Gestalt, vol. 1

Story and Art by Yun Kouga
Published in the US by TokyoPop


Slugline: I guess the cover art is nice

Father Olivier of the Valeria Order has evaded his superiors and is going to the island of 'G,' the home of a banished demon. Along the way he acquires the slave Ouri , who rapidly reveals that she has hidden abilities and a connection to the island of 'G' herself. There are some traveling companions and some complications, but the story was so choppy and all of the characters drawn so similarly that it rapidly become too much work for too little reward to actually care what could be going on. Character motivations and powers appear and disappear with no explanation, bad video-game terminology is used as an excuse to avoid actual world building and plot lines are created and discarded apparently randomly. This was painful to read, and despite the creator's otherwise compelling body of work, this title is one to be avoided.



Gestalt, vol. 1 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

- Ferdinand

Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney

By CAPCOM Games
Released in the US by Del Rey Manga


Slugline: I hope the game is much, much better than the manga.

Game based manga have a tough time of it, and sometimes I snark on them on them a little freely. This time, I can not snark on this mess enough. It bills itself as a prequel to the game, but the volume was such a confused mess that I had to research in order to figure out what was going on with the volume. There are 20 shorts in the volume but they are widely varying in tone and in art style. There are some fairly serious stories, silly ones and ones that barely qualify as a story, breaking the fourth wall freely. None of the characters are introduced, with the apparent assumption that the reader is already familiar with them. What I discovered is that this actually a collection of dojin, so the stories in this volume were not necessarily intended to be presented together. Which explains why there are two separate 'lost kitten' stories in the volume. At the end of the volume I have virtually no idea who the characters were and this was despite the volume being thicker than the standard. This is for game completists, and even then save yourself the headache and just shelve it with the rest of your collection without punishing yourself by reading it.



Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

- Ferdinand

Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, vol. 1

Story and Art by Yoshio Sawai
Published in the US by Viz


Dishonorable mention
Slugline: There is no story here just a really long line of sight gags.

Okay, I admit failure here. I only managed to read about half of this, because there is no sense of logic, storytelling or even what the hell is going on other than an endless line of sight gags. It could be a parody of fight manga. Look, one of the biases we admitted, in the side column in fact, is that we are older readers. I do not require a story, I understand that there are valid experimental manga that are more abstract, but this is just a long line of bad and stupid jokes that would only appeal to a 10 year old. Think of the worse stupid/raunchy movie you've ever seen, and then using that same attitude to make a manga. If you like that, all the more power to you.



Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, vol. 1 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

- Ferdinand

Heavenshield, vol. 1

By Ryu Blackman
Published by TokyoPop


Slugline: What a horrible, over the top mess.

I wish I could tell you the basic outlines of the plot, but the few facts that I managed to glean from the title doesn't seem to match the back cover text at all. And what I did glean, I literally gleaned, sifting through the pages to try to pull out from the chaff some relevant bits of the story. I can sorta tell you that there is a religious/military conflict, that someone is trying to kill political leaders, that there is a maniac general of some sort, and that there is a top flight freelance protection squad out to protect a politician, but that is about it. And after trying to unpack what is going on, who is doing what, what everyone's motivations are, or at least what they say they are, I find that I don't really care. At the end of the volume I know about the same that I knew from the back cover text from before I even started. It just feels like such a mess. And I feel no urge to try figure it out.



Heavenshield, vol. 1 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

-Ferdinand

Dragon Sister!, Vol. 1

By Nini
Released in the US by TokyoPop


Dishonorable Mention
Slugline: What an exciting and suspenseful story. Not.

Okay, maybe I have been away too long and my tolerance of stuff has dropped down, but I couldn't bring myself to finish Dragon Sister! because it was so boring and cookie cutter. The characters were flat, all surface, and not even the art was enough to save it. It felt like a condensation of another work, where the characters moved from plot point to point, without any apparent motivation or reason for them to do so. Unlike yesterday's review of Your & My Secret, where reading it got me mad, this just failed to engage on any level other than wondering how many pages I had left.

Edited to Add: Over the weekend, I started feeling bad that perhaps I had let my negative review of Your & My Secret bias this review, so I tried to reread it, and gave it to Miranda to consider. Miranda is the one that pointed out for an action title, two of the fights were skipped over (we see them posing at the beginning of the fight, then we skip ahead to all the opponents on the ground) and the third is aborted after a couple of punches are thrown. At which point we threw up our hands and decided to let sleeping manga lie.



Dragon Sister!, Vol. 1 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

-Ferdinand

Your and My Secret, vol. 1

By Ai Morinaga
Released in the US by TokyoPop


Slugline: Body swapping leads to new kinds of emotional abuse.

Update: For some additional insight into the title, please check out the comments for this entry!

