Do not adjust your monitors! Yes, it’s a minis column on a Tuesday and we’re back with five more reviews for you. Michelle gets things started with a review of the second and final volume of Brilliant Blue (Digital Manga Publishing); Jennifer’s good for two with her takes on Cause of My Teacher (BLU) and Crimson Shell (Yen Press); Melinda is a bit disappointed by volume eight of Nora: The Last Chronicle of Devildom (VIZ); and Sam weighs in on the final volume of O-Parts Hunter (VIZ).
By Saemi Yorita
Digital Manga Publishing, 220 pp.
Rating: Young Adult (16+)
Brilliant Blue ends as sweetly as it began, offering plenty of humor and warmth along the way. At first, Shouzo continues to fight his attraction for Nanami, resulting in some nice chapters told from Nanami’s perspective in which his confusion over the way Shouzo’s treating him is both adorable and sympathetic.
Eventually, Shouzo can’t resist any longer and takes the relationship to the next level. Unfortunately, after so much internal debate over whether it’s a wise move to make, there’s not much insight into his thoughts when he finally decides to take this step, robbing it of some impact. His haste to make the relationship a sexual one is also a little off-putting; his dissatisfaction with simply spending time together seems at odds with his interactions with Nanami up to this point.
After a positive but rather anticlimactic final chapter, a side story affords us a glimpse of the couple six months on. Shouzo is trying to get used to the residents of his small town knowing about his relationship with Nanami, and is meanwhile dealing with a suspicious-looking apprentice who is also beset by people making assumptions about him based on rumors. It’s a subtle parallel, but a rather nice way to end the story. I might wish more had been made of the stigma of the lead couple’s relationship, but I can’t really fault the series for remaining relentlessly sunny ’til the end.
Volume two of Brilliant Blue is available now.
–Reviewed by Michelle Smith
By Temari Matsumoto
Blu, 176 pp.
Rating: Mature
BL doesn’t have the best reputation, and that’s not entirely fair. There are titles out there that are heartbreaking and beautiful, ones that are side-achingly funny, and ones that are sweet and genuine. Then there are manga like Cause of My Teacher, which reinforce most of the negative stereotypes of the genre. This is an anthology of short stories, some of them more skeevy than others. As the title suggests, most of them have the theme of pairing a student and his teacher.
The first of the stories is about a boy named Tohru who develops a crush on his glasses-wearing teacher. They begin “dating,” but Tohru is concerned because his teacher takes his glasses off every time they kiss. After that one gets resolved, next is a story that shakes it up a bit. In this one, high school boy Kazunari Soma is the seme, and his teacher is this quiet man named Hajime Fukuzawa. The other students call him Hajime-chan, which strikes me as more unrealistic than anything else I see in this book… which says quite a bit. Then there are a few shorts that don’t involve teacher/student relationships—one’s about a pair of childhood friends, one is about a pair of ninja, and one about a young swordsman and his ninja retainer. Then it’s back to a story about a teacher, though the boy he ends up with isn’t one of his students. The volume is rounded out by a couple of vignettes with couples from elsewhere in the book.
Of these, I was most uncomfortable with the first story and the last original story before the vignettes. Though they are set in different time periods and universes, there is something about each relationship that seems predatory. None of the stories in this volume rises above skeevy, and in fact, most of them wallow in it. The art is full of heavy, uneven lines and high contrast, and I don’t really like it much either.
All said, there is so much better BL out there. I can’t recommend this to anyone.
Cause of My Teacher is available now.
–Reviewed by Jennifer Dunbar
By Jun Mochizuki
Yen Press, 224 pp.
Rating: Older Teen
Somewhere in the southwest of England, a lone castle sits in the middle of the wild. It’s the headquarters of an organization called Red Rose, protecting the world against beings called Black Roses. At some point in the past, a mad scientist (there’s gotta be a mad scientist!) experimented on humans, implanting them with the seed of something called the “Premier Rose.” This seed filled its victims with poison, giving them the gifts of superhuman strength, the ability to turn others to their will, control over vines that come out of their body, and utter insanity. There is only one who didn’t succumb to madness, a girl named Claudia, otherwise known as the Rose Witch. She is kept at Red Rose like a bird in a gilded cage.
