2chan.us

Saint Young Men, Nakamura Hikaru (Kodansha/Morning 2), vols 1+2 – Jesus and Buddha come back to the world as cute bachelors living in Tokyo. That alone is normally enough to get me to drop 552 yen but incredibly enough the execution is pretty spot-on too. The chapters are all pretty stand-alone barring the occasional joke that draws on a previous issue, but generally they are one-shots in the form of “Jesus and Buddha go somewhere normal (amusement park, matsuri, the lake, Akihabara) or do something normal (give each other haircuts, celebrate the holidays, live like poor bachelors), and the jokes just go from there. While the jokes all stem from the premise (Jesus is Jesus, Buddha is Buddha), Nakamura digs deep enough to keep them fresh, quoting scripture and Akutagawa short stories like it ain’t no thang. Artwork is solid but nothing to write home about, but that’s really not why you’re buying this, anyway. This seems to be selling like hotcakes, I’m seeing it on a lot of store special racks and in a lot of maid cafes. (zepy has some pictures for you to look at here)

Mozuya-san Gyakujou Suru, Shinofusa Rokurou (Kodansha/Afternoon), vol 1 – Manga about a small girl who happens to suffer from the recently discovered tsundere personality disorder, written by a professed otaku. I am fairly certain that between that description and this image you will know if you will want to read this manga or get really mad about it running in Afternoon and not something that starts with “Dengeki.”

Mudazumo-naki Kaikaku, Oowada Hideki (Takeshobo/Kindai Mahjong), one-shot – Basically the best manga to have ever been published. Former PM Koizumi solves issues of national diplomacy and security through mahjong. Find out which is stronger, Koizumi’s Rising Sun (Kokushi Musou) Tsumo, or Papa Bush’s Apocalypse Now (half flush Chi-Toitsu) Ron! Can Taro Aso save Koizumi from Kim Jong Il’s sinister plots, or will the Tepo-Dong get the better of Japan? How can you beat a 40 yaku hand? With a 105-yaku hand, of course. I didn’t think that the guy behind Dai Mahou Touge could actually write anything this good, but apparently he can, and Japan seems to agree with me, since this damn thing has had to have three printings in the first month it was out. Anyway, a must-read for anyone into mahjong or who enjoys parody manga in general. (akibablog-san talks about this a lot: 1, 2, 3, 4)

Nichijou, arawi keiichi (Kadokawa/Shonen Ace/Comptiq), vol 3 – I’ve gushed shortly about this manga in the past, though I couldn’t really get into volume 2 when I was reading scans of it, I’m not quite sure why. Vol 3 keeps up the trend of solid gags and impeccable comic timing. Basically, while Saint Young Men’s episodes are basically stories that use new settings to facilitate character-based jokes, Nichijou episodes are giant self-sustaining jokes or buildups to a punchline, which is the style of humor that gets me actually laughing out loud as opposed to smiles and chuckles in the case of Saint Young Men. This is basically on my permanent will-follow list unless it pulls a DMC on me or something.

Yo nimo Kimyou na Man☆Ga Taro, Man☆Ga Taro (Shueisha/Business Jump), vols 1-3 – More gag manga, kind of. I use the phrase “nightmare fuel” cautiously, but jesus christ I should not be reading this at night. Basically it is semi-avant-garde grossout horror gag manga, but all of the humor is either extremely dark or just so twisted that the punchline is “old terrifying wrinkled fat naked woman sprays fecal matter on someone and dies”. I couldn’t really bring myself to enjoy the majority of these stories since they seem to be going for not a whole lot more than pure shock value on a number of levels, but there were a few stories that I did find entertaining – the fourth story in vol 1, “Super Meitantei”, about a young amateur detective who loves detective manga who stumbles upon a horrible axe murderer driven to his obsession by horror manga, seemed especially clever to me (especially the last frame punchline), and more or less got me to buy vols 2+3 on its strength alone, a purchasing decision that I now regret on at least some level. I mean, that money could have been better spent on some Horihone Saizo or something. is apparently getting a moving picture adaptation.

