The first wave of Viz’s August releases arrives in stores this Wednesday. Only one new series debuts this month: Pretty Face (reviewed below), a shonen title that reads like a mash-up of Porky’s, Nip/Tuck, and Your and My Secret. The rest of Viz’s offerings are new installments of longer-running series such as Bleach (Vol. 20), Hikaru no Go (Vol. 10), and two of my favorite Shojo Beat titles, Kaori Yuki’s Gothic thriller Godchild (Vol. 6) and Taeko Watanabe’s historical drama Kaze Hikaru (Vol. 6). Mixed in with the new Viz titles are the third installment of Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl (Seven Seas), the seventh installment of Her Majesty’s Dog (Go! Comi), the first volume of Translucent (Dark Horse), and the first volume of Gon (CMX), my pick of the week.

Dubbed “the tiny terror from the Jurassic Era,” Gon is a pint-sized T-Rex who defends the small, the cute, and the furry from the big, the mean, and the hungry. One of the great selling points of Gon is the gorgeous artwork: manga-ka Masashi Tanaka resists the urge to anthropomorphize his critters, instead rendering them in precise detail that extends to both their physical appearance and their mannerisms. (Read: no wolves walking on two legs, no bunnies pulling guns on unsuspecting foxes. Gon is the sole exception to the rule.) There’s plenty of humor, to be sure, but Tanaka never shies away from the more savage aspects of the natural world. He also resists the urge to put human sentiments in his characters’ mouths, relating Gon’s adventures without a single line of dialogue. Readers familiar with the first English language edition will be pleased to learn that CMX has restored the original chapter order and the right-to-left orientation while holding the price to a wallet-friendly $5.95. But will CMX reprint the Gon Color Spectacular? Inquiring minds want to know.

REVIEWED THIS WEEK:

• Crimson Hero, Vol. 6 (Viz)
• Me & My Brothers, Vol. 1 (Tokyopop)
• Pretty Face, Vol. 1 (Viz)

SHIPPING THIS WEEK:

• Absolute Boyfriend, Vol. 4 (Viz)
• Aranzi Machine Gun, Vol. 2 (Vertical, Inc.; click here for a revew of volume one)
• Berserk, Vol. 18 (Dark Horse)
• Bleach, Vol. 20 (Viz)
• Buso Renkin, Vol. 7 (Viz)
• Crimson Hero, Vol. 6 (Viz; reviewed below)
• D-Gray Man, Vol. 6 (Viz)
• Disgaea 2, Vol. 2 (Broccoli Books)
• Dragon Drive, Vol. 3 (Viz)
• Eyeshield 21, Vol. 15 (Viz)
• Godchild, Vol. 6 (Viz)
• Gon, Vol. 1 (CMX)
• Her Majesty’s Dog, Vol. 7 (Go! Comi)
• Hikaru no Go, Vol. 10 (Viz)
• Hoshin Engi, Vol. 2 (Viz; click here for a review of volume one)
• InuYasha Ani-Manga, Vol. 22 (Viz)
• Iron Wok Jan, Vol. 25 (Dr Master)
• JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Vol. 8 (Viz)
• Junk, Vol. 3 (Dr Master)
• Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl, Vol. 3 (Seven Seas)
• Kaze Hikaru, Vol. 6 (Viz)
• Newtype, August 2007
• One Piece, Vol. 15 (Viz)
• Penguin Revolution, Vol. 4 (CMX)
• Pretty Face, Vol. 1 (Viz; reviewed below)
• Protoculture Addicts, #92
• Puri Puri, Vol. 2 (Dr Master)
• Tail of the Moon, Vol. 6 (Viz)
• Translucent, Vol. 1 (Dark Horse)
• Yu-Gi-Oh Duelist, Vol. 22 (Viz)

Crimson Hero, Vol. 6

By Mitsuba Takanashi
Viz, 192 pp.
Rating: Teen

Were it not for its spunky, spikey-haired heroine, Crimson Hero could easily pass for a shonen sports series. The story conforms to the genre perfectly: a group of underdogs band together under the leadership of a talented, charismatic athlete—in this case, Nobara Sumiyoshi, a 15-year-old volleyball phenom—to enter a big competition—in this case, the city-wide Spring Tournament—working their way up the ladder from small fry opponents to the reigning champs. The twist is that Crimson Hero’s principal characters are girls, and the artwork and subplots fall squarely within the norms of mainstream shojo.

