Recently I find myself with less and less time to read manga reviews, let alone write them, as more and more manga hits our shores in a tsunami wave of publishing. To this end I will begin writing micro-notes from the field, your at-a-glance manga briefing.

Only the Ring Finger Knows: The Lonely Ring Finger, Vol. 1 (Novel)

By Satoru Kannagi and Hotaru Odagiri
Published by DMP
Rating: 16+

Only the Ring Finger Knows (Manga)

By Satoru Kannagi and Hotaru Odagiri
Published by DMP
Rating: 16+

In Ryokuyo High School wearing rings as a signal to others whether one is available for dating or not has become a fad. Wataru loses his awesome favorite ring. The most popular boy in school, Yuichi, has an identical ring and starts harassing Wataru. As yaoi goes, it’s just one step from loathing to making out.

The book is long and drawn out, even for such a short work. Once the happy gay couple gets together halfway into the book there’s not much to keep them apart (unless the work were based in reality, then social pressure, parents, and authorities might have proved a source of conflict). A scheming school girl works to break them up for several chapters, unconvincingly. Wataru vows not to sleep with Yuichi unless he gets top scores on his college entrance exams. It’s all very artificial conflict; no climax, no plot, no point – just what the acronym “yaoi” really means.

The manga version is just one volume long, but the the light novel series continues for three volumes, all of which were released by DMP. Book two is called Only the Ring Finger Knows: The Left Hand Dreams of Him and book three is The Ring Finger Falls Silent. The manga was on a list for the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults under the “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered” category.

The manga is shorter and steamy. Seeing hot guys making out works better than having the author assure you the characters are hot. It’s a cute manga based on a dull book. Better than Don’t Worry Mama but not quite as amusing as The Man Who Wouldn’t Take Off His Clothes, I recommend Only the Ring Finger Knows exclusively to yaoi fangirls, and only as manga.

Both the novel and the manga are available now.

Claymore, Vol. 2

By Norihiro Yagi
Viz, 195 pp.
Rating: Older Teen

I only read volume 2 since Midtown west didn’t have volume one in stock (*cough* *cough*).

There may be a more compelling story arc later on in Claymore, but as of volume two is hasn’t started yet. Claire, a half-demon witch called a “Claymore” battles some demons in what some people have called a female version of Berserk. The art is not as detailed as Berserk, but Claymore has it’s own unique and compelling style compelling.

Claymore is one of the few shows of the new anime season which I’ve taken the time to watch. As of volume two the anime and manga are running parallel. This volume covers an episode or two of the anime.

The anime is a series that I can watch with my boyfriend; it’s a seinan title so older boys (guys age 17-35) will enjoy it. Personally, I like seeing chicks with giant swords kick some ass, and I enjoy the social commentary. Claymores are total social outcasts, feared by humans. Even the victims of demons in the series bear a horrible social stigma.

The manga comes off as extremely short, with few words. It took me only half an hour to read this volume. Not great, not terrible, and just long enough and amusing enough to cover a single commute. Be sure to buy it two volumes at a time.

Recommended. Volumes one through nine of Claymore are available now; volume ten will be released in October.

Vision of the Other Side, Vol. 1

By Yu-Chin Lin
DramaQueen, 176 pp.
Rating: Teen

I bought Vision of the Other Side on the basis that it is a Taiwanese fantasy shojo comic. I’d never read any Taiwanese shojo (Taiwanese anything, really), so I thought I’d give it a try. Regrettably, I feel this was a mistake, and a $12 mistake at that. All of DramaQueen’s books are slightly pricier than the average manga – usually you get superior print quality, but in this case I bought a discounted book with a printing error. It was still more expensive, and still not worth it.

Vision of the Other Side is the predictable and trite story of a princess who runs from her arranged marriage only to end up with the leader of a gang of barbarians to whom she was originally beathroved. The chief Barbarian usually wears a mask, so the princess doesn’t realize that he’s the same hottie she ran into in her wacky peasent-disguised adventure in the marketplace a few days prior.

I might be able to tolerate the plot if the layouts were better. Vision of the Other Side is author Yu-Chin Lin’s first comic, and perhaps because she’s new at it, it’s difficult to follow action across the page. The dialog often seems bizarre, almost to the point of being nonsensical.

Yu-Chin Lin has gone to great lengths to draw detailed hair and costumes, but as of volume one, she can’t draw a sword.

Pass this one up, unless you’re a really hardcore fan of Fushigi Yugi and Basara – and even then, you may wish to read Vision of the Other Side in the original Chinese (at least it would be cheaper).

Volumes one and two of Vision of the Other Side are currently available. Theoretically volumes three and four should be currently available, however, they are listed as “on order from manufacturer” and not available on DramaQueen’s webpage.

Puri Puri, Vol. 1

By Chiaki Taro
DrMaster, 192 pp.
Rating: 15+

Masato is an orphan raised by a Catholic priest. His adoptive father is such a role model that Masato decides to become a priest as well. He enrolls in the local Catholic school with a catch – he will be the first male student to enter a previously all-girl school.

I am interested in reading a manga about a boy going through training to become a priest, unfortunately, it’s not this manga. Despite the original premise, Puri Puri is a paint-by-numbers “squish squish” manga. The “squish squish” genre is anything with a scene where a girl’s breasts squish into an adolescent boy’s back in a non-sexual context, usually by accident. The boy is embarrassed and turned on, and the girl is unaware of the boy’s arousal. The sound effect is usually included: Squish squish. As an American girl I don’t have time for the squish-squish genre, since I find it cliche, unfunny, unsexy, unoriginal, feature unrealistic female characters.

Puri Puri has other anime/manga tropes – like the absurdly powerful student council. For whatever reason, a group of super rich girls on the student counsel run the school like puppet masters. For unknown reasons, they really have it in for Masato, and work to get him into as many squish-squsih scenarios as possible.

DrMaster has very nice covers, with Japanese-style cover flaps (called French flaps). However, the paper quality is lacking.

This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher. Volumes one and two of Puri Puri are available now; volume three will be released in October.

Heroes Are Extinct!, Vol. 1

By Ryoji Hido
DMP, 200 pp.
Rating: Teen (13+)

Reviewed by Katherine here. Unfortunately I would rather have worked on this manga than read it. The author explains in the afterward that Heroes Are Extinct is published in a weekly magazine. It has a grueling production schedule, so there is a large staff of extremely geeky manga artists. As they work, they sing old anime songs and watch old tokusatsu shows on TV.

On impulse I bought the book Tokyo: A Certain Style on amazon.com’s recommendation. Most of the book is available on google here. It’s a photobook of very small apartments in Japan. Although not specifically related to anime/manga/nerdom it so happens that several of the photos of the book are of the homes of manga-ka. Manga-ka often work from home, and each of the home-studio apartments featured a desk where the assistant sometimes sits. And by “desk” I mean, “there’s a space on the floor between stack of manga with a bed for the assistant to sleep on right next to a desk.” Because that’s how much work goes into manga. You wake up and you draw, and you sleep under your desk.

Because Heroes Are Extinct is the author’s first manga, and because it’s weekly, and perhaps because it was originally pitches as anime instead of manga, the art suffers – a lot. A flip-through wouldn’t convince anyone to buy this, I’m afraid. There is a lack of tones, and the backgrounds are not details. The number of panels per page is also low, giving the most of the pages a rather blank look.

I enjoyed the script, even if I didn’t get all the tokusatsu references it was still quite funny. Heroes Are Extinct was also exceedingly short, perhaps a 35 minute read. Weirdly, the exclamation points on the cover are a horrible font that make it look like volume one might be volume two.

This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher. Volume one of Heroes Are Extinct!! is available now; volume two will be released in October and the third and final volume will be released in January 2008.

The order you consume the following media does not matter, nor does it matter if you are fashion-impaired (like my boyfriend); you will be equally delighted by Kamikaze Girls the book and the movie, and that is a Ninja Consultant guarantee!¹

Kamikaze Girls (Novel)

By Novala Takemoto
Translated by Akemi Wegmuller
Distributed by Viz Media

After reading some of DMPs light novels, Kamikaze Girls felt like reading literature. Initially, I hesitated to pick up the book due to it’s white slip cover and pink embroidery design. It was jut a little too girly for me, despite my Decora² Halloween costume and childhood love for My Little Ponies. I held the novel in my hand at the comic book store and considered – was it a light novel? Was it a novelization of the movie, or was the movie based on the book? Unsure of myself, I choked at the cover price AND FOOLISHLY SET THE BOOK DOWN, MISSING OUT ON HOURS OF POTENTIAL JOY.

