Author: Andrew Wheeler

This week, in a desperate attempt to disguise the fact that he doesn’t have any coherent way to tie the reviewed books together, Andrew Wheeler will adopt a “countdown” format to write about three brand-new Manga volumes.

Adding to the difficulty level: he will also write about himself in the third person, for no good reason.

Kaze no Hana, Vol. 3
By Ushio Mizta and Akiyoshi Ohta
Yen Press, December 2008, $10.99

This is the end of “Book One” of Kaze no Hana, in which not nearly enough is wrapped up and hardly any indication is given that the series will continue on to a “Book Two” sometime, somewhere. (For those who are lost: reviews of Volume One and Volume Two.)

To recap briefly: Momoka Futami is yet another typical cute Japanese teenage girl, who just wants to live a normal life. But she’s actually part of a family that has spent the past few hundred years defending the world against the minions of an evil god that was trapped under a mountain, using eight “spiritual swords.” There’s also an opposed group that wants to free the evil god – they don’t seem to consider him evil, actually – and they use “sacred swords,” which are totally different in a way that’s never been clear.

Kaze no Hana has a fairly large cast of people with vestigial (at best) noses, and it’s difficult to tell them apart much of the time. This book also has a lot of talking and emoting rather than fighting monsters, though one character does turn out, unexpectedly, to be a werewolf. There’s also a huge plot problem that gets resolved exceptionally quickly, leading this reader to wonder if perhaps the original serialization of this story was hurried to a conclusion quicker than the creators had planned. (more…)

I’m writing this late on Thursday evening, full of turkey and stuffing and good will toward my fellow man. And I’ve been thinking that I don’t have any theme to unify them – I almost had three books starting with “G” and then almost had three volume twos  — but a theme just jumped out and poked me. Today is Black Friday, and these three books all fit that theme: they’re all pretty black. (Yes, I know that’s not what “Black Friday” means, but humor me.)

Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo, Vol. 1
Manga by Mahiro Maeda; Scenario by Yura Ariwara; Planning by Mahiro Maeda and GONZO
Del Rey, November 2008, $10.95

Gankutsuou is the least dark, at least at this point, but it clearly is going to get darker and bleaker. For one thing, it’s explicitly a retelling of Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo (“Gankutsuou” means “The King of the Cave,” and was the title of the first Japanese translation of Monte Cristo), which is not a tale of sweetness and light. And, second, our young hero Albert is the son of one of the men who schemed to put Edmond Dantes – surely you remember Edmond Dantes? – away for good, and, even worse, he’s the son of Mercedes, who was supposed to be Dantes’s wife.

Gankutsuou updates Monte Cristo to the kind of unlikely aristocratic interplanetary future that we don’t see much of any more; it never made a whole lot of sense as a setting, but I must admit that I missed it, and so I’m happy to see it come back here. Monte Cristo is a story that must be told in an aristocratic society – the Count himself only makes sense in such a world – and so it works; it’s a big, gaudy world, with extremes of wealth and poverty – just like the world Dumas wrote about.

This first volume is mostly set-up; we start with Albert and his friend Franz in the midst of a Grand Tour of sorts – of the major planets of our solar system, apparently. They’re just coming to Luna for its fabled Carnival, where the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo meets, befriends, and helps Albert. (Albert, in that all-too-typical manga style, is an overly innocent, puppy-dog-ish young man with boundless enthusiasm and utter lack of guile. I’m afraid he’s in for it, and equally afraid that Gankutsuou’s creators have been utterly innocent of the knowledge of real young aristocrats to think that type is even possible.) (more…)

Once again I’m left with a stack of books that are sequels to other books – that’s what comics is about, isn’t it? stories that never end? – and so I shoved three of them together due to some vague shojo similarities. And they are…

Nephilim, Vol. 2
By Anna Hanamaki
Aurora, July 2008, $10.95

The first volume of Nephilim – which I reviewed back in August – looked a lot like an adventure story, with daring escapes, swordfights, chase scenes, and two battling empires. But it had within it the hints of the emotion-drenched shojo romance it was destined to eventually be. By the end of that book, the dashing nobleman Guy had saved the Nephilim Abel (one of a nearly-genocided race of people who all change sex at night, which must make pregnancies interesting) and they’d seemingly shared a “we both love each other” moment before they were rudely separated.

But it’s now a year later, and Abel is searching for Guy, while swanning over the one moment when he said he wanted to be her husband. (She’s a shojo heroine, so she spends a lot of time in a romantic reverie and hardly any time noticing the world in front of her.) The background is still of a world vaguely at war, between two large powerful countries, with the poor Nephilim (what of them are left) stuck in the middle. But that’s really just for added drama: the focus here has shifted decisively to “but does he luuuuuuuve me?!” territory.

Abel does catch back up with Guy, as we knew she would. She eventually learns he has a Tragic Secret (related to a Weakness He Is Too Much Of An Honorable Man To Tell, and which Threatens His Life when he Performs Great Deeds), and, even worse, that he has what looks like another romantic entanglement. (Interestingly – since he seemingly originally was interested in Abel during the day, when she was a boy – the woman he’s canoodling with now has a short, severe haircut and an tough, commanding attitude that some might even call “manly.”) (more…)