Words of Truth and Wisdom: Support the Industry!``xNibley``xI've been thinking about angry fans a lot lately, because there seems to be so many of them right now. Not that I have any right to say anything about that--we've been known to get plenty angry as fans, and it's not uncommon for us to stay up late ranting and raving about one infuriating thing or another. I guess sometimes fans just thrive on anger. We're trying to get over that (sort of), because when I sit down and think about it, I realize that being a happy fan is much more fun than being an angry one.

The other day, someone told us something that I thought should be addressed, because we have a very sad volume of Nosatsu Junkie on our shelf, waiting for the day it will be translated into English--a day that may never come. I wasn't sure it would make a good column, but in light of the recent further downsizing of TokyoPop, I decided it's appropriate after all. But first! because learning new things is fun, let's explain a common(?) idiom!

Our mom tends to use the phrase “preaching to the choir” a lot. We didn't know what that meant, so we asked her, and she explained. Apparently it refers to a story or something where a preacher was having problems because no one would attend his sermons, except for the choir, because they were there to sing every week. He wanted to teach his congregation about the importance of coming to church every week, but because no one ever came to church, when he gave that sermon, he only preached it to the choir--the people who already heeded the lessons.

That's what I think I might be doing with this column, because everyone we talk to who reads the column is already aware of what I'm going to say, and quite possibly so does everyone we don't talk to who reads the column. But we could at least spread the word? So here goes.

A friend of ours told us that sometimes angry fans will declare that they shall never buy a new series from TokyoPop again, because they can't know if it will be dropped and they'll never get to see the end of it. First and foremost, we would like to point out that there's no guarantee you'll get to see the end of a series anyway, as we're sure any X/1999 fan can tell you. And second of all, if there's a way to guarantee never seeing the end of a series, it's to not buy it. In other words, if you refuse to buy a series, that's a sure-fire way to make sure it gets dropped if a publishing company needs to cut back on expenses.

It's very logical, really. It costs a lot of money to license a series, have somebody translate it into English, have somebody make sure the English makes sense, edit it, put all the sentences in the right places so they match the pictures, edit it, edit it, and send it to print. (I'm guessing on all the steps involved, but we're pretty sure it's something like that.) If nobody buys the book, they don't make the money to do all that stuff, and so the series becomes nothing but a burden. On the other hand, if everybody buys the book, then they make all that money and more, and they're happy to publish the next volume, because it means big money for them. I mean, when the big TokyoPop restructure was announced, was anybody really worried that Fruits Basket would be cancelled? Seriously.

So that brings us to our next point. What if my favorite series has already been cancelled, and I'm a sad, lonely fan, with no more (for example) Nosatsu Junkie to fill the void of my empty heart? Well, chances are, I've already bought that series. But if I only checked it out from the library, I can buy it! (Actually, everybody's having money problems these days, huh? So make sure you can afford it first!) And I can tell all my friends to buy it! (Hear that, everybody? Go buy Nosatsu Junkie!!) And I can buy it for them as a gift! ('Tis the season, after all!) Or maybe I can't afford it, but if I check it out from the library and get all my friends to check it out from the library, then the library will know it's popular, and the library can buy some copies! (It's not much, but it's something, right?)

And then, like with... those titles that TokyoPop cancelled but I hear they picked up again (like I can't go look it up, oy), maybe, eventually, somewhere down the line, TokyoPop will get enough money that they can pick up (for example) Nosatsu Junkie again. And then instead of being a sad fan or an angry fan, staying up late ranting and raving about the latest outrage, I can stay up late fangirling over the latest development in (for example) Nosatsu Junkie and speculating what will happen next, and be a happy fan. And being a happy fan, by definition, is much, much happier. There's no guarantee of course, but there's always hope.

In the meantime, we wish all the best for those at TokyoPop who have been laid off, and for TokyoPop in rebuilding. Gambatte ne!``xEkkAuZFyZkviFWOksc``x1229473672``xfeatures``x``x``x45611116047418``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x150``x225``x``x``x``x``xtwins.jpg We Were There v2``xYsabet``xIn its second volume, We Were There continues to build a romance between two teenagers who have more than the usual high school worries to deal with. Nanami, the female lead, is a very normal girl trying to make sense of her feelings for Yano, a classmate whose last girlfriend died in an accident the year before. As for Yano, his attitude makes it difficult to know what he's thinking--about Nanami or anything else--but a fear of betrayal has already become a recurring theme in their conversations.

After confessing her love to Yano in volume 1, Nanami still isn't entirely sure what to make of him. Despite having no way to know whether he'll react harshly or thoughtfully to what's going on around him, she's determined to be supportive, and does her best to keep him on track during the play their class puts on for the school festival--no easy task when he simply doesn't show up for rehearsals. While their classmates are resigned to Yano's behavior and distance, Nanami defends him and continues trying to reach out to him, with mixed success.

We start to see more from Yano's perspective in this volume, particularly when he dreams about his dead girlfriend and their relationship. At this point we know more details about his past than Nanami does, but Yano's thoughts and feelings still aren't on display in the way hers are, so he remains something of a mystery.

The characters' relationship is tentative but believable in the way it grows, and it's easy to see why Yano both intrigues and frustrates Nanami. I really like the way this series is unfolding, and I'm very interested in seeing how it develops from here.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkAuZFkAVwNTtOPgs``x1229473295``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421520192``xYuki Obata``x``x``x``xDrama``xRomance``x``xTetsuichiro Miyaki``xNancy Thistlethwaite``xViz``xOlder Teen``xA-``x8.99``x150``x225``xWe Were There 02 cover.jpg``x``x``x``x Heaven's Will``xYsabet``xHeaven's Will: A Poem of Atonement is a single-volume "teen goth romance" (according to the back cover copy) about Mikuzu, a girl who sees ghosts (and ghouls and fairies, among other things) and is, unfortunately, scared witless by them. Enter Seto, a cross-dressing exorcist who makes a deal with her: he'll protect Mikuzu from the things that go bump in the night (and the day) if she'll make cake for him every day. Mikuzu takes him up on the offer and begins spending time with him and his pet vampire, Kagari. At first she's nearly as frightened of them as she is of the supernatural things she sees, but she begins to be intrigued by Seto's secrets.

After the first quarter of the book, which introduces the main characters to each other and the readers, the remainder of the volume is devoted to a single story in which Seto is hired to exorcise a haunted piano. The case reminds Seto of his past, which only increases Mikuzu's curiosity about him. That particular plot wraps up tidily, but things are left open enough that Takamiya could conceivably revisit the characters if she felt so inclined.

VIZ seems to be in the habit of releasing standalone volumes of shoujo recently (I think this is the third I've reviewed within the last few months), although I'm not sure whether that holds true with their other imprints. I'm starting to wonder if such short stories just don't work well for me in manga format; I can't think of any one-shot titles that have particularly impressed me. Heaven's Will does wind up having an interesting plot point, late enough in the book that I won't discuss it here, but I didn't get attached enough to the characters to feel invested in it. It might have worked better for me if it had more time to percolate. That might not be true for everyone, so give it a shot if it sounds like your kind of story.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkAuZFpupiOcLEjCt``x1229473040``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421522586``xSatoru Takamiya``x``x``x``xDrama``xRomance``xSupernatural``xLindsey Akashi``xLindsey Akashi``xViz``xTeen``xC+``x8.99``x150``x225``xHeavens Will cover.jpg``x``x``x``x Real v2``xParkCooper``xOkay, next up is volume two of REAL, the wheelchair-basketball series from the creator of the super-big-deal non-wheelchair-type basketball manga series SLAM DUNK.

Here’s my previous review of volume 1:
http://www.mangalife.com/reviews/Realv1.htm

Okay, so what’s happening in volume 2?

--Togawa’s working hard to master his poor working-with-a-team skills so that he can keep playing basketball, because he’s fired up by the goal of beating Nagano, the guy who beat him so badly in volume 1.
--Nomiya is having trouble holding down a job—he’s got that restless, vaguely existential anxiety that everyone had in Viz’s recent epic Solanin.
--In the hospital, Takahashi is starting to face his paralysis... not come to TERMS with it yet, just to FACE it... and boy, is THAT a world of emotional hurt.

But most of all, we get the story of the rare disease that caused Togawa to end up in a wheelchair, and it’s arguably the most touching and memorable part of this volume. This is a kid who loved to RUN.

What else is there to say? The art is good. It’s really not beautiful, but it’s good. That’s key for the realistic, often-painful world of this series. The characterization is good. The plot is good, though slow. Sure, you manage to feel some of Nomiya’s pain as he, hidden by having the hood up on his hoodie, watches his old school basketball team blow it without him. It’s painful. But let’s not dwell on the fact from the side of YOU managing to feel his pain. Focus on how the MANGA is able to MAKE you feel his pain somewhat. And yet, there’s also the flavor of bitter rejection mixed in, of sour grapes, of “maybe they deserved this if they thought they could do without me...” Except that said bitterness just makes the whole emotional situation worse, not better.

I dunno. It’s good. It’s hard to talk about it without spoiling it.

--Plot: involving, but more to the point, not overdone.
--Setting: Well, you know, I think it’s Tokyo, but will we ever really get tired of Tokyo as a setting?
--Theme: Life sucks, and you have to be strong and determined not to let it beat you, especially since you live in Japan, where life sucking and being unsatisfying is just sort of unsurprising in the 21st century. The author will show you how much it sucks and how unfair it is, and will therefore proceed to show you how hard you must try in order to keep life from winning and making you the loser.
--Conflict: life in Japan in the 21st century, whether you have your health, or, particularly, not.

And yet, don’t think that it’s just depressing. It’s just...

...I’m trying to find a way to say this other than “Real” and I’m failing. Maybe that’s the point.

I give this a Mangalife grade of A-.``xEkkllZkZVVRnEmiaQB``x1228872755``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421519909``xTakehiko Inoue``x``x``x``xDrama``xSports``x``xJohn Werry``x``xViz Signature``xOlder Teen``xA-``x12.99``x150``x225``xreal v2.jpg``x``x``x``x Fairy Cube v3``xYsabet``xVolume 3 wraps up Kaori Yuki's Fairy Cube, and after reading it, letting it sit while I tried to figure it out, and reading other people's thoughts about it, I have to admit I'm still not entirely sure how to talk about it coherently.

Apparently I'm not the only one who has this problem. Here's the volume-specific back cover copy in its entirety:

THE LAST WING

Will Ian save Rin? Can he stop Tokage? Ian has only one chance left to get his life back!

Those questions are central to the story, and do get answered, but they give no hint whatsoever about the quantities of sheer insanity Yuki has squeezed into a single volume. (If you're already a fan of her work, I can only assume this will make you happy rather than scare you off. As someone who enjoys her stories in a very surface-level, along-for-the-ride kind of way, I find myself carefully not trying to figure out exactly how all the threads of the story come together. It hurts my head less that way.)

Given that, I'm not going to try to provide a more detailed summary, but it's an interesting read. Yuki does a remarkably good job of keeping all her balls in the air once she's tossed them up: the complexities of the fairies' alliances and goals are a bit dizzying, but Ian is still clearly at the heart of the story, and he and his family get their resolution.

If you enjoyed the first two volumes of the series, you should find this a satisfying conclusion. If you read and disliked the first two volumes, you probably weren't thinking of picking this up anyway. And if you haven't read any of Kaori Yuki's work before, do yourself a huge favor: start with volume 1, suspend your disbelief, and let yourself go on the ride. There's really no other way to figure out if she's for you or not.

Volume 3 of Fairy Cube includes a standalone follow-up story and a gallery of bonus illustrations, featuring the front-piece art from the individual chapters.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkllZkklpxklvGxBQ``x1228872280``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421516705``xKaori Yuki``x``x``x``xRomance``xSupernatural``x``xGemma Collinge``xKristina Blachere``xViz``xOlder Teen``xB+``x8.99``x150``x225``xFairy Cube 03 cover.jpg``x``x``x``x Skip Beat! v15``xYsabet``xSho decides to take the high road rather than confront Vie Ghoul about their theft of his song. But VG frontman Reino doesn't take kindly to being ignored and devises a devious plan to get Sho's attention--he's going after Kyoko! Normally, Kyoko's not the type of girl that needs rescuing. But for some reason, Reino's presence petrifies her. Will Reino's evil scheme work better than anyone imagined?!

The last review I wrote for Skip Beat! covered vol. 2-3, and when I was sent a review copy of vol. 15, I remembered the series fondly enough to make sure I caught up on all the intervening volumes. I'm very glad I did, because the series has really grown on me. Our heroine, Kyoko, is still in full possession of her...let's call it her unusually powerful vibes, which generally translate into her anger or hatred being strong enough that the target can practically see them. (Or be stabbed by them, or buffeted around the room...)

She's also become a force to be reckoned with in several arenas: she's come to love acting for its own sake, rather than its potential as a vehicle for revenge, and her talent has won her a significant role in a new drama (opposite Ren, her main love interest, although she still consciously sees him primarily as a mentor). On the vengeance front, Sho, the former childhood friend she dreams of overshadowing, has started seeing her for what she's become, rather than as the quiet girl who once sacrificed everything for him.

