppy jacket with sleeves too long  for him was complemented by a total lack of proficiency in his studies and by such clumsiness in military drill and physical training that he was perpetually designated as an ‘‘onlooker.” Not surprisingly, I failed to recognize the need to be on my guard against him.

As one might guess from this passage, Yozo’s terror at being discovered is another critical juncture in the novel. “I felt as if I had seen the world before me burst in an instant into the raging flames of hell,” he reports, before embarking on a campaign to win Takeichi’s trust by “cloth[ing his] face in the gentle beguiling smile of the false Christian.” Though Ito can’t resist the temptation to draw an image of Yozo engulfed in hell fire, most of Yozo’s fear is conveyed in subtler ways: a wary glance at Takeichi, an extreme close-up of Yozo’s face, an awkwardly placed arm around Takeichi’s shoulder:

What happens next in Ito’s version of No Longer Human, however, is indicative of another problem with his adaptation: his decision to add new material. In Dazai’s novel, Takeichi simply disappears from the narrative when Yozo moves to Tokyo for college, but in Ito’s version, Yozo cruelly manipulates Takeichi into thinking that Yozo’s cousin Setchan is in love with him—a manipulation that ultimately leads to Takeichi’s humiliation and suicide. That violent death is followed by a gruesome murder, this time prompted by a love triangle involving Yozo, his “auntie,” and Setchan, who becomes pregnant with Yozo’s child. Neither of these episodes deepen our understanding of who Yozo really is; they simply add more examples of how manipulative and callous he can be, thus blunting the impact of the real tragedy that unfolds in the late stages of his story.

Ito’s most problematic addition, however, is Osamu Dazai himself. Ito replaces the novel’s original framing device with the events leading up to Dazai’s 1948 suicide, encouraging us to view No Longer Human as pure autobiography through reinforcing the parallels between Dazai’s life and Yozo’s. And while those parallels are striking, the juxtaposition of the author and his fictional alter ego ultimately distorts the meaning of the novel by suggesting that the story documents Dazai’s own unravelling. That’s certainly one way to interpret No Longer Human, but such an autobiographical reading misses Dazai’s broader themes about the burden of consciousness, the nature of self, and the difficulty of being a full, authentic, feeling person in modern society.

VIZ Media provided a review copy. You can read a brief preview at the VIZ website by clicking here. For additional perspectives on Junji Ito’s adaptation, see Serdar Yegulalp‘s excellent, in-depth review at Ganriki.org, Reuben Barron‘s review at CBR.com, and MinovskyArticle’s review at the VIZ Media website.

JUNJI ITO’S NO LONGER HUMAN • ORIGINAL NOVEL BY OSAMU DAZAI • BASED ON THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY DONALD KEENE • TRANSLATED AND ADAPTED BY JOCELYNE ALLEN • VIZ MEDIA • RATED M, FOR MATURE AUDIENCES • 616 pp.

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Junji Ito, no longer human, Osamu Dazai, VIZ, VIZ Signature

Short Takes: No Guns Life and Ryuko

November 12, 2019 by Katherine Dacey

This month’s Short Takes column checks in with two previously-reviewed series: No Guns Life, a sci-fi thriller whose principled hero sounds like Sam Spade and looks like a Remington; and Ryuko, a thriller starring a yakuza assassin who’s hell-bent on avenging her mother’s kidnapping.

No Guns Life, Vol. 2
Story and Art by Tasuku Karasuma
Translation by Joe Yamazaki; Adaptation by Stan!
VIZ Media, 224 pp.
Rated T+ (Older Teens)

After a decent, if predictable, first volume, Tasuku Karasuma finds his groove in volume two of No Guns Life, maintaining a brisk pace while allowing his characters’ personalities to emerge more fully. Though the action occasionally pauses for the characters to expound on important plot developments, these dialogues are less of a drag on the story than they were in volume one; here, they add badly needed layers of  complexity to a familiar noir plot line. Better still, Karasuma introduces several new characters who push the narrative in a more interesting direction, hinting at the power and secrecy of the Berühen Corporation, as well as the general public’s mixed feelings about living alongside cyborgs. If Karasuma engages in a little too much fanservice, or relies too heavily on speedlines and sound effects to enliven his fight scenes, No Guns Life is still entertaining enough to make all but the most discriminating reader root for Juzo to succeed. Recommended.

