Archive for the English Manga Category


MMF: Karakuri Odette Manga (English)

January 21st, 2011

Karakuri Odette Volume 1This month, the Manga Movable Feast is taking on a series that I personally consider to be one of the most enjoyable shoujo series I’ve read in the past few years. Along with the recent The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko, I consider Karakuri Odette a do-not-miss series for fans of shoujo manga who nevertheless crave something a little different from energetic, clueless girl is in love with jerky, but noble, guy.

Odette is a perfectly normal girl. She wants to make friends, she wants the people she cares about to be happy. She wants to be cute. She wants her battery pack to have a cute cover. The only difference between Odette and any other girl her age is that she was not created as an act of love between a man and a woman in bed, she was created as an act of research by a man in a lab. Odette is a robot, or android, if you prefer.

Odette’s story is not Pinocchio’s, however. While she definitely seeks to better understand the human experience, she does not desire to “become a real girl.” It would be a redundant wish because, as we see time and time again, she is already a real girl and the fact that she is an artificial/created intelligence changes nothing about that.

Karakuri Odette is not just a story about a robot girl being more human that the humans around her. (And even if it was, it would be delightful anyway.) By being so *real*, Odette actually does turn someone around her into a real person. Not Chris, her foster-cousin, another robot brought into the story as a weapon, but integrated into the family circle. Not Shirayuki, a self-ostracized girl who has never been able to relate to other people on account of the fact that she can hear their thoughts. No, the person Odette has the most profound effect upon and humanizes the most is her father, Yoshizawa-hakase.

To illustrate this, let me sum up a number of their conversations from various chapters into one whole conversation.

“Professor, I want to go to school.”

“Okay.”

“Professor, I want to be able to eat.”

“Okay.”

“Professor, I want to go to go shopping for cute clothes.”

“Okay.”

“Professor, I want a cell phone.”

“Absolutely not. You don’t need one.”

Can I get some raised hands from people who had that conversation with their fathers? Anyone? I thought so.

In Volume 5, it all comes to a moment in which, after asking for a cell phone again, Odette says something viciously and the Professor responds with “how dare you say that to your father!” (I’m working from the Japanese version, so my apologies if this differs from the Tokyopop translation. I haven’t gotten that yet.)

While fellow androids, the emotionally stunted Grace and haughty Travis call their creator “Papa,” it is Professor Yoshizawa who declares loudly that he loves every last screw in Odette.

Odette is just a perfectly normal girl, who is fundamentally different from everyone else, but is allowed, encouraged and supported by the people around her to be exactly who she is.

In honor of this month’s MMF theme, and the inspiration Odette is to me and hopefully to a lot of “different” people, I declare today “Odette Day.” For today, we won’t care if there are jellybeans in our eggs. For today, we will treat everyone as if they don’t have bad intentions. For today, we will be okay with being not like the other kids. For today, we’ll cover our insulin pumps and asthma inhalers with a cute fleece cover. For today, it’ll be okay to be different.

Happy Odette day to you all.





Lucky Star Manga, Volume 6 (English)

January 18th, 2011

For a comic that has nothing to say, but keeps saying it over and over, getting more self-referential and introspective every time, I’m amazed to tell you that I actually found Lucky Star, Volume 6…funny.

Not hysterical fall over onto the floor funny, like say Hyperbole and a Half. (You are reading Hyperbole and a Half, aren’t you? If not, you really need to, because you’ll lose your cutting edge geek cred if you don’t and your 13-year old niece will roll her eyes at you because you are so lame.

No, Lucky Star is still basically this: Konata and Hiyori are otaku – and so are a few other characters whose names escape me all the time. Overall, I feel like the less Konata-Kagami time we get, the better the story is. Mind you, I really can’t keep all the characters straight, even with character personality inserts at the beginning of chapters, for one simple reason – the character highlighted almost never appears in the next comic and by the time they do appear, I’ve forgotten them again. But the characters themselves are merely here to deliver lines that we all think (as, obviously we, the readers, must all be otaku), “yeah, I hate that too.”

The art has not changed. Which means that the art is primarily strangely shaped heads floating just barely over the bottom of the panel. This strongly increases the “talking head” feeling of this manga, which then increases my inability to tell anyone apart, as they are all teeny, blob heads just barely floating over the bottom of the panel. Nonetheless, I laughed. I too thought, “Oh yeah, I hate that,” or “Oh yeah, I’m like that too.” I guess I should congratulate myself for being a good otaku.

….I would like to take this opportunity to say that, however good an otaku I am, I have no intention of visiting the city of Washimiya or its shrine.

The readability of the English edition has significantly improved since Bill Flanagan took over the translation. Either Bill is really doing his editor’s job or the editor has finally started to get into the game, as this was the first volume (we really wouldn’t want to rush these things!) that reads almost like normal people speak. Even jokes that complain about weird otaku-speak actually have a natural distinction between average conversational language and the slang-laden drivel that passes for conversation among fans.

There is no Yuri. If you see Yuri in this volume, you are working harder than Hiyori at it.

Ratings:

Art – 5 Floating blob-heads a the bottom of the panel…
Story – 7
Characters – 7(0)
Yuri – 0
Service – 10 for in-jokes that only an otaku could love

Overall – 7

I’ll never be a huge fan of Lucky Star and, to some extent making me wait ’til Volume 6 before it’s funny is simply too little, too late. However, for fans of the series, Volume 6 is closing in on a masterwork of in-jokes about in-jokes.

Many, many thanks to Okazu hero Nadia C for her sponsorship of today’s review!





