Author: Andrew Wheeler

Manga Friday: Fairy Tail

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  • March 21, 2008

I suppose I should start off by saying that Rave Master is the name of Mashima’s previous manga series, not his nickname. (Though it does make a great nickname, actually.) Rave Master ran thirty-five volumes – of which twenty-seven has been published in the US to date – and was a fairly typical young-guy-with-great-power-battling-the-forces-of-evil story.

But that story ended, and now Mashima is back with…

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Fairy Tail, Vols. 1 & 2
By Hiro Mashima
Del Rey Manga, 2008, $10.95 each

The first two volumes of his new series in English – published simultaneously on March 25th by the good folks at Del Rey Manga.

Fairy Tail breaks completely with Rave Master, because its young, untried, magically-powered person fighting evil is a young woman. How ‘bout them apples, huh?

All kidding about the genre markers of shonen manga aside, Fairy Tale is somewhat generic, but still distinctive. It’s set in one of those not-quite-medieval worlds, with magic, walled cities, and mostly low technology – though there’s an exception for trains, as so often is the case. It seems to be ruled by some sort of aristocracy, since there are people with power called “Duke,” but that’s not entirely clear.

Similarly, it’s hard to tell how the working world is organized, but the magical people have a structure of guilds (helpfully explained, with diagrams, in the second book), and, of course, there’s then Tokyo University-level competition to get into the “better” guilds. Presumably, most of the other occupations are regimented in a similar way, but Fairy Tail is not a book that spends much time among the peasants.

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Manga Friday: With the Light

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  • March 14, 2008

This time, we’re focusing entirely on one series, and specifically the two volumes of it published in English so far.

"Is Wheeler slacking off?" ask the punters.

No, he is not – each of these books is well over 500 pages, so I’m actually reviewing more manga, by weight, than usual this week.

With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, Vols. 1 & 2
By Keiko Tobe
Yen Press, 2007-2008, $14.99 each

Every so often, those of us who love comics get a great object lesson with which to confront our friends who are not so open-minded: something that’s not only excellent as a comic, but challenges people’s preconceptions of what comics can do.

Maus was the biggest one, but, since then, we’ve had projects like Blankets, From Hell, The Cartoon History of the Universe and Bone to show off to people who think “comics can’t do that!”

And now there’s With the Light, as well. I’m not saying that it’s as good as those other books – it’s well-crafted, and good at what it sets out to do, but isn’t quite on that level – but it’s another great example of comics story-telling applied to new material.

With the Light is a work of fiction, but it’s based closely on true stories. (And it also shows what a really full comics-publishing ecology, such as the one in Japan, can be capable of.) It tells the story of Hikaru Azuma, an autistic boy in an average Japanese city, from his birth, in the voice of his mother Sachiko.

Sachiko soon begins to worry that her son isn’t normal – he hates being held, he cries a lot, and, at his eighteen-month-year check-up, a nurse declares that he’s deaf because he doesn’t respond to her. The real diagnosis follows quickly, but it doesn’t help all that much – Sachiko is under a lot of pressure from her workaholic husband Masato and his interfering mother to be a perfect mom. And the measure of a perfect mother is how her child behaves – so a badly behaving child proves that she’s a failure. “They say children grow up as they were raised,” the mother-in-law screams at Sachiko in a full-page panel, “It’s all your fault!” (more…)

Review: Andi Watson’s ‘Glister’

Glister, Vols. 1-3

Andi Watson
Image, 2007, $5.99 each

Andi Watson has had a career more typical of a prose writer than a comics creator: he’s worked on a number of projects, pretty much all of them his own original ideas, nearly all of them with defined endings, for different publishers, and kept the copyright. Some of those projects span more than one volume, but, still, his stuff ends up on a shelf as if they were novels, and he’s hasn’t shown any sign of really wanting to be the next great Avengers writer or to re-vamp the Haunted Tank or do anything else horribly fanboyish and all-too-typical for his generation. And yet his work isn’t particularly literary or self-indulgent, either: Watson may have a bit of autobiography hidden around the fringes of his stories, but he’s mostly not talking about himself.

Watson’s recent books have generally been aimed at adults without being restricted to them; a book like Little Star is about parenthood in a way that teenagers probably won’t be interested in, but there’s nothing about it that would keep them out. His earliest works, though – Samurai Jam and Skeleton Key – were much more obviously all-ages books, and he’s returned to a younger audience with Glister.

Actually, if anything, Glister excludes adults: it’s a series about the continuing adventures of a preteen girl (Glister Butterworth), and its central audience is presumably girls of Glister’s age. Each of the three volumes so far are independent stories of about 64 pages each — the first is a bit shorter, but it also has a Skeleton Key back-up to fill out the pages. (more…)

Manga Friday: I’ve Got a Yen

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  • March 7, 2008

 

This week I have three books from the fine folks at Yen Press. All of them are the second volume in their respective series, and I’ve only read the first book of one of them…which means it’s time for me to be confused yet again.

(Don’t worry – I’m well used to it by now.)

