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20 June 2016 16 Comments

My Week in Manga: June 13-June 19, 2016

My News and Reviews

Okay. So I don’t usually get very personal here at Experiments in Manga, but I feel it’s needed this time. Last week I had every intention of posting an in-depth review of Dawn, the first novel in Yoshino Tanaka’s renowned space opera Legend of the Galactic Heroes. But Thursday came along and I’d only managed to write a quarter of it and I finally had to admit to myself that it just wasn’t going to happen. And so while driving to and from taiko rehearsal that evening I took the opportunity to reevaluate some things and to try to find a sustainable solution for Experiments in Manga.

The last year and a half or so has been rough on me. Without going into unnecessary details, I have been under tremendous amount of stress at work, at home, and just in general with more and more responsibilities to take on and less and less time for myself. While my anxiety issues are fortunately mostly in check at the moment, being stressed out feeds directly into my depression which in turn feeds into being stressed out. It’s a miserable cycle that’s difficult to break. And it makes doing all of the things that I want to do nigh impossible, even if I actually had the time to do all of those things (which I don’t).

I can’t do much about the situation at work right now, and my options outside of work are limited, too, but one thing that I have complete control over is my blogging. While there are some very strong arguments to be made for me to completely give up writing at Experiments in Manga, that’s not really something that I’m prepared to do yet. However, I will be drastically changing my approach and will be writing less, at least for the time being. I’m hoping this won’t be permanent, but I will have to see how things go as I try to find some balance in my life.

And so: For now the My Week in Manga feature will continue to be posted as normal, as will the monthly manga giveaways. The Bookshelf Overload feature will still make an appearance every month, too. However, in-depth reviews and other long-form features will by necessity be posted more sporadically and won’t necessarily adhere to a specific schedule. To make up for this somewhat, the Quick Takes section of My Week in Manga will be expanded slightly to include my thoughts on novels and nonfiction works among other things. Even though overall I will be writing less, this means that I’ll be able to read more, and hopefully relax more, which will be very good for me.

Anyway! In happier news, according to the series’ translator, the second volume of Quantum Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner is scheduled for release later this year. (I reviewed the first volume when it was released and liked it so well that it made my list of notable works of 2014.) Kodansha Comics’ most recent creator spotlight features an interview with Akiko Higashimura. The latest manga Kickstarter campaign to launch is a project by Fakku and Toshio Maeda to release a remastered edition of Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend. Some pretty big news for fans of BL in translation, Japanese publisher Libre has cut its ties with Digital Manga. Sadly, though perhaps not especially surprising at this point, Digital Manga’s press release comes across as very passive aggressive and unprofessional.

Quick Takes

Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Side: P3, Volume 2Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Side: P3, Volume 2 by So Tobita. I haven’t actually played the Persona Q video game, but from what I hear from others, the manga adaptation remains true to its tone and main storyline. My knowledge of the original Persona Q, as well as my knowledge of Persona 3 and Persona 4 which directly tie into Persona Q, is admittedly cursory. Those who do not have at least some familiarity with the Persona franchise will be at a significant disadvantage when reading Persona Q, especially when it comes to understanding the characters and their personalities. Fortunately, I know enough to be able to appreciate the Persona Q for what it is—a fun and slightly silly adventure with puzzles, labyrinths, and cute artwork (much like the game itself, which I suspect I would greatly enjoy playing). The manga is very clearly an adaptation of an role-playing game as some of the side quests, boss fights, and other elements of gameplay remain quite evident, but the ways in which they are incorporated into the story are generally unobtrusive and make sense within the context of all that is going on.

Red Red Rock and Other Stories, 1967-1970Red Red Rock and Other Stories, 1967-1970 by Seiichi Hayashi. As far as creators of alternative manga go, Hayashi is fairly well represented in English with several volumes of manga available in translation. The most recent is Red Red Rock and Other Stories, a collection of thirteen of Hayashi’s short avant-garde manga as well as an accompanying essay by the volume’s editor and manga historian Ryan Holmberg. Most of the stories come from the influential alternative manga magazine Garo, but two of the selections were actually created for the magazine A Woman’s Self. Out of all of Hayashi’s manga currently available in English, Red Red Rock and Other Stories is probably one of the least immediately accessible. While Hayashi’s imagery can be stunning and appreciated by all, some of the short manga in Red Red Rock and Other Stories will likely be nearly impenetrable for a casual reader. But that’s where Holmberg’s informative essay comes in handy, explaining some of the references and historical context needed to fully understand the collection. I enjoyed the manga in Red Red Rock and Other Stories, but I also appreciated being able to learn more about them.