VIZ Media provided a review copy. Click here to read my review of volume one.

Ryuko, Vol. 2
Story and Art by Eldo Yoshimizu
Translation by Motoko Tamamuro and Jonathan Clements
Titan Comics, 226 pp.
No rating (Best suited for older teen and adult readers)

Paging the exposition police! The second volume of Ryuko has all the swagger of the first, but leans more heavily into Talking Points Conversation to help expedite its resolution. In some respects, these exchanges are a welcome development, as they clearly—one might say baldly—delineate the various factions’ interest in the Golden Seal, an object whose significance was glossed over in volume one. These passages also help the reader untangle the complex web of relationships among the characters, making it easier to grasp why Ryuko forges an alliance with an avowed enemy and why US military forces are trying to manipulate the outcome of her feud with the Sheqing-Ban. These conversations would feel less forced if the pacing were more even, but the two-volume format is too compressed for such an ambitious, labyrinthine plot to unfold at a reader-friendly pace.

Volume two’s chief attraction is the same as volume one’s: the artwork. Eldo Yoshimizu has a flair for staging car chases, fist fights, gun battles, and dramatic escapes, immersing the reader in the action with his creative use of perspective and fastidious attention to detail; Ryuko’s leopard-print catsuit is practically a character in its own right. In less capable hands, this maximalist approach might be overwhelming, but Yoshimizu’s layouts have a strong narrative pull that leads the eye across the page at the speed of the action, creating an almost cinematic experience. The final confrontation between Ryuko and evil American operatives is a show-stopper involving a motorcycle stunt so outrageous that even Jackie Chan would be impressed with its audacity. None of the story makes much sense, but Yoshimizu’s energetic, bold, and—yes—sexy artwork is cool enough to carry the day. Recommended.

Click here to read my review of volume one. 

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Action/Adventure, Eldo Yoshimizu, No Guns Life, Ryuko, Sci-Fi, Titan Comics, VIZ, Yakuza

Cats of the Louvre

October 30, 2019 by Katherine Dacey

Weird. Uncanny. Melancholy. Beautiful. Those were just a few of the adjectives I jotted down while reading Taiyo Matsumoto’s Cats of the Louvre, the latest volume in the museum’s ongoing graphic novel series. Like Nicholas De Crécy’s Glacial Period and Jiro Taniguchi’s Guardians of the Louvre, Cats of the Louvre is less an illustrated guide to the museum than a story that happens to take place within its walls—in this case, the attic, where a colony of cats have taken up residence. Through a series of eighteen vignettes, Matsumoto gradually reveals that the cats’ primary caretaker—an elderly night watchman—has dedicated his life to searching the museum for his missing sister, who disappeared into one of the paintings when she was a child.

The key to finding Arrieta turns out to be Snowbébé, a kitten who frequently escapes from the attic to roam the galleries, hiding inside canvases to avoid detection. Snowbébé’s gift is both an essential plot point and an opportunity for Matsumoto to luxuriate in the smaller details of his favorite paintings, as is evident in a lovely, strange sequence that unfolds inside Henri Lerambert’s The Funeral Procession of Love (1580). From a modern viewer’s standpoint, Lerambert’s painting seems a little kitschy, with its parade of cherubs, poets, and philosophers strolling under the watchful eye of the goddess Diana:

Once Snowbébé steps into the painting, however, the landscape comes to life in unexpected ways: the flowers grin, the animals speak, and the laws of gravity disappear. In one brief but delightful sequence, for example, Snowbébé and Arrieta cavort across the ceilings and walls of a temple, while in another they board Diana’s chariot for a ride through the Milky Way. Yet for all the joyful (and weird) imagery, there’s a wistful quality to these two chapters, as Snowbébé slowly realizes that he cannot remain inside the Parade forever; his presence has disturbed the painting’s equilibrium, bringing storm clouds and disrupting the flow of time itself, forcing him to choose between staying with his new friend, or returning to the “cold and smelly and noisy” world of the Louvre.