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Black God, Vol. 2
Story by Dall-Young Lim; Art by Sung-Wao Park
Yen Press, 2008, $10.99

This is yet another series about a young man (Keita) bonded to a gorgeous supernatural girl (Kuro) who doesn’t have much knowledge of the modern world – apparently, he lost his arm in the first book, and she saved his life and bonded permanently with him to get his arm back. (She’s a “mototsumitama,” for those making notes at home. What does that mean? I dunno…)

In a startling reversal, Keita is not a nerdy high school student, but a mid-20s jerk of a videogame designer/programmer. (On the big two-page title spread of the very first story in this book, he’s strangling Kuro awake in the morning because she ruined his life – “ruined” apparently in the sense of “saved him from dying and gave him a connection to vast supernatural hoodoo.”) I think Keita is supposed to be at least mildly attractive to the reader, but I found him a complete ass.

In this book, some of the details of the human-mototsumitama relationship are explained, as Kuro meets another mototsumitama woman, who is bonded to an old man. (Keita’s boyhood friend, the equally cute Akane, also has something to do with the overall plot, but exactly what isn’t clear yet.) And what happens when two super-powered folks meet in a comic book, kids? That’s right – a big fight scene!

The art is clean and detailed, easy to follow for Americans while still being clearly in a manga style. The story is nothing terribly new – psychic battles, girls in their underwear, emotional turmoil – but it moves decently and the dialogue is pretty good. If Keita were anything like an acceptable human being, this could be a solid adventure story.

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Manga Friday: The Luck of the Draw

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  • February 29, 2008

The stack of manga to be reviewed has been getting shorter, down to the point where trying to put together a theme is difficult. So, this week, it’ll have to be random reviews. It’s all from Japan, and… that’s probably all it has in common.

Andromeda Stories, Vol. 3
Keiko Takemiya; story by Ryu Mitsuse
Vertical, 2008, $11.95

The epic conclusion of the SF manga series from the early ‘80s ends with a scene familiar from many derivative tales of the Planet Stories era…but I won’t spoil it. As you may recall from my review of the previous volume, a race of intelligent machines, called "the Enemy," has been conquering an unnamed planet in the Andromeda galaxy, and Prince Jimsa of the Cosmoralian Empire, our hero, wants to stop them.

However, being as this is a manga for girls from the early ’80s, most of this book has to be taken up with the relationship between Jimsa and his long-lost twin "brother," Affle. The two share a psychic connection – they feel each other’s pain and their not terribly well defined psychic powers work much better when they’re in close proximity – and they also are strangely drawn to each other.

(Need I mention that the "brother" is not what he seems? This will be important for that very familiar ending.)

Other relationships are equally as central, such as those involving “the Elder,” who was an important advisor to the rules of Cosmoralia but turns out to be More Than He Appears. He was Jimsa’s mentor, but turns his attentions to Affle in this book, as part of his general megalomaniacal plans to utterly destroy the Enemy. Since this is a shojo manga, it’s much more about emotional scenes and relationships than about actually fighting against killer robots.

(And the Enemy’s function is to put whole populations into a kind of cold sleep – entirely willingly – so that they can live in a virtual world of peace and plenty. This, as is common in pulp SF, is seen as horrible and effete, a fate worse than death – so slaughtering the millions or billions the Enemy now warehouses and cares for is the only possibly option. It would have been nice to have seen a little thought given to that background, and a recognition that it might not be all that bad just because it’s different.)

I’m not the audience for Andromeda Stories: I’m too old, of the wrong gender, and I’ve read far too much science fiction. But, if you’re not me, you might like this.

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Review: Bryan Talbot’s ‘Alice in Sunderland’

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Alice in Sunderland
Bryan Talbot
Dark Horse Books, 2007, $29.95

Even for an artist as hard to pin down as Talbot, [[[Alice in Sunderland]]] is odd and unique: it’s one-half a local history of the town in northern England where Talbot lives now and one-half a popular history of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) and Alice in Wonderland. And then both of those halves are wrapped up in a metafictional package, since there are two narrators (the Pilgrim and the Performer, both of them Talbot) and one audience member witnessing this performance (the Plebian, who is also Talbot). To make things even more confusing, about half-way through the book Talbot breaks down and admits that Sunderland, the town he claims he lives in, doesn’t actually exist!

Except even that is a trick: Sunderland is a real town in the northeast of England, on the coast near Newcastle upon Tyne. And the various facts Talbot presents, about the history of Sunderland and of Alice, and the many connections between the two? Well, there’s an extensive list of sources in the backmatter, so I think they’re real. At least, most of them. I think.

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Manga Friday: More from Del Rey

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  • February 22, 2008

Del Rey is about the only manga publisher sending me review copies on a regular basis, so they get an extra-large helping of Manga Friday’s love. And this week is no exception; we have no theme, but we do have these three new books from Del Rey…

Minima!, Vol. 1
Machiko Sakurai
Del Rey Manga, 2007, $10.95

There will not be a test this week, so you can relax – Minima! does not refer to the mathematical concept of minima. It’s not entirely clear what it does refer to, though I’d guess it’s a vague reference to small, cute, furry things.