In order:

Touhou ~ Silent Sinner in Blue (ZUN x Aki Eda) – I was going to complain that this has really bad art, but then I went back and checked the magazine scans and they actually look way better. Maybe they took out all the halftones because they couldn’t afford good printing or something??

->

By ch9 the art really is bad though, pretty much none of the pages have backgrounds. ZUN should’ve got flipflops to do it instead :(

Touhou ~ Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red (ZUN x some dudes) – This has pages from other better artists, but pretty much all of it is already available translated. There’s a long article in the back about the design of Touhou (lol) which I haven’t seen anywhere else yet, but I haven’t really looked.

Roman (Sound Horizon x Yukimaru Katsura) – The best manga adaptation of a concept album I’ve ever read. This one covers tracks 1 (Asa to Yoru no Monogatari), 9 (Yorokobi to Kanashimi no Budoushu), 5 (Hoshikuzu no Kawahimo), 7 (Tenshi no Chouzou), and 3 (Miezaru Ude, best track) in that order.

The text of the first two chapters is pretty much copied from the lyrics sheet, which means all the scanlators probably read the first chapter and gave up since every line is a nonsense metaphor with random furigana abuse. This also produces some strange effects since the conversations have choruses in them. After ch3 someone else starts rewriting it, which I think hurts it – the last two chapters have huge walls of text for narration, and it turns out the ending of Miezaru Ude is really stupid when you fill all the details in. The art has nice moustaches though and it’s cheap, so you might as well get it if you liked Roman. Seriously considering translating it (= making kransom translate it).

Ark isn’t actually a Sound Horizon manga, it just has the same name and plot as one. I haven’t read it yet but the main character apparently wears complicated gothloli outfits all day and night and is kind of hot. Also her friend looks like Souseiseki except is a man and has yandere eyes. I don’t remember why I bought it…

UPDATE: I’m told Ark, the Sound Horizon song, does have a manga adaption. But I don’t know where to find it, sorry!

THE MOST SKILLED SURGEON looks good – ch2 introduces the American stereotype as a giant bodybuilder surgeon named Ashton Kenneby – but I’m too lazy to look up all the heart surgery words to keep reading right now.

Is it me or does WP not let you change thumbnail sizes? I’ll make some bigger ones by hand sometime.

I caught something at Otakon and I’m still feeling kinda bad, but I’ll try to get enough power to write it up by listening to No Border on repeat (although kransom and others pretty much got all you’d care about). Meanwhile, here’s some stuff I meant to post about ages ago.

Melty Blood, Takeru Kirishima/TYPE-MOON, 2006-ongoing (from the moon)

Man, don’t TYPE-MOON adaptations suck? Kara no Kyoukai is some good stuff, but everything I’ve seen out of Tsukihime and Fate/stay night has been completely forgettable at best. It’s usually because of their apparently editorless writer Nasu Kinoko’s scripts, which are thousands and thousands of pages, an endless sea of complete bullshit (but we love him anyway). Throwing enough words away to get a decent pacing is tough, and this manga definitely didn’t try hard enough – Melty Blood is supposed to be a fighting game, and I only count about four short hand-to-hand fighting scenes in the first two volumes. But that’s probably not the point anyway. This manga isn’t about fighting, it’s about tsundere fanservice. Pretty much every scene so far contains a girl trying to lecture/kill Shiki and then immediately complaining about how they can’t be honest about their real feelings, and the artist draws weird facial expressions all over the place. Highly recommended if you’re a fan of tsundere/crazy girl moe, otherwise you might want to stick to Airmaster. You’ll also need a better sci-fi vocabulary than me, although I think I saw some only-kind-of-bad translations.

Seriously, it’s all like this.

