Author: Anna N

Anna Neatrour is a librarian with too much manga in her house. She started blogging at TangognaT in 2003 about libraries, books, manga, and comics. She created Manga Report to focus only on manga reviews in 2010. Anna is a member of the writing collective known as The Bureau Chiefs, authors of FakeAPStylebook and the book Write More Good. Anna contributed the Bringing the Drama column to Manga Bookshelf before joining the team in Nov 2012. When not reading, Anna can be found knitting or wrangling small children.

Categories
Manga Reviews

Summoner Girl Volume 1

Summoner Girl Volume 1

I think with this series, I have contracted a severe case of yokai fatigue. This manga probably won’t interest older readers who are already very familiar with monster hunting storylines from other manga, but I think it would be a fun read for younger readers. Hibiki is a summoner, given the ability to call on spirits that embody the five elements. She’s set on a quest to gather mystical jewels in order to fulfill her destiny to become High Summoner. Hibiki’s sent on quests by her overly enthusiastic grandmother who urges her to ditch school if there’s a spirit nearby that needs hunting. Hibiki is aided by a slightly dim-witted boy named Kenta who possesses some spiritual powers of his own. One aspect of the manga that I thought was interesting was the way Hibiki takes on the personalities of the spirits she summons to help her, for example becoming angry and belligerent when she summons the aspect of fire. Even though Hibiki hunts spirits, her general approach is to try to understand them instead of pounding them into submission with her considerable mystical powers. Hibiki’s spirit aides take the form of cute animals that rest on her shoulders, offering a running commentary on the action

Kubota’s art has a mobile, thin line which blends in cute drawings of Hibiki with elements of the grotesque like a yelling wrinkled grandmother, a house filled with cobwebs, and a snarling fox spirit. The plot was exactly what I’d expect from a yokai manga, without anything extra to draw me in to want to read much more of it. While Summoner Girl didn’t fully capture my attention, I think the combination of Hibiki’s good-willed approach to spirit hunting, demon fighting, and jokey sidekicks would appeal to younger readers. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this volume to a young teen wanting a new action series featuring an engaging heroine.

Review copy provided by the publisher

Categories
Manga Reviews

Shonen Quick Takes – Hikaru no Go 21 and Arata the Legend 4

Hikaru No Go Volume 21

It has been some time since I’ve read Hikaru No Go. I started getting it when it came out and collected up to volume 11 or so, and stopped automatically buying it because I thought at some point I’d go back and fill in the missing volumes. Even though there was a big gap for me, it wasn’t hard at all to pick up this volume and get back into the story.

Hikaru has gone pro, and much of the volume centers around his preparation for his first big international tournament. Many people have a stake in showcasing young players at the tournament. The Go associations and media think there will be more general interest if younger players are included. Hikaru and Toya play well enough in the preliminaries to be selected for the tournament, along with Yashiro and Kurata. Even though I know almost nothing about Go, Obata’s art still makes all the matches and rivalries between the players look dynamic. Hotta’s story juggles several themes and sub-plots, so even though the main storyline might be about gearing up to compete in a tournament, there’s so much other stuff going on that the plot doesn’t seem stale. Akira’s father is competing overseas even though he’s retired. He’s still on a quest to find the divine move, and the way Akira looks at his father shows some frustration that I think is going to be explored in a later volume. A Korean player is talking smack about Hikaru’s former mentor Sai, setting up a cross country rivalry. Hikaru and his teammates sequester themselves for training, and Hikaru is still falling short when playing games against Akira. I’m looking forward to seeing how the young players handle the stress of a professional tournament. Checking in on this series again reminded me of how good it is, I need to stop being such a slacker and seek out some of the volumes that I’ve missed.

Arata: The Legend Volume 4

For the first half of this volume, I felt a little frustrated. I do generally like Yuu Watase, even if some of her series are often a bit formulaic. I like Fushigi Yugi, Fushigi Yugi Genbu Kaiden, Ceres, and Alice 19th a lot. Imadoki is simple, but very sweet. I do not speak of Zettai Kareshi. The first part of this volume was frustrting. I wasn’t sure how many times Arata was going to stumble across Kotoha when she was changing. The romance aspect of this manga is really uninteresting, I don’t particularly care about Arata being tortured with guilt because Kotoha has confessed her love to him, yet he knows she’s really in love with Other Arata who is taking his place in modern day Japan. The quest element of the story is the type of plot that Watase does often, sometimes well, and sometimes not so well. Arata’s emphasis on winning through peaceful means is a little bit of a twist on the more typical shonen fighting hero.