In practice, her relationship with Sho is becoming quite interesting. Kyoko still overflows with hatred at the mention of his name, but when it recently became obvious that an up-and-coming band is not only copying Sho's style but blatantly stealing from him, she zeroed in on the weakness in the way he's handling the situation and warned him. As for Sho, he's seeing Kyoko in a new light, even if it's still overtly antagonistic.

Ren, the ostensible male lead, doesn't get a lot to do this time around; vol. 15 is heavily focused on Vie Ghoul's competition with Sho, and how badly Kyoko is being caught in the middle. The upstart band isn't terribly interesting in its own right, but they're doing a good job of forcing Kyoko and Sho to interact more than they have in a long time. Rumors about their relationship are flying among the other showbiz people, and it seems like only a matter of time before the public starts having the same suspicions, especially since the specter of reputation-damaging gossip looms large in this volume.

All in all, Skip Beat! is remarkably engaging, and a lot more fun than I gave its premise credit for when I started reading.

Vol. 15 of Skip Beat! includes a page of cultural and translation notes.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkllZEyyZaDUdGXZp``x1228871667``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421519526``xYoshiki Nakamura``x``x``x``xDrama``x``x``xTomo Kimura``xTomo Kimura``xViz/Shojo Beat``xTeen``xB+``x8.99``x150``x225``xSkip Beat 15 cover.jpg``x``x``x``x Words of Truth and Wisdom: Christmas Wish List``xNibley``xHappy Thanksgiving everyone! Okay, so it's about a week late, but I wanted to say it anyway. Thanksgiving is a very important holiday, after all. In light of that, we were thinking of doing a little featurette on manga we're thankful for, but then we realized that that would end up being a list of comments on everything in our resume and then some, and that would get pretty long. So for now, suffice it to say, that we're very thankful to have been able to work on all the titles we've been able to work on, and for a bunch of other titles we haven't been able to work on (yet?).

So our next idea was to write up a wishlist of titles we'd like to work on in the future. Actually, Park had suggested we do something like this before, and we thought it was a really good idea, but when we started thinking of what we'd put on that list, it ended up being very short. We had been very busy, so we hadn't had any time to read any manga that wasn't work-related. And if it's work-related, that means it's already licensed, because we're working on it. Of course, there are some titles that have been licensed that we wish we were working on. Some of those will probably show up on this list too.

In no particular order, here are some titles that we would really like to translate:

Himegimi no Tsukurikata: How to Make a Princess, by Asuka Izumi, published by Hakusensha. This is the title that reminded us of the wishlist idea. From the title, you can probably figure out that it's about a girl who suddenly finds out she's a princess, and has to undergo training in order to be more princesslike. It's kind of cliche, yes, but it's a kind of cliche we like. There's also a strong focus on families, which is something we have a weakness for. And, from a translator's point of view, it would be an awesome challenge to work on, because there are two butlers who use honorific language like crazy when talking to the princess, but use regular plain language when they're talking to each other. So it would be neat to try to express that in English.

Speaking of family--The Akiyoshi Family Series, by Banri Hidaka, published by Hakusensha. We really love translating I Hate You More Than Anyone (vol.1-6, on sale now! from CMX!), and we've become huuuuuge Banri Hidaka fans. We're reading Tears of a Lamb and VB Rose, too, and those go on our list of “things that are licensed but we want to translate anyway.” (Incidentally, Manga Life's own Barb Lien Cooper is doing the English adaptation on VB Rose these days.) Anyway, the other installments of the Akiyoshi Family Series are about the siblings of the main character of I Hate You, and they're at least as good. We especially love Chizuru's story.

Hoshi wa Utau: Twinkle Stars Like Singing A Song, by Natsuki Takaya, published by Hakusensha. I'm noticing a lot of Hakusensha titles. We've been kind of obsessed with Hana to Yume Comics lately. Anyway, this is the current series by the creator of Fruits Basket. When I first started reading it, I had heard a few Fruits Basket fans say it was alright, but it just didn't grab them as much as Fruits Basket did, so I was determined to like it more than them and thus be a better Takaya-sensei fan. Because I'm a brat. It wasn't hard, though, because Chihiro is exactly the kind of mysterious character that tends to get me hooked. Plus this series just has an aura about it that makes me happy just to be reading it.

Hare + Guu, by Renjuro Kindaichi, published by Square-Enix. Actually this one is kind of scary. We saw the anime and we loved it to itty bitty bits, but we haven't read the manga, and we're a little afraid because manga can be even crazier than animated versions sometimes. It would get complicated trying to explain what it's about, so instead we'll just recommend watching the anime, because it is in fact made of awesome.

The Violinist of Hameln, by Michiaki Watanabe, published by Enix (now Square-Enix). A series about a hero who saves towns from destruction by monsters with his double-bass-sized magical violin, then charges them exorbitant prices for his service. Actually, there's some crude humor in this one, which we're not big fans of, so we're not sure we want to be the ones to translate it, but at the same time, we'd have a hard time giving it up (it's not all crude humor, after all). I don't remember the details, but I remember at one point deciding that listening to all the classical music he bases the manga on must have made Watanabe-sensei some kind of genius, because there's some kind of really intricate story in there that really takes you by surprise when it shows up through all the insanity.

Kero Kero Chime, by Maguro Fujita, published by Shueisha. This is another one we saw the anime of but haven't read the manga of. It's about a boy who runs into a random wizard who casts a spell on him so he turns into a frog whenever he gets wet, then the wizard throws him through a portal where he meets the princess of the land, who's supposed to help him find the cure to his magical ailment. If the manga is anything like the anime, I'd say it's got a humor that's kind of like a mix of Gakuen Alice and The Emperor's New Groove...? Anyway, it's cute and funny and we like it a lot. And even if the manga doesn't have all the gags of the anime, we have read some other manga by Fujita-sensei, and we liked it a lot.

Well, those are the ones we came up with off the top of our heads. Of course, we have a habit of wanting to translate everything. ...Okay, not everything. We don't like to work with titles that are too “adult,” for example. It's kind of funny, because whenever we go to a manga publisher's panel at a convention, unless they're talking about something we translate, our reaction is usually, “Why can't we translate that? Whine whine whine!”

But in the spirit of Thanksgiving, we really are thankful to be able to translate everything we do, and if we did actually translate every single series we wanted to, we wouldn't have time for anything else. So we just take everything in stride, and enjoy what we have, while looking forward to future possibilities. ...Was that too cheesy? Oh well. Now you can go get yourselves some crackers.``xEkklFElZAuagHEOiLr``x1228318794``xfeatures``x``x``x45611116047418``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x150``x225``x``x``x``x``xtwins.jpg Context Is Good: The Gerard Jones Interview``xParkCooper``xWhat neither his Wikipedia page nor his website tells you is that Gerard Jones is an adapter of manga, such as Dragon Ball Z, a lot of Rumiko Takahashi work, and more: Basara, Boys Over Flowers, Crying Freeman, Inuyasha, Maison Ikkoku, One-Pound Gospel, RahXephon, Ranma ½, Rumic Theater, Rurouni Kenshin, Urusei Yatsura... these are just some highlights, not a complete list...

When I was first courting my wife Barbara, back when I was a comics geek and knew far less about manga and even anime aside from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and a few things like Speed Racer, back at the start of a long-distance geek relationship, one thing I mailed her was Epic’s (an offset of Marvel Comics) The Trouble with Girls, by Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs. I had also found, totally by coincidence, a book at a used bookstore called The Beaver Papers, which was purportedly writers from the 1950s and earlier coming out of retirement to guest-write new episodes of Leave it to Beaver so as to try to prevent its cancellation (and new takes on the theme song, too, by luminaries such as Sinatra)—ALSO by Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs. But since I wasn’t so dumb as to not realize that the guy named Gerard Jones who wrote one comic I liked was probably the same guy who wrote other comics, which, if I tried them, I might like, I started finding more and more of his work, particularly since, in the 1990s, I was not only buying comics from the 1990s, I was doing a lot of going back and finding what was good from the 1980s. I read his work on Green Lantern, Green Lantern Mosaic, Freex. Justice League (JLA, JLI... and JLE I think), Prime, El Diablo, Wonder Man, Elongated Man, The Shadow, and more... He won the Eisner Award for his non-fiction, though. He wrote Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (2004); Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes and Make-Believe Violence (2002), and more, including writing, again with Will Jacobs, The Comic Book Heroes (1985, 1996), and the comic book The Trouble with Girls (1987-1993).

I met him at San Diego Con a few years ago, talked to him and told him how I loved Green Lantern Mosaic so much that I worked a little analysis of it into one of my essay-test final exams in one of my literature classes at Texas Tech, but it was barely a 5-minute conversation. Recently, though (after I read through the entire run of Dragon Ball Z), it hit me that I’d never interviewed him, and so I moved to correct that immediately—as soon as the election was over, because he was volunteering all his free time for making calls.

Here’s my interview with him. Enjoy.




Park Cooper: Hello! Sorry I'm late! I hope you forgot too and haven't been (aware that you've been) waiting long

Gerard Jones: No sweat! I've got my computer open anyway. Just got into a fun argument with a conservative gal about Sarah Palin.

PC: Here, you'll understand this-- got into writing my novel

GJ: Good for you. I wish I forgot the rest of my life while writing my book more often...and forgot my book while dealing with the rest of my life LESS often.

PC: Wife Barbara: "I don't mean to be a geek or anything, but wow, you're gonna talk to Gerard Jones"

GJ: Wife Barbara is good.

PC Dictating For Barb: Well you can tell him from me that I'm a female and I don't understand Sarah Palin for nothin’. In fact I'm from Minnesota so the folksy quasi-Minnesotaesque accent really grates on me.

GJ: That's what I was arguing with this other woman about. Did Palin's rhetoric actually increase the likelihood of violence against Obama?

PC: Unfortunately Barbara is now out of earshot so I cannot ask her. What was your answer?

GJ: At first I said "yes." Then she got me to concede that there is no demonstrable cause and effect. But I still think SP's demagoguery hurt our national dialogue.

PC: Yeah... So... how comfortable or not are you with having politics in the actual public interview...? Because on one hand it has clearly played a very large role in your life recently

GJ: I'm fine with politics being in here.

PC: Check. Well, so, how do you feel now? Relieved? Like relief is denied due to Prop 8? Stunned? Barb and I were discussing earlier how we feel like everyone sort of "still can't believe it" (about Obama)

GJ: I'm thrilled about Obama's victory. I have real hope for this to be a turning point in American history at the level of 1932. Or 1980, which was a turning point, although not the direction I liked.

PC: I wrote a short column encouraging people to vote which I posted on Nov. 3rd. And I was a little cagey in that. But at the end I discussed Geek Values. Which means that I feel that diehard geeks have the values they get from sci-fi and fantasy... good over evil (which is easy), good over fascism (except maybe Heinlein), a good bit of Green Party aesthetics mixed in... and on and on...

PC: Do you believe in Geek Values? And if so do you believe, as I do, that it pushes young minds to the left more than the alternative? Or does all that go out the window when you hear the dumb things people say in the audiences of panels at cons sometimes

GJ: I would advocate a more process-based, rather than idea-based, sense of Geek Values.

PC: Do tell

GJ: There's a book, "The Coming Democratic Majority," published in 2002 I think, that laid out the political shift we're seeing now in largely demographic and generational terms. It used the word "Ideopolis" to describe the new type of American city and suburb based largely on the information and tech industries, although often with academia thrown in. Coastal California from Eureka south is becoming one big
"ideopolis." Parts of North Carolina and Virginia are too, enough to tip those states "blue."

GJ: Centers of media and culture would go in there too--New York, Chicago, even parts of Florida. And areas with huge numbers of government bureaucrats too, as I.T. takes over our bureaucracies.

PC: Hm. I'm having a thought about works of yours in the past that touch on the political...

GJ: Anyway...I’m overexplaining...

PC: No, no, you're fine

GJ: Short version is, people who have been shaped by computers, media, info tech have a different world view from the older generations.

PC: Yesssss

GJ: Which INCLUDES a greater interest in fantasy, science fiction, other geek interests.
Includes a more complete and passionate engagement in media in general.

GJ: So geek entertainment is a living and valid part of that whole. Many ways that shows up, but here are two:
1. The Star-Trek style model of different kinds of people getting along, people being educated out of old oppositions and suppositions.
You can toss X-Men in there too. Buffy. A whole bunch of stuff.
2. A channeling of our fantasies of combat and power into fantastical arenas, a la superheroes.

PC: right, like in Killing Monsters...

GJ: So we still have those visceral, My Symbol Will Beat Your Symbol fantasies, but no longer in any racial, nationalistic, religious context. And usually what you find is that bad guys are shown as forces that set people against each other, destroy the new web of cooperation. Joker in the Dark Knight movie, for instance. Or they're selfish and exclusionary. So...to loop us back around... The life-philosophy of the new generations, the social models of geek entertainment, the economic logic of the information age, all become part of the same pattern. *whew*

PC: Let's shiftjump over to El Diablo. And Green Lantern. A certain incident where J.S. stacks cars in South Africa comes to my mind... Gerard Jones past comics works and politics intersecting... and I also mentioned J.S. stacking the cars (limos perhaps I think) in South Africa

GJ: It all kind of comes from the same place. Plus my book about sitcoms, Honey I'm Home, etc. I keep thinking the same thoughts, they just show up in different places. All my John Stewart stuff was working on those thoughts. Still kind of inchoate at that point.

