Quite by accident, today’s column has turned out to be mostly comprised of offerings from Digital Manga Publishing. Michelle starts things off with a look at How to Capture a Martini and also checks out the fourth volume of ZE. Melinda’s up next with Kiss Your Hair, followed by Connie who reviews the second volume of Kurashina Sensei’s Passion. Though it isn’t BL, Vampire Hunter D, the fourth volume of which is covered here by Ken, is still a DMP title. Providing the sole VIZ content this week, Sam sings the praises of some pivotal volumes of One Piece—35 and 36—and does it without spoilers!

How to Capture a Martini

By Makoto Tateno
Digital Manga Publishing, 190 pp.
Rating: Mature (18+)

As a first year in high school, Naoyuki Hibino experienced his first love, first kiss, and first sexual experience with an upperclassman named Shinobu Okada. When Shinobu abruptly disappeared after his graduation, Naoyuki was crushed but did his best to forget him. Four years have passed since that time, but when Naoyuki happens to run into Okada, who’s working as a bartender, all of his old feelings return with a vengeance.

Shinobu doesn’t seem to care about anything anymore, whether it’s his body—he’s willing to “do” just about anyone—or his career, even though his boss and more experienced coworker encourage him frequently to expand his cocktail-making horizons. Earnest Naoyuki can’t accept this attitude, and keeps pouring his concern and love onto Shinobu until the latter finally admits his reasons for keeping his distance.

While this kind of story and couple isn’t exactly groundbreaking—there are shades of Future Lovers in the humor and characterization—it makes for an engaging romance nonetheless. Naoyuki and Shinobu are both likably flawed, and the cast of supporting characters helps move the story along, though I could’ve done without Shinobu’s boss and his incestuous relationship with his teenage brother.

In the end, How to Capture a Martini is a lot of fun and pretty darn adorable. I’m looking forward to the sequel, How to Control a Sidecar, which is due later this spring.

How to Capture a Martini is available now.

–Reviewed by Michelle Smith

Kiss Your Hair

By Duo Brand
DMP, 177 pp.
Rating: M (18+)

A long-haired gardener provides special services to his employer but finds himself falling for the butler instead. A teenage houseboy (drawn too young for this reviewer’s comfort) catches his master in a compromising position with the head servant. An artist falls in love with his model and feels unable to sufficiently express his beauty through painting. These stories and more make up the anthology Kiss Your Hair, the latest in English from BL mangaka team Duo Brand, authors of Shards of Affection.

Though this anthology holds together better than some, it is unable to avoid the most common trap plaguing its kind—an inability to choose between romance and pornography. As a result, it ultimately fails at both. Loosely held together by the theme of master and servant (stretched to include relationships like senpai/kohai and employer/employee), each of the volume’s stories features grand declarations of love, almost none of which are well-developed enough to ring true. One possible exception is the story “Escape,” featuring two old friends who find themselves thrown together again in desperate circumstances.

Released under DMP’s adult 801 Media imprint, this manga is never coy about getting its characters into bed, but just as too much sexual content leaves little room for developing romance, the reverse is also true. Though the stories rush blatantly toward consummation (a few even begin there), these scenes feel hurried as well, like flashes of memory from a hazy, drunken night.

Duo Brand’s art is sketchy but expressive, with attractive character designs distinctive enough to provide genuine variety over the course of so many unrelated stories.

Without a clear allegiance to love or lust, Kiss Your Hair ultimately falls short on both counts.

Kiss Your Hair is available now.

–Reviewed by Melinda Beasi

Kurashina Sensei’s Passion, Vol. 2

By Natsuho Shino
DMP, 200 pp.
Rating: YA (16+)

The Events Organization Committee and the Student Council are at odds over funding, and only a bizarre and arbitrary contest can settle their disagreement! The carefree Student Council President offers funding to the EOC in a contest of who can get the higher test scores, but if the committee loses, they have to forfeit Kurashina-sensei as their advisor. Later, the President and Asano have a one-on-one basketball competition. Meanwhile, things heat up between Asano and Kurashina, and even the carefree president squeezes an innocent date out of one of the freshman EOC members.

I’m still baffled by the Juné branding for this series, as opposed to DokiDoki. It seems pretty innocent and hand-holdy at this point, and the focus still isn’t on romance so much as it is light comedy and banter between the students at the all-boys school. There is a niche for this type of story, but unfortunately I’m not one of the people it appeals to, and it is otherwise unremarkable and pretty middle-of-the-road in most every way. The members of the Events Organization Committee remain relatively undeveloped and stereotyped, and the characters that receive the most attention (Kurashina, Asano, and Asano’s friend) are still not all that interesting.