Months later I snagged the Mangacast’s review copy (thanks Ed!). Approximately halfway through the book I started devising plans to build a time machine in order to send the book to my high school self. I quickly grasped that the movie and manga were based on the novel.

The story is written in first person by Momokoko, a hardcore Lolita³ fashion victim raised by a “useless” single father who’s dual-logo pirated Versace / Universal Studios merchandise has got him in trouble with the local yakuza. As the story begins Momokoko has found herself relocated to Ibaraki prefecture, which is out in the sticks, quite literally in cowtown.

Momoko does not make friends in Ibaraki – her fashion subculture is far too extreme for hicks, and her obsession with the Rococo period in France does not win over her classmates. She meets Ichigo, a Yanki⁴, when she tries to sell her dad’s pirated merchandise through a classified ad. Ichigo is Momoko’s fashion-opposite, but both girls are followers of obscure subcultures, and they slowly become friends.

The ending is a little too happy, a little too perfect – Momoko happens to have a talent gets “discovered”. Ichigo is really pretty when she doesn’t do her own make-up, and becomes a professional model. I wish everyone could discover their career path so easily! I found this slightly irksome as an adult, however, I know it is the ending I would have wished for as a teenager.

Towards the end of the book I learned that the author, Takemoto, is actually a dude. I was totally shocked! How could a man write such great female characters? Takemoto truly captures a teen girl’s voice and plays it out with such dignity, such veracity, and such style!

This is the most lovingly translated book that I have ever read, (the second best being A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami, also recommended). The jokes are all very funny, and the author’s voice comes through very clearly, in a tone that I’m certain is true to the original. There are several translation notes and a brief glossary. If anything, the glossary could have used a few more definitions, but I never felt totally lost. I heard from Ed Chavez that the translation team worked really hard on this. Akemi Wegmuller – if you’re reading this, I appreciate your hard work! Thank you for doing a good book justice with an excellent translation!

Kamikaze Girls is a love letter to teenage girls written by one’s future self. The ultimate message of the story is: Don’t worry about your future. Have confidence in yourself, and you’ll discover your talents. Be true to yourself and your friends, and everything will turn out alright.

“…ever since I started wearing Baby’s clothes, I realized that to carry them off properly – to truly do them justice – I’d have to improve myself, starting with my attitude toward life. Because if you dress like a Lolita without having the Lolita spirit, the clothes won’t suit you. At all.”
– Momoko

Kamikaze Girls (Movie)

Directed by Tetsuya Nakashima
Distributed by Viz, 102 minutes

I missed this movie three times in theaters, and I feel like Judas denying Christ three times. I own the DVD now, and making all my friends watch it might be my only hope for salvation.

Kamikaze Girls the film rockets along at roughly Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels speed from the first frame, using mixed media and graphic design to quickly lay out for the audience exactly when the Rococo era was and what it meant, all from Momoko’s extremely biased point of view. Momoko then proceeds to narrate the story of her conception and birth to hilarious effect, and this is handled even better in the movie than it is in the book.

By the time Ichigo rides in to town 20 or 30 minutes in the movie just keeps getting better. Even though Ichigo’s laughably tricked-out scooter is described in great detail in the novel, nothing beats seeing the ridiculous contraption on screen. Anna Tsuchiya, the actress playing Ichigo, gives a great performance. In the book Ichigo is a little dumber, but Tsuchiya really brings a new dimension to Ichigo’s character. She was also wonderful in A Taste of Tea, which I reviewed recently.

My second-favorite scene in the film is Momoko’s first encounter with the clothing brand “Baby, the Stars Shine Bright” (the brand name is said in its entirety, in English, dozens of times throughout the film). “My old self…” she narrates “…was killed on the spot.” From a lacy sleeve an old-fashioned Rococo gun pulls the trigger, killing Momoko, and her new self is born.

Recently Kamikaze Girls has been airing late at night on the ImaginAsia channel (available on Time Warner here in New York City). When I see it on TV, I just leave it on, because Kamikaze Girls has such a high re-watch value. It’s definitely worth the cost of the DVD.

Director Tetsuya Nakashima also directed Memories of Matsuko, which won the Audience Award at this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno: Tokyo Teen Fashion Subculture Handbook

By Izumi Evers and Patrick Macias
Illustrated by Kazumi Nonaka
Published by Chronicle Books

As long as you’re purchasing Kamikaze Girls in either form, you may as well buy Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno: Tokyo Teen Fashion Subculture Handbook, at the same time. If you’re like me, and your interest in Yanki fashion subculture was peaked by Kamikaze Girls, and you want more information, this book is your one-stop-fashion-subculture-source in the English language. Those Fruits books at Barnes and Noble are not going to break it down for you with timelines and charts! You will need Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno to get the whole story.

Part history, part anthropological study, part fashion magazine, Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno works as your safari guidebook to the strange world of teenage girl fashion subculture in Japan from the 1970′s to the present. Many of the specimens examined in the book are long since extinct, but the pop culture echoes of these groups lingers on in movies, anime, manga, and live-action television dramas.

Macias and Evers take you on a trip through time in the streets of Tokyo, where bored suburbanite girl have flocked to in weird outfits for decades. Nonaka’s illustrations break down the difference between Sukebans, Decora Girls, and Gothic Lolitas, as well as even more obscure sub-groups like the Kigurumin. It’s all laid out for the reader in a handy fold-out evolutionary tree.

Anime fans watching the current release of season two of Super Gals from Right Stuf can final get some answers, explanation, and historical context to the Gal style. Old school fans of Kimegure Orange Road can finally learn why Madoka carried guitar picks as weapons (she was parodying the days of sukeban girl gangs who carried razor blades).

Since this is a book about teenage girls, I was surprised to find that my male friends took an interest in flipping through the book and picking out their ideal sub-culture girlfriends. Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno specifically outlines what type of guy different gals would want date – at least for the first half of the book. No one wants to date a Kirgurumin or an O-Gal! The latter were nearly homeless, smelly versions of kogals, who return home only to change clothes, and the former wore adult-size animal-themed pajamas on the streets of Shibuya.

Although Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno is of special interest to anyone obsessed with Japanese pop culture, I am confident that it is also a wild (yet accessible) ride for normal people. I am thinking specifically here of my high school days, wherein obligatory trips to the school library resulted in teen girls flipping through the library’s latest fashion magazines instead of checking out any actual books. Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno is loaded with enough pictures that even non-readers will find it fascinating, non-readers being a group that sometimes includes American teenage girls.

My only complaint about Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno is that I did not like the style of the illustrations. Although the illustrations were very accurate and informative and somewhat cute, their artistic style annoyed me. Fortunately, there are plenty of photographs of actual schoolgirls throughout the book that make up for it. The photographs are priceless anthropological studies of eras past.

Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno doesn’t take long to read, but it’s hours of fun passing it around to one’s friends. I loaned my copy out to a friend, and haven’t seen it since.

¹ Not a guarantee. Inversely, you could be equally disgusted by both.
² To find out more about Decora, read Japanese Schoolgirl Inferno.
³ Gothic Lolita; Read more about it Schoolgirl Inferno.
⁴ Again, read Schoolgirl Inferno.

Congratulations to the winners of our very first Manga Recon giveaway! Four lucky folks snagged brand-spankin’ new copies of Alive: The Final Evolution, a Del Rey series making its debut on Wednesday. Our winners:

• Celeste M., Victoria, TX
• John J., Eden Prairie, MN
• Ken H., Braintree, MA
• Mike T., Spotsylvania, VA

And speaking of Del Rey, you’ll find new volumes of Air Gear, Kitchen Princess, Mushishi, Nodame Cantabile, Sugar Sugar Rune, and Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles in stores this week, as well as a new shojo series from CMX, King of Cards; the latest installments of Dark Horse darlings Old Boy (now with Eisner Award validation!) and Eden: It’s An Endless World; a new light novel from Viz, Brave Story (yes, the same Brave Story that Tokyopop has licensed in manga form); and an indispensable addition to every fujoshi’s library, How to Draw Manga: Drawing Yaoi (Graphic-Sha). And if those titles don’t tempt, you’ll also find the latest installments of Viz’s Signature manga line gracing bookshelves, including volume ten of Golgo 13, volume ten of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster, and volume seven of The Drifting Classroom. Or should that read, THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM!!!!??