PC: Yeah wheee, back to the past. I already thanked you, the one time I met you, for The Beaver Papers and The Trouble With Girls...Which was one of the first comics I sent to Barbara early in our (initially long-distance) relationship. Talk about setting a tone...

GJ: That makes me so happy! I love writing humor with Will Jacobs. We're working on two humor books that we're posting on-line. And glad to know Barbara didn't immediately dump you.

PC: That is very interesting to me because I am working on the research for how to make a novel Barbara has written work that way... so will you make money from doing so, and if so, how

GJ: No, this is just to get reader reaction, get some comments that might help us with the revision... Build interest for when we finally try to get them published...

PC: Ahhh. Okay. Do you have an agent these days? Er, for fiction?

GJ: My agent is always open to reading fiction. Right now she's saying that neither of the new Jacobs and Jones projects are ready for the big publishers. Which is part of why we're revising. But she never says, "No fiction please." Fiction's just really hard to sell right now.

PC: Why is fiction hard to sell right now?

GJ: Because millions of people are doing it. Kind of the hip new thing to write a novel.
And non-fiction sells better, so it's hard for publishers to increase their fiction lists enough to keep up with the increased product available. Fiction's actually selling pretty steadily, but...it's a buyers' market. The stuff that seems easiest to place now is genre stuff that can be easily niched. So agents know exactly which editors to hit, marketing departments know exactly which other books to link it to... It's a hard time for oddball stuff.

PC: Hence one reason why I'm gearing up to get a readership excited about mine, online, first. But let's shift this subtly away from me... how did you feel about winning your first Eisner for a work of prose?

GJ: That was really gratifying. Writing that book made me feel very close to the comic book community, made me realize how much that community had meant to me for 20 years--and how much the medium had meant to me since I was 13 years old-- So hearing from the comics community that they thought my book was a valuable contribution meant a lot to me. It was bittersweet, though, as that was the first Eisner Awards held after Will died. Anne Eisner was sitting front and center at the awards. I found myself directing my comments mainly to her. It was quite powerful to see her smiling back when I talked about Will's help on the book. It was also fun to be there with Michael Chabon, who won for The Escapist. He and I knew each other before Men of Tomorrow, but that book really kind of kicked our friendship into gear.

PC: And now a question that to some may sound odd on my part: So do you read many comics these days?

GJ: I was afraid you were going to ask that... No, I'm sorry that I don't. I kind of stopped reading comics during the years I was writing too many of them. My comics-writing burnout spread to the enjoyment of reading them too. And although the writing burnout is long past, I just never seemed to get the comics-reading rhythm back. I'll still go through flurries of reading really old stuff. Usually right after San Diego Con, when I've picked up some new things.

PC: Ah, yeah, old stuff. I'm a fan of that.

GJ: I recently read Wimbledon Green. Otherwise, I have a stack of recent comics that have been recommended to me that I'm sure I'll get to one of these days. Will Jacobs keeps telling me I MUST read Alan Moore's Supreme. Which is "recent" in my world...

PC: Mm. I feel that Supreme is Alan gearing up to do A.B.C. and Tom Strong and Promethea... "If only D.C. was out of the way, one could do this... hm and this... la la la, wouldn't this be entertaining"

GJ: So I'll add ABC and all to my list.

PC: Okay, so let us now speak of manga. And not just because I recently read the entire run of Dragon Ball Z

GJ: Yes, manga. I've been doing stuff on and off for Viz for something like 19 years.
Did you like DBZ?

PC: I did like DBZ. It was amazing to see the author deliberately challenge himself with increasing difficulties of topping himself as far as the insanely god-like amounts of power the heroes and the threats possessed/gained each time... and without cheating by, you know, solving any problem with anything other than sheer brute force. And he managed it every time...

GJ: DBZ was fun to adapt to the American market. Although my favorite manga rewrites have mostly been of Takahashi's work. Ranma 1/2 and Maison Ikkoku were the top.

PC: Barb wants to know: "How much would you say you ADAPT and how much do you REWRITE?" In which adaptation is tinkering with sentence structure and rewriting is more like adding a whole new gag in (lawn chairs? veritable smorgasbord?)

GJ: Barb asks a good question. My official title is "rewriter." But...I try to be more of an adapter. My ideal is to convey the original author's intent and style. I want to contribute that and get out of the way. But: there are times that I just couldn't do that without leaving the original incomprehensible. Or adding explanatory footnotes, which Viz very much tries to avoid. It depends more on the specific reference or gag in question.

Barb: Yeah, a joke you really appreciate, but you know the audience won't get it the way it is at the moment...

PC: Well it also depends on the manga in question...

GJ: Puns are almost never possible just to "adapt," not if the original humor is to continue. And Takahashi liked puns, at least in her more overtly comedic work.
So one story might be 95% adaptation, trying to stay as close to Rumiko Takahashi's intent as possible...but then there'd be some gag based on a double meaning that just wouldn't work in English. So I'd usually make up a whole new gag.

Barb: Oh yeah the kanji-puns are a pain...

PC: Stuff like "You see, the symbol for 'mango' is made up the strokes for 'monkey', 'brain,' and 'explosion...'” and so forth...

GJ: I always felt that NOT including a joke there, just sticking to the literal information, would be a failure to follow the author's intent. Rumiko meant this as a laugh-beat, so I'll come up with another laugh.

Barb: Yes.

PC: Yes.

GJ: I guess that still qualifies as "adapting." Just choosing the overall narrative intent over the literal content.

Barb: Yes, it does. And then there are rich cultural references that you want in there, but you just don't know how to explain them to the causal reader who isn't an otaku...

PC: Yes, our tradition doesn't even understand that horniness makes your nose bleed

GJ: Yeah, there's often a tough choice to be made between otaku-sense and general-reader sense. I'm glad that Viz, in recent years, has trusted more in the manga-awareness of its readership. Early on we were all asked to err too much on the side of the hypothetical reader-who-knows-nothing-about-manga-or-Japan. Which made sense when the manga market was still being tested and there was no huge otaku population in the US.

Barb: Yeah that's always the 7-10 split... each should be respected... but they're in the minority, really...

GJ: The one that still makes me squirm is the "Kyoko" issue in Maison Ikkoku......

PC: Is this the kitten named Kyoko?

GJ: Yup. My stomach still clenches at the thought of it.

PC: I still remember that... I think about it whenever I hear the name Kyoko... and since we just watched two Asian Horror movies in as many nights, I have heard it recently... So how would you have fixed the Kitten Story if you could?

GJ: The thing was...when we started Maison Ikkoku, my editor and I agreed that it would feel weird to an American reader to hear the characters calling their building manager "Manager." Or "Ms. Manager." Or however one might translate it. We went for the American style, which is first names. So everyone called her "Kyoko."

Barb: I’ve had a similar problem with my Korean manhwa assignments sometimes...

GJ: Unfortunately NO ONE involved had read ahead to see that there would be actual story points based on the fact that using a first name in Japan is a big deal, with all kinds of status and role implications. Toren Smith warned me there was trouble coming, but that was only after some issues had been published and we didn't know how to turn back.

PC: Yes, Del Rey always makes a big deal out of what a big deal no suffix means...

GJ: It's good to think this stuff through. Sometimes it IS a big deal. In this case, there was a story in which one of the guys brought in a kitten named Kyoko. And the kitten gets lost, so the characters are going around yelling "Kyoko! Kyoko!" And the human Kyoko gets insulted because they're supposed to be calling her "Manager." She takes this as an offensive intimacy. With sexual implications. So I had to figure out how to give the kitten a name based on "Kyoko" that she would find insulting. The results were...highly unsatisfying to everyone involved.

PC: Oh yes... I just was thinking "it's probably exactly that sort of experience that led to them putting that boilerplate explanation in the front of every one of their manga."

GJ: Yes, introductions can be helpful. Context is good.

PC: Even Barb remembers that story now. All of us adapters and even translators are terrified that doing something one way will come back around to bite us later... since we can't read ahead, and no one else ever seems to do so for us

GJ: I argued hard for it to be changed in the most recent reprint. But the budget didn't have room. So it will sit there humiliating me forever.

PC: So I feel like, in the factory that has a huge sign on the wall that says "NO OPEN-TOED SHOES!!!", you're the guy who got a forklift on his toe back in the day, which led to the sign... it's the Gerard Jones Memorial Boilerplate Explanation of Japanese Relationship Suffixes. We salute you.

GJ: Except with credited work it's like, "No Open-Toed Shoes Because Gerard Jones Got His Stupid Foot Broken."

PC: Soooo... One time Barb interviewed Grant Morrison, who, talking about the growing dominance of video games in the entertainment industry, closed the interview with something like, "In 5 years everything will be games. Everything."

PC: Setting aside whether everything is now video games or not...Where would you say we're headed? Us comic-manga-anime-novel-entertainment type folks? In your opinion...

GJ: I think Grant's overestimating the power of games. I just went to a video game conference in England and everybody was complaining about how the game market is so subservient to movies and TV. Too many games based on characters from other media. I think it's natural for die-hards in every medium to fear and resent every other medium. This "synergy" business makes everyone adjust to everyone else. Also...people will always like to play games, but they'll also always like to surrender to a storyteller's control. There will always be non-interactive media where you don't GET to take matters into your own hands. That's most of the fun.

PC: Yeah, well, but setting that part aside...

GJ: I think the "graphic novel" as a form has carved out a turf that isn't going away anytime soon. But it also may become less hip. Don't know if we'll keep seeing things that get the attention of Persepolis, for instance. But it's more than a fad: it will survive. And there will still be superheroes in some graphic, readable form. But...will the 32 page monthly comic survive? There I'll pull an "I don't know."

PC: Ooh not that we're quite closing yet-- barb wants to talk about Killing Monsters a bit more because we really respect them prose things you did...

Barb: The two things I got out of Killing Monsters are: one, that fascinating kind of connection to 9-11 about how comics and pop culture helped some kids through that trauma...which shows that comics can be more than just escapist fare... and two, how he said that both the male and female audience identify with the active character, not the passive one, which has been the industry's problem when writing female characters.

GJ: I like Barb's comments. And yeah, that's been a problem with female characters. The reader must IDENTIFY. Male readers will objective a female character to an extent, but they also have to be willing to become her. I think I mentioned the 8th grade boy who said he liked Buffy because "Sarah Michelle Gellar is hot." But in further conversation it became clear that he was really fused with the character, too. If you take that "she's hot" too literally and think that's all you need to give male readers...they lose interest fast.
And girls certainly have no interest in reading a female character who is hard to inhabit imaginatively.

Barb: Exactly, amen.

PC: Who is your favorite female character you've ever written?

GJ: No immediate answer jumps to mind. I liked Margo Lane in The Shadow Strikes.

PC: That's a good answer

GJ: But, as bizarre as they were, I think my favorites were a couple of the women in The Trouble with Girls. Especially Brett Ashley, the nice simple girl from Lester's home town who turns out to be a CIA agent. But Maxi Scoops was fun too, after she evolved out of the usual pesky-female-reporter shtick.

PC: We liked Willy and Gerry and their cutting-through-the-crap ways...

GJ: Yeah, the boys were great characters.

PC: Barb liked Maxi.

GJ: Yay! Maxi actually came to life for us after a few issues. Her impatience with Lester was very heartfelt. A lot us in there.

PC: For a second I thought you meant came to life like how Alan claims he actually met John Constantine in a bar one time

GJ: I'm afraid I don't have Alan's imagination. ...I wish...

PC: Now, to get back to what you were saying about the way we're all heading... I have some thoughts

GJ: Please share. I'll comment as we go.

PC: 1. I used to say "comics will never die, because too many of us want to make them." but that was because I thought that all such people would keep reading comics. Lots of creators I could name these days actually don't read any comics any more.

GJ: I guess that's where the internet can come in. Comics as blogs. They'll never die because people want to make them...but who reads other people's blogs?

PC: 2. Marvel's earnings recently were higher than they predicted, because, they say, because of the Iron Man movie (you notice no one mentions the latest Hulk movie). But that Marvel expects that their next quarter will dive more than one might think... because there's no new Marvel movie coming out in that time. Sony is hurting now that it's been a while since Spider-Man 3, too, I hear. And I feel like... wow, I knew the flimsies (single-issues) weren't enough, but even the underwear and t-shirts and toys and things aren't enough...?

PC: And yeah, well, most people don't read most other people's blogs, to answer your question. So...it feels like we're coming to a huge change-or-die moment in comics.

GJ: I think superheroes are good for several more years as movie fodder. Maybe longer. But...will people necessarily want comics about the same characters?

PC: Right.

GJ: There were no Titanic comics or Forrest Gump comics. Superhero movies can exist in the absence of the medium that created the genre. So how do comics change? ...I wonder if the sense of "comics" as a unified whole has to go away.

PC: Ooooh

GJ: There's the superhero biz, which may struggle on as an aspect of movie-licensing. And there's the whole arty-graphic-novel niche. And manga, which most comics people even now see as something other.

PC: Other? Oh, you mean they see it as Not Comics. Yeah.