Okay, I fully admit that I am guy. Not the most manly sort of guy in the world, but I still suffer from the XY set of chromosomes and I realize that there are some kinds of romantic tomfoolery that I will never get. I am fine with that, and I also admit that I am not fully immersed in all that is Japanese society and culture, so sometimes I don't get the attraction of some of the things in manga.

BUT, I am sorry, but I just can't wrap my head around the fact that this title is supposed to work as either a romance or a comedy. Nanako is tomgirl and Akira is the boy that likes her. They suffer a body swap, and Nanako takes to having a boy body with gusto, getting a girlfriend and ingratiating him/herself with the rest of the school and Akira's parent far better than Akira has ever managed to do. Akira, in Nanako's body, has to work to bring in money so that the body transfer can be reversed, but Nanako's scientist grandfather seems to be no hurry to do so, enjoying the money that Akira in Nanako is making and the fact that Akira is now a live-in maid. Akira's best friend is making the moves on Nanako, even though he knew that Akira liked her. So here we are, Akira in Nanako is having his dreams of maybe Nanako liking him back shattered, Nanako is using his body for her own enjoyment and seems to have hijacked Akira's life, while Akira's friend is going behind his back to hit on the girl the friend knew he liked and Akira's attempts to get his life back are stymied by the selfishness of Nanako's grandfather.

Where the hell in comedy and romance in this? I am thinking that this is more a tragedy and if something doesn't change soon, Akira is going to mentally break down or have to take radical action in order to take control of his/her life back.

So, I didn't think like this at all. And if someone can explain to me where the romance or the comedy is hiding in this story, please tell me via comments.



Your and My Secret, vol. 1 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

-Ferdinand

Missile Happy, vol. 1

By Miki Kiritani
Released in the US by TokyoPop


Slugline: A boy and girl, who love each, plan to get married and live together right now, only occasionally smooch. I'm sorry, I am willing to suspend my disbelief for a lot, but even I have my limits.

Mikako loves her sister so much and is so sure that the marriage matches that have been set up for her sister are wrong, she tries to get the dirt on the men. In one case, she shows up at the door of one of the matches, and bluffs her way into living with him, Rou. Mikako and Rou fall in love, Rou's brother falls into love Mikako's sister, and a whole bunch of really improbable coincidences and improbably personalities clash to set up a completely unbelievable premise for the series. Unbelievable not as in, 'wow, what a coincidence', but unbelievable in a way that makes me think the creator had an editor demanding that the story cram in every conceivable shoujo cliche. The second half of the book is rather run of the mill with solid writing, but the entire setup is just too, well, not stupid, but still requiring a generous amount of ignorance of how people deal with each other. Maybe if the world was a little abstract, a little more crazed, as in not set in Tokyo but somewhere else so that the story had some tinge of fantasy and unreality already in it, maybe I could I buy the premise. But I can't.



Missile Happy, vol. 1 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

-Ferdinand

Gon, v.1

by Masashi Tanaka
Published in the U.S. by CMX



Slugline:A chibi dinosaur smashes his way through the modern forest.

This may be my most unpopular review ever -- if you love Gon from the mid-90s release by DC Comics, don't bother reading any further.

Chibi characters used to be novel, if not always cute, but that novelty has long since worn off. Still, I went into this expecting to like it, expecting something cute and clever.

It's not. Gon uses his head, mostly, to smash animals into submission or to take down trees right and left. I don't find either of those things cute or clever. Gon arbitrarily singles out animals to punish for simply doing what comes naturally, and I don't find that cute or clever either. Maybe some people think the predator/prey relationship is inherently unfair, but I don't. There's no particular reason for Gon to be stronger than everyone else, he simply is. So I end up sympathizing with the animals who suffer just for being in his way.

So I was sorely disappointed and even angry after I read this, and I'm sorry to be giving it such a low rating. I had wanted to talk about storytelling without words and have a chance to plug Triplets of Belleville (where no major character says a real word) and the wonderful Owly series by Andy Runton (aimed at young kids but enjoyable by everyone). But now all I can do is tack that on at the end.



Gon, v.1 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.

- Miranda

The Devil Within, v. 1

By Ryo Takagi
Published in the U.S. by GoComi!



Slugline: Okay, I was going to come up with something clever, but these are some seriously messed-in-the-head characters.

Rion, when she was way too young, watched an adult movie of her adopted father's, which has convinced her that men are devils and boys are angels. She is becoming heavily shota-con by the time she is fifteen, as in she is only attracted to underage boys. On her way home one day she meets a boy she is attracted to, but discovers that he is really her age though he has stopped aging. That matter-of-fact revelation is merely the beginning of the weirdness, for when she gets home there are three young men (devils) there, and her father is telling her she must choose from among the three of them to marry. Not to worry, they are not devils, they are really angels -- and they unfurl their wings to prove it to her. And she is really a devil, and the young-looking boy that she likes ages with just a kiss from her, and the three guys have passkeys to her apartment, and her father left that video out for Rion to find to turn her against men until he was ready to introduce her to her fiances... and I can just go on and on.