What made me want to keep giving the series another chance were a couple things that happened a bit further into the book. There was finally a long sequence showing Other Arata trying his best to live Arata’s life in Japan. It was interesting to see how he was able to deal with school bullies and the issue of having parents when he hasn’t had a family before. The other sequence in the book that I thought had a lot more emotional resonance was when Arata and his allies accidentally stumble in to an odd orphanage filled with plucky children who immediately start relating to them as parents. Somewhere there’s a mystical barrier, but the “adults’ in charge of the orphanage are anything but human. Arata and Kotoha befriend twins named Naru and Nagu, and the revelation about who has been creating the orphanage with magic and the resolution of the episode had much more emotional impact than a lot of the previous events in Arata. So while this is not likely to be one of my favorite Watase series, there were enough good elements in this volume to make me hope that the series might continue to get better.

Review copies provided by the publisher.

Categories
Anime

Saturday Morning Cartoon: Super Dimension Fortress Macross

Today’s Saturday morning cartoon is the opening to the classic Super Dimension Fortress Macross! I recently finished watching this series for the first time since I saw the early Robotech episodes in 1985.

I have very specific memories of going to my Grandma’s house after school and watching Robotech in her basement. I absolutely loved the show, but back then it was impossible to rewatch or see repeat episodes. I think many of my memories of the show actually came from reading the later novelizations. So when I was watching some episodes of Macross I could tell that I was seeing them for the first time even though I’d read the scenes before, like most of the Max and Miriya romance.

I’d put off trying to rewatch this series for a long time. I think I tend to put aside some of the things I was into as a kid, just because I don’t think adult nostalgia will ever measure up to the first experience of discovering a new fictional world. I’m leery of tarnishing memories, and think that sometimes reliving childhood fandom isn’t the most productive use of one’s time. There’s nothing worse than the sinking feeling of finding out that something you loved as a child is actually a little bit lame. I remember this sinking feeling all too well when I realized that Aslan in the Narnia books was Jesus a couple years after I first read and loved the books, which was probably around the same time I first saw Robotech. So that was one reason for my trepidation and procrastination about watching Super Dimension Fortress Macross as an adult.

I was surprised at how well this series held up. Part of it I think is due to some of the appealing character designs. It is easy to overlook the occasionally glitchy animation when the character designs are so strong.

Of course, what looks not very fluid today was absolutely groundbreaking to a 10 year old in 1985. Watching the series again, I was able to see how it really lay the groundwork for later philosophical fighting mecha shows. Macross has plenty of space opera, but for all the scenes of transforming mecha fighting aliens, at the core of the show is a longing for peace and a lot of heart. I was glad to finish rewatching Super Dimension Fortress Macross with the knowledge that my 10-year-old self did have excellent taste in after school cartoons. Macross is the reason why I to this day think that airplanes that transform into fighting robots are awesome. Really, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Categories
Manga Reviews

AX Volume 1: A Collection of Alternative Manga

AX Volume 1: A Collection of Alternative Manga edited by Sean Michael Wilson

I’ll be the first to admit that my tastes in manga are decidedly mainstream. I do enjoy the occasional wacky seinen title, but I generally read manga for my daily dose of escapism and don’t go out of my way to be challenged. I have a soft spot for anthology titles, because back in the dark days before the current manga explosion, all I had to read were my Eclipse/Viz floppy comics and the manga excerpted in Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics. I was interested to check out this anthology when it first came out, but decided to purchase it later. So I was excited when I managed to snag a copy in a ComicsAlliace twitter giveaway.

AX is carefully curated, with stories selected that show the true variety of Japanese alternative comics. I was blown away by the variety of art styles in this volume, from the detailed European forest city overrun by mushrooms in “Mushroom Garden” to the bean-head motorcycle lovers in “Enrique Kobayashi’s Eldordo”. “Into Darkness” featured a lush garden entwining around a corpse, while “The Neighbor” showed an inexplicable feud developing with flat, sparse sketches. The themes of the stories ranged from the surreal as shown in “Six Paths of Wealth” where a mother pushes her daughter to engage in some unconventional behavior with insects, to the everyday life of a salaryman who suddenly decides to take up boxing in “The Song of Mr H.”