GJ: And of course comic STRIPS, which few people in comic books have laid claim to for a long time. So...the medium, the use of sequential drawings, usually with words injected into them, probably isn't going anywhere. But the subcultural definition...this increasingly tenuous definition of Persepolis and Spider-Man as somehow part of the same world... Why keep that going? It will be interesting to see what bookstores do with comics in the future. It makes sense to me that Persepolis would be in Literature or Memoir... Road to Perdition would be in Mystery... And then there'd be a separate section for Superheroes. Or maybe that's what the Comics and Graphic Novel sections would become.

PC: Yes, certain people I could name complain that their works have not done well recently because bookstores "didn't know where to put them"

GJ: You could add me to that list. Borders and B&N put Men of Tomorrow in Graphic Novels. But people in that section are usually not looking for books that are 400 pages of text with hardly any pictures. And people who might have been intrigued had they found it in Media Studies, American History, General Non-Fiction, whatever...never saw it.

PC: Yeah.

GJ: I have to say, though...I don't yet see any desire to rethink this on the part of bookstore managers.

PC: Yeah again

GJ: But it would be an interesting change.

PC: You notice we aren't talking about comic shop retailers at all. Which I think speaks for itself...

GJ: Would comics flourish as "another way to tell that kind of story"? Or would they fade quickly because they'd lost that core "I'm into Comics so I'm going to the Graphic Novel section" audience? I'll just say that I HOPE comics find a way to survive. They've been a huge part of my life and I think there's still a vital community centered on them. Maybe the secret is to find what we really like about them and keep THAT alive...and be willing to let go of much of what we've meant by "comics" for the last few decades.
``xEkklkVuEFuxWaDtmIB``x1228254134``xfeatures``x``x``x45611116047418``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x150``x225``x``x``x``x``xgerard jones DBZ5.jpg Whistle! v20``xParkCooper``xWell, it’s about time that I reviewed volume 20 of Whistle, since I’ve had it for maybe I don’t know almost a month now? And especially since, when the Viz PR person with whom I communicate queried what titles I might especially be interested in, Whistle! was one of the ones I was most interested in. This sports manga doesn’t really have any elements of the supernatural as such, it’s just a well-crafted story of a boy and his teammates who love soccer for the Love Of The Game... as indeed all characters in sports manga must.

Recently, Sho and his teammates travelled to Korea for a match, which was quite a big intense deal when considered in light of the relationships, past and present, between those two countries... and the manga DID consider it, and indeed used it as quite a point of suspense, which was quite exciting.

So I was, in a way, a bit sad to come back down to earth and for the plot to just go back to regular old practice and trying to improve our skills and beat other Japanese teams. But I got over it well enough, as there’s certainly enough suspense, skill, and strategy evinced here in volume 20 as ever, and that’s saying a lot.

On one hand, I just told you everything you might need to know in that last paragraph. But ah, the devil’s in the details, and it all makes for a fine read. The pretty female coach whose youth and looks make other coaches totally underestimate her keen mind... Sho’s small size and the way he uses it to his advantage (you see, when you’re on the soccer field, you have to stay very visually focused on the area in front of you, usually a few feet in front of you and so on, and Sho, with his smaller size, has a trick where he can get right in front of you and then suddenly duck down out of the field of where you’re used to looking, so it’s like he [and the ball] vanish out from under you while you’re still figuring out that you should have tilted your head down a bit), the important aspect that the team’s morale level has on play, the way that the team’s physical energy levels and stamina play a completely different role... it’s all good.

On the other hand, you can get these elements of goodness in ANY volume of Whistle! these days, so let’s get a bit more specific. As I mentioned the other day with interest to my wife, this volume is notable in part because it introduces a black character... another team has what is apparently an African-Japanese character on a rival team... quite a rarity. When some other kids mention (in a way that seems both racist and also totally unsurprising) that he has a natural advantage in sports, being of African descent, he demonstrates his pure finesse in handling game equipment with no hands—NOT with a ball, but shogi (Japanese chess) pieces, which just blows their minds because it seems not like a feat of physical prowess, but nigh-on impossible—and that’s before he finally used his foot to launch them into the air and hit each of the two boys in the forehead with the pieces (with one movement, not two)... “I _am_ Japanese,” says Kotaro Abe, the young man in question.

Oh yeah. They got served.

And then he goes on to play Sho’s team. Can the team’s morale stand up to a team with a guy who can pull acrobatic moves that would impress even professional players?

Well, we’ll find out in volume 21. But it was quite a ride thus far, as usual. A-.
``xEkklkVkFlFKLyAscck``x1228252383``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421511118``xDaisuke Higuchi``x``x``x``xSports``x``x``xNaomi Kokubo``xHeidi Alayne``xViz``xAll Ages``xA-``x7.99``x150``x225``xwhistle v20.jpg``x``x``x``x Movie Review: Dororo``xParkCooper``xOkay, now I’m going to review the movie based on the manga also known as Dororo. And there are going to be some spoilers in here, not SO much for the movie, but for reading Dororo the series. So if you don’t want a surprise in the manga ruined for you, don’t read this review of the movie, okay? But just as a non-spoilery preview: I liked it a lot. So go see the movie if you want... before or after you read Dororo the manga... but I’m about to do a manga-spoiler here, though it won’t ruin the movie for you at all really. Okay?

Okay, let’s hope that that’s enough to make it so that spoilers don’t show up on MangaLife’s front page.

In the meantime, here’s the basics—I’m going to draw on the summary I just wrote for Dororo, the manga, volume 3, here: A warlord, losing badly these days, makes a monk let him into a sealed-up room with 48 statues of demons that another monk carved, which drove him mad. The warlord considers it a fitting place to dwell on his next move, because he’s extremely bummed-out about his bleak prospects for taking over the world. He offers the demons whatever they want in exchange for success in winning the war. The demons respond that they want the body of his unborn son. Okay, says the warlord, take it and split it up between you. And so a deal was made...

And so, once upon a time, a baby was born who was missing almost all of his parts. He had a mouth-hole, and a head, and a torso, and, like, skin covering everything, but that’s about it. How did he live nonetheless? That’s how you know the supernatural is involved, baby. They sent him in a basket down the river (y’know, like you do) and he was found (what are the odds? Insane. That’s how you know it’s FATE) by a guy who was the best prosthetic-parts maker in the world, who made him all his 48 parts, although of course they don’t work quite the same as real eyes and ears and so on. On the other hand, if you get poked with a sword in your fake leg, you don’t feel anything or bleed, if you get my drift. Little Hyakkimaru grew up to be a badass swordsman, and every time he kills one of the 48 demons scattered around Japan, one of the parts he’s missing grows in for real.

Now, in the MANGA, his sidekick is Dororo, a little kid who purports to be the world’s greatest thief (Since Dororo gets into trouble constantly, you can’t help but think that there must be someone SOMEWHERE who’s a better thief, but Dororo isn’t bad at the pure thieving, really).

In the MOVIE, a few things are done differently. In the manga (here’s the big spoiler!), Dororo, near the very end, is shown to be: a little girl! And you thought he was a smart-ass boy all this time! In the movie, though, well, they didn’t want to screw around with actual child actors, so they got a very cute, slightly-androgynous-considering-most-Japanese-actresses-are-insanely-hot actress to play Dororo, about 20 years old or so, acting more like a tough tomboy 15 year old. She does a great job!

The actor portraying the main character Hyakkimaru also does an excellent job, which is harder, since he’s sort of the badass samurai Helen Keller, having neither real eyes nor ears at first, and so he’s not really supposed to have a very wide range of body/facial/vocal expression from the start of the movie, having never EXACTLY seen or heard how people normally express themselves. Okay, acting like a stiff isn’t that hard, but loosening it up gradually as the movie proceeds is a pretty good acting challenge in my opinion. He is, of course, about as physically attractive as your average guy from a shoujo, too... I jokingly started calling him “Deppo Johnnymaru.”

So, yeah, the plot is good, the special effects are either very good or kind of rubber-suity... at one point there was an armless giant lizard one could swear was on Power Rangers... not that I watched Power Rangers... but somehow that added to the fun/riffed on the tradition of rubber monsters in Japanese films...

Barbara, my wife, did not like this movie quite as well as I did. I am giving it an A-. She would give it a B+. The reason for this is that sometimes, you do wish that the story would kind of get on with it and walk and talk a tiny bit less. It’s not a mixed-bag of pacing... it’s not inconsistently-paced... you just wish, in general, that we could get on with things and tighten it all up JUST a bit more. I would use the fast-forward-but-not-so-fast-that-I-couldn’t-still-read-the-subtitles button in short bursts sometimes.

Still. My jaw was just standing open at the beginning... the acting was good... the endgame was different and more exciting/suspenseful (and yet slower) than the confrontation, in the manga, with Hyakkimaru’s father and brother... I was glad we watched this, and Barb was too.

At the end of the movie, it says 24 DEMONS TO GO, which made us wonder if maybe they had a TV show spinoff in mind, which would be great because this would be PERFECT for a TV show, it would totally be Japan’s BUFFY. The whole episodic nature of the thing seemed to lend itself much more to that medium than to a movie, really. But... no. I did a little research online and read that it's planned to be a trilogy, with another movie coming nowish and another one sometime next year, so we'll see...

--P``xEkklkVEyukFVFgZsiu``x1228251642``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x``xOsamu Tezuka``xSatoshi Tsumabuki``xKou Shibasaki ``x``xAction``xAdventure``xSupernatural``x``x``xVertical, Inc.``xOlder Teen``xA-``x8.95``x150``x225``xmovie_dororo.jpg``x``x``x``x Dororo v3``xParkCooper``xAw, man. I forgot to review Dororo volume 3. I meant to. I swear.

Let’s see how fast I can review: Once upon a time there was a baby born who was missing almost all of his parts. He had a mouth-hole, and a head, and a torso, and, like, skin covering everything, but that’s about it. How did he live nonetheless? That’s how you know the supernatural is involved, baby. They sent him in a basket down the river (y’know, like you do) and he was found (what are the odds? Insane. That’s how you know it’s FATE) by a guy who was the best prosthetic-parts maker in the world, who made him all his 48 parts, although of course they don’t work quite the same as real eyes and ears and so on. On the other hand, if you get poked with a sword in your fake leg, you don’t feel anything or bleed, if you get my drift. Little Hyakkimaru grew up to be a badass swordsman, and every time he kills one of the 48 demons scattered around Japan, one of the parts he’s missing grows in for real. His sidekick is Dororo, a little kid who purports to be the world’s greatest thief (Since Dororo gets into trouble constantly, you can’t help but think that there must be someone SOMEWHERE who’s a better thief, but Dororo isn’t bad at the pure thieving, really).

I missed part one, so that’s all I got going into volumes 2 and 3, but that’s all you need. This final Dororo phonebook features Dororo and Hyakkimaru doing their demon-fighting thing some more, mostly running afoul of pirates who want the treasure to which Dororo’s late pirate-captain dad tattooed a map on Dororo’s back. This is complicated by the fact that the more demons Hyakkimaru kills, the less-invulnerable he gets. Along the way, our heroes run into a kid who has befriended a pair of demon-sharks, and so it’s high-demon-fightin’-adventure-at-sea. Even though the sharks are technically evil in the sense of being really powerfully good at eating humans... isn’t that kind of what sharks DO? And so you feel a sympathy about how the kid who’s their human friend feels their loss when they die. Because let’s face it, those evil sharks have gotta go.

But yeah, that’s just the sort of playing-with-what’s-evil-and-what’s-sympathetic that the genius creator of Dororo, the guy who brought us Astroboy, Black Jack, and Buddha, loves playing with. And the end is just about as bittersweet as the stories from Buddha or sometimes Black Jack can be.

If you don’t think you could read a bad-ass samurai type story where all the characters look like the guy who drew Astroboy drew them, seeing as how he did, well, this might be a bit of a challenge for you, but it’s worth it. As MangaLife staff member David Rasmussen often says, I recommend you go back and get this one from the beginning. And (as he usually means when he says it), it’s not because you’ll be confused if you don’t—it’s just that that’s the way you’ll get the most reading-pleasure reward out of reading it.

--P
``xEkklkVpVVFuwfKxWSh``x1228250553``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1934287180``xOsamu Tezuka``x``x``x``xAdventure``xDrama``xSupernatural``xDawn T. Laabs``x``xVertical, Inc.``xAll Ages``xA-``x13.95``x150``x225``xbook_Dororo3.jpg``x``x``x``x Honey and Clover v4``xYsabet``xHoney and Clover's subplots of unrequited love really take center stage in volume 4: Morita has abruptly left Japan and headed to Los Angeles, leaving the rest of the characters to wonder what he's doing there and when--or if--he'll be back. (The between-chapters sketches of different characters' mental pictures of Morita in LA are a nice touch.) For Takemoto, Morita's absence has particular weight; he feels left behind in more ways than one, and when he asks Hagu if she wants Morita (who is, after all, his rival for her affections--although Hagu herself seems oblivious to that) to come back, he finds her answer less than comforting.

(I have to admit that I find Morita kind of exhausting, so I'm perfectly happy with how little he's around in this volume.)

Meanwhile, Mayama is settling into his new job and trying to get over his feelings for Rika, which is a bit difficult since everyone he works with knows her (and knew her late husband). On top of that, it's starting to become obvious that his feelings about Yamada, who's still helplessly in love with him, are more complicated than he's comfortable admitting--as he discovers when one of his co-workers begins to take an interest in her.

