Taking a page from the KRAFT™ playbook, I’m offering a new “product” for Manga Recon readers: manga minis! Sure, they’re lower in fat, carbs, and calories, but they have the same great taste that you’ve come to expect from regular size reviews. I’ll be posting a fresh batch of minis on the last day of every month. Each batch will contain a mixture of new titles, reissues, and later volumes of previously reviewed series, as well as the occasional old-school title that’s worth the extra effort to find.

In the Starlight, Vol. 1

By Kyungok Kang
NETCOMICS, 224 pp.
Rating: All Ages

If you’re a fan of Keiko Takemiya or Moto Hagio, I encourage you to seek out Kyungok Kang’s In the Starlight. This Korean series is a bit more recent than To Terra or A, A’, but its aesthetic and shojo-esque approach to science fiction will remind readers of the Magnificent 49ers’ best space operas.

Kang’s story focuses on Shinhae, a high school student with a keen interest in science. Sensing that Shinhae is a curious, open-minded soul, her classmate Donghoon asks her if she’d be willing to house Sarah, a Korean-American exchange student. The catch: Sarah has ESP. But not just run-of-the-mill, hear-what-your-friend-is-thinking ESP—Sarah can actually harm other people with her thoughts. Undeterred, Shinhae welcomes Sarah and Radion, Sarah’s telepathic bodyguard, into her home. As if the introduction of Sarah and Radion wasn’t enough to hold our interest, Kang adds another wrinkle to her story when a UFO crashes in Shinhae’s neighborhood. Do Sarah and her sixth sense have something to do with the visitors’ arrival? You probably don’t need a Magic 8 Ball to arrive at the answer.

While its plotline feels like an amalgam of Medium, Never Been Kissed, and The Thing from Another World, In the Starlight offers many pleasant surprises for the reader. Shinhae is an appealing character, not least because she demonstrates genuine intellectual curiosity—a rare trait in shojo heroines. I also found her rocky relationship with Sarah compelling and plausible. Their petty squabbles, unspoken romantic rivalry, and intense bonding through confessional conversation reminded me of my own adolescent friendships. I admit, however, that my favorite part of Starlight was its retro look. Given the decade in which it was first published, it’s no surprise that the male aliens look like refugees from an intergalactic hair metal band. (The otherworldly visitors sport fabulous hair, ridiculously tight pants, and artfully tied headbands.) But don’t let the big hair and androgynously beautiful men fool you: In the Starlight offers readers classic sci-fi thrills as well as earnest—but honest—teen drama.

Volume two will arrive in stores in May. Volumes one and two are also available online through NET Comics’ pay-per-view system.

Kurogane, Vol. 3

By Kei Tome
Del Rey, 272 pp.
Rating: 13+

Volume 3 of this criminally underappreciated series follows the same basic template as the first two: Jintetsu, our favorite Frankensamurai, wanders the countryside, coming to the aid of (or into conflict with) an assortment of characters. In volume two, Jintetsu’s adventures had a slight whiff of been-there, seen-that-on-Samurai Champloo, as he encountered a beautiful blind performer and Makoto, a fierce, cross-dressing girl doing her best to pass as a boy. The first chapter of volume three is of a piece with volume two, as Jintetsu crosses paths with a creepy dollmaker in a remote mountainous region. But before Kurogane devolves into just another supernatural thriller, Toume takes the narrative in a new direction. In a complex, four-chapter story arc, we learn that Jintetsu and Makoto’s previous encounter wasn’t simple coincidence—the two have a tangled history that pits them against each other in a bitter yakuza dispute. Yet their rivalry is tempered by honor and grudging mutual respect—this is, after all, a period piece, despite the mecha elements—that compels them to protect and assist one another. Yes, we’ve seen the “I’m gonna save you so I can kill you later!” schtick before. But like so many other recycled elements in Kurogane, the gambit feels fresh and plausible in Kei Toume’s capable hands. I can’t wait to read volume 4.

Volume 4 arrived in stores on March 27th. Click here to read the PCS review of volume 2.

Trinity Blood, Vol. 2

Story by Sunao Yoshida; Art by Kiyo Kyujyo
Tokyopop, 168 pp.
Rating: Older Teen (16+)

Volume two of Trinity Blood offers more gloriously silly supernatural smackdowns—including confrontations between Our Vatican Gang and blood-thirtsy trees, mersharks, and vampires—as well as slapstick galore. The layout is, at times, fiendishly difficult to follow, a problem compounded by Kiyo Kyujyo’s decision to cram every panel with an extra helping of dialogue and detail. (I’m beginning to think he studied with my fourth grade art teacher, Ms. Schill, who insisted that real art covers every square inch of the canvas.) The pacing, too, is hectic. Characters chibi-fy with clockwork precision—once every three pages, or so it seems—and 50% of the dialogue seems to be spoken AT 70 DECIBELS OR LOUDER. Still, I’m hooked, so I’ll be shelling out the clams for volume 3 in the hopes that we’ll see more of the robotic Father Tres and coolly calculating Cardinal Caterina and less of the shrill, ditzy Esther.

Volume 3 arrives in stores on July 10th. Click here to read the PCS review of volume one.

Yukiko’s Spinach

By Frederic Boilet
Fanfare/Ponet Mon, 144 pages
Rating: Mature (18+)

One of my perennial gripes about comics—and by comics, I also include manga and manwha—is the way in which women are drawn, from the watermelon-shaped breasts to the barely-there outfits found on characters as different as Supergirl and Orihime Inoue. So it was refreshing to see a beautiful but normal female body, imperfections and all, gracing the pages of Yukiko’s Spinach. If only the book was more than just a highbrow validation of the male gaze!

The story itself is paper-thin: a French manga-ka meets a young Japanese woman, becomes infatuated with her, and makes her the subject of his comic-in-progress. He ruminates about Yukiko’s shoulders and tummy and face, draws intimate pictures of their time together, and waxes poetic about her subtle physical imperfections (i.e. a birthmark on her forehead). All of these ruminations might be tolerable—even poetic—if the artist’s obsession with Yukiko wasn’t utterly superficial. Yet we never learn why the artist has fixated on her. Is she intelligent? Interesting? Funny? Employed? And if she’s such a singular presence, why does the artist cheerfully accept a look-alike to be her replacement muse? None of these questions are addressed; instead, Boilet offers us lovely but empty experiments in visual storytelling (hello, time-bending narrative devices!) that only underscore the shallowness of his conceit.

The bottom line: if you loved The Double Life of Veronique, Yukiko’s Spinach might be your kind of manga. If that movie struck you as a stylish but silly excuse to film Irene Jacob in various states of undress, skip Yukiko and buy one of Fanfare’s first-rate titles—The Times of Botchan, The Building Opposite, The Walking Man, Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators—instead.

Yukiko’s Spinach was originally published in 2003; this review examines the second edition, which was released on March 7th.