The best thing in this volume is unrelated to the main couple, and that is the adorable side story at the end about the president and his date with the freshman. It wasn’t anything super interesting, and not terribly romantic, but it was still cute stuff, and I have to give it a nod for that chapter.

If you like light comedies with a yaoi tinge to them, I would suggest checking this out, but most others will probably want to look elsewhere.

Volume two of Kurashina Sensei’s Passion is available now.

–Reviewed by Connie C.

One Piece, Vols. 35-36

By Eiichiro Oda
Published by VIZ
Rating: Teen

Splitting up is a hard thing to do and no one can tell you more about it than the Straw Hat crew in Eiichiro Oda’s smash hit, One Piece. After arriving at an island known for its expert shipwrights (a maintenance crew for ships in layman’s terms), the crew soon realizes that one of their members, the elusive Nico Robin, has run off. To make matters worse, the crew gets their beloved ship, the Merry Go, examined by the shipwrights… only to find that the ship can no longer sail! Throw in a fight amongst crew members and a murder mystery on the island and what’s a crew to do?

I don’t know exactly how Oda does it, but his characters’ emotions continually leap off the page at the reader. Whether it’s the blubbering sobs of Chopper or the rare anger of Luffy, its hard not to feel something while you’re reading this. That’s what I love about his writing, though: it’s full of such raw and pure emotion but there’s also a subtle complexity to the flow of the story.

This also rings true for the artwork. While the images certainly lend a enormous helping hand to portraying the story arc (The end of chapter 332, anyone? I won’t ruin it, but it’s a tearjerker.), there are beautiful secrets hidden in the panels and the chapter breaks. Either way, this is a pretty great arc and I am excited for more!

Volumes 35 and 36 of One Piece are available now.

–Reviewed by Sam Kusek

Vampire Hunter D, Vol. 4

Original story by Hideyuki Kikuchi, Adaption by Saiko Takaki
DMP, 248 pp.
Rating: M (Mature Readers)

The adventures of D continue with the fourth volume in the manga adaption of the popular novel series. This time around, D’s wandering leads him to a marvel of hi-technology, a mobile, floating town. While the town initially appears to be a utopia, as the story progresses it becomes clear that it’s anything but. With xenophobic and distrustful townspeople, and a mayor with his own dark agenda, it may ultimately be no better than the wasteland.

Takaki’s artwork brings out some mixed feelings in me. Initially it looks lovely and wonderfully detailed. The characters, backgrounds and more are fantastic to look at, but there are certain panels where it looks like the characters are literally pasted on top of the background. Likewise, the action scenes are a bit awkward and unclear at times.

For the most part, I enjoyed the book, minor complaints about the art aside. Kikuchi returns to an idea that he first brought up in the second Vampire Hunter D novel and its reappearance gives the series a vague hint of an actual subplot and direction. There’s nothing wrong with random one-off tales, but it’s always nice to have the idea that there’s something else going on, especially when part of the theme of the book was finding direction and purpose.

Volume four of Vampire Hunter D is available now.

–Reviewed by Ken Haley

ZE, Vol. 4

By Yuki Shimizu
Digital Manga Publishing, 194 pp.
Rating: Mature (18+)

It’s maintenance time for the kami who serve the kotodama users of the Mitou family, which provides an opportunity to introduce some members of the extended family.

Volume three dealt primarily with the couple of Genma and Himi, an arc that carries over into the first few chapters of this volume. Himi, who had once been the kami of Genma’s father, protects his new master from an attack and “dies” as a result of his injuries. Genma is frantic to have him resurrected, but has trouble adjusting to the new Himi, who has the appearance of the original but none of his memories. I’d have more sympathy for Genma if he hadn’t been such a creep to Himi in the previous volume, but at least this is better than what follows.

After Himi’s maintenance is complete we meet a pair of extremely obnoxious twins and the kami they share. This whole episode—intended to be comedy, one assumes—is jarring because it doesn’t mesh at all with what’s just come before.

I seriously think the twins appear only because Shimizu wanted to draw a threesome, which is an example of ZE’s main problem. I’ve lost count of the characters who’ve appeared in this series so far, and it seems like manga-ka Yuki Shimizu is focusing on variety rather than fleshing out any of the characters who’ve been present from the start. The guy who goes crazy for ice cream is still just the guy who goes crazy for ice cream, and nobody else seems poised to grow, either.

There were hints in earlier volumes of a larger story, and maybe those threads will be picked up again in the future, but I’m certainly not holding my breath.

Volume four of ZE is available now.

–Reviewed by Michelle Smith

Review copies provided by the publishers.