The Seven Deadly Sins, Volume 12The Seven Deadly Sins, Volumes 12-14 by Nakaba Suzuki. It’s been a while since I’ve read any of The Seven Deadly Sins, but I picked up the series again just in time for a major showdown. Granted, just about any of the fights that occur in The Seven Deadly Sins become epic battles simply because all of the combatants involved are so incredibly powerful. The action sequences are impressive, although sometimes it can be difficult to tell exactly what is going on. Some of the characters move so quickly only the results of their martial techniques are apparent. Occasionally Suzuki absolutely nails these sequences and they can be thrillingly effective, but just as often the action ends up being confusing. Suzuki also seems reluctant to actually kill anyone off which means the stakes don’t seem as high they should be. Well, except for the potential end of the world. At first it seems as though an apocalypse has been averted in these few volumes, but soon it become apparent it that it may have only been delayed. The Seven Deadly Sins still have plenty of fighting left to do, not only for the future of their world but also to overcome their past mistakes.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 1: DawnLegend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 1: Dawn by Yoshiki Tanaka. Thanks to Viz Media’s speculative fiction imprint Haikasoru, Tanaka’s award-winning Legend of the Galactic Heroes novels are finally getting an official English-language release. Although Dawn is largely a standalone novel, it feels even more like an extended prologue to the ten-volume work as a whole, providing an introduction to the setting and the war that is the focus of the series. Much of Dawn is devoted to two opposing factions, the Galactic Empire and the Free Planets Alliance, but there’s also the Phezzan Dominion, a third faction which ultimately isn’t as neutral as it first appears. While the cast of characters in Legend of the Galactic Heroes is fairly large, at this point the most is known about two rival strategists—the reluctant hero Yang Wen-li and the ambitious genius Reinhard von Lohengramm—and their closest cohorts. With strategists as some of the main characters, a fair amount of legitimate battle strategy is included in Dawn which I particularly liked. There’s also a significant amount of politics involved in the story and none of the factions come out of the first volume looking very good with their warmongering ways.

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27 January 2014 4 Comments

My Week in Manga: January 20-January 26, 2014

My News and Reviews

Last week I declared it to be Usamaru Furuya Week here at Experiments in Manga. Ostensibly, it was to celebrate Furuya-sensei’s birthday, but mostly it was just an excuse for me to finally get around to reviewing more of his manga. I have now written an in-depth review of all of Furuya’s manga currently available in English. As for last week’s Furuya reviews, I have for your reading pleasure Short Cuts, Volume 2 (the final volume of one of my favorite gag manga), the second and third volumes of Genkaku Picasso (probably the most accessible entry into Furuya’s English manga), and the second and third volumes of No Longer Human (an excellent adaptation of Osamu Dazai’s novel No Longer Human). I’d love to see more of Furuya’s work translated. Although there are no immediate plans, I know that Vertical has expressed interest, so I am hopeful that someday we’ll see more.

Elsewhere online, manga translator and scholar Matt Thorn has an excellent piece Regarding Inio Asano’s gender identity. (He also talks a bit about his own gender identity.) And speaking of the complexities of gender, sexuality, and translation, a few months back I attended the lecture “Out Gays” or “Shameless Gays”? What Gets Lost, and What is Gained, when U.S. Queer Theory is Translated into Japanese? and posted some random musings about queer theory, Japanese literature, and translation. Well, the video of the lecture was posted earlier this month and is freely available to view. The most recent ANNCast, Vertical Vortex, features Ed Chavez from Vertical and included a license announcement for Takuma Morishige’s comedy manga My Neighbor Seki. In other licensing news, Seven Seas has acquired Kentarō Satō’s horror manga Magical Girl Apocalypse. Also, Seven Seas will soon be announcing licenses for a new yuri manga and a doujinshi (which is very unusual in English). Finally, Shawne Kleckner, the president of Right Stuf (one of my favorite places to find manga), recently participated in a Reddit Ask Me Anything.

Quick Takes

The Drifting Classroom, Volume 1The Drifting Classroom, Volumes 1-3 by Kazuo Umezu. An award-winning horror manga from the early 1970s, The Drifting Classroom is a series that I’ve been meaning to read. After a bizarre earthquake, Yamato Elementary School along with more than 860 students and staff disappear, leaving behind an enormous hole in the ground and very few clues as to what has happened. From the students’ perspective, everything outside the school has been turned into a wasteland. The situation they find themselves in may be extreme and unbelievable, but the consequences that follow are terrifyingly probable. The series’ setup allows Umezu to freely explore humanity’s darkness. The Drifting Classroom isn’t frightening because of the unknown; the true horror comes from how people react out of fear to the unexplainable. There are immediate concerns for survival, such as the lack of food and water, but even more problematic is the violence the erupts among the school’s survivors. The Drifting Classroom is an intense horror and survival manga with extremely dark psychological elements. I’ll definitely be reading more.