Saijou no Meii (The World’s Best Surgeon), Takashi Hashiguchi, 2008
When I started reading manga a few years ago there was one called Yakitate!! Japan, which was a shounen competition manga about becoming the world’s best bread baker. This is a manga by the same guy about becoming the world’s best pediatric surgeon. At this point you should be convinced – I haven’t read more than one chapter so I can’t say much else yet.

Getting some stuff out there before I clean it off my desk and shelve it in the black hole known as my room.

Mononokemono, GotsuboxRyuji, vol 1 (2007)

When Ibuki returns to his home town for his grandmother’s funeral, he discovers that he has been chosen as her successor as a mononokemono, a human that mediates between the world of humans and mononoke, mythological Japanese creatures that make great story fodder thanks to their wide variety and volume. Grudgingly forced into the position, he balances the challenges of being a junior high student with his newfound duty of keeping the mononoke in check. While it sounds like a fairly potboiler story, I found myself enjoying Mononokemono quite a bit. The art style stands out most immediately, as it blends quite a bit of sketchy manga shorthand (almost reminding me of Japanese flash anime), used to match its overall light-hearted mood, with some more solid talent, all done in a very limited black and white palette. Gotsubo’s treatment of mononoke is also worth paying attention to if you have any familiarity with that, as he does both modern takes on old creatures, like a mascot character-style nue, while also inventing his own beasts, like the kireru 24-sai, roughly translated as “24-year old flipping out”. It all adds up to a humorous, somewhat strangely attractive volume, and I’ll be going back for more.

Ore to Akuma no Blues (Me and the Devil Blues, Eng version out July 29 by Del Rey), Hiramoto Akira, vol 1 (2005).

Anime and manga have never been the best when it comes to portraying racial and ethnic groups that aren’t, well, Japanese. As a result, I was a little skeptical when I picked up Me and the Devil Blues, but had heard nothing but praise for it, and thankfully I am able to echo that praise. Me and the Devil Blues is a fantastic re-telling of the life of the legendary blues musician who, as said legend has it, sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his blues chops. The Japanese volume one gives us the devil story as well as the foundations of a story about Johnson’s (fictional) adventures with Clyde Barrow. Both the detailed story and art is dark and dense yet also sensitive, forgoing what could be easy exploitation for serious exposition, a breath of fresh air after Bob Makihara and Mr. Popo (I had to do it, sorry). I was very excited when I heard that Del Rey picked this series up, as they continue to do great work for manga over here with their Jump Millions, and I plan on doing everything I can to get my hands on the translated first volume ($20 retail, but it’s the size of two Japanese volumes, I believe) once it finally hits our shores, apparently next week.

Amawres Ken-chan, Wakasugi Kiminori, 2006 (one-shot).

I’m sure many people by now are aware of Wakasugi’s most famous manga, Detroit Metal City, which now has an anime adaptation, a work about hilariously pathetic people doing hilarious and pathetic things in order to not appear pathetic. (hilarity ensues.) Ken-chan is really more in the same vein. Nagano Kenpei is an average loser at his high school until he is taken under the wing of Numata Puchokof, a half-Japanese, half-Russian ex-olympic wrestler who teaches at his school, and joins the wrestling club, which is full of horrible losers like him. The manga follows him and his friends in the wrestling club as they try to be less lame and (very unsuccessfully) get girlfriends. I’ll say this flat out: if you don’t like gross-out humor and gay jokes (read: are over the age of 17), you probably won’t enjoy this very much. DMC is saved by its over-the-top obscenity and metal jokes, while any remote strands of interest here, like the whole wrestling thing, are played, more or less, for one-dimensional jokes. (Here is the joke for wrestling: it is kinda gay! A ha ha ha.) I suppose that there is also an appeal in this manga if you love seeing people be absolutely pathetic and walking failures at life, but really, you can get that for free between television and livejournal.

