Tagged: Manga

Manga Friday: Plight of the Themeless

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  • April 18, 2008

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Here’s the manga I read this week (no, seriously, that’s the only thing they have in common) –

Kaze no Hana, Vol. 1
By Ushio Mizta and Akitoski Ohta
Yen Press, 2008, $10.99

Momoka Futami is just your normal teenaged manga heroine – an amnesiac orphan who’s coming to live with her unknown family four years after the mysterious death of her parents. Oh, and she learns that she’s the rightful wielder of one of eight ancient magical swords that are need to keep back various monsters that regularly pop into existence in this town.

Kaze no Hana has a lot of characters, and they’re all related to each other somehow, and most of them have magical swords, and…it just turned into a Russian novel in my head, with the added problem that I couldn’t even keep some of them straight visually. (This is mostly my problem; they don’t look identical, but they’re different in manga ways rather than Western ways, which means I can’t tell people apart unless they’re in the same panel and I can compare them directly.)

So, um, Kaze no Hana is complex and interesting, but it made my head hurt, OK? And I really don’t need that from a comic about the secret family of people that kill monsters – I can get secret families killing monsters in a dozen places without any headaches.

Your mileage may vary…

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Manga Friday: Two Yen, Joe!

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  • April 11, 2008

This week’s manga delivery brought two more books from mighty Yen Press, and they are…

Kieli, Vol. 1
Story by Yukako Kabei; Art by Shiori Teshirogi
Yen Press, 2008, $10.99

Some books, like this one, just have too much backstory for their own good, but let me roll up my sleeves and see if I can get it all clear: sometime in the future, mankind expanded to at least one other world, the planet Kieli is set on. (According to at least one character in this book, though, God decided not to travel, and so this unnamed world is godless.)

Anyway, about 80 years ago, there was a big war on this planet over fossil fuels – the two sides aren’t named, by the way – which seems to have gone global and gotten particularly nasty. Towards the end of the war, one side (or maybe both) created nearly indestructible warriors, called “the undying” from dead soldiers. The Undying had their hearts replaced with stones, and so stopped aging, could take ridiculous amounts of damage, and healed nearly any hurt in time.

After the war – we don’t know who won, or any real information about the politics or government of this world – the Undying were hunted down, mostly by “the Church,” and are now considered a legend.

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Manga Friday: Osamu Tezuka’s ‘Dororo’

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  • April 4, 2008

Dororo, Vol. 1
by Osamu Tezuka
Vertical, 2008, $13.95

Vertical continues to reprint some of Tezuka’s most interesting and idiosyncratic manga with this first volume of his 1967-68 serial Dororo – the other two volumes will follow a little later this year.

Dororo is, I guess, Tezuka’s take on a samurai manga – it’s set in pre-modern Japan and the main character runs around cutting people with a sword.

But let me back up a bit. Dororo opens with Lord Daigo, the typical nasty, ambitious nobleman so beloved in genre fiction around the world. He spends the night in the “Hall of Hell” – a shrine or pavilion filled with statues of forty-eight evil gods. Daigo wants to rule all of Japan, and wants to make a deal with the demons, so he offers up his about-to-be-born son. For the power he wants, he asks each of the evil gods to take one thing from that child… (more…)

Manga Friday: A Random Walk

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  • March 28, 2008

 This week finds me in near Old-Mother-Hubbard mode, with just a few random old things. But let’s run through them, just because they’re here, and maybe the Manga Gods will smile on us for next week…

Priest, Vol. 1
Min-Woo Hyung
Tokyopop, 2003, $9.99

From the evidence – the creator’s name, and the fact that this reads left-to-right – I deduce that this series is manwha rather than manga, and comes from Korea. (If I’m wrong, someone will let me know.)

In a time and place that’s supposed to be the late 19th century American West – but contains guns from at least fifty years later – the half-doomed ex-priest Ivan Isaacs battles the undead servants of the fallen Archangel Temozarela, with the fate of the whole world at stake.

(Yes, Temozarela. He must be in one of the footnotes to the Bible, since he’s not one of the “Big Three” Archangels. Question for discussion: Is what Eastern comics creators have done to Christianity in their stories equal to, less than, or greater than what Westerners have done to Buddhism and Shintoism? And does the Western infestation of ninjas have any part in this discussion?)

Oh, and our priest hero does this, in this first volume at least, on a train. Badass only begins to cover it. Ivan sold half of his soul to Belial for the power to battle Temozarela’s forces – there might be some political war in hell going on in the background, but that’s not explained in this volume.

What Ivan does is 1) to pump several metric tons of silver bullets into marauding hordes of zombie-like creatures, though, sadly, usually not until they’ve already killed most of the other people in the vicinity and 2) to bemoan his fate and to proclaim loudly that he is still alive and so Belial hasn’t captured him yet.

The odd thing about Priest is that, with its scratchy, blocky art style, overarching gloom, and marauding undead, it feels and looks very much like an independent comic of the mid-’90s; Hyung’s style only looks manga now and then, generally with his female characters. Sure, the big sound effects in Korean characters are a tip-off, but otherwise this looks a lot like a book Slave Labor would have at least thought about publishing in 1996.

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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: Manga Sutra Volume One – Flirtation

 
It used to be, if you wanted to reach for the comic art form for your sex education you had to send a couple bucks to those want ads in the back of the cheesy magazines for “Comics – the Kind Men Like!” That stuff was a bit distorted; well, in the case of the ones that featured [[[Popeye]]], I’d have to say they were quite a bit distorted.
 
Trust the Japanese to get real. After all, they’ve been using the comic art form to foster all kinds of truly educational venues: business, economics, history, language, and so on. You’d figure sex ed would be a no-brainer. 
 
Be that as it may, doing sex ed comics in the form of a genuine story with a plot and character development is uniquely Manga. And TokyoPop brought the first volume of this series, Katsu Aki’s (Futari H) [[[Manga Sutra]]], to American shores. 
 
Manga Sutra is a sweet and sensitive series that focuses on the psychological aspects of sex as much as – actually, more than – the mechanics. The story is about a young couple, Makoto and Yura, who met through an arranged “marriage meeting.” This is sort of a counseled dating service, but one where the ultimate intent of marriage is upfront. The two 25 year olds dated, liked each other, got married, and only then discovered they were both virgins with a lot of understandable insecurities and a lack of any clue.

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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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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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