Life’s tough when you’re a teenage girl – sometimes, it’s even almost as tough as those teenage girls think it is. This week, three “normal girls” with gigantic eyes try to get through their massive problems…most of which, as you might have guessed, have to do with boys.

Orange Planet
, Vol. 1
By Haruka Fukushima
Del Rey Manga, April 2009, $10.99

People in manga quite often have very odd living arrangements. Let’s take Rui, the heroine of Orange Planet, as an example: her parents died six years ago, so she moved in with her aunt then. But now – at the age of maybe fourteen – that aunt has gotten married, so Rui lives all by herself in an apartment and has an early-morning paper route…to pay her rent? for spending money? just because? And, after that paper route, she has the habit of climbing into bed (purely for warmth) with the “adorable boy next door,” Taro, who also seems to be her ex-boyfriend. And then, just a few pages into this book, a strange older man – whose name we and Rui don’t learn for a while – moves in with her because his crazy ex-girlfriend (one of many) burned his house down. And then, of course, he turns out to be the new teaching intern, Eisuke.

Luckily, Kaoru, the boy that Rui’s interested in – she’s writes her first love note ever to him on page eleven – doesn’t live next to her. But, of course, the old-friend-who’s-known-her-since-childhood, Taro, has discovered that he’s in love with her, but he can’t tell her, or the story would end suddenly. So we’ve got the usual shojo love triangle (with a girl at the vertex), with the optional advisor living (semi-secretly) with the girl – call it Shojo Plot # 7B.

Fukushima tells that story in a clean, modern shojo style – yes, everyone has gigantic eyes and no noses to speak of, but the backgrounds and page layouts aren’t cluttered and flowery like the height of ‘80s shojo frippery, and her thin, elongated bodies are exaggerated but clearly reminiscent of the real coltishness of fast-growing early teens. Orange Planet is a standard story done professionally and with a real love for the material, which goes pretty far. But I still don’t have any clue what the title means.

(more…)

Think of it as the Absolute version for the screen.

In an attempt to appeal to PlayStation 3 owners, Warner Bros. is releasing a special version of Watchmen
bundling the Director’s Cut of the movie on Blu-ray disc with the full version of the video game, Watchmen: the End is Nigh.

Part one of the game was released for Xbox Live, Windows PCs and the PlayStation Network in March.

On the heels of the broadcast network’s fall announcements
comes the never-ending trickle of cable commitments. As is their wont, many of
these shows will debut in the summer months (like, June) when broadcast network
series are on hiatus.

TNT will be showing us a hospital series starring Jada
Pinkett Smith called Hawthorne, Jerry
Bruckheimer’s got a cop show called Dark
Blue that stars Dylan McDermott, Mark Burnett’s got a new reality series
called Wedding Day, and this December
a series with an impressive pedigree called Men
of a Certain Age starring Ray Romano, Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula.

truTV has a bunch of “reality” shows that fit square into
their format: a behind the scenes show called NFL Full Contact– the sort we used to call a “documentary,” Conspiracy Theory with Governor Jesse
Ventura, U.S. Special Ops: Declassified
– a program that outs our nation’s terrorist hunters, and Full Throttle, another behind the scenes look at Ballard’s Full
Throttle Saloon biker bar in Sturgis, South Dakota.

TBS has some inexpensive stuff lined up: a talk show
starring George Lopez, an animated
sitcom about suburbanites who used to live “down below” called Neighbors from Hell, and, of course, they’ve
picked up Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns
and The Bill Engvall Show.

MTV has a new series ripped from today’s political
headlines called 16 & Pregnant.
There hasn’t been a teevee series with a more self-descriptive title since The Jack Paar Program.

Boy, is Chris Claremont going to be unhappy…

The last of the broadcast nets revealed themselves this
morning, and in a fit of original thought they’re giving us a lot more of the
same.

Angelenos, The Beautiful Life, and The Vampire Diaries are being added. They’re about pretty but dangerous residents of Los Angeles, struggling fashion models, and a family of vampire brothers, respectively. Oh, and they’re bringing Melrose Place back. Holy 90210, Bat-brain!

The Gossip Girl spin-off got spiked, as did the CW’s entire attempt to
program Sundays. The night is being returned to the individual affiliates.

On a personal note, the only sitcom I’ve actually enjoyed
(non-animated) all century, Everybody Loves Chris, played its last, last Friday. Just like the show’s creator Chris Rock, the titular Chris dropped out of school when forced to take the 10th grade over. He may or may not have passed his GED; the show ended with a wonderful send-up of The Sopranos finale. It went out in style.

Smallville will be back. Now that he’s flying, please give him the big red S. C’mon. The movie sucked. Kal-El’s Superman without the cape, and the “red-blue-blur” is just stupid.

Here’s the list of network shows that will disappear into
the black hole of broadcast oblivion. It’s possible that, like Medium, one or more of these shows might
get picked up by other broadcast or cable nets.

• According to Jim
• Cupid
• Eleventh Hour
• Everybody Hates Chris
• Kath & Kim
• Kings
• Life
• Lipstick Jungle
• My Name Is Earl
• Privileged
• Reaper
• Samantha Who?
• Sit Down, Shut Up
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
• The Game
• The Unit*
  
• The Unusuals
• Without a Trace
• Worst Week

* UPDATE: The Unit has already been picked up for the broadcast syndication marketplace by Twentieth Television for Fall 2010. The series has already been sold in all top 15 markets and cleared in 56% of the country.  Stations acquiring the program are primarily FOX Television Stations with a smattering of stations from CBS Station Group and some independent players.

From our good friends and ComicMix alumni over at the Flickcast, we find a trailer for the new Human Target series coming soon to Fox, starring Mark Valley as Christopher Chance, with Tricia Helfer, Jackie Earle Haley and Chi McBride.

Looks like fun– although I hope they use the rubber masks once in a while.