Kuishinbou, Tsuchiyama Shigeru, vol 1 (2005)

Every once in a while, I hear someone throw out the idea that a certain manga is made specifically for Japanese salarymen as vicarious entertainment. Sometimes the claim made by mistaken individuals in regards to works that simply have universal appeal (Golgo 13, Fist of the North Star) while other times they’re actually talking about works about average 20-30something dudes who, by luck or by pluck, end up doing something TOTALLY AWESOME with their lives, like become a professional pachinko player, a professional mahjong player, or the athlete-playboy ancestor of Gilgamesh who gets hypnotized by the granddaughter of Hitler so that they can mate and create a new breed of supermen. Kuishinbo belongs to the latter group, as it is at once about a regular guy in fairly believable situation, doing something we all can do, while also being as ridiculous and over-the-top as anything you’d find in Jump.

So what’s this guy’s special ability? Sharingan? Nanto Ningen Houdan? PILDER ON? Actually, it’s already spoiled for you if you know any Japanese, because it’s eating. Kuishinbo is about a guy who likes to eat. A lot. Ouhara Mantarou (大原　満太郎, a ha ha ha) is a regular salaryman who finds himself suddenly thrust into the wild world of food fighting when he takes up his local donburi shop’s timed eating contest of 10 katsudon in 30 minutes. While he fails, he finds a powerful, possibly American (!!) professional food fighter who recognizes his talent and is willing to take him under his wing! His next challenge is to act as his boss’s entry in a nikuman eating contest against a fearsome opponent: Yokogawa, the famous (possibly Chinese !!!) Osakan man who once ate 100 Takoyaki in 5 minutes!!!! While I won’t spoil the exciting ending of the volume for you, I will tell you that I learned that the true path of a righteous food fighter is that of respect towards the food.

So yeah, like I was saying, a lot like a shonen manga for grown men, while trying to retain some sort of grip on reality. I mean, everyone loves to brag about that time that you were 16 and ate two large pizzas, and if you were put up to it, you could totally eat like, five and a half pounds of curry. To be honest, the first time I read through this volume, I rolled my eyes at it and decided not to get the second volume, but reading it again, it’s kind of grown on me. (Actually to be completely honest, I bought this out of frustration when I couldn’t find where Oishinbo was at the Shibuya Mandarake) It’s ridiculous and the plot so far is a bit formulaic, yes, but that stopped me from reading a manga, then my bookshelf would be out dozens of volumes of Golgo 13, and that is an alternate reality in which I could not bear to live. The art isn’t bad, though sometimes people are drawn in Grappler Baki-style poses while slurping down a bowl of food. Either way, I’m probably going to pick up at least one more volume of this when I get a chance, and I’d suggest it to anyone looking for a fun, light read who can put up with plot contrivances for the sake of fun.

I know I promised to keep writing manga reviews, but I’ve been too busy taking stock and making a website where you can buy fabulous doujinshi, doujin music, manga, and more at low low prices! Touhou, Bemani, Rozen Maiden, Haruhi/Lucky Star crossovers, Naruto manga, anime girls with boy parts where their girl parts normally are, there’s something for everyone!! Please buy things and keep me from starving on the streets of Kyoto! Check it out at:

http://krsale.wordpress.com/

Remember that time I did this in February and I thought that maybe I’d do this once a month? Man, I’m a funny guy. Anyway, as part of my plan to clean up/out my nerdy crap from my house before I leave to Glorious Nippon for a year of education and debauchery I figured I’d give some of the manga that’s been lying around my place a review before I leave all my earthly belongings behind / try to pawn it off on you suckers (keep an eye on this webspace in the coming weeks for more on that!). Oh, and rather than doing a bunch of reviews at once, I’m going to actually split these up in a futile attempt to get more page views. anyway this introduction is already longer than it should be so

Neko Ramen, Sonishi Kenji, vols 1 (2006) and 2 (2007)

This manga apparently has gotten not one but two seasons of flash-created Original Net Anime (what an unfortunate acronym) made out of it, so I figured that this would be worth reviewing. Anyway, obligatory plot summary:

A cat… that makes RAMEN??! This must be high-concept gag manga at its finest! Well, it got me to buy it at least.