The plot of Crimson Shell starts with a boy named Shion and his first day at work at Red Rose. This coincides with the return of an operative named Xeno, a young man who has a special relationship with Claudia that teeters between siblingesque and crush, and his subsequent betrayal of the organization and an attack on the compound by several Black Roses. Claudia refuses to accept that Xeno would betray her, and with a group of three teenage operatives, tries to get to the bottom of the matter.
This was Mochizuki-sensei’s first work, and it shows. The art is good, but the storytelling is abrupt and doesn’t really innovate in any way. Having said that, Crimson Shell also shows promise; I did end the volume caring about what became of Claudia and the other protagonists. I’m looking forward to reading more titles by this author.
Crimson Shell will be available in November 2009.
–Reviewed by Jennifer Dunbar
Nora: The Last Chronicle of Devildom, Vol. 8
By Kazunari Kakei
Viz, 200 pp.
Rating: T + (Older Teens)
As the battle with Fall continues, Nora’s body has been put under the control of Fall’s ally, Deuce, whom Fall later kills without a moment’s hesitation when she is overcome by the combined efforts of Nora and Kazuma, an action which shocks Nora to his core. When Fall uses his power to transport their battle into the human world, Nora’s determination not to let any more of his friends die lends him enormous power, but in the end it is his relationship with Kazuma that gives him the power he needs to fight against Fall’s efforts to absorb his power.
After two volumes of action, revelation, and fairly significant character development, this volume, which consists mainly of action without all that much of the other two, is a bit of a letdown. Granted, there are some new developments for Fall, especially in terms of his relationship with the former Cerberus, Deigree, but Nora’s big declaration, “I’ll win ’cause I’ve got something worth fighting for!!!” seems anticlimactic now that his awareness of the importance of friends is a couple of volumes old. The relationship between Nora and Kazuma is still the most compelling thing about the series and there are definitely advancements made here, but they are a bit lost in the din of battle.
What would have been a pretty exciting volume earlier on in the series fails to quite live up to the new heights reached in the last two volumes, but the conclusion to this storyline is still quite satisfying in the end. Whether Kakai can continue to build on the series’ new strength from this point forward remains to be seen.
Volume eight of Nora: The Last Chronicle of Devildom will be available on December 1, 2009.
–Reviewed by Melinda Beasi
By Seishi Kishimoto
Viz, 192 pp.
Rating: Older Teen (16+)
Another series that I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing here on Manga Recon ends on its nineteenth volume, making O-Parts Hunter a medium-sized but still very engrossing tale. The volume opens with our haphazard team—comprised of O-Parts Technicians, angels, devils, two talking dogs and a pickle-loving swordsman—at the bottom of the belly of a whale, finally facing the head officer of Zenom. Ruby, our intrepid heroine and resident angel, is shocked to find that Zenom’s leader is none other than her long-lost father. Due to his infusion with a pair of devils, he has promptly forgotten his past and, ultimately, his daughter. A fight escalates between Zenom, Satan (our hero, Jio, whom everyone is after) and Amaterasu Miko, a woman bent on world domination and immortality. The series ends in a rather existential way, focusing on the importance of individuality and friendship.
I still really like this book artistically (almost more than Seishi Kishimoto’s brother’s Naruto). The end is certainly a step-up from the rest of the series, providing the most detail we’ve ever seen. You can tell that Seishi really put his heart into the pen. As for the writing, there were a few “huh?” moments for me. I think that as the story progressed, there were too many issues concerning the characters (Ruby’s daddy issues, Cross’s dead sister baggage, et cetera). I understand wanting to come full circle with the story but at times, they really distracted me as a reader from the overall message. It would’ve been nice to see them solve their issues earlier on. Either way, I would recommend this series on a whole; I think it’s a creative step from traditional shonen and it’s a good great laugh factor. In short, go buy it.
Volume nineteen of O-Parts Hunter will be available on December 8, 2009.
–Reviewed by Sam Kusek
Review copies provided by the publishers.
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