Tagged: sex

Manga Friday: Here We Go Again

  • News
  • August 8, 2008

 

kaze-no-hana-2-9687297This time around I have a volume two, a volume three, and a volume four – all in series that I’ve read at least some of the earlier books. Let’s see if I can still remember what went before – since manga often don’t have “who the heck are these people and what are they doing” pages – and whether they’re getting more or less interesting.

Kaze No Hana, Vol. 2
By Ushio Mizta and Akiyoshi Ohta
Yen Press, August 2008, $10.99

This is the series about an amnesiac teenage girl, Momoka, who is part of a family that wields magical swords to drive monsters away and protect their city. I reviewed the first volume in April, and had to admit then that there were too many characters with too few faces for me to keep them all straight.

Well, this time, we get even more characters, including another sword-wielding family that likes the monsters and wants to see them take over the earth or rampage through Tokyo or do whatever it is these particular monsters would do. Their leader is the cute girl Kurohime – and the only thing more dangerous than an old man in a Hong Kong movie is a cute girl in manga – and they have “sacred swords,” which are utterly different from the heroes’ “spiritual swords” in ways that perhaps don’t entirely translate well.

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Joss Whedon Talks ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ Future

buffy16-revisedthumb-1898091Over at MTV, Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon talks about the big new direction for the comic book series, which sees Buffy and crew going off into the future.

In case, like me, you don’t hold a Ph.D. from Whedon University, it’s a good primer on all the implications that take hold with issue 16 (cover at right). In the issue, Buffy and Willow go to New York as a mystic event messes with time, into the world of Fray.

"The world of Fray has been a huge influence, in fact, the influence on season eight," Whedon said. "At the end of the series, I had something that categorically did not connect, and rather than throw out continuity, I used that. The present is so interesting with tons of slayers, and the future as we know it is quite the opposite. So why is that? And is that the death of magic?"

There’s also this, which is sure to set some nerdy hearts aflutter:

Also, we’ll be seeing a naked Willow soon.

"I had my fiancee pose for that one," [artist Karl] Moline said of the drawing. "It’ll be a nice, special-looking pose."

"It’ll be tasteful, unless he does it the way I wrote it," Whedon laughed. Don’t assume it’s another sex scene with Buffy, but something is about to happen that will rock the Scoobies’ world. "Things really start to change after the Fray story arc," Whedon said, "and the next thing we’ll be doing is seeing that from various points of view, with stand-alone issues dealing with larger issues of the world of the slayer and Twilight. There’s someone in the picture who hasn’t been there before, and the trick is, what’s the most unexpected, and who’s the most obvious and where’s the most pain?"

ComicMix Six: Biggest Tease in Comics (Male)

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In previous editions of ComicMix Six, our contributors have given you their lists of comics’ top political campaigns, the best and worst movies based on comics, and even a few reasons why a Skrull invasion isn’t anything to worry about.

This week, ComicMix Media Goddess Martha Thomases ranks some of comics’ most desirable — but unattainable — men, and the reasons why they always remain just out of reach. -RM]

Some of us yearn for a man’s touch. Sometimes, that man refuses. The very beauty that drew us to him now taunts us.

Here are the worst offenders, in no particular order, for my ComicMix Six list of The Biggest Tease in Comics (Male):

6. MORPHEUS: The Sandman only comes to you when you’re already asleep. This limits how much fun you can have, and more important, how much fun you can remember.

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Review: ‘Sex and Sensibility’ edited by Liza Donelly

sex1-3981535What do women want? Sigmund Freud thought he knew, but we all know about him. After a few decades of feminism, it’s become clearer that the best way to find out what women want is… to ask them.

Sex and Sensibility
Edited By Liza Donelly
Hachette/Twelve, April 2008, $22.99

Donelly is a noted single-panel cartoonist and the author of Funny Ladies, a history of female cartoonists for The New Yorker. (She also teaches at my alma mater, Vassar College, which instantly inclines me to consider her a world-class expert on whatever she wants to be – we Vassarites have to stick together.)

Donelly collected nine of her colleagues – mostly single-panel magazine cartoonists, with a couple of editorial cartoonists for spice – and asked them to contribute cartoons on women, men, sex, relationships – that whole area. Two hundred cartoons later, [[[Sex and Sensibility]]] emerged. It’s divided into several thematic sections — Sex, Sensibility, Women, Lunacy, and Modern Love — and each cartoonist provided an essay about herself and her work, which are sprinkled throughout.

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Review: ‘Blue Pills’ by Frederik Peeters

blue-9583352Blue Pills
By Frederik Peeters; translated by Anjali Singh
Houghton Mifflin, January 2008, $18.95

This is another one of those semi-autobiographical graphic novels; I’m not going to assume that this is all “true” (whatever that means), but I will note that Peeters’s bio says that he lives with his girlfriend, her son, and their daughter — and that [[[Blue Pills]]] is the story of a man named Fred, his girlfriend, and her son. (And the main character of this book mentions that he working on a graphic novel about their lives.) So keep that in the back of your head — some proportion of this book is true, though we don’t know how much.

Fred, the narrator of Blue Pills, is a Swiss cartoonist, still in his mid-20s, who’s lived in Geneva his whole life. He remembers Cati vividly from a pool-party late in his teens, but never really knew her well. When he moves into the apartment building where she lives, though, he comes to see more and more of her and her young son (called “the little one” or “L’il Wolf,” but not named). Before long, Fred and Cati are drifting into a relationship, and Cati has to sit Fred down and tell him something difficult — both she and her son are HIV-positive.

(The “Blue Pills” of the title refer to their drug regimen to stay symptom-free, though they’re never called that in the body of the book. The fact that most Americans will immediately think of Viagra when blue pills are mentioned is unfortunate, but neither Peeters nor Houghton Mifflin seems to have taken a moment to worry about it.)

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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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