Yeah, that’s about it. I know I shouldn’t have really expected too much from this, especially given my horrible track record with 4-koma (the genre needs more Ki-Sho-Ten-Ketsu-YAMI), but somehow I couldn’t help myself. I blame the Nekojiru kick I was on. Anyway, it’s about two volumes of roughly 4 jokes: the cat is bad at making ramen, the cat is bad at making business decisions, one of his three customers displays their character traits, the cat is a cat!! I do have to say in its defense, blasting through a volume of 4-koma gags is not really the optimal way to enjoy the form and genre, but still, this only got the occasional smile out of me. Incidentally, the parts of Neko Ramen that I found most interesting were the 16-page regular manga-style stories. They’re mostly little vignettes about Taisho, the eponymous neko, and his past, riffing off of generic manga backstories to somewhat comedic effect. These free up the story a bit, letting Sonishi play around outside of THERE IS A CAT. HE MAKES RAMEN. JOKETIME ENSUES., but they tend to not have any joke until the last page, and not in the shaggy dog Cromartie kind of way, either.

I checked out the net anime for this, too, hoping that somehow they could turn it around into something great, like the top-notch adaptation of Sketchbook‘s snooze-inducing manga (which incidentally runs in the same magazine as this, remind me to stay away from it), but no dice. At least it’s free! (Like most, um, onanisms.) Overall, if you want a casual, light read (it’s got furigana!) and/or love cats doing goofy things, or happened to love the anime and think I’m completely misguided, I’d say to pick this up, but otherwise I’d recommend saving your yens.

I made an order for a bunch of manga on rightstuf a little over a month ago, and I would have liked to review it all at once. Unfortunately, 3 of my volumes are stuck in backorder hell, so you thankfully get a shorter entry.

Golgo 13 by Takao Saito, vols 9, 10, 12.(I’m talking about the series in general though – I totally need to pre-empt the issue of Otaku USA that’s probably hitting the stands as we speak.)

I’m really a fan of the way that Viz conducts their whole manga business, though a lot of it could very possibly stem from their very fortunate circumstances, as a lot of this industry stuff seems to fall. The way it looks to me, with the backing of titles like, well, their entire Shonen Jump catalogue, they’re able to bring high-profile but probably low-grossing titles like Golgo stateside, a move so crazy that I would normally think that it could only be made in the 80s. I’m honestly hoping that sales of this release will be bolstered by viewers of the new anime series finding out that getting scans of Golgo is harder than getting their hands on the fansub they just watched.

Really, there isn’t a whole lot to say about the plot of Golgo 13. Golgo is an assassin. A very good one, at that. He has sex with prostitutes and is instrumental to just about every significant political event of the last 30 years, along with a bunch of not-significant events, but that’s about where the overarching narrative ends. Saito shows incredible consistency in style and execution throughout the work’s 40-year history, keeping it pulpy enough to keep me turning the pages until I’m late for odd jobs (professional pianists don’t really need page-turners) and lending an almost timeless feel to narratives that acutely date themselves. I mean, there can be a ten-plus year difference in publication date of the two stories in each of the thirteen volumes that Viz is putting out, and I’d have a damn hard time picking them out from stories that are getting published now like the ones I have in Volume 140-or-so at home. The art might take some getting used to if all you’ve been reading is the Shana manga and Kodomo no Jikan scans while keeping yourself warm by burning all of your Seven Seas manga in protest, but everything from extreme long shots to close-ups are drawn in an effective, gritty way that echoes the tone of the stories. Paneling, as mentioned in the extras of volume 9, is very cinematic and formal in style, dynamically and intelligently pacing the unfolding of each story.