Missions of Love, Volume 6Missions of Love, Volume 6 by Ema Toyama. I started reading Missions of Love in the middle of the series. Although there is some background information that I am missing, I was still able to pick up on the major plot points fairly quickly. I really should go back and read the earlier volumes, though, as I’m enjoying the series much more than I anticipated. None of the characters are particularly nice people; their relationships are a twisted and tangled mess because of how they are all manipulating one another. And in the process, they’re confusing their own personal feelings as well. Missions of Love is intentionally scandalous and deliberately suggestive. However, it’s not exactly what I would call fanservice since it is meant more for the story and characters’ sakes rather than for the readers’. There are intimate moments and scenes of extreme vulnerability that challenge appropriateness but never quite cross the line, although Toyama frequently pushes the limits. I’m just waiting for something really terrible to happen. At this point, I can’t imagine that any of the characters in Missions of Love will be able to make it through the series unscathed.

Red Colored ElegyRed Colored Elegy by Seiichi Hayashi. Another manga from the early 1970s, originally serialized in the alternative manga magazine Garo, Red Colored Elegy is only one of two volumes of Hayashi’s work available in English. The story follows Ichiro and Sachiko, two young animators in love and living together, but who are struggling to make ends meet as life slowly drives them apart. Hayashi’s artwork is deceptively simple and often free of backgrounds, placing the emphasis on the characters and their tumultuous lives and relationships. He conveys a tremendous amount of emotion through a minimalist, almost stream-of-conscious approach. Hayashi’s style in Red Colored Elegy can make it feel a bit disjointed from page to page, as though it were a collection of closely related vignettes rather than a single continuing story, but the overall melancholic mood created by the manga is consistent. Red Colored Elegy is about falling into and out of love and about pushing through life’s tragedies, both small and large. Emotionally compelling and beautifully crafted, Red Colored Elegy stands up to multiple readings.

Yowamushi PedalYowamushi Pedal, Episodes 1-14 directed by Osamu Nabeshima. The Yowamushi Pedal anime series is based on an ongoing manga by Wataru Watanabe. Sakamichi Onoda is an otaku trying to revive the anime club at his new high school, but he quite unexpectedly finds himself caught up in the bicycle racing club instead. He has some natural talent at cycling—his frequent 90 km trips by bike to Akihabara probably didn’t hurt—but he has had no formal training. That’s about to change, though. The series so far has mostly focused on Onoda and the Sohoku High School racing club. The other teams that they will be facing have only been shown briefly. However, now that Onoda has started to get the basics of cycling down, the other cyclists are becoming more prominent in the story. I particularly like Yowamushi Pedal‘s casting; all of the characters have very distinctive speech patterns and voices which are very entertaining. I’m enjoying the series a great deal. Although I never was a racer and I don’t cycle as much as I used to (once upon a time, it was my primary mode of transportation), Yowamushi Pedal makes me want to get my bike out again.

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2 December 2013 6 Comments

My Week in Manga: November 25-December 1, 2013

My News and Reviews

To start things off, I would like to thank everyone who voted in the poll to pick my next monthly review project. I am very pleased to announce that over the next year I will have a series of reviews that focuses on yuri and lesbian comics and manga. A Year of Yuri took an early lead in the poll and earned just under half of the votes. I’m now in the process of determining exactly which comics I’ll be reviewing for this project. Nothing has been finalized yet, but ideally there will be a good variety of both old and new titles. I’d also like to thank those of you who took time to comment on the poll as well. I was sincerely interested in reviewing all of the choices; taking into consideration all of your input and suggestions, I’m currently working on other ways to review some of the manga outside of a monthly review project. I had fun with the poll, so thank you again for indulging me!

There was a mix of different posts at Experiments in Manga last week. Of particular note, the monthly manga giveaway—a Fairy Tail Feast—is currently in progress. I completely underestimated the popularity of Fairy Tail; I’ve never had so many people turn out for a giveaway before. Not even for Tezuka. There’s still time to enter for a chance to win volumes thirty, thirty-one, and thirty-two of Hiro Mashima’s Fairy Tail manga. And as a bonus the winner of the giveaway will also receive a copy of the anime movie Fairy Tail: Phoenix Priestess! November’s Bookshelf Overload was also posted last week as was my review for Ichiya Sazanami’s manga Black Bard. It’s a bit of a mess, but I still had a lot of fun reading it; I couldn’t resist the combination of music and magic.

Since last week was Thanksgiving here in the United States (my favorite holiday!) I was doing quite a bit of traveling. So, I probably missed out on a lot of the week’s manga news. But there are still a couple of links that I’d like to mention here: The most recent Speakeasy Podcast focused on Crunchyroll’s new manga project. And over at Manga Bookshelf proper, Melinda Beasi posted a Status Update & Station Identification which includes a shout-out to Experiments in Manga which joined the Manga Bookshelf family a few months ago. (She also described my mind as “deeply eloquent” which absolutely made my day. Hopefully I can continue to live up to her expectations!)