REVIEWED THIS WEEK:

• I Hate You More Than Anyone, Vol. 1 (CMX)
• Kekkaishi, Vol. 10 (Viz)
• Mushishi, Vol. 2 (Del Rey)

SHIPPING THIS WEEK:

• Air Gear, Vol. 5 (Del Rey)
• Alive: The Final Evolution, Vol. 1 (Del Rey)
• Brave Story (Viz)
• Claymore, Vol. 9 (Viz)
• The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 7 (Viz)
• Eden: It’s An Endless World, Vol. 8 (Dark Horse)
• Full Metal Alchemist, Vol. 14 (Viz)
• Golgo 13, Vol. 10 (Viz)
• Gundham Seed Destiny, Vol. 4 (Del Rey)
• Guru Guru Pon-Chan, Vol. 9 (Del Rey)
• Hana-Kimi, Vol. 19 (Viz)
• How to Draw Manga: Drawing Yaoi (Graphic-Sha)
• Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs, Vol. 4 (Viz; click here for a review of volume 3)
• Kamui, Vol. 8 (Broccoli Books)
• Kekkaishi, Vol. 10 (Viz; reviewed below)
• King of Cards, Vol. 1 (CMX)
• Kitchen Princess, Vol. 3 (Del Rey)
• Mushishi, Vol. 2 (Del Rey; reviewed below)
• Naoki Urasawa’s Monster, Vol. 10 (Viz)
• Ninja High School, No. 151 (Antarctic Press)
• Nodame Cantabile, Vol. 10 (Del Rey)
• Old Boy, Vol. 7 (Dark Horse)
• Omukae Desu, Vol. 5 (CMX; click here for a review of volume 1)
• Pichi Pichi Pitch, Vol. 6 (Del Rey)
• Sugar Sugar Rune, Vol. 6 (Del Rey)
• Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles, Vol. 14 (Del Rey)

I Hate You More Than Anyone, Vol. 1

By Banri Hidaka
CMX, 190 pp.
Rating: Teen (mild profanity)

Seventeen-year-old Kazuha Akiyoshi is the oldest of six children. With both her mother and father working full time, Kazuha functions as the de facto parent in her household, running errands, wiping runny noses, cooking meals, and shepherding the youngest to and from daycare. Like many harried parents, Kazuha has little time for herself, giving no thought to such normal teenage obsessions as boys or clothing. Her routine is upended when she meets Mizushima, a twenty-four-year-old teacher whose compliments leave the inexperienced Kazuha bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. Complicating the romantic picture is Mizushima’s pal Sugimoto, a hairdresser with a crush on Kazuha. Kazuha, however, finds Sugimoto singularly obnoxious, rebuffing his advances with the titular refrain: “I hate you more than anyone!”

It’s to Banri Hidaka’s credit that Sugimoto gradually evolves from overbearing creep to prospective boyfriend in a plausible way. Alas, his transformation is one of the few elements of the story to receive adequate development. The supporting cast comprises an undistinguished group of one-note characters; neither Kazuha’s siblings nor her classmates make much of an impression, a problem compounded by their androgynous appearance. (In fact, I sometimes had difficulty distinguishing Kazuha from Sugimoto, as they have nearly identical hairstyles and body types. Tip: Sugimoto is the cool cat in the John Lennon sunglasses and ponytail; Kazuha is the cutie sporting the vintage Dorothy Hamill ‘do.) The layout, too, leaves something to be desired. Hidaka’s tendency to pack every panel with unspoken thoughts and comments directed at the reader leads to busy pages with very small print; I found myself wishing she’d let the artwork convey her characters’ inner turmoil. The bottom line: I Hate You More Than Anyone shows some promise of moving beyond the usual opposites attract premise, but is hampered by cluttered design and a lack of interesting subplots.

Volume one of I Hate You More Than Anyone is available now; volume two will be released in September.

Kekkaishi, Vol. 10

By Yellow Tanabe
Viz, 192 pp.
Rating: Teen

If Kekkaishi were a TV show—say, penned by Tim Kring or J. J. Abrams—the promo for volume ten would sound something like this: “Tonight on Kekkaishi: battles will be fought. Friendships will be tested. And one of our demon slayers must come face to face with the ultimate enemy: himself.” The catalyst for this barn-burner of an episode is the Kokoburo’s arrival at the Karasumori. With their ailing, fox-tailed princess in tow, the ayakashis engage Gen, Tokine, and Yoshimori in barrier-busting combat. Though I’m not usually a big fan of protracted battles, Tanabe masterfully stages the fight scenes, enlivening the action with a parade of fantastic monsters while building towards a tense, emotional climax that only J. K. Rowling or Philip Pullman would have the guts to pull off in a work of juvenile lit. Perhaps as a palette cleanser, volume ten also includes one of Yellow Tanabe’s signature extras: a gag strip that answers the question, what do manga artists do all day? (A hint: the answer involves marshmallows and microwaves.) You’ll never again wonder why the next installment of your favorite series has been delayed.

Volume ten of Kekkaishi arrives in stores on August 1st. Click here for a review of volumes 1-9.

Mushishi, Vol. 2

By Yuki Urushibara
Del Rey, 233 pp.
Rating: OT (16+)

The first volume of Mushishi introduced readers to Ginko, a laconic, chain smoking, trenchcoat-wearing wanderer who’d be equally at home in A Fistful of Dollars or Kwaidan. Spurred by his insatiable curiosity and armed with a traditional healer’s knowledge, Ginko traveled the backwoods of Japan in search of mushi (literally, “bugs”), antediluvian parasites who cause their human hosts all sorts of ailments. Volume two follows the same episodic structure as volume one, as Ginko uncovers a nest of mushi in an ancient library, debunks a cult centered on an afflicted woman, and combats a resilient organism with shape-shifting abilities. Most of these stories tap the same spooky vibe as a good installment of The X-Files, with a visceral jolt or two and a little extemporizing about such perennial themes as man vs. nature and faith vs. science. The notable exception is the first chapter. Though beautifully illustrated, the story is a perplexing mess, marred by stiff, unnatural dialogue and several logical gaps in the narrative. (It’s hard to tell if the problem resides with the translation or is an artifact of the original Japanese.) My suggestion: skip it and let the other four tales work their eerie, graceful magic on you.

Volume two of Mushishi arrives in stores on July 31st. Click here to read a review of volume one.

Mushishi © 2000 Yuki Urushibara/ KODANSHA LTD. All rights reserved.

Want to get your hands on a free copy of Del Rey’s new sci-fi thriller Alive: The Final Evolution? We have brand-spankin’ new copies of this spooky series to give away. All you need to do is send us an email with your name and address before Saturday, July 28th at midnight (EST). Four winners will be chosen at random from all the entries and announced in next Sunday’s Weekly Recon column. There are no special requirements to enter—you don’t need to write a limerick or answer any trivia questions—but we ask that you be at least 18 years old and live in the United States. (Sorry, no foreign entries accepted. One entry per person, please!)

To view sample pages and read our review of Alive: The Final Evolution, click here. You’ll also find glowing endorsements at MangaCast—where Ed Chavez declares Alive “the best new shonen title of the year”—and activeanime.com—where Scott Campbell gives it a big thumbs up.