This all sounds like pretty heavy stuff in a summary, but Honey and Clover doesn't really go that way. The characters' emotions ring as true as ever, but Umino continues to punctuate their heartaches and growing pains with lighthearted moments and different looks at their believable, evolving friendships.

If you haven't yet taken a look at Honey and Clover, go check it out!

This volume includes a short behind-the-scenes comic from the creator and two pages of cultural notes.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkklkulApFAxwfdMDw``x1228248903``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421515075``xChica Umino``x``x``x``xDrama``x``x``xAkemi Wegmuller``xAkemi Wegmuller``xViz``xOlder Teen``xA-``x8.99``x150``x225``xHoney and Clover 04 cover 1.jpg``x``x``x``x We Were There v1``xYsabet``xAfter reading the first volume, my initial impression of We Were There (Bokura ga Ita) is that, depending on how it develops, it could be either ordinary or remarkable. I haven't read any spoilers for what happens after this volume, but between the positive things I've heard from manga-savvy friends, and the not-insignificant fact that it won the 2005 Shogakukan Manga Award for shoujo, I'm thinking it's the latter.

This high school romance begins on Nanami Takahashi's second day of high school, as she begins trying to make friends with her new classmates. She has very mixed success, but the other girls draw her attention to Motoharu Yano, the most popular boy in class. Nanami finds Yano attractive but contradictory and off-putting--he says and does whatever he feels like, with no apparent concern for other people's feelings. She develops a crush on him in spite of herself, though, and it isn't long before she starts to learn about his painful past (given away in the back cover copy) and begins trying to make sense of it.

Nanami herself is a very ordinary girl, who doesn't fall into the traps of being either saccharine or clueless. She wants to make a lot of friends, but that's her understanding of how to get by in high school, rather than being a burning desire for popularity. She frequently assumes the best of the people around her, which may be why she finds Yano's sporadic unpleasantness so frustrating. As a heroine, she's accessible and fairly sympathetic, which I appreciate.

This is the kind of story that requires a delicate touch to keep it from being either too predictable or too melodramatic, which is my only reservation about it right now; the stage is still being set in vol. 1, so I'm not making up my mind about the storytelling just yet. (Although, again, I'm biased towards it.) It's visually appealing: the artwork is wispy and fragile, and while the backgrounds are rarely very detailed, it mostly strikes me as an effective use of white space, keeping focus on the characters at all times.

In other words: recommended, and I'm looking forward to volume 2.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkZyykpEkHbjzluzb``x1227662012``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421520184``xYuki Obata``x``x``x``xDrama``xRomance``x``xTetsuichiro Miyaki``xNancy Thistlethwaite``xViz``xOlder Teen``xA-``x8.99``x150``x225``xWe Were There 01 cover.jpg``x``x``x``x Gaba Kawa``xYsabet``xDemons like Rara are supposed to cause mischief in the mortal world and draw humans to darkness. They're not supposed to help mortals, and they're definitely not supposed to fall in love with them! But that's just what happens when Rara enters high school, where a hot guy named Retsu Aku calls her "Gaba Kawa"!

While demons gain power by causing mischief, the opposite is also true--if Rara uses any of her powers to help mortals, she'll immediately lose that very power. If she loses enough power, she'll disappear! Poor Rara. What's a "Gaba Kawa" demon to do?

What we have here is an extremely fluffy one-shot manga by Rie Takada. It's a fast read, and eminently predictable--taking a quick look at both the cover art and the back cover blurb should be enough to tell you exactly what happens, unless this is your very first shoujo manga ever. There's no new ground being broken here, and since it's only one volume long, there isn't a lot of time for either character development or any kind of serious exploration of the premise.

As a light way to spend half an hour, though, Gaba Kawa holds up fairly well. The main character, Rara, is very cute and spunky (although horribly inept at being demonic; one wonders how any of the other demons imagined for a moment that she'd be able to wreak any kind of havoc on Earth). Her love interest, Retsu, realizes early on that there's something unusual about her, and their attempts to figure each other out provide most of the story's plot.

As might be expected, the artwork aims to be cute, and it delivers. As with the story, there's nothing exceptional, and the designs are fairly standard, but the cute is undeniable. (I particularly like the cover art--Rara's bright-eyed determination looks especially good in color.)

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkZyyElVEXWtTkgyH``x1227661851``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421522594``xRie Takada``x``x``x``xRomance``xSupernatural``x``xNoritaka Minami``xLance Caselman``xViz``xTeen``xC+``x8.99``x150``x225``xGaba Kawa cover.jpg``x``x``x``x Words of Truth and Wisdom: Translating Is Like... ``xNibley``xI think I'll pick up this column where I left off two weeks ago. Or somewhere around where I left off two weeks ago. Remember that literal translation we posted, with the “first ear” and the “my stomach is diminished” and all that fun stuff? Let's talk about that some more. What I said last time was that you can't tell how well or poorly written the dialogue was from reading a translation like that... or from reading any translation, come to think of it. But anyway, the problems come up when people start to think of that translation from our last column as a “good” translation. Then they'll probably either think that A)the original dialogue was bad, or B)Japanese people aren't very bright.

I think most people reading this column are already into manga and all that stuff enough to know that B is purely false. It's just that with a different language and culture, they have different ways of getting messages across (obviously). Take “my stomach is diminished” for example. It probably doesn't take a whole lot of thought to realize that an American would say “I'm hungry.” We actually did find out the other day that there is a Japanese word for “hungry,” but it doesn't get used a whole lot. Instead, they usually say, “My stomach is empty” (or diminished, which actually seems to be, from our translation experience, the least polite way to say it), just like when someone is thirsty, they usually say, “My throat is dry.”

It actually kind of reminds me of our little sister, and how she'd come up to us and whine that she was hungry, and expect us to do something about it. Most really nice people actually would do something about it, I think, but big sisters aren't so kind to little sisters. I was going to say I think it happens with even more phrases in Japan, but come to think of it, only one comes to mind, and that phrase is “urusai.” “Urusai” basically means “loud, noisy, and annoying,” and manga characters say it a lot. But in English, it usually gets translated to “shut up,” because while the character is saying “you're loud and annoying,” the unspoken continuation of that is “and I want you to stop it,” or “shut up.”

It doesn't always have to be translated to “shut up,” though. For example, there might be a character who uses very polite, girly speech, who would say “urusai desu wa.” (The “desu” makes it polite and the “wa” makes it girly.) A character like that would be more likely to say “Be quiet!” Unless she was really breaking character, but then she'd probably say it differently anyway. Athena points out that one time, in the subtitles to Outlaw Star, she saw “urusai” translated to “bite me.” But here you really have to look at the context, because it only works in certain ones, and I can't come up with an example, or I'd give it.

Anyway, I think my main point here is that Japanese words don't usually have “one true English translation.” Let's use another example: baka. Even our little sisters who don't watch anime or have any other interest in the Japanese language know that “baka” means “stupid.” But it doesn't only mean “stupid.” It means any other synonym for stupid you can think of. It can also mean “ridiculous” or “silly,” and in some contexts translates nicely to “impossible,” like when a villain's just been defeated, he says, “Baka na...!” just before he dies, meaning “That's ridiculous! How could I possibly be beaten by these people!?” But that's a little wordy, so “Impossible...!” works much better. In that sense, translating is a lot like acting--you have to get into the characters' heads to do it right.

I think the most common translation of “baka” that I've seen is “idiot,” but our personal preference is “stupid.” It just sounds funnier. I think we finally thought to start using it one time when we were remembering funny quotes from Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, and there was that one episode where Space Ghost and Zorak kept telling Moltar to shut up, only one time they didn't, so he asked, “Isn't anybody gonna tell me to shut up?” and Space Ghost says, “You don't deserve it!” and Zorak says, “Yeah, so just shut up, stupid!” I also think that translating is a really good job for people who like quoting movies and stuff, because that's basically what it is: quoting the Japanese lines in English (in our case). Anyway, “Shut up, idiot!” doesn't sound as funny, so we prefer to use “stupid.” And man, this column has some vicious vocabulary.

Let's try and think of some happier vocabulary. The first thing I thought was, “What's Japanese for 'love' again?” and that brings up an interesting point: while sometimes one word in Japanese has a bunch of different meanings in English, the same can happen in reverse. I can think of a bunch of different words for “love” in Japanese, but not so many in English. Maybe I just need to get better English vocabulary. For example, from our experience, “ai” is a general love that covers about everything, and “koi” is romantic love that you get in a lot of shojo manga. Then there's “suki,” which is a translator's bane, because it can mean “love” or just “like,” and fans can get very picky about which one they think should be used. Usually we try to go with what we think is in the character's head plus what sounds best in the context, and a lot of the time it just flows onto the word file, but sometimes there's a lot of discussion.

So that was a lot of rambling, but I hope it was at least interesting and/or informative. The main point is this: it's really easy to get a bunch of different translations of the exact same thing, the tricky part is choosing the best one. And there's a lot to consider in making that choice. I think that with experience, it comes more and more naturally--like how a pianist doesn't have to take the time to say, “Okay, so that note is a C, so I want to hit this key, and then it goes to...” They just look at the page and translate the notes into music. I think translation is kind of the same way.``xEkkZEuykpuNssjHTUL``x1227146204``xfeatures``x``x``x45611116047418``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x150``x225``x``x``x``x``xtwins.jpg Sugar Princess v2``xYsabet``xLet's start with a refresher on Hisaya Nakajo's Sugar Princess: Maya, an eighth-grader who'd never figured skated before vol. 1, has enough natural talent to mimic a jump she saw on TV, and to do it well enough that she catches the eye of a skating coach. The coach doesn't stop at deciding that Maya is a diamond in the rough; instead, he pairs her with Shun, a famous ex-pairs skater who switched to mens' singles after his sister (and previous partner) died.

If you can suspend your disbelief over Maya's incredible innate talent (which isn't that hard, especially since this volume makes less of a big deal out of it than the first one did), volume 2 is an enjoyable read. Shun begins getting used to the idea of skating with Maya, just in time for them to train intensively; they've agreed to enter a competition, with the understanding that the rink they train at will be shut down if they don't place well. The stakes are high, but amid the training and the actual competition Nakajo takes the time to show us things like Maya figuring out what to do about a skating costume (she has no idea, and worse, no money) and Shun meeting Maya's family for the first time.

Nakako's depictions of the actual skating continue to be one of the highlights in this series, although her cute between-chapters sketches of real skaters have disappeared. Her enthusiasm for skating is still very apparent, though; most of the book's side notes involve anecdotes from her research.

If you're looking for a pleasant series that doesn't require a long-term investment, Sugar Princess (complete at two volumes) may be the one for you.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkZEuVAkVhVFyqUmt``x1227145925``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421519313``xHisaya Nakajo``x``x``x``xRomance``x``x``xAnastasia Moreno``xAnastasia Moreno``xViz``xAll Ages``xB``x8.99``x150``x225``xSugar Princess 02 cover.jpg``x``x``x``x Boys Over Flowers v32``xYsabet``xI'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that if you're reading a review of volume 32 of anything, you're at least passingly familiar with it. And Boys Over Flowers is a well-known, long-running shoujo classic; personally, I saw the anime years ago, and while I've been reading through the manga slowly, I'm familiar enough with the series that I use it as a reference point when discussing other titles.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean I love it. Structurally, it's painfully obvious that Kamio never expected it to run as long as it did, and that new plot twists just got added on as she went (to her credit, her author's notes are always very upfront about her surprise over reaching each landmark volume number). By this point in the story, every time it looks like things might possibly go the characters' way, you can set your watch by the next implausible plot development that's going to interfere.

On the other hand, I have a positive bias towards the main characters from watching the J-drama TV series, which brought Tsukushi's rock-solid determination to life and also somehow managed to make Tsukasa endearing. (Full props to actor Matsumoto Jun for pulling that off.) So while I remember watching the anime series and being wildly unimpressed by the character, I now have a soft spot for him. Fortunately, the manga helps by making it clear that Tsukasa, despite his serious issues, is at least trying to improve himself--he's just kind of inept at it. Except when he's not.

So: 32 volumes in, where are we now? In a hospital, where Tsukasa is unconscious after being stabbed (which happened, naturally, immediately after his decision to defy his mother, leave his family, and be with Tsukushi). While she waits to see if her boyfriend will survive the night, Tsukushi has to deal with his mother's typically cold attitude and apparent lack of concern. The good news is that all of their friends are there to offer support, including Rui, who only recently admitted that he has real feelings for Tsukushi.

It's not much of a spoiler to say Tsukasa pulls through (there are a few more volumes, after all), but this volume is almost entirely about the aftermath of his injury and how Tsukushi tries to deal with it. And even this late in the series, Kamio is still introducing new characters who can either help or hinder Tsukushi and Tsukasa's turbulent (to say the least) romance.

Again, if you're considering picking up this volume, you're probably already in it for the long haul. Vol. 32 is Boys Over Flowers continuing to do its thing, and if you've loved (or even just enjoyed) that all along, you'll probably be very happy with this volume.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.

(Note to VIZ's licensing team: if you feel inclined to license the J-drama version of this, I will buy it in a heartbeat and encourage plenty of people to do the same.)``xEkkZEuVZyyYTeddSPD``x1227145766``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421517191``xYoko Kamio``x``x``x``xDrama``xRomance``x``xJN Productions``x``xViz``xTeen``xB``x9.99``x150``x225``xBoys Over Flowers 32 cover.jpg``x``x``x``x Blank Slate v2``xrasmussen``xSay, isn't this the name of some "Series Within A Series" ran during the summer by TNT during episodes of Law & Order or Bones or whatever?!? Well I think it was, but that's not important as this has nothing to do with that... almost.

