Welcome to our first batch of new manga reviews courtesy of Erin Finnegan, aka the Ninja Consultant). In an attempt to help everyone keep track of overwhelming amounts of good and evil manga out there, she'll be doing reconnaissance and filing her reports on a bi-weekly basis (or thereabouts!), so keep your eyes peeled.

Who Would Like This Book: Anyone with a beating heart.
Who Would Hate It: The Grinch.

Are you breathing? Then you should read Love Roma. I was going to begin with "Are you a jaded hipster you turns up your nose at manga?" or "Are you an American comic book artist who loves indy comics but is skeptical about manga?" However, upon further consideration I've decided that I would recommend Love Roma to anyone who isn't legally blind and is reasonably literate.

I first heard of Love Roma from a Del Ray representative who said that it is one of CLAMP's favorite titles. Having read the first volume, I am thoroughly puzzled, as Love Roma is the opposite of nearly everything CLAMP has ever done. Or, more precisely, Love Roma is the opposite of "Love Hina". The protagonist, Hoshino, asks out his love interest Negishi on the first panel of the first page. (Whereas this same act takes at least 4 volumes of "Love Hina".) Negishi doesn't punch him in the face or call him a pervert like Naru, nor does she offer to be his wife on page three. Negishi agrees to go out with Hoshino, even though she doesn't remember his name at first. They proceed to date in a very realistic junior high way.

Love Roma lacks so many of the standard annoyances of normal manga. The characters do not have big doe-eyes, there are no bishounen, nor any harems of beautiful girls. There are no love triangles, no magical girls, no demons, no vampires, and no cute mascots. If it weren't for the school uniforms and the bento boxes, you might think that Love Roma was an American indy comic - or a throwback from when indy comics seemed so much more promising.

I encourage anyone who thinks that all manga looks the same to pick up this book. I strongly encourage aspiring comic artists to pick up this book because the artwork is inspiring to anyone who thinks they can't draw. This isn't a poorly drawn book, but it is drawn in a neat and simple way which isn't intimidating to other artists. The author's notes are also highly encouraging. Instead of giving the impression that he breezed through the book, Minoru Toyoda writes that he really struggled to create the comic.

Love Roma is a simple tale of romance told with simple art. It is never sappy or overly sentimental. Flower petals do not shower onto kissing characters. Instead, it's a love story told with a good sense of humor. The age rating on the back says 16+ because there's a condom in the first chapter (as a joke), however, this is a book that anyone from ages 10 to 85 would love.

 

Who Would Like This Book: Aspiring yaoi doujin artists.
Who Would Hate It: Everyone else.

I picked up Pieces of a Spiral because I thought it was something else. Pieces of a Spiral is not, in fact, "Spiral Suiri no Kizuna", the latter of which is the story about "Blade Children" which has been adapted into an anime series.

Instead, Pieces of a Spiral is the confusing tale of two identical strangers, Kazuki and Makoto, who used to study under the same mystical teacher in a past life. Now, reincarnated in modern Japan, Kazuki and Makoto must fight an evil demon who also troubled them in ancient Japan. This time, the demon posses their cute greenhouse-tending friend.

Sound confusing? It certainly is! The story is so muddled in the early chapters that apparently the editors stepped in and started providing more story summaries and character profiles in later chapters. The skimpy backgrounds, identical protagonists, and flashbacks to ancient Japan really don't help one's understanding of the plot. When one does grasp what's going on, it's disappointedly generic. It turns out the story is a very dull Inu-Yasha rip-off with no girls and fewer half-demon dog-men.

Instead of reading this manga, I'd much rather read doujinshi by a fan of this comic. At least in the doujinshi, the cute boys might make out. As it is, they just stand around wielding their incredibly powerful yet boring psychic powers.

I wouldn't recommend this book to non-manga-fans, as they will only complain about the same things that they think are "wrong" with all manga - the characters look alike, the boys look like girls, their eyes are too big, the plot makes no sense, etc. Pieces of a Spiral will poison the minds of skeptical hipsters against manga.

I can't picture the sort of person I'd recommend this book to. In fact, I was left wondering exactly what sort of person would want to read this book.

 

Who Would Like This Book: Girls who read manga. Perhaps metrosexual guys?
Who Would Hate It: Heterosexual guys (unless they have a great sense of humor).

Ouran High School Host Club is terrific, but I wouldn't recommend it to beginner manga fans who are not yet steeped in the details of Japanese culture. There are absolutely no translator's notes in the book, where I think many are needed. To begin with, what's a host club?