Hollow Fields, Vol. 1

By Madeleine Rosca
Seven Seas, 192 pp.
Rating: All Ages

Hollow Fields begins, as so many books for children do, with a youngster being dispatched to boarding school. Nine-year-old Lucy Snow, a plucky girl with smartly striped stockings and a stuffed pal named Dino, arrives in Nullsville bound for the genteel halls of Saint Galbat’s Academy for Young Ladies. Bad directions from a stranger lead her instead to Hollow Fields, a.k.a. Miss Weaver’s Academy for the Scientifically Gifted and Ethically Unfettered. Though Lucy’s gut instinct is to flee, she enrolls at Miss Weaver’s school—after all, the tuition is free and her private room has its own bath. (Anyone who’s ever endured the indignities of dorm life will appreciate Lucy’s delight at having en suite amenities.) Not surprisingly, the cheerful, naïve Lucy struggles to fit in with the sour, competitive snots in her taxidermy and robotics classes. But when a shy, underachieving boy named Simon Belljoy is sent to detention—a punishment from which no one has ever returned—Lucy decides to tough it out until she can rescue her friend.

While the story is a bit derivative, borrowing elements from Lemony Snickett and Harry Potter—not to mention Castle in the Sky and Steamboy—Rosca’s artwork is crisply appealing. The Hollow Fields faculty are a sinister-looking lot, from animatronic dorm mother Miss Notch to grave robbing instructor Mister Croach. (Did I also mention that Rosca has a Dickensian flair for names?) Miss Weaver is the picture of menace, clad in a Morticia Addams gown and a gravity-defying ‘do that would be the envy of Frankenstein’s bride:

Rosca lavishes similar attention on the school grounds, rendering Hollow Fields as a lugubrious, gothic heap of a building with exposed ironwork and steam seeping from vents in the walls and support columns:

Though many of her images are detailed and heavily toned, leaving little white space on the page, Rosca’s precise linework and artful panel arrangement ensure an easy visual flow.

Some readers may feel that Hollow Fields strains too hard to be “authentic,” with its right-to-left orientation, steampunk elements, and saucer-eyed moppets. Granted, there are a few design elements in the book that seem a bit gratuitous. Most of Hollow Fields’ staff members, for example, dress like employees at a maid café—a design decision that seems especially impractical, given the curriculum’s heavy emphasis on blood, entrails, and machines. But Rosca’s smart-looking artwork is as good—if not better—than the artwork in many licensed series, employing the visual tropes of shonen manga to tell a story that would resonate equally with Frances Hodgson Burnett and Hayao Miyazaki fans.

If I had any criticism of Hollow Fields, it’s that Rosca never settles on a consistent tone. Sometimes the story aims for black comedy a la Lemony Snickett; other times the story seems like standard-issue boarding school drama. I suspect that this tonal issue will resolve itself in subsequent volumes as Lucy unravels the secrets of Miss Weaver’s Academy. (It would also help if Rosca fleshed out some of Lucy’s classmates, most of whom seem like one-note characters at the moment: the Mean Girl, the Know-It-All, the Ditz.) Here’s hoping that Rosca continues to mine that same dark vein of humor that inspired the series’ tagline: “Forgetting your homework was never this dangerous.”

Volume one of Hollow Fields is available now; volume two will be released in January 2008. To read the first three chapters of volume one online, click here.

Otaku USA is an all-new anime and manga magazine that hit streets Tuesday, June 5th. In 2007 it will be printed bimonthly, but word on the street is that it will go monthly in 2008. Fans on the internet are already balking at the $9.99 cover price, although it is $3 cheaper than competitor’s NewType USA’s $12.95 pricetag. Both magazines come with a double-sided poster and a DVD with three episodes of anime (on average) as well as trailers for anime series and videogames.

Sure, there are some other anime magazines on the market, but most of them are garbage. Wizard’s Anime Insider is possibly the worst of the bunch, with their stiflingly positive reviews and stale news items. Anime Insider is analogous to Time Out New York insomuch as when I pick up a copy of Time Out New York and flip through it I find a wealth of information that I already know.

My relationship with Protoculture Addicts, which partnered with Anime News Network, has been a tumultuous one. New issues are slow to come out. Although Protoculture Addicts has useful coverage of the world of live action Asian cinema, it still seems a little after-the-fact. I’ve already read most of Protoculture‘s news items on Anime News Network prior to the magazine’s release.

Several anime magazines over the years have gone under. I remember Animerica fondly from my days of browsing through Suncoast stores. Suncoast’s parent corporation filed for bankruptcy last year (or two years ago). Animerica disappeared from the scene, but now it’s back as a free magazine in Waldenbooks and Borders. I almost never go to Walden’s or Borders, so I have not seen a copy of the latest incarnation of Animerica.

I have subscribed to NewType for three years, which was not a big deal when I had a disposable income. I don’t know how teenagers manage to swing the $90 a year subscription rate.

NewType‘s glossy full-color pages on heavy paperstock are tough competition for Otaku USA, if you’re, y’know, shallow. Otaku USA, although it is also glossy and full color, has a slightly smaller trim size and the pages are a bit thinner. NewType offers one sample manga chapter each month (June’s issue has Kobato, a new manga from CLAMP), and Otaku USA offers two chapters from different manga (this issue has Gon and Princess Resurrection).

But I’m not here to talk to you about how NewType has 11 manga reviews in the June issue and Otaku USA covers 25 manga titles, no, I’m here to talk to you about graphic design. Get a load of Otaku USA‘s cover design:

Crillee Italic is not really my favorite font. What’s with the bright almost neon colors and all caps? It reminds me of those “Button Your Fly” t-shirts from circa 1990:

More importantly, get a load of NewType side-by-side with Otaku USA:

What is up with the identical layout? Is this a trap for parents who were told to pick up NewType for their teen and couldn’t remember the title? Or is it a trick for n00b fans who have read NewType in the past and forgot the title, and they might accidently grab Otaku USA instead?

If it’s a trap, I guess that’s alright. There’s a lot more useful content in Otaku USA. I rarely learn anything from NewType outside of the latest promotional anime studio blurbs from Japan in the front and the columns in the middle. NewType does not deeply analyze any of their featured anime, and since the magazine is owned by ADV, a heavy percentage of the magazine is devoted to promoting ADV’s shows.

I learned a lot from Otaku USA – mostly about Gundam models in a series of three features titled: “The Meaning of Gunpla,” “A Brief History of Gunpla,” “Building the World’s Biggest Gunpla” and “Bandai Hobby Center Break-in,” a tour of Bandia’s hobby factory where Gundam kits are built. I’m not a giant robot fan or a Gundam fan, but each piece was interesting and well-written.

The anime features were clever and more quoteable than anything you’ll read in Anime Insider or NewType.

From Joseph Luster’s spotlight on Yoshiaki Kawajiri, talking about Wicked City: “This joint is so loaded with sexuality that it put 90% of the otaku generation through puberty in an instant.”

Tomohiro Machiyama’s piece “A Good War: The Meaning of Gunpla” opens with the line: “What kind of boy hates war? None!”

From Daryl Surat’s review of Hellsing Ultimate, volume 2: “Alucard simply can’t be killed or even injured; his fighting style consists of ‘don’t bother to dodge while the other guy shoots/stabs/dismembers me, then reveal that I’M ONLY USING 20% OF MY FULL POWER, AND IT’S OVER NINE THOUSSSSSSSANDDDDDD!’ ”

I’m a little worried that Otaku USA might not have a future. Although I hate advertisements as much as the next reader, magazines need funding, and Otaku USA had less than half the ad count of NewType. Three of the ads were for starblazers.com and three were for rightstuff.com, giving the bizarre impression that “this magazine was brought to you by Star Blazers.”

The balls-to-the-wall hands-down best article in Otaku USA‘s first issue and the reason to buy the magazine is Mark Nagata’s article about collecting Japanese Children’s Rides. Holy crap, look at this:

That is a ride-on Ultraman thing, my friend, and Mr. Nagata bought it and had it shipped to his home in California.

On the downside, some of the internal layout of Otaku USA is a direct rip-off of NewType in a ridiculous way. Compare these the two magazines’ video game review sections:

What the hell is that? I think Otaku USA could be a little more original than that in the graphic design department.

Only the Gunpla section of articles breaks free of the NewType layouts and ventures into new design territory:

At this point I should admit that this review is far from biased. Contributors Daryl Surat, Gerald Rathkolb, and Clarissa Graffeo also run the Anime World Order podcast. I’m a huge fan of AWO, and I was even shot by Daryl Surat at Anime Weekend Atlanta last year, wherein I was sharing a hotel room with Gerald and Clarissa. Gerald had a few articles in this issue, but I was shocked to find that Daryl and Clarissa wrote nearly all of the anime reviews.

