Boy Princess, Vol. 1

By Seyong Kim
NETCOMICS

Who Would Like This Book: Yaoi fans? Shounen-ai fans? I’m not exactly sure. Am I a yaoi fan? This book didn’t lead me to any strong conclusions about my yaoi fandom one way or another.

Who Would Hate It: People not interested in yaoi.

Boy Princess, not to be confused with Princess Prince or Princess Princess, is a Korean manhua shounen-ai title being released in North America by Netcomics. There’s no real nudity, and the age rating is an appropriate 13+.

In the first few pages, the story hits the ground running. Prince Nicole is the youngest son in a small medevil kingdom of some unspecified European-looking country. Nicole’s sister has run away instead of being married to a neighboring country’s prince in a political marriage. Nicole is forced to cross-dress and take his sister’s place. And all of this happens in the first three or four pages. Prince Nicole finds himself married and living as a woman in another kingdom before chapter one is half-way over. Fortunately it doesn’t turn into some kind of Madame Butterfly affair; the prince realizes almost immediately that Nicole is a guy. Instead of divorcing or killing Nicole, Prince Jed, decides to let him continue living in his kingdom as his wife.

If this were Shakespeare, a chick would fall for cross-dressing Nicole and he would be unable to return her affections until the end of the play. Shakespeare would also throw in some twins, some more cross dressing, and maybe a sea monster. But this isn’t Shakespeare, it’s yaoi. So it’s no surprise when Nicole starts to fall for Jed. They kiss a few times during the course of the volume one, but there’s always some bizarre set-up for it, like the kiss is the prize in a kingdom-wide tournament, or Jed’s men are bugging him to kiss the princess. So although Nicole and Jed have feelings for each other, none of their kisses ever really “count,” and they can’t seem to tell each other how they really feel.

Meanwhile, Prince Nicole must adjust to palace life as a chick. While Jed is out defending the realm Princess Nicole must deal with the drama of intrigue of castle politics – or in other words, he has to put up with bitchy female relatives being snarky to him. Apparently Nicole is considered lower than dirt in the royal family until (s)he can produce an heir to the crown. This is the most interesting part of the book, in my opinion. But Nicole doesn’t want to deal with this kind of female nonsense and royal court intrigue, so he goes to hang out with Prince Jed and his soldiers in the woods instead.

This isn’t exactly yaoi, it’s shounen-ai, or boy’s love. Ultimately I suppose the question is: Is it sexy? At this point, I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer that question. I preferred the more explicit Brother, which is actual yaoi. Boy Princess is funny enough and kind of sweet, and that might be the point of shounen-ai, a genre which I am not terribly familiar with.

The art is really interesting – the characters are drawn in bizarre proportions. Something about the length of their necks just isn’t right. The profile views are sometimes really freaky looking. Anatomy aside, many of the textures and costumes are really incredible. I often paused in my reading to look at the detailed tones and textures. There were enough backgrounds to suit my tastes, and the characters’ hair was all very long and detailed. The art is different, but I wouldn’t call it “hot”.

The characters’ names are kind of odd. “Jed” seems like a redneck name from an American point of view, and not so much a prince’s name. I suppose “Nicole” is gender-neutral, but mostly I’ve only met girls named Nicole, and I suppose that’s appropriate for this book, all things considered.

Overall I don’t have many complaints about Boy Princess. It’s alright, and it’s the first Korean yaoi/shounen-ai/whatever I’ve read, so it was interesting from that perspective. The story didn’t knock me out, and some of the characterizations could’ve been better. I might take a chance and read volume two.

Enchanter, Vol. 1

By Izumi Kawachi
Digital Manga Publishing

Who Would Like This Book: 13-15 year old boys, for whom ecchi is not (yet) a cliche.

Who Would Hate It: I didn’t haaaaaate this it, but I read it for free. If you paid the full cover price you might feel ripped off. $13 is a bit much for this generic tale of wizards…

Digital Manga was nice enough to rush me an advance copy of Enchanter with a note attached saying “Finally, a title that’s not yaoi!” I had to laugh – 90% of the books DMP have sent me so far have been yaoi, or at least “boy’s love”.

Enchanter is presented like the rest of DMP’s titles – they’re just a little bigger than the rest of your manga so they won’t fit on your shelves if you specifically sized-out your bookshelf to fit Viz and Tokyopop releases. Enchanter comes with a nice dust jack like Japanese books do, but is the dust jacket worth the extra $2 for the cover price? The printing is really nice, on quality paper. The sound effects are translated off to one side the way I like it. Overall, it’s an excellent presentation of a mediocre book.

Enchanter is the story of Haruhiko, a hapless high school student who’s in love with his teacher Yuka. Yuka also happens to be Haruhiko’s childhood friend and next-door-neighbor. She’s only four or five years older than Haruhiko, and perhaps more importantly she is both shy and totally hot.