As with any anthology there were a few stories that weren’t to my taste. I might be a prude, but I don’t tend to get much out of stories where the main point of the narrative is to be transgressive mainly by showing sex acts or bodily functions. If I wanted to read stuff like that, I figure I could always seek out something like Prison Pit. Fortunately the way the selection of the stories was paced, when I was reading I wasn’t mentally checking off repetitive themes like “Penis, sex with a cursed plant-woman, the runs, giant penis, penis again.” Instead there was more variation in the way the anthology was put together, so my running tally of themes was more like “Naked woman, fable about insanity told with assassins, boy falls in love with a butterfly, massive existential angst and vomiting, penis, symbolic story about a relationship breakup.”

The production quality for the book from Top Shelf Productions was excellent. I am always a sucker for paperback books with french flaps, and I appreciated the inclusion of author notes for all the stories collected in the anthology. I appreciated the variety of artists represented, especially the inclusion of many female artists. With Drunken Dreams and AX being published, 2010 is ending as a good year for providing readers with access to important and influential manga. I hope that this book does well enough that we get a second volume published. With so much commercial, slickly produced manga (that I dearly love!) out there, it is also good to take a step back and gain a wider appreciation for the sheer variety of stories that can be told in the comics medium. AX will be a great addition to the bookshelf of any well-rounded manga fan.

Categories
Manga Reviews

Tokyopop Quick Takes – Karakuri Odette, Neko Ramen, How to Draw Shojo Manga

Karakuri Odette Volume 4

I think this takes the prize for most consistently charming shoujo manga. I mean, take a look at the riff on Revolutionary Girl Utena in the cover illustration. How cute is that!? Odette makes a new friend when she meets Shiroyuki, a rich girl who lives in isolation because she can read people’s minds. When Shiroyuki meets Odette she’s happy that she can’t read her thoughts, and Odette encourages Shiroyuki to start attending school. Shiroyuki thinks that Odette must be picked on at school and is determined to save her. Unfortunately Odette already seems to have things well in hand, despite her tendency to immediately do other people’s classroom chores when asked. There’s also an appearance by Kurose, Odette’s juvenile delinquent with a heart of gold non-boyfriend. He starts getting stalked by another girl, which awakens feelings of jealousy in Odette. Suzuki’s pacing is great. There are little hints here and there that show Odette might becoming something more than just an android. Her dependence on her battery seems to be lessening, and her experiences of new emotions through her interaction with her friends seems to be increasing. There are only two volumes left in this series, and I’ll be sorry to see it end.

Neko Ramen 2

People who liked the first volume of this series about Taisho, a cat who inexplicably runs a ramen shop, will find the second volume equally enjoyable. There are plenty of gags about Taisho switching out different theme corners of his shop in an effort to find an added attraction. He goes through options like a petting zoo and spiritual fortunes in short order. Taisho also does curry experiments, with disastrous results.It felt to me like there were a few more long form comics included in this volume as opposed to the 4-coma strips. The longer stories focused on Taisho’s famous cat model father and a food competition that seemed like a satirical take on the food battles often found in cooking manga like Iron Wok Jan. Hapless businessman Tanaka gets a shock when his father has a mid-life crisis and confesses his secret desire to open a ramen shop. This is one of those manga that I think is best read in spaced-out stages, because while the jokes are funny, there’s a certain element of sameness for the reader when reading a bunch of similar gags back to back.

How to Draw Shojo Manga

I’m not an artist, but I think that this how to draw book will be interesting for shoujo fans since it was put out by the editorial teams of some of Hakusensha’s manga magazines. There’s a simple story used as a framing device – enthusiastic but slightly clueless aspiring manga artist Ena gets put through her paces under the guidance of Sasaki, a manga editor. Topics like what tools to use, drawing people and objects, composing panel layouts, working on storyboards, and developing characters are briefly touched on. While this volume is too slender to use as a true drawing textbook, it does introduce a lot of terminology and concepts that provide a basic overview of the manga-making process. Some of the details included are likely to be too specific to the Japanese system to be very useful for American aspiring manga artists. An appendix on alternate routes to publication, like how to create a webcomic, might have been useful. Still, I enjoyed leafing through this book but I was tortured by the inclusion of some of the examples from untranslated Hakusensha manga. Now I’m curious about English Tutoring School Wars, Go! Hiromi, Go!, and especially the Tea Prince’s Princess which appears to feature a hot guy playing the cello with some unfortunate bowing technique. I do think this title would be a popular addition to any library’s collection of how to draw books.

Review copies for Neko Ramen and How to Draw Shojo Manga provided by the publisher.