Jason Thompson is the manga editor. He was recently interviewed for the Mangacast about his upcoming book Manga: The Complete Guide, which is a guide to every manga ever published in English. Most of the synopsis were written by Thompson himself, enabling him with the super-human power to write short and succinct manga reviews at lightening-fast speeds. Other manga contributors included Shaenon Garrity – who does the “Overlooked Manga Festival” thing that I read each week. (I’ve read a few of Garrity’s Narbonic books as well.) Mangacast host and animeondvd.com reviewer Ed Chavez is doing a column on manga from Japan for Otaku USA. Chavez may have stayed at my apartment last weekend to go to the Book Expo convention. (Also I may have contributed a feature article for a future issue.)

Basically if Brigid Alverson, Carl Horn, and those guys from the Same Hat blog contribute to Otaku USA, everyone who I think is cool on the internet will be writing for Otaku USA.

I’ve been reading editor-in-chief Patrick Macia’s blog ever since I picked up a copy of Cruising the Anime City an Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo. Some of the topics covered on Macia’s blog and podcast “Hot Tears of Shame” are also in the first issue of Otaku USA. Months ago he posted a video of himself building the world’s largest Gundam kit with Matt Alt (who appears frequently on Macias’s podcast) and the mysterious Masked BAKUC. Matt Alt (Hello Matt Alt, if you’re reading this, I think you are cool!) also contributed articles to the magazine, and even BAKUC gets a weird Engrish write-up: “I feel this mysterious heartbeats by making model-kits.”

Macia’s coverage of Wonder Festival in the magazine feels like a rerun of his blog, and of course he takes the time to plug his own books. Look for my review of Japanese School Girl Inferno on this site later this month.

On the last page of Otaku USA is “Mistakes of Youth,” a webcomic I never would have heard of had Macias not linked to the comic creators interviewing him on their podcast.

In the future, I’d like to see an older, artsy-er, hipper look to Otaku USA – particularly the cover. I was going to make mock-ups of Otaku USA covers parodying some of the magazines below, but I have other things to do this weekend. In conclusion, Dear Otaku USA, please consider cooler magazine cover designs, more like the following:

Think about it! The girl on the cover could be making Gundam models!

MPD Psycho, Vol. 1

Story by Eiji Otsuka, Art by Sho-U Tajima
Dark Horse, 184 pp.
Rating: Mature (18+)

Do you like a little bit of the ultra-violence? Have you watched the movie Se7en multiple times? You might like MPD Psycho, which is being released by Dark Horse on June 6th. Fans of Takashi Miike have likely already seen the 2000 TV mini-series based on the manga.

MPD Psycho combines top-notch artwork with a grotesque and disturbing story. The pacing and panel layout is reminiscent of watching an episode of an HBO police drama… if that drama was Ichi the Killer.

The “MPD” of MPD Psycho is a clever acronym for “Multiple Personality Disorder”. Protagonist Kobayashi Yousuke was investigating a serial killer when the killer killed his wife mid-case. Kobayashi’s personality split and he killed the serial killer as a different person. That personalty then hid while a third personality did time for killing the serial killer. The main story of the manga begins when Kobayashi is let out of jail on a consultant basis in order to work profiling criminals on current serial killer cases. (How many times can I use the word kill in this review?)

Poor Kobayashi’s wife was killed in a really disgusting still-left-alive-but-better-off-dead kind of way. Here is some life advice: If you are a cop working on a serial killer case, and someone delivers a mysterious box, and you happen to be married at the time (or have a significant other), DO NOT OPEN THE BOX. I’m serious. Just return to sender and call your S.O.

You might recognize Shou Tajima’s artwork from Madara, and he was the character designer for Kai Doh Maru, Otogi Zoshi, and the anime segment of Kill Bill. Writer Eiji Ohtsuka is also the author of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, also available from Dark Horse. The art of Corpse Delivery Service is a little weak – it’s too bad Tajima didn’t draw that title – it would be absolutely terrifying.

Tajima draws eyes in an amazing way. Check it out:

Eyes figure into the larger story arc. Many of the victims in the story have registered with “the Eye Bank”, and the protagonist happens to have a barcode on the white part of his eyeball just below the lid. He doesn’t remember how the barcode got there. Here’s what I would say if a friend told me that:

Friend: So I found this barcode on my eye, and I don’t remember getting it.
Me: Oh really? That’s weird. Well, you know what? Don’t worry about it. This kind of stuff happens to me all the time.
Friend: Really?
Me: Uh…. sure. Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s nothing. I have a mole on my back that I don’t remember being there last year.
Friend: …

MPD Psycho is one of the sickest things I’ve ever read. It gives new meaning to the phrase “better off dead”. Fortunately there’s not a lot of text per page so you can flip really fast past the frequent nudity and often-severed limbs and still be able to follow the story. This works to the book’s credit. I didn’t really have the stomach to stop and enjoy the artwork, but perhaps other readers will.

For a brief and spoiler-free example of the twisted nature of MPD Psycho: One splash page of art between chapters (unrelated to the story) features a nude woman missing an eye. Her missing eye has been sewn into a space where one of her nipples used to be.

I once heard an NPR story about a kid who wrote letters to jailed serial killers to befriend them as a pen pal. The NPR interviewer was so disturbed by the kid that after the interview he went outside and looked up at the sun for a while. That is exactly how MPD Psycho made me feel. As a nerd I am normally averse to bright sunlight, but after reading volume one of MPD Psycho, I felt like going outside for a while.

Despite the adequately awesome art and adequately disturbing story, I had some problems with the supporting cast of police detectives. The profiler who springs Kobayashi from prison is a rookie and she’s not good at her job. I can understand that. But the only other detective in volume one is a total idiot, so much so that I wondered if he was suffering from mild brain damage. It broke me out of the world of the story to think that only geniuses and morons exist in the universe of MPD Psycho.

Speaking of worlds made up exclusively of geniuses and idiots, MPD Psycho reminds me of Death Note, and here’s why: Both stories start off with a simple Hollywood-style premise. “A boy finds a notebook with the power to kill anyone who’s name is written within.” ” A detective is released from jail to profile criminals after avenging the death of his wife.” On top of these simple premises, crazy manga-like details are layered on, and it could no longer be a regular Hollywood film. As an American I am so accustomed to the Hollywood formula that I have certain expectations for any media that follows Hollywood rules.

Death Note stops being a normal Hollywood movie plot as you stack on the manga details: The notebook is found by a genius schoolboy, the top scorer in Japan. And he’s pursued by a super-dective who’s also a genius. MPD Psycho suffers the same fate: The detective also has multiple personality disorder. If it weren’t for the “MPD” in MPD Psycho it would be a more reasonable, believable, down-to-earth story.

I’ve made a chart using an onion to illustrate my theory:

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that MPD Psycho reminded me of the film proposed by Charlie Kaufman’s brother Donald in the movie Adaptation. Donald’s script, called The 3 was about a detective, a serial killer, and the killer’s female hostage who all turn out to be the same person. If you haven’t seen Adaptation, you should rent it, and watch it back to back with Hot Fuzz.

This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.

Flower of Life, Vol. 2

By Fumi Yoshinaga
Digital Manga Publishing, 200 pp.
Rating: 16+

Just to quickly follow-up my review of Flower of Life volume 1 – there is still no actual yaoi in this series so far and I am still finding it charming and hilarious. Every day I’m becoming more of a fan of Fumi Yoshinaga and it’s really scary.

I forced my boyfriend to read parts of volume one and all of volume 2, and he didn’t like it at all. He didn’t even laugh out loud once! Maybe it’s just me. Maybe only girls will find this series charming and funny. I can only hope to test this theory by sending it to podcaster friends of mine with diverse tastes and seeing what they think of it.

There is a misogynist joke at the end of volume 2, but I still found it funny and not particularly offensive, although my boyfriend found it deeply troubling. I’m not going to spoil it for you here.

This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.

Nosatsu Junkie, Vols. 1-2

By Ryoko Fukuyama
Published by Tokyopop
Rating: Teen

Surprisingly energetic, fast, and funny for a story about teenage models, I recommend reading Nosatsu Junkie buzzed on caffeine as the author intended. Nosatsu Junkie looks like it was a fun manga to draw, and Fukuyama says many times in the free-talk section that she (he?) writes the storyboards for the book in a Starbucks.

