Manga Friday: Done in One
One of the differences – I won’t say “advantages,” since opinion differs on that subject – of manga from Western-style superhero comics is that manga stories all have endings, eventually. Oh, “eventually” can be a long, long time coming – two decades, in some cases – but manga are created by one person or set of people, and all eventually come to an end, unlike corporate-owned characters, who live as long as their revenue stream does.
Some manga, though, end more quickly than others. Some even end in a couple of hundred pages – a story short enough to fit into one volume. And, by luck, I have two stories just like that in front of me this week.
Haridama: Magic Cram School
By Atasushi Suzumi
Del Rey Manga, May 2008, $10.95
Kokuyo and Harika are childhood friends who both ended up at the Sekiei Magic Cram School – named after its founder and apparently only teacher – studying to be magicians (who, once they’ve climbed the magic ladder as far as they can, we’re told are qualified to open cram schools of their own, which makes the whole thing seem like a pointless pyramid scheme). They’re “Obsidians,” people with only Yin or Yang power – instead of both, like proper magicians – and so they need swords with stones in the hilt to channel their lesser powers.
The other two main characters of this story are Sekiei, their young teacher – there don’t seem to be any other students in the school, in fact – and Nekome, a third-level sorcerer who recently graduated from the rival Torame school. Sekiei pushes Kokuyo and Harika to work harder and achieve more, while Nekome mildly torments them and puts down their abilities. (more…)
The “Dungeon” series has gotten so full of stories, so complicated, that there’s a diagram on the back of this book to explain how all of the sub-series relate to each other.
In a previous edition of 
Neil Gaiman has been too busy lately to write much for comics unless it’s an event — like 
or his curiously pointless 
There continues to be strong debate about the equality (or lack thereof) between female and male comic book creators, and a recent online panel discussion shines much light on the situation.
During 1992–1993, my newspaper-of-record became a sponsor of a traveling exhibition of art tracing the centuried history of editorial-opinion cartooning in Texas. Curators Maury Forman and Bob Calvert, seeking to preserve the display as a book, enlisted me to edit their program notes into manuscript form. The finished result, Cartooning Texas
The fall lineups for the major networks continue to be revealed and you may not be happy at where a few of our favorites landed. To ease the pain, we poke Heroes‘ star Milo Ventimigila to find out what he picked up at his local comic shop, plus:
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While 
