Archive for the Artists Category


Amayo no Tsuki, Volume 4 ( 雨夜の月)

May 7th, 2023

Two young women appear to be wrestling and laughing on a sofa in a room with sound-proofing, a piano, and boxes of books.Well, wow. A whole lot of story happened in this volume. First, Saki finds Kanon’s former best friend – the one Kanon feel betrayed her – and learns the whole story.  It was pretty heart-rending, with a strong element of children being forced to take on adult responsibilities without money, time or ability. Saki’s reaction may change a lot of things, because she sees both sides and really understands what happened in a way that Kanon could not. She then assures the other girl that she was really trying to be a good person – something she had never considered and with no one to tell her, she believed she was the bad guy.

Saki and Kanon’s days change rapidly as the school festival becomes the talk of the class. Kanon is encouraged to write a story for the upcoming short story contest and Saki is tasked with creating an arrangement of music for the chorus. The song she picks is surprisingly profound. But in doing so, the classmate she was paired with – who seems to carry some kind of grudge again Kanon  – stops coming to school completely. I feel another systemic failure by adults coming on.

But last and not at all least, Kanon decides that she’d actually like to sing with her class, rather than just lip sync and enlists her mother to at least give a fair review. She’ll need work.

The story here is that both Saki and Kanon are allowing new things into their lives and they have each other to thank. Kanon, especially, is taking Saki’s advice and pulling down the walls around her, learning to take risks, and in doing so…has come to realize how important Saki is to her.

At this point, whether Saki and Kanon become a couple is entirely irrelevant to me. What I keep coming back for is a story of two girls forming a friendship that makes space for other people and new challenges and support for each other.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 9
Characters – 9
Service – 0
Yuri – 4

Overall – 9

The first volume of The Moon On A Rainy Night will release in English on my and Guest Reviewer Matt’s  birthday, so I am declaring it an official Okazu event! Grab your copy, read it and come by here on or around Sept. 5, when I do a review and drop your review of that fantastic first volume in the comments! Depending on how I feel, there may be prizes. I’m super excited than Kuzushiro-sensei is getting a print series here in English at last and I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.





Yuri Is My Job! Anime on Crunchyroll

April 26th, 2023

Title Card for Yuri Is My Job! anime, featuring a short blonde and a tall brunette in dark old-fashioned Japanese school uniforms, holding hands before a large window, in a classic Yuri trope pose.Earlier this year, I started a series on YouTube called Erica Reacts (Not Really) to first episodes of Yuri anime coming out this year. Long Covid has pretty much put making videos (and all my Yuricon 2023 video plans) on hold for now. So I apologize that this anime will not get a not-react video from me. Because…it’s wack. 

High school first-year Hime has a plan for her life. It’s a really banal and superficial plan – be universally beloved and cute, marry wealthy- but it is a plan, which puts her ahead of most of us, I guess. ^_^

When Hime bumps into a very young looking girl, slightly injuring her, she finds herself subbing for the other girl at a Yuri concept café, based upon a popular set of light novels. In these novels, students at an old, and old-fashioned, girls’ school form passionate platonic sisterly bonds called “schwestern.” As a plot concept, it’s fun, light-hearted and appealing to Yuri fans who are familiar with ‘S’ tropes and/or Maria-sama ga Miteru. 

I’ve been reading Watashi no Yuri ha Oshigoto Desu! since the first chapter came out in Comic Yuri Hime at the beginning of 2017, and I guess I became inured to how deeply screwed up everyone in the series is. ^_^ Watching the anime, which is about as funny as a fake broken arm, has really hammered home that Yuri is My Job! now streaming on Crunchyroll, is not really a comedy set in a Yuri concept cafe, but a drama about deeply dysfunctional teenagers who will step all over each other’s toes and feelings and generally fuck up in every possible way. All while serving custom tea blends and German-inspired sweets in a syrupy ‘S’ environment. 

It’s less like Marimite and more like Mad Max in long dresses at a café as a Bravo television series. This is not comedy…this is survival. We’ve hardly even met everyone yet and we dislike them all for their own reasons. ^_^Except Nene. I like Nene. 

Ratings:

Animation: Mediocre, but adequate
Story: Off the rails, and kind of compelling, but also repulsive?
Characters: Mostly completely unlikable, but does that matter?
Service – The customers at the café squeal convincingly when classic Yuri tropes happen
Yuri – None, until there is

Overall – I have no idea how to score this. Let’s hedge my bets at a 7

If you’ve read my reviews of the manga you know why. If not, don’t start now. Grab yourself some popcorn and watch the drama, the obsession, the mental instability, the lesbianism (and, technically, an actual lesbian or two, although you may never get to the second.) There is a lot of everything to come.