Protagonist Naka has the peculiar problem that her face looks like a criminal’s face when she’s nervous. Her crush dumps her in favor of the famous super-model Umi, citing Umi’s “warm smile” as the kind of thing he goes for in a girl. In a rampage of self-improvement/revenge, Naka vows to be a model like Umi and even joins the same modeling agency. She quickly finds out by accident that Umi is actually guy. Of course Umi falls in love with Naka as the two become inseparable in a hot-and-cold “we’re just friends but obviously in love with each other” relationship.

I am so sick of the manga character-who’s-disguised-as-the-opposite-gender as a plot device, and I haven’t even read Hana Kimi. Fortunately, Nosatsu Junkie carries off the time-worn trope rather well. By the end of volume two I found myself making excuses on behalf of the author. “Sure, there’s a cross dresser,” I told my boyfriend, “but it’s like… Shakespeare’s early comedy works, right?” By now, there are so many cross dressing characters in manga that it’s almost a token character.

This is not a story to be read for the romance, nor is it that interesting to read as a story about a model (instead, Paradise Kiss is better in both respects). Rather, Nosatsu Junkie is a comedy about a girl with a hilarious facial tick. Look at this:

There are tons of jokes about Naka being wrongfully detained by the police, and I assure you these jokes never get old. Well, provided this doesn’t run 20 volumes…

This review is based on complimentary copies provided by the publisher.

Reborn!, Vol. 1

by Akira Amano
Viz, 192 pp.
Rating: Teen+

Dude, dude, are you busy this Friday? Ask your mom if you can ride the bus to my house and spend the night. On Saturday, let’s like, wake up at 7 AM, eat three bowls of Cocoa Puffs and read all my issues of Reborn. Then we can watch the animes of it on YouTube! It’ll be awesome.

Dude, you haven’t heard of Reborn? It’s about this kid who’s like a totally normal kid but then this baby from Italy shows up and is all like “You’re going to be the next mafia boss!” and the baby’s name is “Reborn” and he starts totally shooting the kid with like, magic bullets that do different things depending on where you get shot. There’s also another weird baby in a cow costume who wants to be friends with them or something. It is like, sooooo funny!

Maybe after that we can check out Hayate the Combat Bulter and Bobobobob-bo while we drink Mountain Dew mixed with Kool Aid and eat Pop-Tarts for lunch.

Yoki Koto Kiku

By Koge-Donbo
Broccoli Books, 208 pp.
Rating: 13+

I was looking forward to this Koge Donbo title but had a hard time finding it. It was a Borders exclusive for a while, and then both Broccoli and Dark Horse mysterious moved to another distributer – perhaps due to distribution problems? I finally picked up Yoki Koto Kiku at the Broccoli booth at New York Comic Con.

Yoki Koto Kiku is a one-shot parody of a famous Japanese mystery novel Inugami-ke no Ichizoku (in English: The Inugami Clan), as explained in the useful translator’s notes at the end. I suspect if you’ve read the book or are familiar with the larger series of Kindachi mysteries – and perhaps you are also immersed in Japanese culture as an expatriate, or your parents are Japanese and you go back to Japan a lot, then you might really like Yoki Koto Kiku. Being a first-year JET program teacher is probably not enough cultural saturation to really “get” this one.

Yoki Koto Kiku is differs from The Inugami Clan in that there are triplets who don’t exist in the original story. Each of the triplets has a weapon that’s a pun on their names – again, I’m getting this from the translator’s notes. They try to kill each other for their inheritance – but it’s not a fighting manga, it’s a comedy, and a relatively un-funny one.

An American friend of mine recently showed Don Hetzfeldt’s short animated film “Rejected” to an office filled with her Taiwanese coworkers. Nobody laughed. In the end you can only chalk it up to cultural differences.

I’m confident that Yoki Koto Kiku is funny and I just don’t get it. I’m also unsure why I feel the need to defend Donbo. It’s not like she’s a friend of mine. Donbo is a powerful character designer, and her designs make me go weak in the knees but storytelling is not Donbo’s strong point. I just want to be as kind as possible to her book… the character designs are great… it’s a quick read… the paper quality is awesome, just like all of Broccoli’s books.

I heard at New York Comic Con that Donbo is one of the fastest manga artists in the biz, cranking out double the normal page output of a regular manga-ka each month. Somehow knowing that Donbo draws so fast tainted my reading experience. Her occasional two-panel pages never used to bother me, but now I sit there thinking “She cranked this out in like five minutes between doing loads of laundry.”

I watched the first episode of the new Kamichama Karin anime, and it was really weak. The manga was kind of weak, too. It had the worst opening theme sequence I’ve seen in a long time – the song just didn’t seem to match the visuals. I’m a big fan of the Kamichama Karin manga, but it’s a guilty pleasure.

Yubisaki Milk Tea, Vols. 1-2

By Tomochika Miyano
Published by Tokyopop
Rating: Mature (18+)

I need to preface this with a couple of things about myself as a reader:

1. I do not usually read a lot of porn.
2. It really bugs me in Love Hina when Naru slaps Keitaro for being a pervert, when he is just a young man with a healthy interest in sex.

We’ll get back to #1. Meanwhile, I think the word “hentai” (pervert) gets thrown around pretty loosely in a lot of anime and manga. Many a male character is accused of being perverted in situations that are simply sexual, and don’t warrant the “perverse” label. The average male manga/anime protagonist if often accused of sexual abnormality based on his totally normal and usually quite innocent interest in sex.

Yubisaki Milk Tea breaks the mold, insomuch as it is actually perverted by the actual English definition of the word.

At the outset, Yubisaki Milk Tea is not that different from other manga plotlines. Protagonist Yoshinori is stuck in a love triangle with his bitchy megane classmate Minamo and his childhood friend Hidari. He also likes to dress up as a girl. We differ from the norm here in that unlike other manga cross-dressers Yoshinori uses his photography of himself to deal with his emotions and relieve stress. He feels sexually gratified by the act of cross dressing. His habit is a secret only known to a few close friends.

The love triangle wouldn’t be interesting or perverted, except that Minamo is younger – she’s only in junior high and just barely hitting puberty. Yoshinori feels uncomfortable when he finds himself attracted to her. Even though he’s only two or three years older, he is more sexually mature.

Although the characters in this book are younger teens, the rating is Mature, and it’s shrink-wrapped, and I wholeheartedly agree with this rating! There is a fair amount of nudity and hot teenagers making out. Two of the artists’ earlier short stories are included in the first volume and they are really perverted. The short “Those Insolent Legs in the Rain” ends with a full splash page of a 9th grader wearing only her underwear and holding an umbrella!

Yubisaki Milk Tea is titillating, and I feel more perverse for having read the first two volumes. I mostly associate Tokyopop with romance titles for teen girls, so this was kind of a shock.

When “light novels” started hitting American shelves last year I wasn’t really excited about it. However, my trip to Japan in January really opened my eyes. “Gamers”, the famous anime/manga/videgame store in Akihabara (the store with Digi Charat as their mascot) has an entire floor devoted to light novels. About one fourth of Comiket was devoted to novels written by fans (in my estimation), and there was a plethora of doujinshi based on light novel series. The most popular anime in Japan last year, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya was based on a light novel.

So what is a light novel, exactly? For American fans it’s difficult to distinguish light novels from young adult fiction. The books are relatively short and come in series. Many of the books are sci-fi, fantasy, or romance. The books contain a few illustrations in anime or manga “style.” This differs from American young adult series where the illustrations, if there are any, are not in any one particular artistic vain. The audience is also different. YA novels are aimed at young adults, but light novels are generally aimed at the otaku market – hardcore nerds between 15 and 35. The equivalent series in the U.S. might be novels based on “Star Wars,” or fiction based on the Dungeons and Dragons games.

I get the distinct impression that light novels in Japan are not renowned for their literary merit. The “real books” are shelved elsewhere. Light novels are not the type the win the Japanese equivalent of Caldicott Awards. They are the literary equivalent of Cheetos. They are junk food targeted strictly at the otaku market.

