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.

I haven’t been posting recently for the following reasons:

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Here is a pile of things I hope to blog about now that I finally have a reprieve from unlimited home works:

pile

stay tuned!

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.

Seriously.

I think I measured the salt wrong, my crepe tastes a little off. But at least I found a use for Ikea jam.

(A cake would totally be inappropriate, it’s not flat enough)

Anime Weekend Atlanta is pretty much the best con around, you should go to it. But if you stay more than a few minutes away you’ll probably oversleep and miss the Eva panel, so watch out for that.

On Friday I saw Patrick’s Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno panel; after the fire alarm triggered by the Japanese schoolgirls had been fixed, he explained what a takenokozoku was and how to be a gothloli (buy his book). Afterwards I went to with some guys and some other guys (and also the specter of these people hanging over us) to Abdullah the Butcher’s House of Ribs and Chinese food, which is not a joke and has good ribs. I forgot to introduce myself, but I was wearing my most powerful shirt. Afterwards, the con illuminati introduced everyone to the wonders of Crystal Triangle and that one episode of TV Champion 2 whose torrent I forgot to seed.

Afterwards I got sick and accidentally missed every other panel I wanted to go to, but at any other convention I wouldn’t even have a chance to miss a panel about Message from Space. And that’s what it’s all about.

(also I bought a marisa x youmu vs nitori doujin, and all the tsukihime manga after it turned out to be sort of good/interestingly flawed, although drmaster is the worst publisher)

Trawling around the net, catching up on rss feeds and adding new ones now that I’m actually getting settled in. Some very mildly interesting things that have likely been posted elsewhere:

Lupin: Cagliostro, Secret of Mamo, TV Season 1+2 coming to Blu-ray
5040 per movie, that’s like half the price of what Bandai Visual wants for Honneamise!

Tokyo International Film Festival has a ridiculous anime lineup, why am I stuck in Kyoto
animecs TIFF is doing a Tezuka restrospective and has some bad-ass premieres of “Japanimations” and ungggg

notables:
10/18: Marine Express (lol) (digital betacam), Hell’s Angels (premiere, hdcam-sr), Both Rintaro’s Phoenix and Ichikawa’s Phoenix (35mm), Summer Days With Coo (35mm)
10/19: Both Unico movies (hdcam), Shoji Kawamori feature “The Universe of Kawamori Shoji” (!!!)

maybe I’ll just take a week off of school and go to M3 and then go to TIFF!

“Relese” details on the new Ali Project single/op for Kurogane no Linebarrel
Atonal warbling, no one cares, etc

Drunk Germans covering Ghibli film songs: the album
Featuring probably the best cover of this song that will ever be recorded

Further proof of the NHK conspiracy: while flipping through channels last night, I caught the tail end of this show run on public tv about hero songs. HERO SONGS! Since I only saw the end, I missed the earlier parts with lame songs like the Eva op, and instead got to see Masaaki Endoh and Tanaka Kouhei be totally awesome. Endoh sung some parts of Yuusha-oh Tanjo, Kouhei sung some other parts while playing an electric piano, and this dude wearing a lot of black and a funny hat was mouthing along to all the lyrics. In between songs, there’d be comments on the pure-heartedness of hero songs and some discussion on how they have awesome lyrics that would sound really lame if it weren’t for the fact that they’re yelling move names in between verses. Kouhei laid down some high-level music theory and explained how rather than take after the earlier styles of hero songs in “minor keys” he opted to use a “major key” to keep with the totally awesome feel of GGG, and how he wanted to go balls-out so he made the “dodekkai shugoshin/bokura no yuusha-oh” line keep ascending because a true hero/composer can do whatever the hell he wants. Seriously, how does PBS expect to stay afloat when they don’t have JAM PROJECT members on tv singing the Abaranger theme song? Or when they don’t have Tanaka Kouhei confessing that he composed the King Gainer op as a joke, then had to admit defeat to Tomino once he saw the op animation, causing Tomino to just nod and say something along the lines of “Good. Now you know my power.” Now that’s the kind of tv that Viewers Like Me want to see.