Quick Takes

Attack on Titan, Volume 9Attack on Titan, Volume 9 by Hajime Isayama. The mysteries keep piling up in Attack on Titan. It makes me wonder how long Isayama will be able to keep the series going without it collapsing under its own weight. The more ideas and plot twists he adds to the story, which can admittedly be very exciting, the less focused Attack on Titan becomes. I have no idea how much Isayama has thought through to the end or how much he is making up as he goes. It’s very possible that he could he write himself into some sort of absurd corner. That being said, I am hooked on the series and I really want to know what’s going on. This particular volume reveals more about some of the secondary characters, especially Sasha, Connie, Krista, and Ymir. It also provides the setup for what will be some very big plot reveals. The artwork in Attack on Titan continues to be incredibly uneven, which is unfortunate. There are a few brilliant panels and the titans are appropriately disconcerting, but the artwork remains one of the manga’s weakest points.

From the New World, Volume 1From the New World, Volume 1 written by Yusuke Kishi and illustrated by Toru Oikawa. Honestly, I am more interested in reading Kishi’s original From the New World novel (and I’m still hoping that it will one day be licensed), but it’s the anime and manga adaptations that are currently available in English. After reading the first volume of the manga, I want to read the original novel more than ever. From the New World has a fantastically dark ambiance. I also have an established fondness for dystopias and tales of survival. Unfortunately, the level and intensity of fanservice in the manga feels out of place distracts from what could be an extremely intriguing premise. Saki’s clothing choices in particular are ridiculous and could hardly be described as functional. (Bizarrely enough, some of the outfits aren’t really all that attractive, either.) I’m not even going to try to explain Maria’s underwear. Still, all of the moments in between the nonsensical bath and sex scenes are legitimately engrossing. I do plan on continuing on with From the New World for at least a little longer.

Gold Pollen and Other StoriesGold Pollen and Other Stories by Seiichi Hayashi. The first volume in PictureBox’s Masters of Alternative Manga, Gold Pollen and Other Stories collects four of Hayashi’s short manga from the late sixties and early seventies—”Dwelling in Flowers,” “Red Dragonfly,” “Yamanba Lullaby,” and the three chapters from the unfinished “Gold Pollen”—in addition to an autobiographical essay by Hayashi and an essay by the series’ editor Ryan Holmberg. I am particularly grateful for the inclusion of these essays for they reveal some of the semi-autobiographical aspects of Hayashi’s manga that I would have otherwise missed. It is clear that his mother and the concept of what a mother should be influenced him greatly. Each of the manga included in the volume deals with motherhood at least tangentially if not directly. While the manga share some similar characteristics and themes, each is distinctive in both storytelling and art style. Hayashi’s use of color is also rather striking. Gold Pollen and Other Stories is an excellent start to the series; I’m looking forward to future volumes a great deal.

Mr. Flower BrideMr. Flower Bride / Mr. Flower Groom by Lily Hoshino. The powerful Souda family has an unusual marriage custom—in order to prevent disputes over inheritance, the younger sons in the family are partnered with male brides. The basic premise of the two Mr. Flower volumes could have easily been the basis for a comedy manga. But instead, Hoshino plays it straight, honestly addressing the personal challenges and issues that the characters have to deal with in regards to arranged marriage with the additional twist that they both happen to be the same sex. Mr. Flower Bride and Mr. Flower Groom follows two related couples with similar plots—both brides are already in love with their reluctant husbands and both pairs have to navigate jealousy and come to terms with their developing relationships. However, the stories do play out differently. The two Mr. Flower manga end up being rather sweet and even a little lovey-dovey in places, which is not to say that the newlyweds do not have their problems. I enjoyed both volumes, but Mr. Flower Groom has the more interesting gender dynamics of the two.

Kaiji: Against All RulesKaiji: Against All Rules directed by Yūzō Satō. If I had to choose, I think I enjoyed the first Kaiji anime series slightly more, though I liked the second one, as well. The stakes in the first series were incredibly high—the gamblers were literally risking their lives. To some extent this is still true in the second series, but for the most part the large amounts of money involved have become more prominent than life and limb. The ways of cheating, counter-cheating, and general manipulation of the games in the second series also tend to be much more outlandish, convoluted, and unbelievable than in the first. However, it is impressive for how long, and for how many episodes, a single pachinko game can be stretched. By the end of the series I was starting to anticipate some of the major plot twists and developments before they actually happened which unfortunately made the big reveals much less effective. Even so, there were still a few surprises in store and Kaiji remains an incredibly intense and dramatic anime.

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