I found out about hostess clubs by reading "Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation" by Karl T. Greenfield. Hostess clubs may have died out by the late 1990's, but for a time they were trendy nightclubs where rich businessmen would pay big money just to have pretty women talk to them in semi-private booths. These businessmen would buy the hostesses expensive gifts, like jewelry and designer purses, all for the slight possibility that there might be sexual favors involved later.

According to this TIME Asia article, by 2002 host clubs were all the rage, and somewhat classier. Rich women would pay big money to talk to hot young men. Ouran High School Host Club is the high school equivalent thereof - idle rich girls at a private academy hang out with the host club's hot young men in an ornate, unused library. They're not looking for sexual favors later, but they might want a date.

The protagonist, Haruhi (Haru for short), stumbles unknowingly into the club, breaks an $80,000 vase, is mistaken for being a hot guy herself, and is forced to work as a host to pay back her debt. At least one character is surprised to discover that Haru is actually a frumpy girl and not a guy - as a scholarship student she simply couldn't afford the school's fancy uniforms.

Much of the humor of the book is derived from fact that Haru is middle class while the boys are upper class. They've never had instant coffee or instant ramen! Haru has never had fatty tuna! The rest of the humor stems from Haru's calmness as she is surrounded by metrosexual prettyboy dramaqueens, many of whom need their egos stroked continually. Haru becomes the calm in the middle of the host club maelstrom.

The art in this book is quite good. The manga-ka has not cut corners with backgrounds. There aren't many giant splash panels, or blank panels with floating text. The pages are busy-looking throughout, to the point where sometimes it's a little hard to tell what's going on.

The characters are all very attractive looking, and are usually easy to tell apart. I was a little surprised to find in the character profiles at the end that Kyoya and Takashi (both brunettes) were not the same person!

Despite the large cast of adorable boys, this is not a harem romance. It's pretty obvious that Haru is going to end up with Tamaki from the outset, if not from the cover art. That said, I don't really look forward to Haru's inevitable romance with Tamaki - even if he really cares for her, he doesn't seem like the type of guy Haru would want to date.

What appeals to me most about Ouran High School Host Club is Haru's lack of feminity. Haru isn't disguised as a boy (like in "Hana-Kimi") nor is she actively un-girly (as in The Wallflower). Instead she's just kind of lazy. She cut off her long girly hair because someone threw gum in it. She wears her dad's bulky sweaters because she feels like it. I can see a lot of myself in Haru.

I would recommend this book to seasoned manga readers, although I would hesitate to recommend it to heterosexual guys. It's really funny and I plan to buy the whole series, but it isn't a "general audiences" kind of funny.

 

Who Would Like This Book: Anyone who likes sexy violence.
Who Would Hate It: The easily offended, parents, grandparents.

Tons of controversy surrounds Tenjho Tenge being censored and edited by CMX. You can read all about it in the Comics Journal and on the rest of the internet. Meanwhile, I have watched the first DVD of the Tenjho Tenge anime series and read volume 3 of the manga. I wouldn't recommend starting with volume 3 like I did. It's a bit confusing.

I was surprised how much cuter the characters are in the manga compared to the anime. Keep in mind when I say "cute" I mean it in the context that Natsume is surprisingly adorable as she smashes every bone in that guy's arm! The trouble with many shounen titles is that the characters - including the girls - are ridiculously masculine looking, and the girls are just plain ugly (like in "Baki the Grappler" or "Air Master"). Tenjho Tenge serves up a platter of bone-crunching fight scenes with attractive girls and relatively good-looking guys (who won't make anyone question their sexuality).

The art is high quality. It's not artsy like "Blade of Immortal" - if manga were movies "Blade of the Immortal" might be more like "Kill Bill" and Tenjho Tenge is any action-packed summer blockbuster, like "Independence Day" except infinitely cooler (although less scientifically feasible). There are plenty of splash pages and large, well-rendered panels that make the book a fast read. For example, page 90 has only two panels, three characters therein, and only one line of text as a character says "Hmmm..." That's both a good thing and a bad thing. When the characters do talk a bit more, it's usually to describe a fighting technique in detail or to explain how they became a brawler.

Granted, that's pretty typical shounen fare, where characters must constantly reiterate why they must fight and exactly what there is to fight for, and where sometimes a move is so cool that other nearby characters must narrate to you the audience exactly why that particular fighting technique is so difficult and so deadly.

