Archive for the Gag Comics/4-koma Category


Yuri Manga: Kyou mo Futari ha Nakayoshi Desu. ~Kuzushiro Short Story Collection (今日も２人は仲良しです。)

April 17th, 2015

FutarihaNakayoshiKyou mo Futari ha Nakayoshi Desu.~Kuzushiro Short Story Collection (今日も２人は仲良しです。) is a collection published not by Yuri Hime Comics, but by Rex Comics, also an Ichijinsha imprint. I found that interesting, although without any particular context.

The short stories are right in Kuzushiro-sensei’s ballpark – two people who are lovers/rivals and both slightly nuts, so that the situations, while they may start off normal, are guaranteed to descend immediately into wackiness. The majority of the stories are or could be considered to be Yuri, but there are a few male x female pairings which work just as well.

The first few chapters follow various couples in a idol group. Each couple is equally amusingly dysfunctional, but anyone familiar with Nekoyama-san to Inugami-san, would instantly recognize the formula. And speaking of Nekoyama-san to Inugami-san, this collection includes an early story idea for that series.

My favorite stories follow a seriously creepy eye-patch wearing girl and the girl she targets in school…and yes, I know that’s utterly predictable of me, but it’s not the eyepatch that worked for me this time, it was the utterly fucked up eye she had under it. ^_^

The art was clean, much cleaner than I’m used to from Kuzushiro-sensei, but the comedic gags weren’t quite as sharp, as befits earlier work.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – Variable, we’ll say 7
Characters – 7
Yuri – 8
Service – 2

Overall – 8

A great way to enjoy more from a creator whose work makes me happy.





Yuri Manga: Inugami-san to Nekoyama-san, Volume 3 (犬神さんと猫山さん)

December 19th, 2014

istns3Here we are at Volume 3 of Inugami-san to Nekoyama-san (犬神さんと猫山さん) and…I’m not tired of it yet. Why? I don’t know, but I’m not! There’s something about Kuzushiro’s characters that make them completely not-boring to me. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a gag comic this much since…well, ever really.

So here we are and Nekoyama is fully invested in being too interested in Inugami, with no real way to express herself, while Inugami wears her heart on her sleeve.  We follow Aki for a good portion of the book and get a new seasonal addition with her Kendo sempai Touko (whose name is written with the character for “winter.”) Most of the other animals take a back seat to  to Ryuuzaki and Torao. And we see that indeed, they are the couple they appear to be. In addition to Otome and Mari, we get to see Nekoyama’s older sister, Tamaki with her girlfriend. So the Yuri level is significantly higher than previous volumes.

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For the rest, it’s basically a balanced mix of genuine emotion and excruciating jokes that I nonetheless laugh out loud at.

What is it about this comic that I like so much? It’s taken me a while to nail it down, but I think I’ve figured it out. Kuzushiro-sensei likes these character and as a result, so do I. ^_^  Despite the animal puns, there’s a sense of depth to all the characters (except Torikai). While we’re mostly seeing the silly side, every once in a while we see that depth – just a glimpse – and it convinces us that time spent in this boisterous crowd is time well spent.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 7
Character – 7
FanService – 6
Yuri – 8

Overall – 7

Apparently the key to a good gag comic is not one loud joke-cracking annoying character, but about half a dozen of them all at once. ^_^

This volume is also available on Kindle for folks with Japanese IP addresses.

 





Yuri Manga: Inugami-san to Nekoyama-san Volume 2 (犬神さんと猫山さん)

May 8th, 2014

Volume 1 of Inugami-san to Nekoyama-san, (犬神さんと猫山さん) introduced us to the animal-themed cast of a “typical” Japanese high school. Inugami Hachiyo who likes cats and Nekoyama-san and Nekoyama Suzu, who likes dogs, but maybe not Inugami-san, their classmates Ushiwaka (“ushi” means cow, so she is big-breasted, har har), teeny little Nezu Mikine (“nezumi” means mouse) and their zookeeper, Inugami’s friend Aki (whose name means “autumn” and is wholly unrelated to animals.)

In Volume 2, we add a monkey and a bird to the menagerie. The bird is sickly, ghostly, flightly Torikai Hibari, the monkey is class rep Sarutobi Sora. It is with perpetually irritable Sarutobi (who does not get along with Inugami-san, despite her most puppy-like attempts at friendship) that we encounter the one genuinely laugh-out-loud gag of the book.

Sarutobi really cannot stand when people ascribe the characteristics of her animal name to herself. So she says, quite seriously to our resident mouse (who is, apparently, the most worldly of the bunch and the most likely to use sex appeal to get her way.) Quite seriously, Sarutobi explains that their names are just their names and really, people should stop saying she’s like a monkey, she insists as she picks up her schoolbag and pulls out a banana. I laughed as Nezu-san calmly pointed out that that would have been a lot more more convincing without the banana.

I’m struck again at how bananas are intrinsically the funniest of fruits.