What prevents Snowbébé’s odyssey from seeming twee or precious is Matsumoto’s studied primitivism; his characters’ mask-like faces, oddly proportioned bodies, and grotesque smiles are genuinely unnerving, creating a surreal atmosphere in which the boundaries between reality and imagination are blurred. Nowhere is this tendency more obvious than in the way he draws Snowbébé and his friends: the cats look like animals to their caretakers, but assume a humanoid form when interacting with each other. In Matsumoto’s hands, they look more like people in cat costumes than pussycats, with their essential feline features—ears, whiskers, tails, elongated limbs—rendered in an exaggerated fashion that gives them a faintly alien appearance.

Matsumoto’s depiction of the Louvre is more straightforward, recreating iconic works with fidelity to the originals, whether he’s drawing a lesser-known genre painting or a genuinely famous sculpture. His rendition of the physical environment—the claustrophobic, dusty garret where the cats live, the grand staircases and hallways that lead to the galleries—is similarly precise, helping the reader envision the sheer size and opulence of the museum. As a result, the Louvre transcends its basic function as a setting, taking on the qualities of a living, breathing organism whose vaulted ceilings and majestic columns invite comparisons with dinosaurs or whales:

And while all the comics in the Louvre Collection have done an admirable job of depicting the museum, Cats of the Louvre approaches its subject matter without didacticism or pedantry; though Matsumoto’s human characters express strong feelings about art, those conversations spring organically from the story. Equally important, Cats of the Louvre has its own personality; unlike Hirohiko Araki’s Rohan at the Louvre, which recycled ideas and characters from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Matsumoto’s story stands on its own, capturing his unique response to the museum and its collection. But the best reason to read Cats of the Louvre is its hero Snowbébé, whose quest to find his place in the world invites us to see the Louvre through fresh eyes, as a place of danger and sadness, but also of wonder, magic, and possibility. Recommended.

A review copy was provided by VIZ Media. To read a short preview, click here.

CATS OF THE LOUVRE • STORY AND ART BY TAIYO MATSUMOTO • TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL ARIAS • RATING: TEEN • 432 pp.

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Cats, Louvre Museum, Taiyo Matsumoto, VIZ, VIZ Signature

The Drifting Classroom Signature Edition, Vol. 1

October 13, 2019 by Katherine Dacey

In a 2009 interview with Tokyo Scum Brigade, Kazuo Umezu acknowledged that his debt to Osamu Tezuka went beyond storyboarding and character designs. Tezuka “didn’t pull any punches for children or dumb down his works,” Umezu explained. “He dealt with complicated themes and let the readers work it out on their own.” The 1972 classic The Drifting Classroom reveals just how profoundly Umezu absorbed this lesson. Though it ran in Weekly Shonen Sunday, a magazine aimed at grade schoolers, Umezu’s work was bleak, subversive, and weirdly thrilling, depicting a nightmarish world where kids resorted to violence and deception to survive.

The Drifting Classroom begins with a freak accident in which a rift in the space-time continuum sends the Yamato Elementary School and its occupants into the distant future. Initially, the students and teachers believe that they are the sole survivors of a devastating nuclear attack, and the area immediately surrounding the school supports their hypothesis: it’s a barren wasteland with no water, plants, or signs of human habitation save a pile or two or non-degradable trash. As the school’s occupants realize the severity of the crisis, panic sets in. Teachers and students engage in a brutal competition for dwindling supplies while attempting to solve the mystery of what happened to them. And when I say “brutal,” I mean it: the body count in volume one is astonishing, with murders, mass suicides, fist fights, knife fights, and rampaging monsters culling the herd at a breathtaking rate.

It’s sorely tempting to compare The Drifting Classroom to The Lord of the Flies, as both stories depict school children creating their own societies in the absence of adult authority. But Kazuo Umezu’s series is more sinister than Golding’s novel, as Classroom‘s youthful survivors have been forced to band together to defend themselves against their former teachers, many of whom have become unhinged at the realization that they may never return to the present. Umezu creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable dread that conveys both the hopelessness of the children’s situation and their terror at being abandoned by the grown-ups, a point underscored by one student’s observation that adults “depend on logic and reason to deal with things.” He continues:

When something happens and they can’t use reason or logic to explain it, they can’t handle it. I don’t think they were able to accept that we’ve traveled to the future. You know how adults are always saying that kids are making things up? It’s because they only know things to be one way. Kids can imagine all kinds of possibilities. That’s why we’ve managed to survive here.