Ame Oikawa is a quiet middle-school girl who’s vaguely dissatisfied about something – exactly what is not clear, because she’s so quiet – when she goes with her class to an amusement park. (Her problems are probably related to having a crush on some boy or other, but I couldn’t keep the other characters straight, so that part flew past me.)

But then a cute little stuffed animal that she just bought starts talking and walking around – its name is Nicori, and it’s standing up for her. Whatever the previous problem was – and did I mention that I’m still not sure about that at all? – disappears into the background, as there’s a media frenzy about this talking toy.

The plot lurches forward almost randomly from there, focusing mostly on the relationship between Ame and Nicori, with side-trips into the price of fame, the terrors of junior high, and the dangers of kidnappers before this volume is over. There’s a whole lot of big emotional scenes, mostly because Nicori is embarrassing Ame by misunderstanding things or blurting out her secret crushes.

This was very much not for me – it’s a story for and about tween girls; the kind who go “ohmiGOD” at the slightest thing and who make and break BFFs five times before lunch. For that audience, it’s harmless, but I doubt many (if any) ComicMix readers fit that demographic. However, if you have daughters or nieces, they might love this more than life itself.

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Review: ‘Confessions of a Blabbermouth’

Mike Carey is a noted writer of both comics and prose – Lucifer, The X-Men, the “[[[Felix Castor]]]” novels – but, one might ask, what does he know about being a teenage girl? Probably not a lot…but he does have a secret weapon on his side: his daughter Louise is a teenage girl, and she’s the co-writer of this particular project.

Confessions of a Blabbermouth is the most recent publication of DC Comics’ Minx arm, which aims squarely at teenage and tween girls. (You remember: the audience that never, ever would read comics, so it was no use ever trying to get them interested – no, really, it’s just not worth it…until Sailor Moon ignited the manga boom and suddenly American comics companies were sitting on the sidelines watching those girls buy billions of dollars of Japanese comics? That audience.)

I’ve reviewed Minx comics twice before for ComicMix – Re-Gifters and Clubbing last August, and The Plain Janes and Good As Lilly in September. And the book that was most successful out of those four was Re-Gifters, written by one Mike Carey (without any assistance from anyone in the target audience), so I had high hopes for [[[Blabbermouth]]].

 

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Manga Friday: Slight Return

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  • February 15, 2008

This week the theme is “stuff I liked the first time around,” as I review the second volumes of four series that I enjoyed in volume one. For those who came in late, the reviews of the first volumes are here and here.

Mu Shi Shi, Vol. 2
Yuki Urushibara
Del Rey Manga, 2007, $12.95

Mu Shi Shi is still a quiet, atmospheric comic that feels steeped in folklore, even if most of its stories are completely invented. Since the background was explained in Volume 1, this time around we get five separate, freestanding stories.

Ginko wanders through the countryside of a Japan neither in this century nor any other, finding various mushi – tiny, primitive creatures that come in a bewildering array of forms and which often parasitize or otherwise harm humans – and helping the nearby humans to live with them, or just to survive.

In this volume, he meets another mushishi, who had made himself master of a mountain’s mushi, but is about to be overthrown. Then there’s a young woman cursed with hereditary mushi that she controls by writing them on scrolls, and a younger girl who dies and comes back to life every day to heal her local villagers. Ginko also helps a man searching for a rainbow, and a family with a cuckoo-ish mushi child.

Some of the stories here are as powerful as in Volume 1, especially the first and last. But I do wonder how long this series can be just about Ginko wandering around, with each story being discrete and separate. I hope Urushibara is building up to something – several characters look like they’re being set up for a return in a later story – because Mu Shi Shi is quite good as a series of individual stories, but could be great if there’s something to tie it all together. (more…)

Manga Friday: Something Old, Something New

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  • February 8, 2008

Since last week was big swords, I’d hoped to do big guns this week – but I didn’t have enough books to make it work.

So, instead, we have two brand-new manga series (first volumes published at the end of November) and two older, pretty well-known series. (“Old” is a relative term here – one was first published in English in 2004 and the other in 2002…)

Aventura, Vol. 1
Shin Midorikawa
Del Rey Manga, 2007, $10.95

Our first new manga this week is an unabashed Harry Potter rip-off, set in the Gaius School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a flying magical school divided into two parts. On one side, the students study magic, and on the other, swordsmanship (which somehow also makes magic, or something like that). Lewin Randit is an orphan, a poor swordsmanship student, who has shows no magical aptitude so far. But, once he meets two elves (a boy and a girl) from the magic school, things start to look up for him.

Oh, and the back cover copy, unsubtly, mentions that he “could become the greatest of them all.” Of course he could…

The art is, to my eye, medium-high shojo, with big hair flying everywhere, large luminous eyes, and a fineness of drawing everywhere. I find it very hard to differentiate characters in a style like that, so I might not have gotten as much out of Aventura as I could. But let’s be honest: it’s pleasant but very derivative, for readers who are looking for yet another “magical school” story.

 

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