I’m not sure why U.S. publishers would want to pick up light novels, but I am excited about reading novels which spawned some of my favorite anime series. To clarify, I am not enthusiastic about reading novels based on my favorite anime series. For example, if “Star Wars” were based on a novel, I would read that novel, but I am totally uninterested in reading novels that “expand the Star Wars universe”, regardless of how good Gabe from penny-arcade.com thinks they are. I am more like Tycho in this regard.

Boogiepop and Others

by Kouhei Kadono
Publisher: Seven Seas

I watched the Boogiepop anime series first, and was interested in reading the best selling novel that inspired the series. The anime is very mysterious and I was under the mistaken impression that this novel might lend clarify the plot a little.

Let’s just say I’m bad with names. Like, really bad with names. If your name is Mike, Chris, Dan, or John you can go ahead and roll a twenty-sided die, and if you rolled under a three I’ll remember your name. When I read Shakespeare I continually refer back to the dramatis persona until the end of Act I. This problem is magnified when it comes to Japanese names – it’s all Yamato, Yamada, and Miyazawa with the added stumbling block that high school students refer to each other by their gender-neutral last names and 48% of the population of manga characters have the first name Sakura.

Boogiepop and Others has a dramatis persona of sorts in the front. There is an illustration of each major character, with a quote from each one. This did not help in my reading of the book. Besides the Boogiepop, I couldn’t tell any of the characters apart. Even by the end of the book I was kind of foggy as to who was doing what to whom. It doesn’t help that the Boogiepop is a genderless entity who switches bodies half-way through the story.

As for the plot – basically, an ensemble cast of teenage protagonists are coming to terms with the fact that kids at their school are disappearing. The adults in the community claim that the kids are “running away,” but it’s obvious that these kids are going to the creepy Twin Peaks high school and the runaways are probably being horribly murdered. Even though there are sci-fi elements at the end of the book, the story is more about an atmosphere of secret anxieties.

The Boogiepop is a mysterious hero-split-personality thing who possesses a girl for the first half of the story. The Boogiepop is by far the most interesting part of the book. Thematically, the Boogiepop poses the question, “Sure, Batman is a hero, but isn’t he also a crazy rich dude?” – with the emphasis on the crazy. This is an interesting question, and the whole book could come off as a non-traditional superhero story in the way that the anime series does not.

However, it is not interested enough to make me tackle any more of this purposefully obfuscating ensemble-cast series. The anime series is better. I have not seen the live-action movie of the same title yet.

The wikipedia page about this title contains a very useful, although spoiler-iffic list of the cast of characters. If you decide to read this book, I recommend not peeking at the wikipedia page until you’ve finished. Instead, keep your own notes on the different characters as you read it.

Twelve Kingdoms

Volume 1
by Ono Fuyumi
Translation by Alexander O. Smith and Elye J. Alexander
Published by Tokyopop

I’ve seen almost all of the anime series Twelve Kingdoms, so I was very excited to read this book. There are a few major differences between this book and the anime series – the anime gives us two additional characters in order to split the action, and this book only covers two DVD volumes of the series. It is worthwhile to both watch the anime and read the book(s), as you can get a little something different from each source. It also doesn’t matter which media you consume first.

At the outset Twelve Kingdoms gives you the same-old fantasy anime premise: High school girl gets magically transported to a fantasy kingdom that she’s destined to save. I promise if you push past that, there is more to the story. Just ignore Yoko’s whining about wanting to go home to Japan. Ignore it for the first DVD, and ignore it through the first half of the book, because let’s face it, she’s not going home. What separates Twelve Kingdoms from something like InuYasha or Fushigi Yugi is that Yoko will not have a home to go back to. She is shown visions of her parents mourning her loss back home, and her classmates say terrible things about her in the police interviews that follow her disappearance from reality. We the readers know that Yoko can never go back to her old life – it’s just going to take a little longer for Yoko to reach the same conclusion.

Parts of Twelve Kingdoms can be a little like a videogame. Yoko is given a magic sword and a healing jewel. A demon-like entity possess her body so that she can fight the monsters roaming the countryside. Fortunately these elements of the story are balanced out with more originality and realistic elements. Unlike in a videogame, Yoko does not “level up”. Lost alone in the woods fighting monsters for a month leaves Yoko starving to death. If her life is a fantasy videogame, she’s really bad at it.

Monster fighting is also not the focus of the story. The author paints a very interesting world, a world complete with a complicated government system that includes a mythic origin as well as a series of checks and balances. There is a systematic way in which people become Kings, and it is not the will of the people but rather the will of heaven that dictates who takes the throne. Reproduction, land ownership, natural disasters, geography and economics are all covered in great detail, mostly explained in the last half of the book. You could probably write a few different papers for school based on volume one alone.

Ono Fuyumi paints a complicated fantasy world complete with themes and symbolism and social commentary that’s worth checking out. This is thoroughly a book for teenagers, but it gives teens a lot of credit. For a “light novel” this is not particularly “light”. I would say that it’s an easy pick for librarians, but there is a lot of blood-spray in all of the monster fighting scenes before you get to the really great discussion of immigration policy.

Yoko is a very real teenage character, and I wish I could’ve read this when I was a teenager. Much of the book takes place inside her head as she transforms from someone without a spine into a stronger person. Sure, it takes being covered in demon-blood to get there, but she gets there eventually. Yoko is considerably less whiny in the book than the anime.

I can only give this book an A- because it succeeds despite its flaws, and its similarity to existing fantasy. You’re just going to have to trust me and believe me when I say that Yoko totally goes on the Hero’s Journey, Joseph Campbell style.

(This review is based on complimentary copies supplied by the publisher, sent to the MangaCast.)

The Man Who Doesn’t Take Off His Clothes

Volume 1
by Narise Konohara
Translation by Matthew Johnson (?)
Published by DMP

This is the first yaoi light novel I read, and it did not disappoint. Kaitani works for a cosmetics company, hired on by a relative into his first post-college job. Kaitani is your Everyman, an average 20-something who doesn’t care about his job and is late to work every day. He’s a little bit of a slob and a sports fan. Fujiwara is Kaitani’s manager, a total hotty OCD neat-freak who’s always on-time and carries only the finest designer hankerchiefs.

There is no way these two men would sleep together in reality. Kaitani becomes obsessed with Fujiwara when he vetoes an old college friend’s hand lotion bottle design. Suddenly slovenly Kaitani turns into a career-man overnight, researching the project and pushing for his friend’s design. He’s a hothead and takes everything far too personally.

Finally we step off into bizarre-fantasy-land wherein Kaitani is taking naked blackmail photos of Fujiwara. He finds out why the man won’t take off his clothes, but it’s too good of a secret too spoil here.

There is only one sex scene in this book, and it’s near the end. Fortunately, it’s a really short book. Fast readers could probably breeze through it in a few hours. It is the first installment in a series, so nothing really resolves at the end of volume one. The sex scene is pretty sexy, but it is so ridiculously unlikely that it’s hard to suspend one’s disbelief while reading it. It’s also pretty immoral – in that way that roofies are really not OK, no matter what your gender or sexual orientation happens to be. Suspend your disbelief – suspend!

Like with most yaoi I’ve read, it’s hard to get past the way that the characters never come to terms with their sexuality. No one ever really comes out of the closet as we know it here in the States. Usually when there is an openly gay character in these stories, they have come out of the closet well before the story begins. There is never a moment where an otherwise straight character comes to terms with his suddenly turning gay during the course of this novel or other yaoi stories I have read. It’s hard to get over this cultural gap as an American reader.

Nevertheless, I had a fun time reading this book. I think the translator did a decent job. This isn’t a bad place to start if you’re interested in reading yaoi light novels. It’s light, fun, unrealistic, sexy, and a fast read.

(This review is based on complimentary copies supplied by the publisher.)

Don’t Worry Mama

by Narise Konohara
Illustrations by Yuki Shimizu
Translation by Matthew Johnson
Publisher: DMP

I noticed that The Man Who Doesn’t Take Off His Clothes was part of the Don’t Worry Mama series, so I read this book next. It’s about a minor character from the other book who works at the same cosmetics company as Kaitani in The Man Who Doesn’t Take Off His Clothes.