Enter the demon who looks identical to Yuka, and goes by the name of Eurakanaria. Unlike Yuka, Eurakanaria has demon wings, wears a miniskirt, and has absolutely no shame. Eurakanaria breaks through some dimension wall and starts hanging out with Haruhiko because it turns out he’s identical to Fulcanelli, a very powerful enchanter who has lost his body and exists only as a soul contained in a jewel that Eurakanaria wears.

Eurakanaria wants to put Fulcanelli’s soul into Haruhiko’s body, and this makes up the main conflict of the manga. Naturally, there are demons who are out to get Fulcanelli, or maybe just eat his soul. And as luck would have it, if Haruhiko uses Fulcanelli’s “spirit energy” he can defeat the demons plaguing his school using something that looks like a light saber. It’s all very Bleach-like.

There are only two remarkable aspects of Enchanter; first, it’s pretty ecchi. Eurakanaria is often shaded in such a way that her leather shorts are so reflective that it looks as if she’s not wearing pants. Yuka’s bra is revealed during a demon fight seen in an erotic way. Characters randomly get water dumped on them for what must be a wet T-shirt contest in which you, the reader, are the judge.

Second, demons can only be hurt with magic weapons. This might be a standard manga thing, but it reminds me of the game of Dungeons and Dragons that I play with my friends. We often run into powerful enemies that can only be hurt with magic weapons, and it’s really annoying, because magic weapons are hard to come by in our campaign. My characters have had to sit out of many fights for lack of a magic weapon. Since Enchanter takes place in the real world, the lack of magical weapons is a problem, at least in the first volume.

In the second half Eurakanaria and Haruhiko meet an enchanter who is only a skeleton. He’s a pretty funny character – and a physician – but that’s not really enough to save an otherwise generic story.

Overall, Enchanter is well-drawn enough, but the plot is filled with cliches. The ecchi aspects only annoyed me. It’s rated 16+, but I think it’s too immature of a book for most 16-year-olds to enjoy. Even though it’s totally inappropriate (maybe because it’s totally inappropriate) I’d say that 13-15 year olds might get the most enjoyment out of Enchanter.

Life, Vol. 1

By Keiko Suenbu
Tokyopop

Who Would Like This Book: Mostly girls who like drama.

Who Would Hate It: If you’re not interested in melodrama, and only want to read light-hearted stuff, stay far away from this one.

I first heard about Life at the New York Comic Con, where someone high-up on Tokyopop’s staff described what it was about, and how when she heard they aquired the title, she sat down and read the first one – and immediately had to read the next four volumes. (I’m assuming she was reading them in Japanese.) Life is just that gripping of a story – I wish I could read the next four volumes as quickly!

Life is about cutters. Cutters, as described by the clinical psychologist who wrote the afterward, are people who cut themselves because they can’t control other kinds of pain in their life, and they don’t have any other coping strategies. Cutters are not suicidal, but they can injure themselves very badly at times if they cut too deep. They usually cut their arms and legs, and wear long sleeves and pants to cover up their habit.

Life is the story Ayumu, who becomes a cutter over the course of volume one. Ayumu is a junior high student who doesn’t have any friends at all beside her best friend Shii-chan. Shii-chan is a top student in their class, but Ayumu is kind of an idiot. When Ayumu learns that Shii-chan is going to try to get into an elite high school, Ayumu is terrified that she’ll be left alone and friendless in high school. So Ayumu decides to study hard and aim to get into the same high school as Shii-chan.

While studying late into the night Ayumu hears a story on the radio about an exam student stabbing herself with a mechanical pencil in order to stay awake. Ayumu gives it a try, but the mechanical pencil does nothing for her. She stabs herself with something sharper – and although it’s painful and terrifying, it wakes her up enough to keep studying all night long.

Soon Ayumu’s grades get better and better. So much so that she starts to pass Shii-chan. Then the worst thing possible happens; Ayumu manages to get into Shii-chan’s high school of choice, but Shii-chan fails the exam.

Even worse, Shii-chan takes it really hard. She blames Ayumu for her failure. If Shii-chan didn’t have to help Ayumu study, maybe she could have done better. Shii-chan and Ayumu have a heart-wrenching best friend break-up. Ayumu can’t deal with the pain of losing Shii-chan and going to high school alone, so she starts cutting herself even more.

Perhaps what’s most gut-wrenching about this friend break-up is that it’s obvious that Shii-chan wasn’t being a true friend to Ayumu. If she was really Ayumu’s friend she might’ve been angry when Ayumu started getting better grades, but she would’ve gotten over it if she honestly loved Ayumu as a person. It’s obvious from the way the story is told that Ayumu just doesn’t have any other friends, and Shii-chan, by default, is her best friend.

