Tokyo Is My Garden
By Frederic Boilet and Benoit Peeters
Fanfare/Ponent Mon, 152 pp.
No rating (Mature content)

To give full disclosure, I was a little reluctant to tackle this comic after crying my eyes out after a nineteen-volume Banana Fish marathon this week. After that kind of an emotional joyride, an arsty-fartsy nouvelle manga did not sound like [...]

In this installment of On the Shojo Beat, Isaac Hale proves once again he’s man enough to read shojo… and enjoy it. The series: Ai Yazawa’s addictive rock-n-roll soap opera NANA, a staff favorite here at PCS.–KD
NANA, Vols. 9-11
By Ai Yazawa
Published by Viz
Rating: Mature

If you look at the back of any book in Viz’s Shojo [...]

Kekkaishi, Vol. 13
By Yellow Tanabe
Viz, 200 pp.
Rating: Teen

For many manga, picking up a volume which transitions from one story arc to another can be an exercise in pure tedium. Not so with volume thirteen of Yellow Tanabe’s Kekkaishi. Kekkaishi avoids this classic shonen pitfall by simply deviating from the shonen formula frequently. Though it has [...]

Barefoot Gen, Vol. 5: The Never-Ending War
By Keiji Nakazawa
Last Gasp, 266 pp.
Rating: Teen (13+)

In a week when Cromartie High School and Yotsuba&! are all but put on hiatus, it’s hard to imagine anything more depressing. Think off-the-hook comics depressing. I don’t mean Akira, Adolf or Abandon the Old in Tokyo depressing either. Think full-blown, real [...]

Nightmare Inspector: Yumekui Kenbun, Vol. 1
By Shin Mashiba
Viz, 184 pp.
Rating: Older Teen

Wow. I haven’t read a manga this derivative since, oh, Hell Girl. If Hell Girl read like a cheap shojo Death Note rip-off, this reads like xXxholic after years of lead poisoning. This is not to say that Nightmare Inspector is particularly bad [...]

The Drifting Classroom, Vols. 10-11
By Kazuo Umezu
Published by Viz
Rating: Mature (18+)

Well, it seems like eleven volumes is the magic number for me. Last week I reviewed the eleventh volume of From Eroica with Love, and this week I’m tackling the tenth and eleventh (and final) volumes of The Drifting Classroom. Though help me out here–is [...]

From Eroica With Love, Vol. 11
By Yasuko Aoike
CMX, 224 pp.
Rating: 13+

After reading eleven successive volumes of From Eroica With Love, I am forced to admit that it is simply one of the best shojo series I have ever had the pleasure of getting my grubby paws on. And that’s a tall order, because the competition [...]

Hell Girl, Vol. 1
By Miyuki Eto
Del Rey, 208 pp.
Rating: Older Teen

The first impression I had from seeing the cover of the Hell Girl manga was “Wow, that girl’s eyes are big.” I don’t mean normal manga big, I mean big as in “bigger than the girl’s hands” big. I’m making it clear that this was [...]