Ugh. This story is a mess and it's all over the place. I am not automatically against shota-con, but I do ask that they be handled carefully -- which this definitely is not. What the father has done to Rion, and continues to do to her, should be counted as child abuse. Her fiances are not really much better, knowing that she is at best damaged but needing to marry her in order to be rich, or because it is destiny, or for some reason justifies all of this abuse. That reason was not revealed by the end of this volume, and I really, really needed to have a some attempt at a rationale, to try to salvage what I could, but that was dashed. The cover and the back cover text makes it sound like a reverse harem comedy, and I wish it was. And considering my distaste for harem comedies, that should give you a hint about how I feel about this title. Not to say it wasn't funny at times, but once you took those times into the greater context of the story, you feel sorry for Rion and want to make a long-distance phone call to Japanese Child Protective Services.



- Ferdinand

Kingdom Hearts II, v.1

By Shiro Amano
Released in the U.S. by TokyoPop



Slugline: Isn’t this supposed to have Disney characters? Or, you know, real characters rather than ciphers?

I understand that the Kingdom Hearts franchise has its fans and I don’t want to knock them, but I hope the video games are a lot better than the manga, since I understand that the videogames came first. This first volume of the new series doesn’t tell you what is going on, implies that nothing you see is real, and has discontinuities in storytelling that I hope are part of the plot -- but I have no idea of whether this is true or not. It is just all over the place, I have no idea what is going on with the characters, and except for a single panel there are no Disney characters that I recognize.

If you are going to have the main character driven by a mystery about what he is, you need to have some kind of payoff along the way rather than stringing things along hoping people will stick with you. That is what happened with the X-Files and after a while people stopped giving them the rope to hang themselves because there were never even any minor payoffs along the way to the big one. Maybe if I was willing to read every single Kingdom Hearts manga before this one, and the background for the videogame, I could appreciate what they were doing here, but if so, they should have labeled this part 7 of 20 or something along those lines, rather than #1.



Kingdom Heart II, vol. 1 is also available from Right Stuf, Intl., an online retailer specializing in anime and manga.


- Ferdinand

Little Queens, v. 1

By Yeon-Joo Kim
Published in the US by TokyoPop



Dishonorable Mention

My brain hurt after reading this. The story tone and the actual flow of the plot, what exists of it, jumps all over the place. I kept on thinking they had accidentally forgotten to include some panels, pages, heck, a whole chapter. Not sure why they're queens in training, and by the time they kind of gave half an explanation I didn't care. Characterizations seemed to change page to page, sometimes panel to panel. Sometimes the story took itself very seriously, other times it became very metatextual, which that is a difficult feat to pull off and the story failed in that regard. And honestly, I spent first couple chapters trying to connect the intro text to the story I was reading, and it was only after the headache started that I realized that it wasn't worth bothering. Time jumps around without explanation.

So yeah, not loving it. If the art was truly spectacular I might have rated it better, or if the story was an ambitious failure I could forgiven the attempt, but it is neither, merely average in both respects.




- Ferdinand

Innocent W, v. 1

by Kei Kusunoki
Published in the U.S. by Tokyopop



Dishonorable Mention

Oh, boy, teenagers being slaughtered in the woods! That's never been done before!

- Miranda

The Wallflower, v.7

by Tomoko Hayakawa
Published in the U.S. by Del Rey Manga



Slugline: Four guys attempt to suppress the individuality of a girl. At the request of her aunt, apparently.

Let's dissect a bit of the teaser on the back cover, shall we?

"Four of Japan's hottest guys..." I'll have to take their word on this. They spend most of their time in chibi form.

"...are doing the best they can..." Not in this volume, they weren't.

"...in their mission to turn dark, macabre Sunako into a dainty young woman" And why the heck does she need to be a dainty young woman? Not every girl dreams of being a bubble-headed housewife, you know. But no, these four guys are out to "convince" her it's the thing to be -- without the least bit of evidence or persuasion.

I suppose her resistance is supposed to be amusing, except that it isn't. Given that she's a horror film fan, I'm hoping she goes Freddie Kreuger on their asses.

I haven't read the previous six volumes. I'm rather insulted they exist, but I should give them the benefit of a doubt. Maybe they're funny. Maybe Sunako has some zingers up her sleeve.

But given the tepid art and writing in v.7, I doubt it.



- Miranda