ULTIMATE-MAMA, Volume 1

March 10th, 2023

A woman with scars across her face in a tactical bodysuit carries a high school girl in a torn school uniform, ULTIMATE MAMA in Japanese and English in pink letters across the front cover. Black letters read Story and Art by Hayashiya ShizuruOne of the minor high spots last year that wasn’t everything to do with launching a book on the history of the Yuri genre (!), was news that one of my favorite manga artists, Hayashiya Shizuru, was serializing a new manga online. ULTIMATE MAMA, Volume 1 is the print collection of that series. Please allow me to simply quote myself for the synopsis:

A bunch of content warnings on the manga for today’s review, for blood, and violence, and “comedic” BDSM and nudity and some other stuff.

Fujimori Manatasu is a very cute high school student. At 18, she already has a modeling career and is well-liked by her friends. Walking home from school one day she sees what looks like a giant black crescent moon in the sky. She is rescued from some slavering creature by a woman with abs of steel, Ultimate Fang, and her apparently small child, Meteora. The next day at school, Manatsu finds the child to be 18, and a transfer student into her class…and both Juou Ruriru, the child and Juouo Hagane, the buff mother, are now her next-door neighbors. Hagane is there because Manatsu has blood that will also give her super powers as well, if only Hagane can awaken them. Preferably by having sex, but whatever. When another equally buff woman arrives, Savage, (real name Jade Anderson) Manatsu’s mom falls, hard. Now it’s up to Hagane to awaken Manatsu’s powers and gain a partner.

In addition to the gags about Hafgane and Manatsu having sex to activate Manatsu’s powers, two high school girls are having intimate relations in the school library, and seem to be opening up the crescent gates for the creatures to come through. Who are they and…why?

This story plays out with not-explicit, but very obvious, sex, along with nudity, gags, blood, and excruciating puns. Hagane and Manatsu save the day from the big bad who was a bit of a surprise in the sense of the “half-brother who had gone to South America” kind of surprise – you know, we just weren’t told the important thing up front.  Everyone ends happily every after, and the bad jokes keep going, one presumes, long after the story ends.

The art here is very on point for me, as well as for Manatsu and her mom. Both Hagane and Savage have exceptional exterior obliques and wear a suit with class. Both the action and sex are full of gags…in fact, when she published the “climactic” (hah) chapter, Hayashiya-sensei commented something like, “I just can’t do good sex scenes.” She can, she just can’t do *serious* sex scenes. But she can’t do serious anything, so that’s fine. ^_^ Her art, though has probably never been better. I was flipping through some earlier work and wow, this art is so confident and mature.

As an added bonus, this volume contains “Friday Is The Day,” the one-shot from the second of Shueisha’s Yuritora Jump Yuri anthologies. This story pretty much convinced me that Sensei and I are separated at birth TM, as it is a short about two mixed martial artists beating their confessions into one another at a boxing gym, while an audience of an elderly man and woman cheer them on.

This volume is a delightful mix of humor, violence and Yuri, by Hayashiya-sensei, just the way I like it. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 8 Ridiculous, but fun
Character – 10 Ridiculous and fun
Service – 5 Ridiculously fun
Yuri – 10 Fun and ridiculous

Overall – 9

In addition to this, I also got Yankoi Shokudo C-teishoku (ヤン恋食堂　C定食), the third issue of Hayashiya-sensei’s yanki girls fighting, eating and falling for one another doujinshi, so I am replete with Yuri, food and fighting manga for a moment. ^_^ 





If My Favorite Pop Idol Made It to the Budokan, I Would Die, Volume 1

February 22nd, 2023

A 7-member pop idol group, each singer in a specific color, on a white background. In the foreground, a girl with brown hair in pigtails, in salmon pink holds her hands out to us.Eri is a fan. Not just a regular fan, but a full-on fanatic. Her favorite idol is a singer with Cham Jam, a small, not-well-known idol group from Okayama, in western Japan. Eri has given her life over to support her idol, who is very cute, pathologically shy and almost always in the back row. While her fellow fans shout their support for the main three, Eri enthusiastically lets Maina know she’s got at least one fan.

The problem is, that neither Eri nor Maina can seem to communicate. Eri tries to give Maina her support, but is awkward and incompetent…and the author will complicate this in maddening ways. Maina is apparently unable to understand Eri or communicate with her in any way that makes sense, setting these two up for a frustrating relationship in which two people who appreciate each other are completely unable to express that to each other. 

This is on top of what I have to believe is a critical look about the mutually manipulative relations between idols and fans, because if it I believed it were really only cheap jokes, I would collapse in tears.