Like a majority of Japanese RPG games (and quite a few manga), there's just something about a guy who can't remember nothing about himself that seems to be like the bright light of ill-reason that draws moths like Aya Kanno to it, even if it might mess Aya up in the process. So once again we have ANOTHER series (groan no oh please) where some other handsome man-meat does the Bourne thing by having his memory wiped, then questioning what the heck is he? A hero? A villain? Oh I don't know, what is this?!? A Fable clone?!? (Remember if you're wearing the right stuff, have the right tats, and do the right mission cards, you'll be good or evil!)

Zen, the title's main manmeat, has had his memory wiped and he's also concerned about finding out who or what he was. To do this, off he goes with a bunch of other pretty boy studmeatmuffins, and oh the places he'll see to find out who he is -- and wow, that's fast, in this issue he already finds out who he is and it isn't Joe the Plumber! No. So you're just at that point where you can taste your true identity at the tip of your tongue, Mr. Zen. Where are you off to now?!? Bleah. Wow, this series is over just as it began, as with the other series I just talked up that was this short... only I don't have as much fondness over this one as I did that other title, oh no.

The ending is just convoluted, and while I am wondering if I would be more sympathetic to the character if I absorbed this from the beginning and Volume 1, I can't say I bonded well with him, the cast, or their plights by jumping in at the middle of this story. Also, I just felt the ending didn't work for me: too overly dramatic, rambling, overdone emotions that don't impact in a good way (even the most subtle of emotions can carry deep strong impact if done right, this just plows right into you like Sarah Palin through her invisible opportunity door... not really reaching you, just impacting into you).

Mind you, if you love the whole Bourne thing and like people who lose their memories, then off you go. It's a nice short run, a quick taste of action and... and... well, whatever it is that's supposed to make this Sho(u)jo... say, I read this and this is the first Sho(u)jo title I didn't see the Shoujo in! Where's the Shoujo again? Did I miss it? Was I just not paying attention enough?!? Where's the shojo!?!

Anyway, it's short and a slice of espionage, action and at-times-overdone drama... and it's shojo... really? Didn't feel like it, but whatever... C.``xEkkZEuVkVEWMgtCmAs``x1227145251``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421519259``xAya Kanno``x``x``x``xDrama``x``x``xJohn Werry & HC Language Solutions, Inc.``xCarla Sinclair``xViz``xOlder Teen``xC``x8.99``x150``x225``xblank slate 2.jpg``x``x``x``x The Record of a Fallen Vampire v3``xrasmussen``xOh, great, another title with vampires in it. Color me unimpressed. I don't know, maybe I'm just burned out on the whole vampire thing. It's not VIZs fault, though, I blame the books that are about to become movie(s) (Twilight) for my sudden disdain for vampires. Aren't you as irritated by vampires after being bombarded by all the trailers for that movie as I am? You should be. But since we're stuck with vampires we should review it.

What did I miss in the first two volumes? Let's see.

Thousands of years ago the Vampire King Akabara Strauss had a slight problem. He kinda ended up being a Vampire King without a kingdom, he lost his wife aka the Vampire Queen) and ... well, he didn't exactly lose her as much as she was hidden. It seems she was sorta unkillable (Steven Seagal bad career unkillable) so they sealed her away (something we should consider doing with Seagal's career before he starts cranking out new movies people actually take note of) and erected thousands of fake "seals"... no, no, not the clubbing in the North Pole we don't think much of anymore seals... so that said king would never find her ever again... because apparently nobody thought vampires were anything but totally 110% dedicated to their lifemates, or she was just too powerful to dump for a little vampire jailbait of the ripe tender age of 120 to 270 years of age. Oh, yeah, thousands of years later he's still looking for her... hooray?

In this volume you find out apparently no matter how many get whacked by this Akabara who cares, that whole thousands upon thousands of years looking for his queen is so darn catchy (even if you know one of the Dhampires has the ability to keep the King on a short leash)!! That's why at least one who should be against Akabara got his back... but maybe not for long as the title deterioates into a long dialogue about kill or not kill the Vampire King, whether he really loves his Queen or just wants to wrap his hands about her throat (and other body parts) and rip her apart, Death and revenge, move and counter move, and boy does this title talk you to ... yeah.

Thing is with this title, is that it's not like other vampire titles which mixes up action and dialogue, this is a brainy title without a doubt. Strong in its emotions and emotional impact, deep in intricate plot and character emotion (not sure about development but you do see a lot of that emoting), the title is no flash in the pan like Vampire Knight or most other recent vampire titles we've seen. Of course if you'd rather have an action yarn to sink your literary teeth into (so to speak), this title is light on the action. But if you want a title with a bit more of a brainy sharpness, and lots of drama and less vampire smackdowns, then you should be pleasantly surprised with this one. Hmm... hope this title has a good run to it, should be interesting to see how this develops as the plot rolls along.

Love and loss, revenge and hate, emotions run high and bring unto Fallen Vampire an A-, cheers.``xEkkZEuuVZkPIMaOpaX``x1227144572``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421517752``xKyo Shirodaira``xYuri Kimura``x``x``xAction``xSupernatural``x``xAndrew Cunningham``xAndrew Cunningham``xViz``xTeen``xA-``x9.99``x150``x225``xrecordofafallenvampire03.jpg``x``x``x``x Fushigi Yûgi: Genbu Kaiden v7``xYsabet``xYuu Watase's work has never really clicked for me before, and I always figured I'd given her a decent shot, having read both Absolute Boyfriend and Alice 19th. But I'd never tried Fushigi Yûgi, which is arguably her most beloved work; partly that's because I cut my anime-geek teeth on Sailormoon, a fandom in which complaints about Usagi being a crybaby were frequently answered with, "At least she's not as bad as Miaka in FY!" Despite that vague and negative impression, I always figured I'd give Fushigi Yûgi a shot if it crossed my path, but it never did.

So when vol. 7 of Fushigi Yûgi: Genbu Kaiden arrived in a package of review copies, and I found that my library had the rest of the series, I got hold of the entire thing and sat down expecting it to be a decent enough read that didn't blow me away.

What I discovered is that, while Watase still isn't one of my favorite manga-ka, I enjoyed this much more than either of her other series that I've tried. Genbu Kaiden is a prequel series to the original Fushigi Yûgi, and I gather from the author's notes that readers who're familiar with the original series will already have some idea of where this story is going. The plot has some predictable elements, but not enough to detract from the enjoyment of reading the story.

In brief: Takiko, an ordinary girl from early 20th century Japan, is pulled into a book called The Universe of the Four Gods, which her father translated into Japanese in hopes of using its wish-granting power to save Takiko's mother's life. In the world inside the book, Takiko discovers that she is the Priestess of Genbu, and that she has to find the seven Celestial Warriors in order to fulfill her destiny--which she hopes will grant her the power to bring her mother back to life. Along the way, she falls in love with Limdo/Uruki, who is both one of the Celestial Warriors and an outcast prince who wants to kill his father.

Volume 7 opens just after Takiko and her companions have learned that the power of the seventh Celestial Warrior is divided between twin brothers: Hagus, who's been their enemy from the beginning, and Teg, who's been held captive for years. Takiko and Soren, Limdo's manservant, are almost immediately taken captive and brought into enemy territory, a journey which gives Takiko the chance to learn more about the world she's found herself in, as well as about Limdo's past.

Quite a lot happens in this volume, which is at that exciting spot in a series where most of the major players have been revealed and the action is well underway. I'm very curious to see what happens next; these are interesting characters in a complex political climate, and Watase has a nice sense of pacing. On top of that, the artwork is very pretty without being too cluttered, and VIZ's presentation is excellent. I may just have to go back and check out the original Fushigi Yûgi to see how it compares.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkyVFkAyVsvAELOwe``x1226532965``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x142152256X``xYuu Watase``x``x``x``xFantasy``xDrama``xRomance``xLillian Olsen``x``xViz``xOlder Teen``xB+``x8.99``x150``x225``xFushigi Yugi Genbu Kaiden 07 cover.jpg``x``x``x``x High School Debut v5-6``xYsabet``xHigh School Debut is one of those titles that I enjoy more and more with every volume. This is high school romance manga done right: the main characters, Haruna and Yoh, have lives that don't begin or end with each other, and have believable flaws and virtues. Some of their problems have to do with their own issues or conflicting points of view, and others come from outside, but it's obvious why they like each other and that they really want to be together.

Haruna is finally starting to be comfortable with the fact that she and Yoh are actually in a relationship (after a lot of embarrassment and flustered moments in vol. 4), but it's not entirely smooth sailing. They're still two very different people, in terms of their histories as well as their attitudes, and history has a way of not quite staying behind you--even if, like Haruna, you don't have the best memory in the world. (Or the ability to comprehend holding a grudge. Haruna's particular type of naiveté is one of my favorite things about her.)

Dealing with people from the past is a major theme in each of these two volumes, and the storylines do a nice job of filling in some of the characters' history while giving Haruna and Yoh's relationship a chance to develop further. Sometimes this means less time than usual focused on the supporting cast, but these volumes still maintain the balance between the romance and the other parts of the main characters' lives.

High School Debut is a pleasure to read, and I continue to highly recommend it.

Review copies provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkyVFklFlYtWFBhyM``x1226532838``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421517337``xKazune Kawahara``x``x``x``xRomance``x``x``xGemma Collinge``xGemma Collinge``xViz``xTeen``xA-``x8.99``x150``x225``xHigh School Debut 6 cover.jpg``x``x``x``x S.A. v7``xYsabet``xRomance is in the air in volume 7 of S.A.--at least compared to the previous two volumes I've read. As the school sports festival comes to an end, Kei has accepted his feelings for Hikari, although that doesn't mean that confessing them to her can possibly go smoothly. Meanwhile, Akira is trying to come to terms with her love for Tadashi, who's apparently oblivious to how she feels, and Megumi takes matters into her own hands in an attempt to deal with the potential fallout from everyone else's romantic complications.

Unlike the last volume, which was mostly devoted to one main subplot, each chapter in vol. 7 has its own storyline. The stories tie together in a way that keeps this from feeling choppy, but it makes it a bit harder to think of the volume as a single unit. Minami has a lot of balls in the air here, with the spotlight constantly moving between characters, and some chapters are much stronger than others.

For a series that's nominally about Hikari's lifelong competition with Kei, that doesn't really come up much. It's still on her mind from time to time in this volume, but she finally seems to be consciously aware that her feelings for him are changing. That relationship, whether or not it's at the forefront of the action, continues to not interest me all that much. I do like some of the ways the group's friendships are developed in this volume, though, even if the events surrounding them aren't entirely to my taste. (The high school hijinks subgenre of romantic shoujo is rarely my thing unless it's done exceptionally well, as in Ouran High School Host Club.) I don't think my mixed feelings about this title are going to be resolved anytime soon.

Volume 7 of S.A. includes several pages of bonus material from the author.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkyVFkyAyMKLCUhJa``x1226532696``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421517507``xMaki Minami``x``x``x``xRomance``x``x``xJN Productions``xAmanda Hubbard``xViz``xTeen``xB-``x8.99``x150``x225``xSA 07 cover.jpg``x``x``x``x Words of Truth and Wisdom: Lost In Translation``xNibley``xThere's something that we've been thinking about for a while now, and I think it might turn out to be a multi-part discussion, mainly because we want to do a study and we don't have time before our next column is due. Of course, we also get easily distracted, so I make no guarantee that the other parts of this discussion will come consecutively. Yay, I used a big word! (Sometimes that makes me prouder than other times. I don't know why.)

Anyway, here's what happens. We'll be totally in love with a series, but then someone will say, “It was alright, I guess,” or something to that effect. Now, of course we have to make allowances for the possibility that we just have really weird taste. But it happens so many times that we're forced to believe one of two things. Either A, we have no taste whatsoever, which is entirely possible, but I have a really hard time believing that so many things we think of as SUPER AWESOME are “Alright, I guess.” Or B, some of the super awesomeness gets lost in translation.

Many months ago, before we stopped downloading anime, we were watching a fansub of something we know to be highly beloved by more people than just the two of us. The series will remain unnamed to spare the innocent. We had already seen the series raw, and only had the fansub version so we could show our friends. The problem there was that then our friends had to deal with our constantly talking over the episode saying things like, “I would have translated it like this,” or, “Augh, that line is so hilarious! If only they'd worded it this way, it would still be hilarious!” We actually had similar problems with another very popular title that we were watching on legal domestic DVDs just a couple of weeks ago. And both of the titles I've mentioned are titles that have been described as “benefiting from movement” by someone who has read non-moving versions of them.

But when we read the non-moving version of the first one... okay, so the first volume of the manga wasn't that great, but as the series went on, it was still pretty darn awesome, and we didn't think the lack of movement was a problem at all. So my current theory is that the movement and voices make up for the lack of clever wording in translation. Basically what I'm saying is that I think that sometimes a series is judged as “not that great” or even “bad” when it was actually very well written in Japanese, just poorly translated into English.