In the end, the real question for me was not how much or how little CMX censored out, but how embarrassed I was to read this on the subway. I've heard that in Tokyo people read hentai on the trains, but reading any comic book at all on New York City transit is a rarity that usually attracts the attention of curious commuters nearby. As character after (female) character had her clothes ripped off or shredded by ki or samurai swords or whathaveyou, I would shift my bookmark just in case someone was glancing over my shoulder. There's one character in this volume - the head of the Executive Committee - who wears some kind of leather bondage suit as his costume. He looks like Goku gone super saiyan. I'm a little worried a small child might look over my shoulder and say, "Mommy, why is Goku wearing leather?"

My main complaint about Tenjho Tenge isn't the censorship or the pointy breasts or the Hollywood plot. It's the mixed bag of sound effects translations. Some of the sound effects are totally replaced with their English translations, but others have been translated with the English in smaller letters off to one side (which is how I like it). It seems like I ran across one or two effects that were left totally untranslated. I found this really annoying, since most publishing companies either totally replace the sound effects with English (Shojo Beat titles) or translate them to one side (Del Ray) or don't bother translating them at all (Tokyopop). Why would CMX inconsistently do all three things? It looks like Pieces of a Spiral is also unevenly translated, but there are far fewer sound effects, so it's less noticeable.

If you've been reading Tenjho Tenge all along, you probably won't want to miss volume 3, since most of it takes place during the middle of a school wide rumble. It seems to pick up at the end of one fight and leave off at the start of another fight. If you're already a fan of the series, I'm sure it's more of the same.

Tenjho Tenge isn't really my thing, but it is certainly entertaining. It's kind of like the Guns & Roses of manga. In fact, there's a guy in this volume who dresses like Axl Rose. I'd recommend Tenjho Tenge to guys, fans of shounen, and anyone who might re-read Natsume's character in a positive light for feminists (probably not an impossible task, but not an easy one either). If you don't want to support CMX's cutting the book to shreds buy a used copy, or borrow it from a friend. It only takes half an hour to read.

 

Volume 1 :
Volume 2 :

Who Would Like This Book: Shy girls who like horror movies. Fangirls. Most of my friends.
Who Would Hate It: Macho shounen fans.

The first two volumes of The Wallflower were forced into my hands by a Del Ray employee at a manga event. "You'll love it!" he claimed, but I wasn't so sure. Based on the premise alone, this series should be horrible. Based on the cover art and the blurb on the back cover, the first two volumes sat on my shelf for a few months unread.

I was totally wrong and that Del Ray guy was totally right - I love this series. It's about Sunako Nakahara, who lives alone in her aunt's mansion pursuing her favorite pasttimes - sitting in the dark and watching horror movies. Her only friends are a plastic skeleton and an anatomical dummy (named Hiroshi-kun). This is Sunako's perfect life.

Sunako's life is ruined when her aunt allows four super-hot high school students to live the mansion for free on the one condition that they make-over Sunako into a real lady. Fortunately, the plot doesn't go as smoothly as "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy". If it did, I would hate this series as much as I hate that show. Instead, Sunako is largely successful in her attempts at dodging reform. She only cuts her vision-obscuring bangs in the direst of emergencies, and by the beginning of volume 2 she's wearing a hat to cover her eyes.

Don't get me wrong - Sunako does get made-over in volume 1, and when she does it's one hell of a splash-page. Fortunately, two pages later, she's back to her usual self.

The art in this series varies a lot. The hot guys are always drawn hotly, but Sunako is often a very flat cartoonish caricature of herself. The panel layout can get weird at times, and occasionally the artist seems to cut corners when it comes to drawing backgrounds. Overall, I think the lack of background art is made up for by the level of comedy.

I can't stress enough how funny The Wallflower is. Sunako is regularly mistaken for a ghost. Every time she comes into close contact with her hot housemates her nose bleeds profusely, hitting the guys in the face as Sunako passes out from blood loss. The guys are continually confronted by squealing girls and solicited by host club owners (see the Ouran High School Host Club review).

That said, volume 2 is a little disappointing. After the phenomenal volume 1, which I will loan to all my friends (or at least my friends who are girls) volume 2 is filled with standard anime/manga cliche plots. There's a Christmas story, a New Years adventure, and a hot springs adventure. The manga-ka specifically states in her author's notes that she couldn't wait to do a hot springs story. Maybe it makes more sense if you're Japanese and you understnad all the hot springs in-jokes, but this kind of cliched storyline will bore more seasoned American fans of anime.

There are still remarkably funny bits in volume 2, and an insightful mini-comic at the end about the author going to a rock concert and acting like a groupie. I had a assumed that the author identified with Sunako, but I guess she's not a shy person after all.

It's definitely worth picking up volume 1 of The Wallflower but whether you should keep buying the entire series remains to be seen. I will certainly keep reading it and tell you about it on Buzzscope.