Things get worse as Ayumu enters her new school and makes friends Manami, a crazy chick who starts manipulating Ayumu right from the start. It’s obvious that Manami isn’t a true friend to Ayumu either, but Ayumu is too depressed to interact with the other students and too easily manipulated by Manami to know better.

It’s hard to describe Life in the equivalent of American storytelling. Life doesn’t play out like an after-school special or “a very special episode of Blossom”. The next-closest manga equivalent that I’ve read is Confidential Confessions, but those seemed more like after-school-special morality tales, where the kid doing drugs is obviously in the wrong and you should clearly Go To A Parent, Teacher, or Another Trusted Adult To Help Your Sick Friend. There is no such moral in Life. The plot simply forges ahead, at times melodramatically. Only Tokyopop’s provided epilogue tells you how to find help if you or someone you you know is a cutter. They provide a few links to look up for further reading.

On one hand I kind of respect that there is no obvious moral to the book. The reader is presented with Ayumu’s problems in a sympathetic and straight-forward way. There are no easy answers to Ayumu’s pain, and it’s heartbreaking to read. It’s also really gross when there’s a gory close-up of Ayumu cutting or stabbing herself. Unlike in normal manga when a demon gets cut in half or whathaveyou, you feel Ayumu’s pain. And Ayumu is no emo kid like Shinji from Evangelion – it’s obvious Ayumu would be a cheerful girl if her life didn’t suck (one can’t say the same for Shinji).

Life is a fast-paced, horrifying, gut-wrenching read. It’s fairly short and you can get through it all in one sitting. I’ll read volume two for sure – but it’s up to volume 12 in Japan. How can Ayumu keep cutting herself for 12 volumes? Does she meet a new screwed-up best friend in each volume? Maybe she should date that kid from Loveless…

Here’s a comic I drew of myself reading Life volume 1:

Pretty Maniacs, Vol. 1

By Shinsuke Kurihashi
DrMaster

Who Would Like This Book: Mostly me, but I might be a very small demographic.

Who Would Hate It: If you’re looking for a lot of realistic depictions of female manga fans, you’re not going to find them here.

Pretty Maniacs is the sequel to Maniac Road, which I’ve never read. It’s less of a sequel than it is a spin-off, so I didn’t feel lost after the first few pages. Pretty Maniacs is the story of Shinano, the little sister from Maniac Road. As Pretty Maniacs opens she inherits her school’s manga club. At first she’s thrilled when she’s informed that she will be the new president of the manga club, but she is perhaps less thrilled to find that she is the sole member of manga club.

She might not look like it from the outside, but Shinano is an otaku through and through. She knows more than she should for a high school freshman about old mech anime series and manga. The beautiful Otowa is introduced early on as a rival and more reluctant female otaku. Otowa and Shinano disagree on favorite mech series and favorite robots. They have a falling out and Shinano fails to recruit Otowa into the manga club.

Part-way through the book the school decides to cancel clubs that don’t do anything and clubs with too few members. The manga club is going to get the ax. Desperate to do something to save her club, Shinano decides to produce an amateur comic (doujinshi). The only trouble is that she can’t draw…

Enter Tateshi, an Art Club drop-out who’s secret desire is to draw manga!

By the end of the Pretty Maniacs volume 1 Shinano has recruited more members to the manga club and they’re off to sell their doujin at ComiFest. Sure, it’s a plot we’ve seen before in Comic Party and Genshiken, but it’s a plot I’m not tired of yet, and this is a newish spin on it. The manga club of Pretty Maniacs consists entirely of high school girls who don’t really know what they are getting themselves into.

And therein lies the weirdness of Pretty Maniacs. All of the girls in manga club, but particularly Shinano and Otowa are really cute. To the point that it’s kind of ridiculous. Usually no one that good-looking is a hardcore otaku. For more of a realistic look at what girl manga fans might look like, check out High School Girls volume five. It’s a cute fantasy on the part of the author that adorable high school girls might be selling their adorable first comic at ComiFest, but the reality of the nerds in attendance is much closer to Genshiken. I’ve seen pictures.

I really enjoyed the art of Pretty Maniacs. There’s something about the way that the book is inked that is visually intriguing. There isn’t too much tone. There’s something about the way the hair is drawn that’s different from most manga and it comes as a refreshing change of style. The panels are laid out in a very squared-off way, more like an American indy comic, although not to the extreme of Love Roma. I’m almost tempted to say that Pretty Maniacs looks like it might be some kind of doujin, or it’s by an author who started off drawing doujinshi, but I don’t really know enough to be able to say that definitively.

Like many DrMaster books, Pretty Maniacs is a little smaller than average manga size. The cover price is $10. The sound effects are translated just off to one side similar to how Del Ray does it. The paper quality is a little crappy, but not as crappy as the $8 Viz releases.

What really carried me through this story was the energy of all of the characters – particularly Shinano’s spasticness. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, and I’ll probably check out volume two and read Maniac Road as well, if only because I like the author’s unique visual style.