I think that what some people don't always understand is that translation is all about interpretation. Well duh, that's like exactly the same thing, right? Wrong! I think! Maybe? See, that's the problem right there. How do you interpret the word “interpret”? As translators, we sometimes get picky about the fact that when going from one language to another, “translating” is text, and “interpreting” is speaking. They're like the same thing, only in different media. But that's only when you're speaking about translators and interpreters. Of course the word “interpret” has other meanings. So how we translate a manga into English depends a lot on how we interpret, or I guess in this case “understand,” the Japanese, which I feel like we've probably said about a million times before. I hope I'm not too repetitive, but learning is repetition, after all.

The main point we're trying to make here is that the same thing can be translated in lots of different ways and still technically be correct. Think of our last column about “so's your face,” for example. Now, I've definitely come to the conclusion that “so's your face” actually isn't a correct translation. But I still think that “same to you” is a better translation, even though “you are too” means the same thing.

So now, just for kicks, here's a fun thing we did a while ago. We had been thinking about “literal translations” for a long time, and we were pretty upset about it, because people were telling us we needed to translate things more literally. And, in the spirit of being literal, we took that very very literally (which is actually something we tend to do a lot (occupational hazard); it just happened to be about literalness this time). So we opened to a random page of our Japanese copy of Saiyuki volume 1 (non-Reload), and translated it as literally as we could and still have the sentences be in any kind of English grammar (not to say that they entirely make sense; just that the grammar should be correct). And here's what we came up with:

This is page 132 in (the original Enix printing of) volume 1 of Saiyuki. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, this scene has the four main characters traveling in the mountains, and the only place around with people is a temple. It's either stay the night there, or camp out.

Priest: Some sort of business!?
Hakkai: We are travelling persons, but...
Hakkai: Even for only this night, couldn't we humbly partake of being lodged in this direction?
Priest: --Hmph.
Priest: As for this place, due to it being a sacred temple...
Priest: ...it will not go to the reason of inviting in persons of unknowable lineage!
Goku: Wha--...!?
Gojyo: (Feces!) Because of this, as for me, guys called priests are hated!!
Sanzo: Hmm, first ear.
Hakkai: We are bothered, yes? (Hmm)
Goku: Hey, my stomach is diminished! Sanzo!!

And I can't in good conscience use that without saying, “If you want to see how the final version turned out, check out volume one of Saiyuki, from TokyoPop!” Come to think of it, I don't think _we_ know how the final version turned out, but we're sure it's better than that, although that is hilarious. But a Japanese person, if we interpreted it correctly, would probably understand the original Japanese about the same way it turned out in the final version. But if you don't know any Japanese it would be practically impossible to tell how well or poorly the original was written with only a page of Japanese manga and that dialogue to go off of.

Athena suggests that we might want to provide a more legitimate translation, so you can see the difference, but I think the column is long enough as it is. Oh well.``xEkkVlVylFykoxWRkiP``x1225856836``xfeatures``x``x``x45611116047418``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x``x150``x225``x``x``x``x``xtwins.jpg Ouran High School Host Club v11``xYsabet``xI loved the Ouran High School Host Club anime back when it was the current Big Thing a couple of years ago, and I'm thrilled that the first half is finally available domestically, and that FUNimation is sensibly releasing the series in two box sets instead of a heap of individual DVDs. (Keep that up, guys.) Given that, I assumed I'd love the manga when I got around to reading it; I almost always prefer the original version of a story, and it seemed likely that Ouran would be no exception. But the first time I tried reading it, under admittedly less-than-ideal circumstances (volume 3, in a bookstore. Yes, I'm ashamed), I bounced off it.

Ouran, for anyone who's not familiar with it, centers around a group of bored, rich high school boys who form a "host club" at their ultra-elite school, and an eminently practical commoner girl who gets dragged into their insanity. Haruhi, our heroine, keeps the other characters (as well as the readers) rooted; their reactions to and relationships with her are what keep the series from being an impossibly over-the-top collection of shoujo tropes (which the creator obviously enjoys playing with and dismantling), and also give it an unexpected depth.

One of my impressions from that first attempt at reading the manga hasn't changed: Ouran benefited hugely from being animated. The show brought the story very faithfully to life, and the hyperactive comedy simply works better in motion than on the page, especially with a great voice cast. That said, the anime suffers from the fundamental problem of having been made while the manga was still running, and the itch to see what really happens brought me back to the original version.

The second time around, I bought vol. 1-10 in one go and read them through in a sitting. Unsurprisingly, reading the manga from the beginning helped a lot, and by the time I was finished I was as in love with it as I was with the anime. Somewhere around vol. 8-10 the plot moves in directions that weren't covered by the anime, and now, in volume 11, there are things coming to the surface that might have long-lasting implications for the characters. While the plot often resets (time doesn't pass in the most realistic sense at Ouran High), the characters' arcs are taken more seriously. The nature of Kyoya and Tamaki's friendship lies at the heart of the school's first-ever sports festival, while it's becoming increasingly obvious to everyone (except Haruhi) that both Hikaru and Kaoru, the twins who are much less interchangeable than they like people to think, have feelings for her. The twins' relationship is one of the things that interests me most in Ouran, and I'm particularly looking forward to seeing how that develops as, for the first time in their lives, they're faced with both wanting something that they can't simply share.

On the production side, VIZ is doing a very nice job with this title (although I do wish they'd retained the name honorifics). It reads surprisingly consistently, given that it's been through four translators and five adapters in the three years it's been running in English. I don't know that I would have even noticed if I weren't in the habit of reading credits, and that's very high praise.

Volume 11 of Ouran High School Host Club includes a page of editor's notes and an extensive fanart section.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkVlVyuEVoSkONXha``x1225856415``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421522551``xBisco Hatori``x``x``x``xComedy``xRomance``x``xMasumi Matsumoto``xMasumi Matsumoto``xViz``xTeen``xA``x8.99``x150``x225``xOuran 11 cover.jpg``x``x``x``x B.O.D.Y. v3 ``xYsabet``xThe short review: I liked B.O.D.Y. vol. 3 noticeably better than vol. 2.

Why? Well, it still has a premise that isn't my thing at all, but the constant onslaught of implausible plot points has slowed down enough that the characters can process what's going on, and actually talk to each other and try to figure things out--at least occasionally. Ryoko (now in full Gutsy Heroine mode, where my impression of her in vol. 2 was more in the vein of Good-Hearted Heroine In Over Her Head) and Ryunosuke are trying to make a serious go of their relationship, which includes sorting out their respective emotional and practical issues about Ryunosuke working in a host club (i.e., dating for money).

Things might even go a bit smoothly if Ryoko weren't so fascinated Jin, by the president of the club where Ryunosuke works, but she is. Common sense and her boyfriend's entirely reasonable concern aside, she spends an awful lot of this volume focused on unraveling Jin's past, which isn't the safest hobby ever. (I did say the over-the-top aspect had slowed, not disappeared.)

My other main frustration with B.O.D.Y. is how often things revolve around misunderstandings that could be cleared up in about two minutes if the characters really sat and talked, or made a real attempt to figure how the other person might be feeling, but that's hardly unique to this series, or even to this genre.

This volume has changed my impression of the series slightly for the better, then, but it's still not really to my taste. But again, if you're a fan of this flavor of shoujo, go on and give it a shot.

Volume 3 of B.O.D.Y. includes a page of editor's notes.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkVlVVlZVSFLGVyiM``x1225855875``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x142151804X``xAo Mimori``x``x``x``xRomance``x``x``xJoe Yamazaki``xKelly Sue DeConnick``xViz``xOlder Teen``xB-``x8.99``x150``x225``xBODY 03 cover.jpg``x``x``x``x Crayon Shinchan v6``xjoykim``xCrayon Shinchan is a gag manga about a cheeky five-year-old boy whose obsession with bodily functions, pretty girls, and his mother's clothing tends to make life very interesting for his family, friends, and classmates. Though I haven't read the earlier volumes in this series, I imagine volume 5 is pretty much more of what's come before and what comes after: a collection of brief episodes characterized by spectacularly low-brow humor and cartoony, scribbly art.

Make no mistake: this is not a manga for young children, even though the art style and main character's age might lead some naive readers to that conclusion. The humor and references in this manga are aimed at a much older set. Shinchan's age actually mostly serves to make his invariably transgressive behavior--which ranges from flashing random women to discussing his mother's panties with her friends--acceptable enough to be comic rather than wholly creepy. Actually, I still find it a little creepy, but I recognize that I'm not the target audience. Not only is this a manga aimed at adults, it's specifically targeted at adult men. This is particularly evident in the way the series treats adult women characters, especially Shinchan's long-suffering mother. Though all of the other characters are pretty much targets for mockery, women tend to be the objects of Shinchan's worst behavior.

As this review has probably already made rather obvious, Usui's humor is not going to work for everyone. The jokes in this volume cover topics ranging from high leg cut swimsuits and poop to women's breast sizes and panties. That list alone is probably enough to tell any reader whether he or she will find this series worth investigating.

Not surprisingly for a gag manga, the art style is unpolished and very cartoony. Those who read manga for gorgeous bishonen or kinetic action sequences are going to be pretty disappointed if they come looking for those things here. Backgrounds tend to be barely sketched in, if they are present at all, and there is little use of screentones, giving the art a very hasty and slapdash feel. It suits the subject matter and stories just fine, but there's nothing in the art that will hook new readers on its own. This is a manga series with a single selling point--its particular brand of humaor--and it will attract or repel readers on that basis alone.

It's difficult to give a fair rating to a manga that's so clearly is just not designed to appeal to readers like me. Crayon Shinchan is not a work of high art, but it also was never meant to be. Readers with a taste for potty humor may want to check out this very long-running series, but anyone with tastes remotely like mine can probably safely give it a pass.

Review copy provided by CMX/DC Comics. ``xEkkVlVuFuFaHTYiboD``x1225854343``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1401220312``xYoshito Usui``x``x``x``xComedy``x``x``xSheldon Drzka``xSheldon Drzka``xDC/CMX``xMature``xD``x7.99``x150``x225``xcrayon6.jpg``x``x``x``x Gun Blaze West v2-3``xrasmussen``xWhat can I say? When a series is this short and punchy it can be quite easy to recommend since it's easy to get into, easy to cover (so few volumes to collect), and easy to read from beginning to end. This collection comprises just enough volumes to carry on a plane with you and just enough to give you something to pass the time while waiting through a delay or during a flight (if you are one of those people who can read on a moving plane).

From the creator of Rurouni Kenshin & Buso Renkin (sorry, I never reviewed either title) comes a tale of the Old West told in a fresh new way. Now I missed Volume 1, by the way, so I'm just going to recap from the start of Volume 2 and get you up to speed (sorry about that).

Sorry again, also, for the first volume recap. I know I covered that in my Volume 2 review but one more time just for the record.

It's America in the 19th Century and we're hanging with a young boy named Viu. Viu has a dream to become a gunslinger. He lives over in Winston Town, Illinois, with his older sister Cissy. Well, as you probably guessed, one day Viu's world is flipped upside down when he meets one Marcus Homer (a gunslinger who is doing the whole Wagons East thing heading as quickly away from the West as he can). With Marcus' help, Viu stands up against two outlaws, managing to apprehend them despite getting his tail handed to him quite badly.

So during a brief bonding moment, Viu blurts out "I want to become stronger" and Marcus points him on a little quest to become stronger by heading him westward-bound towards a "promised land" called "Gun Blaze West" (same name as the title of course). Here is supposedly a place where only the strong who are confident in their ability to wield lead-spitters and other weapons of bodily harm can enter. The two end up vowing to take the trip West (which is kinda odd
since didn't Marcus just hightail it East from the West before meeting Viu?!?) but that doesn't go well when Marcus ends up taking a bullet during a challenge with a cowardly bandit leader, who ends up taking the long nap himself when he and his little gang gets wiped out by a righteously-pissed Viu.

Five years later from this point, Viu is still underaged, and he's heading west where he starts off by dropping in on the city of St. Louis (future home of the St. Louis Cardinals, St. Louis Rams and St. Louis archway) where he ends up getting caught up in a battle between rival saloons (which continues into Volume 2). When he leaves St. Louis he has a new companion in a guy named Kevin (master of the rope... no, not like that). Along the way Viu and new companion Kevin end up running into a traveling circus and it's many strange talents. There he runs into his next traveling companion, the asian beauty Colice Satoh, mistress of blades. Viu ends up getting dragged into a fresh conflict with some very strange shooters, this time his talents with the gun needs to be upgraded to face the new threat he has found himself stuck into.

At the end of Volume 2 he's once again on the trail to Gun Blaze West, with a new female companion on his trip. As Volume 3 open the trio reach Fort Smith… and by the abyss do these three move so SLOW!! It's the third part of the story (the end) and they are nowhere near Gun Blaze West!! As for the place they just arrived? It has a bit of a bad rep for having a certain Hanging Judge who likes to string people up for being criminals and all (which is not a good thing I suppose).

Who cares?! They are barely into the local saloon and already they've run up against an oddly-dressed cowboy, and they nearly throw down with the entire town before a hulking Middle-Ages armored knight guy walks in between the gunfire and brings everything to a halt. Yeah, the weirdoes are coming to town! Apparently they (and more to come) are all going to race to Gun Blaze West... so then the story is going to just turn into a race to the finish where... well, you'll see.