If My Favorite Pop Idol Made It to the Budokan, I Would Die, Volume 1 has come out in English and I still don’t know what to think about it. It’s well executed. If you read my reviews of the 8 volumes I’ve read so far, you’ll see me go through a whole journey and back. ^_^; 

This is what I said about this first volume in Japanese, back in 2016. “So used am I to feeling frustration born of absolute disinterest in hideously boring characters in previous Hirao Auri manga series, that reading Hirao Auri’s new manga, Oshi ga Budokan Ittekuretara Shinu, Volume 1（推しが武道館いってくれたら死ぬ）instilled in me a wholly new feeling – frustration because I actually care about the characters! It’s a completely different feeling, I assure you. ^_^”

I have been wearing this series like an albatross around my neck for 7 years. So, like the Ancient Mariner (wow, two classic literature references in a week, I’m on a roll!) let me warn you: This series is not light comedy. It pretends to be light comedy and we are supposed to be laughing.  I have laughed out loud once that I can think of in 8 volumes – which is *still* a better record than I had with Hirao-sensei’s previous long-running series Manga no Tsukurikata. It does get better. It’s a slow crawl, but it does get better and, funnier.

I really like the otaku group. They aren’t all one thing, but we really get to see a side of the idol/fan relationship we don’t tend to see if we’re not part of it. And the Cham Jam girls are nice, as well. You don’t feel yucky liking them

If you are interested in a mockumentary about provincial idol groups, with a highly improbable main Yuri relationship (and a few actual side ones, and a business Yuri relationship or two, for flavor) this is a solid series. As light comedy, it’s agonizing.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – Frustrating, but there is hope for a decent payoff; some moments of joy, no matter how brief
Character – 8
Service – Not really, except for it being a pop idol group, but even the costumes aren’t creepy.
Yuri – 4 Hovering at “I think I feel something for you, but can’t put a finger on it,” to “I can’t look you in the eyes, but don’t know why” with potential

Overall – 8

Thanks very much to Tokyopop for the review copy. It reminded me of all the feelings I have about the idol – and fan – industry. And Hirao-sensei. ^_^





I’m In Love With The Villainess Manga, Volume 4

February 16th, 2023

On a background of yellow lilies, A girl with long, blonde hair with a big red bow, looks up and away from the center, a girl in a maid's outfit, clutched a plate looking down and away in the opposite direction. Black letters read "art by Aonishimo, story by Inori., character design by Hanagata." "Manga 4" is set inside a solid pink compass-rose shaped sigil. It’s already been 5 months since I read the fourth manga volume of Watashi no Oshi ha Akuyaku Reijou. This volume is as I said in that review, “highly emotional and action-packed.” And now we are able to read I’m In Love With The Villainess, Volume 4  of the manga in English and the volume packs the same gut punches over again.

In this volume, the Commoner Movement arc comes to an end with a betrayal. And a redemption. And seeds of more betrayal and further redemption. At the risk of lazy writing, I want to quote myself from my review of the Japanese volume:

This is the volume where everything, all of the goofy light-hearted comedic moment fall away and what remains is social justice withheld, love perverted into betrayal and a new, unpredictable, danger. We finally meet Salas, the King’s right-hand man, a key player in the oncoming storm. I mention him because it is often stated how attractive he is in the novels – in fact, without him being attractive, his character fails to make sense…so I was really interested in seeing how he was portrayed. Not at all coincidentally, we also meet Lily, the nun, who also become a major player in the narrative, for the first time. I believe now all the primary pieces are on the board. The game begins with a huge loss. If you’ve read the novels, you know how huge a blow it will be for Claire, and as the end of the volume comes with a letter from Susse, what that means to Rae having to battle for her.

In this volume we learn how much Claire has lost, and how often her loss has come back to haunt her. For one brief flash, Claire will rely on Rae. Again, it sets seeds for the next arc, which will irrevocably change their relationship

Again and again, I am blown away by Aonoshimo-sensei’s art for this series. A turn of the eyebrow makes all the difference here. When we get Rae and Claire dressed up to speak to the King, phew! Those clothing choices slay. I appreciate an artist who can draw great clothing. Joshua Hardy’s translation has given us a solid “voice” for our characters, a voice I know we’re all looking forward to seeing be reproduced in animated form. Courtney Willams gives us solid lettering that really conveys the tone and depth of these emotional scenes.  Another fine volume from the team at Seven Seas.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 9
Characters – 9
Yuri – 6, since it’s not the focus. But it soon will be.
Service – Rae in that outfit at the end is definitely service. Hope we get a standee of those looks.

Overall – 9

As I move back and forth between the Japanese manga, the print volumes of the novels, the spin-off series and the English editions, I have to tell you that this series doesn’t not lose it’s power with re-reading. It might even be more impactful every time, as I have the chance to catch one more thing than I did the last.