My News and Reviews

Last week I posted my monthly Blade of the Immortal review. This month I took a look at Hiroaki Samura’s Blade of the Immortal, Volume 21: Demon Lair II, which is the second and final volume of the finale of the fourth and penultimate major story arc of the series. It’s a great conclusion; I’m really looking forward to the next volume. As promised, I also posted about my first time attending the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. The article ended up being longer than I really intended, but there was a lot that I wanted to talk about: my general experience, Taiyo Matsumoto, Gengoroh Tagame, IKKI magazine, queer comics, and more. If you don’t feel like reading the entire thing, the take away is that TCAF is an amazing festival and I’m already making plans to go again next year.

Early last week I tweeted about a note in the RightStuf catalog indicating that Yaya Sakuragi’s boys’ love series Bond of Dreams, Bond of Love was being seized by Canadian customs. Lissa Pattillo at Kuriousity saw the tweet and wrote an article on the subject (RightStuf Warns of Boys’ Love Book Seizing at Canada Customs) and the story was subsequently picked up by Anime News Network (BL Manga Bond of Dreams, Bond of Love Sold in Canada Despite Seizure) and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (Online Retailer Won’t Send Some Manga to Canada Because of Customs Seizures). It was kind of neat to see the ripple effect of the tweet.

Elsewhere online, Kathryn Hemmann of Contemporary Japanese Literature (which is one of my favorite blogs) posted the article In Defense of Fujoshi. As Kathryn warns at the beginning of the post, it is not safe for work. However, it is definitely worth reading and is an excellent and  engaging look at some of the controversies surrounding bara and boys’ love manga. About a month ago I mentioned Kansai Club Publishing. Well, their Kickstarter project to release Osamu Tezuka’s short story collection The Crater has now launched.

Also, the Yumi Tamura Manga Moveable Feast is this week! Keep an eye on Tokyo Jupiter for updates. For my contribution to this month’s Feast, I’ll be reviewing at least the first volume of Tamura’s Chicago (and hopefully the second as well!)

Quick Takes

21st Century Boys, Volumes 1-2 by Naoki Urasawa. Although the title has changed to 21st Century Boys, these two volumes are actually the ending to 20th Century Boys. I thought they were a decent conclusion to a good series, but ultimately I enjoyed the earlier volumes much more than the later volumes. Even though I liked the manga, after twenty-four volumes of twists and turns and convoluted storytelling, I feel like Urasawa was somehow cheating. I’m not convinced he had a clear idea when he began 20th Century Boys where he was going with the story and where it would end up. However, most of the plot threads he introduced are at least addressed if not completely tied up in 21st Century Boys.

Hetalia: Axis Powers, Volume 3 by Hidekaz Himaruya. Despite the fact that the manga and the anime cover the same material, the manga seems to be less inherently offensive. I’ll admit though, I do prefer the Hetalia anime over the original. For some reason, the manga is more difficult for me to follow. Not that there’s a complicated story or anything—Hetalia tends to be more a series of gags than anything else. Hetalia works best for me when the focus of the manga is on actual history rather than the countries acting as characters. The third volume introduces even more countries with a particular emphasis on medieval history, Poland and Lithuania, and the Nordic States. The artwork, or perhaps just the reproduction of the artwork, seems improved over previous volumes, too.

This Night’s Everything by Akira Minazuki. After enjoying Minazuki’s collection of boys’ love manga Tonight’s Take-Out, I decided to pick up This Night’s Everything, her only other work currently available in English. Although I was left with an overall favorable impression of This Night’s Everything, I didn’t enjoy it quite as well. In fact, I wasn’t sure I even liked it at all until after finishing the entire manga. But in the end, and after a few key plot revelations, I was satisfied with it as a whole. There is a deliberate coldness to the characters which is somewhat unpleasant but eventually explained. The world-building is such that This Night’s Everything actually feels like it could be part of a much larger work.

X, Omnibus 5 (equivalent to Volumes 13-15) by CLAMP. For as much action, death, and destruction as there is in X, the plot itself doesn’t seem to be moving along very quickly. Even so, I’m completely addicted to the series and its over-the-top epic-ness. The dialogue does seem to have gotten better, or at least it doesn’t seem quite as ridiculous as it did in earlier volumes. The cast of characters in X is fairly large and they all have their own tragic backstory. But because there are so many of them, only a few are able to be developed in depth. Because of this, the impact of some of the deaths in X is lessened. Out of all of the characters, Subaru is one of the most fully realized, but then he had the entirety of Tokyo Babylon, the predecessor to X, to evolve.

Kids on the Slope directed by Shinichirō Watanabe. I adore Yoko Kanno and her music and was very excited to learn that she was working with Watanabe on Kids on the Slope, an adaptation of Yuki Kodama’s award-winning manga. I was not disappointed at all by the music in the series. The anime’s pacing is a little on the slow side, especially in the beginning, but I did like the story. The ending, however, ties everything up a bit too neatly and nicely (even if it did make me smile.) For me, the real draw of Kids on the Slope (apart from Watanabe and Kanno’s involvement) was its emphasis on music, how people express themselves through it, and the bonds people forge because of it.