Look closely at the cover of this book. Really closely. Notice how there’s a second character hugging the protagonist, but he’s totally obscured and his face is hidden on the cover? OK, now flip it over to the back cover, and notice the bold, italicized, prominent headline:

“I’m not a chubby chaser!”

I can only hope no one riding the subway with me was reading that quote on the back cover and judging me, harshly and silently.

The front and back covers are sending you hints, subtle hints that I missed, that this story is about a gay man falling for a very fat, very horrible straight man. As a member of Weight Watchers, I found the grotesque descriptions of Imakura’s obesity mildly offensive. It’s not enough that he has a bad personality – his horrible physical features are written to match. Fortunately, the horrific descriptions of back-fat stop after the first 50 pages.

Yuichi, the gay man, and Imakura, the fat man, are stranded on an uninhabited island off the coast of Japan on a work trip to research new plants for their company. A series of unlikely circumstances leave them stranded on the island for weeks; the old fisherman who dropped them off dies, the cosmetics company goes bankrupt, friends and family follow a receipt detailing last year’s business trip. None of it seems viable, and the reader must simply set their disbelief over there, on a shelf, for much of the rest of the book.

Unlike The Man Who Doesn’t Take Off His Clothes, there are a lot of sex scenes in this one starting from much earlier on in the book. However, it is not nearly as sexy as TMWDTOHC. I had to look up the word “phimosis”. Let’s leave it at that.

Don’t Worry Mama is based on a short story, and it shows in the flawed structure of the book. The first two thirds cover the desert island plot from Yuichi’s point of view. The last third is a “bonus story” from Imakura’s point of view. The bonus story lacks conflict – it’s just a cheerful story about the couple’s anniversary. Remember that episode of Gravitation where Shuichi wears a junior high uniform? Yeah.

Imakura’s transformation from the world’s worst and perhaps Japan’s fattest manager into a hot 30-year-old wine steward by the end of the book is totally unbelievable. Just because someone drops about 100 pounds and stops being a a mama’s boy that doesn’t mean that they’ll turn into a completely different person. I mean, I lost 50 pounds and I’m still a jerk.

What this book lacks in character development it makes up for perversity. Unfortunately it’s not sexy, it’s just kind of gross. Maybe if you are a chubby chaser, you’ll be into it.

(This review is based on complimentary copies supplied by the publisher.)

Club 9, Vols. 1-3

By Makoto Kobayashi
Published by Dark Horse

How much do I love Club 9? So much! How bummed out am I that the last few chapters were never collected into a graphic novel? So bummed!

This is kind of my own version of Shaenon’s Overlooked Manga Festival (which you should totally read). Club 9 might be a title that time forgot. A coworker of mine was reading this on the subway once and I was shocked that it was a Dark Horse title I had never heard of. It turns out Club 9 was brought to our shores long ago by Studio Proteus, and published in the now-defunct anthology Super Manga Blast. I feel bad for Super Manga Blast in the same way I feel bad for Viz’s Pulp magazine – both were just slightly ahead of their time.

Club 9 is the unlikely story of Haruo Hattori, a hottie idiot virgin hick of Li’l Abner proportions. Most importantly, Haruo is “pure hearted” – a strange Japanese concept that I am only now beginning to understand. Nothing is more valuable in Japan – even a 1980′s bubble economy Japan – than a pure-hearted virgin, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Haruo graduates from high school somewhere in the backwaters of the Akita prefecture and heads off to college in Tokyo to fill her head with book learnin’. Her high school boyfriend Kingoro lead the school baseball team to a miraculous victory at Koshien, (the World Series of high school baseball). Kingoro has been passed over for the baseball draft as the story opens, crushing his hopes of being in the big leagues and moving to Tokyo. Haruo moves to Tokyo by herself, vowing to remain a virgin for Kingoro.

Unfortunately Haruo’s dorm room is haunted by a disgusting masturbating ghost (a nerd ghost who died a virgin). In order to afford to live in Tokyo on her own, Haruo gets a job at the same bar where a college friend works. Haruo is too innocent and too “country” to know anything about hostess clubs, and thus, she unwittingly becomes a hostess.

Club 9 is hysterically funny and charming, but it’s a bit of a hard sell. First of all, the dialog is written in hardcore dialect – the type that people reading old-timey strips from the ’40′s (the Comics Journal crowd?) might be used to. This is basically how Haruo talks through most of volume one:

“Ah’ll call yuh iffen ah have a speck o’ trouble! Heba!!”

“Heba” as explained in a translation note on the first page, is provinicial dialect for “Hello,” “Good-bye,” “Howdy,” and “Aloha” all rolled into one. Haruo says it a lot. The Japanese title of this book is “Heba! Hello-chan,” since Haruo’s working name is “Miss Hello”.

Here’s another example of dialog from volume one:

Ken: Whoa nelly!! Lookit thet!! A Fah-rari-testa-roh-sa!! Ain’t Tokyo somethin’…? Yer’d never see one o’ them in Akita!
Haruo: Ehh…?! That thang? Don’t y’ try t’ tell me thet’s s’pose t’be cool! It’s pig-bitin’ ugly!

Yes, pig-biting. There are enough apostrophes in volume one to stretch back and forth the moon several times. My spell checker is exploding as I type this. I can only imagine what the original Japanese must have been like to inspire such colorful dialog! By volumes two and three the regional dialect is toned down, unless Haruo is talking to someone from her hometown.

“Ah ain’t got th’ tahm nor the inclination raht now for mixin’ with menfolk!”

The other barrier to reading Club 9 is a lack of cultural notes. Much of the story takes place in Ginza, in the 1980′s, in a hostess club. If you know anything about the Japanese economic bubble and have some idea of what Ginza is like and what hostesses do, it’s no problem. I suppose if you didn’t know anything about hostesses – well, neither does Haruo, and Club 9 explains it well enough, but you won’t get all of the jokes.

The finally stumbling block to enjoying Club 9 is the weird art. Backgrounds are rendered fabulously, and characters’ bodies are well-drawn, but their mouths are freakishly large and stylized. Check out Kingoro:

I don’t think that Club 9 would survive a flip-through in a bookstore by today’s typical manga fan. The fashion and hairstyles in the series are also 1980′s spectacular. I have to invent a word to describe that, like: Eightiestacular!

The story is strong enough that I think almost anyone could enjoy it – even if you don’t know anything about sports cars or baseball or Gucci or Li’l Abner. I hesitate to say this but I “laughed out loud” many times and attempted to relay the best jokes to my boyfriend. I avoided cleaning the apartment to read the volumes back to back.

Haruo is wonderfully star-struck by the manga artist she meets in the club and the guy from “the funny toilet commercials”. By volume two her sweet-hearted innocent charm has captured several men, including a national morning news anchor and a big-shot businessman who owns a baseball team or two. Things are building up for a major conflict in volume four…

…but wait, there is no volume four! The remaining chapters exist in English, in the pages of the out-of-print Super Manga Blast magazine. I haven’t read they ending yet! Crap!!! I wrote to Michael Gombos at Dark Horse, who had this to say:

“The editor of the serialized Club 9 English-language episodes in Super Manga Blast! has a great affection for that series. Although it is on hiatus now, he hopes to present the series to Dark Horse in a different format when some time has passed and the market may be open to revisiting Club 9, possibly collecting the whole story in an omnibus edition with those uncollected chapters. In the meantime — the whole story does exist in English. Please look for the later issues of Super Manga Blast! for those last episodes…”

Let’s generate some interest! The wikipedia page about Club 9 is blank! The Anime News Network encyclopedia page has no information about the plot. I think there might be a live-action drama of Club 9, but my internet surfing skills are not great when it comes to Japanese searches. Rightstuf has a page on a volume that never existed.

Here are some of my favorite scenes from the manga:

Haruo’s regular “work clothes” remind me of my own, back on the farm. She’ll learn the ropes soon enough:

And eventually, Haruo is totally made over:

Towards the end of volume 3 Haruo makes a surprise visit to favorite manga author/client:

It’s worth noting that Makoto Kobayashi is also the author What’s Michael?, which has been made into an animated series. I have never read What’s Michael?, but it was also in Super Manga Blast! and was made into an animated series.