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.
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