And that's that. Don't want to ruin anymore since this is the end of the short series. Now let's see... is this worth reading? Yeah. It is. Really.

A nice punchy little yarn about a young man looking to become stronger, and his companions he meets along the way on his quest to becoming stronger (and a man in the process). A nice balance of action, drama and storytelling with a nice artistic style and pretty solid cast of characters (main, secondary and incidential cast). I was at first convinced it was a string of old Incredible Hulk TV Series incidents (Viu enters a new location and ends up getting caught up with the problems of the locals, growing as a gunslinger as he has to fight his way out of the situation he's found himself in, gaining new friends along the way) but it proved to be more once I comsumed all three volumes and finished up the read as a whole... OK, technically speaking it wasn't all, as I missed Volume One but I'm going to pick it up in the future to make a complete set. You should do that too.

For a read that is actually quite good this short little run of Wild West rampaging (though it takes all the way to the end to reach the wild wild west) is recommended reading, take it on your next trip out of your comfort zone and it'll be a nice steady time-passer on your next mosey regardless of whether you're headed West, East, South or North. B+ from me to you, and I think that's a pretty good score, don't you think?``xEkkVlVFZpkTmLXosnV``x1225853702``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421518074``xNobuhiro Watsuki``x``x``x``xAction``x``x``xJN Productions``x``xViz``xOlder Teen``xB+``x7.99``x150``x225``xGun Blaze West 2.jpg``x``x``x``x MangaLife Halloween Review Spotlight Special: Cowa! and Friends``xParkCooper``xBelow is the text of my original, A PLUS review of COWA!, re-presented here AGAIN because I declare it by the power invested in me to be this year's PERFECT MANGA HALLOWEEN GIFT.

But first, some runners-up for that title.

--DEATH NOTE. It's that good, and it also has a beginning, middle, and an end. 12 volumes of happiness for the gothy-or-otherwise brainy person in your life.

--FullMetal Alchemist, the manga. It doesn't have an end yet, but what's going on in that country is scary. And bloody. Oh yes. There will be blood.

--And finally, Fruits Basket, the anime. If I'm reading this site right, I think you can buy the whole 4-disc series from Borders for under 60 bucks. And it is rewatchable over and over and over my friends. You may wear it out just repeatedly replaying The Momiji Song. But it earns a hallowed Halloween place here, because Akito Sohma is one scary individual. I am deadly serious with you. Excellent script adaptation and voice work helps ensure that you will shudder with androgynous-flavored fear and delight.

But before our main show, let me speak some more about COWA!

--Created by the guy who did Dragon Ball Z and yet delightful on every level (as opposed to just a "I'm only using 1 percent of my power to blow you up" level)
--only costs 7.99
--is actually rated All Ages (okay, so is Dragon Ball Z, but I can hardly understand how they got away with THAT)
--is fun, fun, fun, fun, fun and yet all contained in one little volume.

Read on and then hit the local manga/anime selling-place.

Rock on.

--P




me: Hey, what does COWA mean? it's the title of a really cute manga by Akira Toriyama

Alethea: Hm... maybe it's from "kowai (scary)"? Because usually when something scary pops up, someone'll say, "Kowa!"


Cowa!, from the creator of DragonBall Z, gets an A+. Barbara agreed with my assessment. We’ve each said, previously, that we don’t like horror that is cute, funny, scary, or quirky. Cowa, however, is not horror. It’s just delightful.

There’s also something else it’s not. It’s not punny.

That’s right, punny. There’s a certain type of work that’s nothing more but a writer/creator trying to recreate (Why, oh why?) that Halloween-themed joke book they loved when they were seven years old. What do you serve a little ghost at a party? Ghoulade. Ha ha ha shut up.

http://www.wickermanstudios.com/comics/gsg/gsg-08-03.html

Cowa is NOT that stupid thing we’ve all seen way too much of (which my wife once made fun of in the link above). Cowa is just a great kids’ adventure that happens to have cute little monsters in it.

In the first chapter, we meet our little monsters: Paifu, a vampire boy who’s part were-koala... show him a cross for three seconds and he becomes a snarling, super-strong fighting koala, and stays that way until you calm him down by showing him something round... and his best friend, a ghost named Jose Gonzalez (No, I don’t know why. A baseball thing?).

In the second chapter, we meet the other main character, the strongest man in the world, a former sumo wrestler who accidentally killed a guy in a match one time, so he’s retreated from the world of humans and frankly gets along with monsters better. He’s gruff and harsh... with a heart of gold, of course.

And then in chapter three, the PLOT kicks in—everyone but the kids comes down with the Monster Flu, and only the kids are well enough to go far away for the medicine that’ll cure it—and they get their large new friend to drive them. Adventure ensues. And it’s great.

I won’t spoil anything else. It’s a shame that it’s just one volume total, but maybe that helps make it so good. Go get it for your kid, or your anything for that matter—but for kids especially, it’s a great step up from puns about boo-berry pie and ghoul-ade.``xEkkVFkpEpZvXtpxMVC``x1225320107``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421518058``xAkira Toriyama``x``x``x``xAction``x``x``xAlexander O. Smith``xAlexander O. Smith``xViz``xAll Ages``xA+``x7.99``x150``x225``xCOWA.jpg``x``x``x``x Inu Yasha Ani-Manga v6``xrasmussen``xRumiko Takahashi ain't my thing. No, not at all... that's not entirely true. At one point I did rather like the work, but I don't follow it anymore (my favorite is still Urusei Yatsura the Manga and Anime series, though it is way too involved and too many to pick up to even consider building a collection of).

So I guess it's the fondness of memory of that series back in the day that brings me back to Rumiko's work from time to time, when I occasionally manage to pick up a title here or there I don't mind reviewing. Not totally my thing post U.Y., but still, it's good for a nice solid review, since the work is always consistently good.

So when I was running low on CineManga/Ani-Manga content, I didn't mind picking this up for review. After all, I've never been disappointed with the work, and no disappointment came from this review, I assure you.

Containing three episodes in manga format, the content is as follows... After the whole incident where Kagome had her soul sucked out of her body (then put back in), she could use a break for awhile... so what did she do so wrong that she had to end up running into a perverted, thieving, not-just-a-"lover"-but-a-fighter, as well as capable-of-really-kicking-it-back-if-he-needs-to young thief/monk. Let's see... when he has the chance, will he steal Kagome's partially-reassembled Shikon jewel shard, or will he go for a booty call… oh, not enough time for that, even if some hentai flash games on the internet say otherwise. They chase him down to a village nearby, there's a fight between Inuyasha & the monk, and then they all sit down and chat (after he cops a feel off Kagome's rear end while playing possum).

Next, a common plot ploy of such horror series like Friday the 13th, Goosebumps and whatever: what happens when good paintings of demons go bad? That's what you find out when a persecuted painter who happens to have a shard of the Shikon jewel finds out it can turn his paintings of demons into an army that'll fight his oppressors... not good, since he seems to have a major persecution complex (which in this case isn't his paranoid delusion as people really are out to get him). Looks like Inuyasha, Kagome and the pervert monk thief (who seems to really have no problem riding about on Kagome's bike despite the fact it's technology that doesn't exist yet in this time period the series takes place in for the most part) to the rescue.

Finally, it's a twisted family reunion of sorts as Inuyasha's half brother Sesshomaru shows up with a brand new partner to work with. Maybe what Sesshomaru really needs to do is hook up with a personal makeover expert, since he's such a girly-man looking being!! Come on!! From a distance I am pretty sure you can mistake this guy for a girl!! Really!! What the heck is up with that?!? Oh, and his new partner? Yeah, it's the creature mentioned in the first part of the volume.

Wow, what a coincidence… not.

Hmm… I guess I could stand if Cartoon Network shows this more. I mean, really, the weekday line-up on Adult Swim suck so badly short of Family Guy and Robot Chicken, they could show more Anime during the week to make it suck less! Inu Yasha? Sure. I could watch that every day. Better than half the junk they show right now. If I can get ahold of any more volumes of this, I'm going to review them; this is nice... though I guess I couldn't buy it (VIZ charges too much at $11.95 a pop, though by now you should be able to find some of these on sale in the bargain bin of such sites as amazon.com and Barnes & Noble)...``xEkkVFEluAlweLMbvqI``x1225318498``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1591165946``xRumiko Takahashi``x``x``x``xAction``xSupernatural``x``xKaty Bridges``x``xViz``xOlder Teen``xB+``x11.95``x150``x225``xinu yasha ainmanga 6.jpg``x``x``x``x Crimson Hero v9``xYsabet``xAll that matters to 15-year-old Nobara Sumiyoshi is volleyball--she's an awesome player with big-time ambitions. But sometimes it seems like a girl just can't get a break in the competitive world of high school volleyball.
Just when Nobara is set to play with the Eagles against the men's team at Central Sokai University, Yushin shows up on campus! Has he come to make a play for Nobara?

Volume 9 of Crimson Hero is my first look at the series, and I found it fairly easy to follow, although I made heavy use of the "story thus far" blurb and the character guide at the back. Like most sports manga, the story centers around characters for whom their sport--in this case, volleyball--comes first, and everything else in their lives has to be worked in around it. Crimson Hero handles this fairly well: it begins as Nobara is about to play in a major game, having finished the intensive training she left her school for, and the story maintains the energy of the game while allowing room for the characters' relationships to develop (particularly between Nobara and her love interest, Yushin).

There were some things I was unclear about, not having read the first eight volumes, but the relationships (of all kinds) were easy to understand, if not necessarily simple. The story is very aware of the sacrifices the characters have to make to keep volleyball their main priority, and makes it clear that they are sacrifices, not just annoyances that only matter to other people who aren't Athletes.

I particularly liked how Nobara's transition from her training back to her daily life at school is handled, and how the balance between friendship and rivalry is struck. Takanashi has a delicate touch at the right moments in the story, and a good sense of pacing. If I have a chance to read further volumes in this series, I'll be interested to see how things develop.

Review copy provided by VIZ Media.``xEkkVFEZFAkxlTxhpbT``x1225317392``xreviews``x``x``x33481114656321``x1421515660``xMitsuba Takanashi``x``x``x``xSports``xRomance``x``xNaoko Amemiya``xNaoko Amemiya``xViz``xTeen``xB``x8.99``x150``x225``xCrimson Hero 09 cover.jpg``x``x``x``x Venus in Love v5``xjoykim``xIn volume 5 of Venus in Love, romance is finally blossoming between Suzuna and Eichi, and their relationship grows stronger as various holidays provide opportunities for each to demonstrate their affection to the other. But complications loom on the horizon in the form of Yuki, another boy in their group of college friends, and once again, Nakaji has added an extra sexually ambiguous twist. In previous volumes, Eichi became Suzuna's romantic rival when both developed crushes on their friend Fukami. Here Yuki initially enters the story as Suzuna's rival for Eichi's attention, but that very rivalry soon becomes a basis for a tentative friendship. Before long, Eichi's the one who has reason to be jealous, as he begins to wonder about the amount of time Suzuna and Yuki are spending in each other's company.

To anyone who's read much shojo manga, this latest plot twist is really not much of a twist at all. Eichi's and Yuki's uncertain sexual preferences are hardly shocking developments in a genre that glories in sexual and gender ambiguities; in fact, as shojo narrative twists go, Nakaji's efforts here are positively tame.

This is a problem because everything else in this story is all too familiar. The episodes in this volume are spins on familiar shojo manga plot points--such as going on a date at the zoo, working a seasonal job for the holidays, and giving Valentine's Day gifts--and Nakaji does little to put her own spin on them. Each of these episodes comes to a wholly predictable end, and as a result, they do almost nothing to further develop the characterization of the three leads. Readers don't know Suzuna, Eichi, or Yuki any better at the end of the volume than they do at the beginning. Though the stories are pleasantly fluffy and occasionally amusing, they have almost no narrative substance.

These chapters also fall flat because they focus solely on romance. Several months pass during the course of this volume, but Nakaji hardly shows readers anything in the characters' lives as college students. One character apparently has an interest in archaeology, but that only serves to provide a semi-exotic location for a romantic misadventure. Occasionally Nakaji shows her characters coming and going from classes, but their hopes, dreams, and fears outside their love lives never become part of the story. Many other manga series set in schools, whether high schools or colleges, also focus mostly on romance, but the best of them find ways to incorporate other aspects of the characters' lives--such as their families, their ambitions, their attempts to define themselves--into their romances to make the overall storyline more compelling.

Nakaji's art is pleasant and serviceable. For a shojo artist, she uses relatively conservative paneling; as a result, her pages are very easy to parse; even a reader more used to shonen page layouts would probably have no problem following the action here. Her character designs are drawn in a fairly typical shojo style. Sometimes it is a little difficult to tell characters with the same hair color apart, but this is only a minor problem.

Though Venus in Love is ultimately very forgettable, CMX has done a solid job with their US version. Sheldon Drzka's translation and adaptation retain at least some of the original Japanese honorifics, which is always nice to see, and most importantly, they never throw the reader out of the story by sounding too American or otherwise infelicitous.

Shojo manga fans won't find anything exceptional in Venus in Love: it's not quite charming enough to be more than average. If this was the start of the series, I might be inclined to give it a couple more volumes to find its feet; given that this is volume 5, however, I'd only recommend this and future volumes to fans who are