As with Eyeshield 21 and Whistle!, however, much of Crimson Hero is devoted to game play and team practice. Mitsuba Takanashi does a great job of making volleyball come alive on the printed page. She’s clearly done her homework, creating suspenseful matches that capture the layout of the court, the interaction between teammates, and the skill needed to block a spike or return a serve. Off the court, Takanashi shows a similar flair for depicting the petty squabbles and friendly rivalries among the six-member team. (Take it from a former high school jock—Takanashi does team banter as convincingly as the bumps and sets.) It’s only when Crimson Hero focuses on Nobara’s personal life that it loses momentum. Nobara is caught in the middle of a love triangle involving two stars of the boys’ volleyball team. Neither Keisuke, a possessive stalker of a friend who refuses to take “no” for an answer, nor Yushin, a self-absorbed pretty boy, seem like great romantic prospects. The other major subplot—Nobara’s reluctance to follow in her mother’s footsteps as proprietress of the family ryotei—is similarly underdeveloped. Though the tenor of their interaction feels right, the intergenerational conflict seems more like a contrivance to keep Nobara off the court than a genuine mother-daughter relationship.

That said, Nobara’s character is an appealing and believable mixture of skill, attitude, and adolescent insecurity. I suspect that many female athletes will identify with her fierce desire both to win and to land a cute, sensitive boyfriend who shares her passion for volleyball. Hey, a girl can dream, can’t she?

Volume six of Crimson Hero will be released on July 25th.

Me & My Brothers, Vol. 1

By Hari Tokeino
Tokyopop, 186 pp.
Rating: Teen (13+)

The editorial team at Tokyopop summarizes Me & My Brothers thusly:

One Lost Girl + Four Confused Brothers = A Whole Lotta Wackiness!

If I were going to represent Me & My Brothers in mathematical terms, the equation would look more like this:

(Party of Five + Crossroad) + female siblings = Me & My Brothers

In other words, Me & My Brothers is yet another example of the Instant Family: Just Add Hot Water genre. Sakura, the “Me” of the title, is a fourteen-year-old high school student who was orphaned at the age of three. When her grandmother dies, Sakura inherits both a house and four male guardians, all sons from her father’s previous marriage. And what a crew they are: Masashi, the eldest, is a cross-dressing romance novelist; Takashi, the second oldest, is a bespectacled teacher; Tsuyoshi, the family slacker, is a self-proclaimed “full-time part-timer”; and Takeshi, the youngest, is a high school student whose most distinctive feature is the soul patch on his chin. Let the fighting and family bonding begin!

The opening chapters unfold at a frantic pace. Sakura’s first few weeks of family life lead to myriad rounds of misunderstandings, slammed doors, and apologies. It’s hard not to sympathize with Sakura, as her brothers’ frequent incursions into her personal space often cross the line between “awwww, that’s so sweet” and “ick, she’s too old for that!” (I’m also not sure what purpose Masashi’s cross-dressing serves, as it doesn’t reveal anything about his character that couldn’t be inferred from his motherly behavior.) Once Hokeino has explained her impromptu family’s rather complicated history, however, Me & My Brothers settles into a pleasant groove. The disjointed, busy layout of the earlier chapters gives way to some simple, nicely illustrated flashbacks to Sakura’s childhood. These less self-consciously wacky scenes mix melancholy with slapstick to good effect, suggesting that future volumes of Me & My Brothers will be heavier on the character development and lighter on the arm-flapping and shouting.

The first four chapters of the series are rather short, totaling just 144 pages. The remainder of the book contains a very confusing short story by Hokeino (something involving multiple dimensions, a chain-smoking miniature Santa Claus, and a hint of BL), a cute comic of Sakura as a pigtailed tot, and a preview of the penultimate volume of Fruits Basket.

Volume one of Me & My Brothers is available now; volume two will be released in November.

Pretty Face, Vol. 1

By Yasuhiro Kano
Viz, 192 pp.
Rating: Older Teen (nudity)

Masashi Rando is an eighteen-year-old jock with an attitude to match his considerable athletic prowess. En route to a karate tournament, Rando is nearly killed in a bus accident. He awakens from a coma one year later to learn that he was so badly disfigured that everyone presumed him dead. Worse still, Dr. Manabe, the pervy plastic surgeon who restored him to health, reconstructed Rando’s face using a photograph of Rina Kurimi, a pretty classmate whose picture Rando carried in his wallet. Rando can’t figure out how to put his life back together until he makes a fortuitous discovery: Rina, it just so happens, has a twin sister who ran away from home. Rando poses as Rina’s twin, taking up residence in her house until he can scrape together the money for the surgery to restore his original face. This gender-switching premise might yield a few good laughs and prompt the hero to a better understanding of the opposite sex. But Rando doesn’t gain much insight from his experiences as a “girl”; the cross-dressing is just a pretext for panty shots, exposed breasts, and accidental gropings. With so much explicit fanservice and so few appealing characters, however, it’s hard to imagine anyone other a sixteen-year-old boy enjoying Pretty Face.

Volume one of Pretty Face will be available on July 25th.