That speech is delivered by The Drifting Classroom‘s plucky protagonist Sho, a sixth grader who becomes the children’s de facto leader. When we first meet Sho, he’s behaving petulantly, pouting over his mother’s decision to throw away his marbles. The intensity of his anger is drawn in broad strokes, but it firmly establishes him as an honest-to-goodness ten year old, caught between his desire to play and his parents’ desire to mold him into a responsible teenager. Once transported to the future, Sho’s strategies for scavenging supplies or subduing a rampaging teacher are astute but not adult; there are flourishes of imagination and kid logic guiding his actions that remind us just how young and vulnerable he is. As a result, Sho’s pain at being separated from his parents, and of losing his comrades, is genuinely agonizing.

Umezu’s artwork further emphasizes the precarity of Sho’s situation. Sho and his classmates have doll-like faces and awkwardly proportioned bodies that harken back to Umezu’s work for shojo magazines such as Sho-Comi and Shoujo Friend, yet their somewhat unnatural appearance serves a vital dramatic function, underscoring how small they are when contrasted with their adult guardians. The adults, on the other hand, initially appear normal, but descend into monstrous or feckless caricatures as their plight becomes more desperate. Only Sho’s mother—who is stuck in the present day—escapes such unflattering treatment, a testament to her devotion, courage, and imagination; while her husband and friends have accepted the official story about the school’s fate, Sho’s mother is open to the possibility that Sho may be reaching across time to communicate with her.

Like his character designs, Umezu’s landscapes are willfully ugly, evoking feelings of disgust, fear, and anxiety that are almost palpable, whether he’s drawing an abandoned building or a garden filled with grotesquely misshapen plants. The area just outside the school gates, for example, resembles the slopes of an active volcano, with sulfurous clouds wafting over a rocky expanse that seems both frozen and molten—an apt metaphor the characters’ state of mind as they first glimpse their new surroundings:

Though The Drifting Classroom‘s imagery still resonates in 2019, its gender politics do not, as an egregious subplot involving a sadistic girl gang demonstrates. When the gang attempts to seize control of the school, a classmate urges Sho to oppose them on the grounds that girls are fundamentally unsuited for leadership roles. (“Women are made to give birth and rear children so they can’t think long term,” Gamo helpfully opines.) Umezu’s goal here, I think, is to suggest that girls are as capable of violence and cruelty as boys, but the dialogue suggests the gang’s behavior is a symptom of innate irrationality instead of a genuine and logical response to a desperate situation. Making matters worse is that the few sympathetic female characters are consigned to stereotypically feminine roles that give them little to do besides scream, run, and comfort the younger children; even Sakiko, the smartest girl in the class, never gets a chance to solve a problem or offer a useful opinion.

Yet for all its obvious shortcomings, The Drifting Classroom is a thoughtful meditation on adult hypocrisy, exposing all the ways that adults manipulate and terrorize children for their own convenience. “Adults are humans, children are animals,” a cafeteria worker tells Sho and his friends. “That’s why adults have the power of life and death over kids.” That Sho and his followers cling to their humanity despite the adults’ selfish behavior reminds us that children are innocent but not naive; Sho and his friends are clear-eyed about their teachers’ failings, yet choose to persevere. Recommended.

This is a greatly expanded–and reconsidered–review of The Drifting Classroom that appeared at PopCultureShock in 2006. VIZ Media provided a review copy. Read a free preview here.

THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM, VOL. 1 • STORY AND ART BY KAZUO UMEZZ • TRANSLATED BY SHELDON DRZKA • ADAPTED BY MOLLY TANZER • RATED T+, FOR OLDER TEENS (VIOLENCE, HORROR, GORE) • 744 pp.

Filed Under: Manga, Manga Critic, REVIEWS Tagged With: Classic Manga, Drifting Classroom, Horror/Supernatural, Kazuo Umezu, VIZ, VIZ Signature

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