Anyway, we do get a shocking amount of Yuri in between the excruciating gags and Kuzushiro’s typical fake-y Yuri. Nekoyama hallucinates (she thinks, she hopes) that Inugami-san kisses her while feverish and we’re told that Nezu and Ushiwaka are an item. And, as unsubtle as Inugami-san is, she’s going to have to be less subtle than this to get her actual interest across.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 6 Slice of life
Character – 6
FanService – 6
Yuri – 7 Slightly more  in the real world-ish

Overall – 7

The Sarutobi gag all by itself notched this up a point.

Tl;dr:





Yuri Manga: Yurimekuru Hibi (ゆりめくる日々)

December 16th, 2013

While in Japan in October, I was loading up on Yuri manga I probably would not have bothered buying if I had to pay shipping. Yurimekuru Hibi (ゆりめくる日々) was among these. I just picked it up without looking and threw it into my pile without really looking at it. When I got it home, the cover did not fill me with desire to read it, so it just drifted lower and lower in the “to review pile” until I finally had no choice but to pick it up. And then I noticed that it was a Champion Red book and my blood ran cold.

If you are a regular reader, you will be familiar with my dislike of Champion Red, the imprint that brought us such abominations as the Mai HiME manga (and Mai Otome, but I knew to not read it by that time)  and the inexpressibly vile El Cazador de le Bruja manga, among others. While Yuri is a not-uncommon fetish among CR comics, the most common fetish to be seen in this imprint is a pathological dislike of women.

So, with some dread, I opened the pages of Yurimekuru Hibi and found…a perfectly normal, slightly silly gag comic about two girls who like each other.

Saiyuri and Yoriko-sempai are in deep like, with very typical skinship (holding hands, sharing food, etc.). They go to school together, hang out after school together, go to the beach and flower-watching. The only standout quality of their relationship is that Yoriko-sempai is a nutball. Not in a bad way, in a Fuurai Shimai “living in an alternate reality” way. Yoriko is excessively rich, also excessively odd, with occasional lapses of sense, manners and sanity. Sayuri is left to clean up after her, but she’s glad to do so, because she really likes sempai.

Typically of a gag comic, the humor is gentle “heh” as opposed to guffaws. Yoriko gets stranger as the volume goes on, and by the end, this reader felt she had sufficiently plumbed the depths of Yoriko’s reality. But for a CR comic, it was light-hearted and had no trace of the kind of violence against women in which this imprint so often engages.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – There isn’t one. It’s a situation comedy in which the situation is “they like one another + Yoriko does goofy thing.”
Characters – 6
Yuri – 6
Service – 3 Downright low for a CR manga

Overall – 6

Yoriko and Sayuri really like one another.





Yuri Manga: Sakura Trick, Volume 1 (桜トリック)

December 1st, 2013

Sakura Trick (桜トリック) is not a new Yuri manga. It’s been around for quite a while, in fact. Last year I even picked up a copy of the magazine in which it runs, MangaTime Kirara Miracle, just to take a look at the series in situ. I found exactly what I expected.

Sakura Trick, Volume 1 is a 4-koma school life gag comic about Haruka and Yu, two newly minted high school students. They have been friends for a while and have become very close. But, when classmates develop a skinship with Yu, Haruka surprises herself by suddenly becoming insanely jealous. She runs away in a panic. Yu and she have a conversation about it and they realize that they both want more than just friendship. They kiss.

Amazingly, this is not the end of the story, just the first 20 pages or so. The rest of the story follows Haruka and Yu and their classmates – another couple Shizuku and Kotone and a not-quite couple Yuzu and Kaede. These last two are more like comedy routine than a couple and my favorite characters so far.

Complications are few in Volume 1. Yu’s older sister, Mitsuki, is the Student Council president, has terrible eyesight and falls for Haruka without realizing it, even though she knows her sister and Haruka have an intimate relationship. Haruka gets jealous when she comes into the classroom to find Yu sitting on Kotone’s lap.

Yu is narcoleptic. Kotone is gregarious, Shizuku is tsundere, but cutely so. Kaede and Yuzu amuse themselves by filling in internal monologue as they spy on Haruka, or pride themselves on guessing Mitsuki’s favorite drink.

On the minus side, Sakura Trick has very little of anything approaching a plot. But, that is typical and expected in a school-life gag comic.

On the plus side, the couples are couple-y and all quite different. The characters are slightly less “type” and slightly more “character” than usual, with the exception of Shizuku (who, in this volume at least, is no more than a twin-tailed tsundere.)

I’ll give it at least through Volume 2 to develop a personality.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 3 There is none, so far.
Characters – 7 Better than I expected, not yet fully developed
Yuri – 9
Service – 4

Overall – 7

Sakura Trick is too dramatic a story to be funny, and too romance-y to be a drama. But it is a comfortably low-stress way to pass the time. Whether it will bear up to the pacing of an anime remains to be seen.