Yuri Manga:Tsubomi, Volume 5

March 5th, 2010

I cannot begin to describe how disappointed and frustrated I am with Tsubomi. It’s not like I ever expected it to have me scattering rose petals in front of the publisher’s door, but I really did not expect to make the scrunchy face so often while reading it at this point.

It makes me sigh, and not in a good way. I’m sorry. I don’t see what the appeal of 80% of the stories are. The art is not particularly skilled, the stories that are being told run the gamut from well beyond overdone to death to okay. And most of it is merely meh. The one saving grace of this fifth volume of Tsubomi is that the second volume of Comic Lily is so god-awful that in comparison, this publication looks pretty good.

It vexes me. I want to support Yuri, heck I want more than anything else (and maybe more than anyone else) to see a LOT of Yuri on bookstore shelves all around the world. But I can’t really keep throwing my money at this magazine and hoping that it will suddenly be something it is not. Like, for instance, good. You know how much I eschew delusion in my dealings with anime and manga.

Tsubomi is a collection of nearly identical “Story A” type encounters, and a few downright icky feeling or bad stories. Try as I might, I can’t come up with even one story that really stands apart from the rest.

Yes, I dislike “Ebisu-san and Hotei-san” less than many of the other stories, but that is more because of key concepts in my head than anything the story itself has to offer.

“Hoshikawa Ginza Yon-choume” is a story waiting to happen. Every chapter it inches forward. I’m not in a rush. I’d just like someone to tell me when we get to the story part. This has been the longest prologue I’ve ever read.

And Takemiya Jin has a story that takes one small thing – cold hands in winter – and builds a whole thing about it in “Snow Dome.” But that’s the problem – every story is a “one small thing” take on the same one chapter over and over and over.

There is a Girl, she likes another Girl. They like each other. The End.

I’ve been reading, writing, talking about and promoting Yuri for more than a decade now. Can we *please* have something more than this already? There are more to lesbian lives than just “realizing you like someone” “realizing they like you” and “coming out.”

Ratings:

Overall – 6

I’m not going to be buying this anthology any more. That’s the only way I can tell the publishers that it’s insufficient for my needs. That depresses me. Surely by now, we should be getting some better Yuri in our anthologies, not just more of the same old-same old, shouldn’t we?

5 Responses

  1. Katherine says:

    It’s too bad this magazine didn’t shape up- especially since you liked the fourth volume a little more than previous volumes. (And what’s up with the cover? o_o;)

  2. 李古夏 says:

    Though some of the lines are so not solid, i like the tone that tsubomi runs xD.
    Especially “SISTER”, something that makes you laugh and you want to look forward to see how those sister are interacted xD
    I know the some-girls-like-some-girls-and-they-finally-get-together line are kinda retarded. It just shows what Yuri’s dreams are.
    They can hardly get the one who love in the reality. :-) There are too many octave in the real world. Tsubomi is the one that can heal them.

  3. Jennifer says:

    Hey, why does Lililicious do so much of these crappy anthologies when there’s so much better stuff out there?

    It seems like half of the scanlated Yuri manga out there is boring anthology oneshots, and it makes me sigh in a not good way.

  4. Kaori-sama says:

    Hii, Erica.
    You can answer me if the chapter 5 is the end of the manga Ebisu-san To Hotei-san?
    Thank you and Sorry for my bad english u.u

  5. @Kaori-sama – Since Tsubomi Volume 6 has not yet been published, there is no way to know if Chapter 5 is the end of the series or not.

Leave a Reply to Jennifer