In fact, thats most of the reason that I’m not talking about individual stories in the volumes in the review: the series works by getting you hooked on its basic framework, and though each story has its own hooks you seem to most of all be reading “A Golgo Story.” I don’t mean to discount the individual stories, of course – “Wasteland” in volume 10 does an incredible job of capturing 80s nuclear paranoia, and “The Dark-Skinned Sniper” features a rare, refreshing not-horribly offensive treatment of African-Americans that I’ve really only seen in manga in Me and the Devil Blues. I’m sure that the scholar and gentleman of anime, Carl Horn’s editorial oversight helps ensure the highest of quality from these stories, too. Also, the bonus sections included in each volume are short but absolutely packed with Golgo-related knowledge that WILL make you a better person.

I know that a lot of people have the same negative reaction to Golgo that they do to shows like Fist of the North Star, but I would honestly recommend this to just about any manga fan that enjoys a good, serious story. Sadly, I can’t say the same about FotNS, but it is best for one to come to FotNS, as it is not to be forced on an individual, no matter how wonderful it may be. Kind of like Christianity, only a lot better. Buy this, please? I promise I won’t start drawing parallels between this and Aria if you do. (Don’t think I won’t. I’m crazy.)

These next reviews are shorter, I swear.

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (or the KUROSAGI corpse delivery service depending on how faithful I want to be to the cover/spine) by Eiji Otsuka, illust. Housui Yamazaki. Vol 2.

It had been a while since I ordered vol. 1 of this, but volume 2 was on the top of my list of things to get when the rightstuf Dark Horse sale popped up. Fond remembrances of a rag-tag bunch of Buddhist college graduates fighting evil actuaries while trying to shuttle corpses around still found their way into my head after a long separation, despite my absolutely horrible memory.

Volume 2 covers one self-contained story about a corpse that the Kurosagi crew receives from the Japanese state after it was executed, and a very creepy organization that uses Kung-Fu (read: inexplicable magic) for evil. Well, semi-morally-ambiguous evil. Kurosagi really lives and dies on its characters and its scenario. That’s really my attempt at nicely saying that the art isn’t very good, the backgrounds are often sparse, and there’s nothing really stylistically eye-catching here. The volume has a neat bit of suspense, but nothing here really seems to fetch the $10.95 MSRP. I’ll probably end up buying volume 3, but I’m beginning to think that the character exposition and scenario explanation in the stories of volume 1, which I would gladly recommend, was its high point.

Mail by Housui Yamazaki. Vol 1.

Next up is the first volume of a work that the artist of Kurosagi wrote and drew. This one’s about a detective, Reiji Akiba, who finds ghosts and then shoots them to make them go away. Really, that’s about it. My feelings about the art are the same as Yamazaki’s work in Kurosagi, except no girls that are strangely, ambiguously sexy. The story for the first five chapters really are cut-and-dry in their Person Finds Ghost, Detective is Summoned and Finds Ghost, Detective Kills Ghost, Cursory Post-Explanation format. The last chapter is an origin story, but even that isn’t terribly engrossing. I don’t think I’ll be picking up volume 2, despite the prominence of a character named “Akiba.”

I’d write some words about Eden by Hiroki Endo, but for one thing, I need to go to sleep, and for another, it lived up to my very high expectations of Endo after reading Tanpenshu and I plan to buy a whole lot more in the near future, so I’ll review it as a larger unit at some later, undetermined time.

A gag manga featuring quirky girls in school. Though my reasons for buying this are faulty at best (was placed next to Yotsuba& on display, author uses archaic “wi” in name) I was greatly rewarded for my purchase! Of course, I’m not very well-versed in gag manga, so this might be very standard fare, but I do know that it was a hell of a lot easier to read and harder to put down than Gag Manga Biyori, which seemed to benefit strongly from an anime adaptation unless you can read Japanese at like 50 characters/second.

Anyway, quite a few laughs were had, and the art is well-drawn, fun, and kinetic. In other words, this manga is everything that the Sketchbook manga isn’t, and as such I strongly recommend it.

Plus it has Nazo no Kanojo X and Vinland Saga, and I can whack cockroaches with it. At $8 it’s a great deal.

But I have no idea how you could keep up with these things. It may only come out once a month, but at 1000 pages I’d never finish reading these before there was another one.