This is an incredibly late report, but better late then never! All but one of the photos is stolen from Moondabor, who pretty much single-handedly made my two weeks in Tokyo three times as interesting and infinitely more maidy.

About a month ago, I went with a big ol’ group of gaijin to one of the few shrines most otaku will ever willingly visit: Washinomiya, aka “you know, the Lucky Star shrine.” And Lucky Star shrine it was. The place looks like any other small-medium-sized town in the Kanto area, except a large number of stores have realized that they can make a ton of money from fairly quiet people who smell a little funny if they put up some signs and offer minor changes to their goods and services.

Naturally, the first thing we did upon leaving the station was go to a very small restaurant and order some “Tsukasa no Katsudon Dakee~!”s. The store was run by a very elderly couple, and the only other customer there was an equally elderly man watching the Olympics on an ancient tv set while an equally ancient electric fan was blowing on him. There was a full set of Lucky Star figures placed next to the tv which one of the guys with me identified in about 10 seconds, noting that he too owned the set. As our food came, the lady working our table also had Lucky Star chopstick holders and Lucky Star Washinomiya-area food store stamp rally sheets, and confirmed that we were there for “this,” in the simplest Japanese she could muster. The katsudon wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t really that “Dakee~”, but it did have an egg on top!

The actual temple was a pretty short walk from the station, and before we knew it, we were at those famous gates. Of course, we were immediately distracted by the nearby itasha, oddly placed billboards with ads for affordibly-priced Minoru Shiraishi haircuts, and of course this bizarre doll that appears to be half Konata, half KFC ad.

The temple itself was very quiet, it being a weekday afternoon and all. I mean, despite all this anime stuff, the place is still a regular temple, with regular temple stuff like this huge sign about the temple’s history that none of us even made an attempt to feign interest in. We did some regular temple stuff, like washing your hands and drinking some temple water like “the sign with the loli that they had in lucky star” tells you to on a handy poster, and ringing the bell and clapping and bowing and messing up the order in which you’re supposed to do all that business.

I guess there were some really faint signs that an otaku or two had been to the temple, like a board here and there on this thing (…(2), (3), (4), (5).) I’m fairly sure we spent a good half hour just looking at these things, because there were some real gems in here. Some highlights:

• Germany
• Taking it Easy
• Konata can full combo Hare Hare Yukai Oni mode like it was nothing
• MULTI-TEMPLE DRIFTING?
• Can’t spell Misao without M..ao! (tte VUA!)
• Who in the world would put something like this up there
• MOE AND PEACE. DESU.
• Lots of Japanese seem to really like praying for traffic safety in temples, which I guess isn’t that bad of an idea, to be honest.
• what in the world is going on here
• This is the Lucky Star shrine, not the Vocaloid shrine!!!
• Sorry to break it to you guys, but Ronald is now taken as someones yome.
• This is the Lucky Star shrine, not the FUTAE NO KIWAMI shrAAAAAAAAAAAAAAa
• And what better way to end the photo collection than a picture of Golgo wishing death upon all the disgusting otaku talking about Lucky Star?

I have to say that I had more fun than I was expecting, but I doubt I’ll ever be going back to the place, unless someone wants to accompany me as I finish the rest of this damn stamp rally. Anyone who has the opportunity that remotely cares about this stuff should go out there, it’s a good excuse to say that you took in some Japanese culture while also nerding out at the same time, not to mention that the place will probably go back to being yet another decrepit small town in another few years :(

A website banner and the Moonphase unsourced rumors blog say that SHAFT/Akiyuki Shinbo’s newest upcoming anime is a Nisio Oishin novel named Bakemonogatari. I read Zaregoto pretty recently and was only a little impressed, mainly because it had the exact same writing gimmick as every other Japanese book I’ve ever read, so it’s just as well this is just going to be more otaku jokes. I think SZS is their only other recent series not based on a bad manga, so it might be interesting, I guess? This genre is getting really overcrowded now, though, they should animate something else from Kodansha Box. Like Megatokyo.