Gatch Gatcha Manga, Volume 8 (English) Guest Review by Sean Gaffney

December 21st, 2010

Gatcha Gacha Volume 8 I know it’s only Tuesday, but I’ve been sick the past few days, and so asked Sean to hustle and write me a guest review for today. And he did! So, once again, let’s welcome back Guest Reviewer, Sean Gaffney!

I’ve already reviewed Gatcha Gatcha, Volume 8 on my own blog, but since I had  previously done an overview of the series here in September 2008, I  thought that I would come back and dwell a bit on the more Yuri-friendly  aspects of the series as a whole.

First, a small digression. A lot of manga have sidebar comments  interspersed throughout the volumes. In the magazine, this is a place where the page was thinner so that an advertisement could be placed. For the volume, the publisher asks the artist to fills those spaces with original material to draw in a reader who may not want to buy something they already read in the pages of, say, Melody magazine. As readers of shoujo manga know, 90% of the time the material is the artist talking about what they ate, or where they shopped, or the awesome fellow manga artist they hung out with, or simply whining about how awful they are. And Yutaka Tachibana does this a bit too, no doubt. But she also discusses this series, and the choices she made.

She talks about Motoko, and how the editor asked for her more violent and lecherous tendencies to be toned down, but that Tachibana put her foot down. She also mentions Yuri, and said that she tried to make her a girl who’d only gone as far as kissing with her boyfriends, but felt Yuri worked better when she was ‘less pure’. More to the point, Tachibana wrote this manga ‘doing what she felt like’, and decided to simply dispense with most of the shoujo romance most series demand. Volume 8 gives us a good idea of why – it doesn’t fit the characters at mall. At least not the female characters. Yuri spends most of this volume trying to get herself to fall out of love with Yabe and in love with Hirao. She certainly does have some feelings for Hirao, and notes that she’d be jealous if she saw him with another girl. But she doesn’t get him. When she finally goes on a date with him – a very awkward one – she senses stares coming from the other females in the room, and worries that they all see Hirao as some ’empty-headed bimbo’. Later, seeing him blushing after eating a bite of her food, she compares him to… a princess.

Role reversal is the order of the day throughout this volume. Yuri dreams of being rescued from a snowy mountaintop by a ‘prince’ whose face she can’t quite make out. It’s clearly Motoko, but she hasn’t yet connected those dots. Later, she and Hirao are captured by the evil gang leader who’s been trying to make everyone’s life miserable this whole series. She then decides to disguise herself as Hirao and take the abuse and torture of her captors so that he can escape. Yuri is supposed to be the blushing shoujo heroine, only she simply can’t fall into those lines.

Neither does Motoko. Her main character arc wrapped up in Book 7, so here she simply does what she does best – makes insensitive yet telling remarks and beats up tons and tons of people. Much of this is a facade, of course – we’ve seen how much Motoko cares for Yuri, and she’s been trying to get her and Hirao to stumble towards each other almost from Day One. It’s not working, though, and clearly Yuri’s happiness is more important to her than she ever expected – Sekine understands this when he asks in a prior volume how she feels about Yuri and Hirao, and Motoko blankly replies “Dunno.”

So the climax of the series is, of course, Motoko coming to Yuri’s rescue, not Hirao. And in the final scene, we see Motoko finally at peace with herself. Her big sister is back, but seems to have lost the obsession with Motoko that led to jealous insanity. Motoko even cut her hair again, now that she doesn’t have to be ‘girly’ to ward off Kanako’s affections. And Yuri notices, saying that Motoko looks cool and makes her heart skip a beat. Now, Motoko had flirted with Yuri in a joking way several volumes earlier, but this comment seems to pull her up short. Then she just smiles and says “You bet I do.” This is lampshaded by the author, who has Sekine noting to Hirao while this is going on that Hirao has to win Yuri quickly and keep her or else he’ll lose her. But then the final line of the author’s narration is “Then again… maybe it’s already too late?”

The author already mentioned she stood her ground on keeping Yuri and Motoko the flawed yet far more awesome characters they were. More to the point, most of the time she didn’t go for the easy out, or the typical plot. The narrative, from the start, clearly was about the meeting and subsequent friendship of these two girls. And the two guys co-starring were shown, over and over, to be fairly weak and ineffectual, no matter what was done to toughen them up. As a result,
when it’s implied Yuri and Motoko get together at the end, this isn’t a surprise. It’s what the series has been working towards.

Ratings:

Art – 6. Still can get busy and confusing, especially during action scenes.

Story – 7. There are some cliches here, don’t get me wrong, but I liked the way the author stuck to her guns much of the time.

Characters – 9. Fantastic, especially the females. Even the psycho incestuous sister, Kanako, gets a depth rarely seen in psycho incestuous sisters.

Yuri (no, not the character): 5. It can still be read as hypothetical, but you’d have to squint, especially with the final pages.

Servicey – 2. There’s not a heck of a lot of service here.

Overall: 8. A highly underrated series from Tokyopop, and I’m pleased that it is finally finished. Definitely worth the effort to find it.

Also, the inside cover picture has Motoko wearing a fedora while snuggling Yuri. Fedoras make everyone sexier.





Jormungand Manga, Volume 5 (English)

December 2nd, 2010

The plotlines in Jormungand have never been really tight. In Volume 5 the plots are thin red strings that hold all the characters’ fates together.

Without these barely-there threads, the characters give the impression that they’d fly right out of their orbits around Koko. And it is Koko that holds all these strings. This is a team that exists entirely because of Koko. Because she can smile, they can smile. Because she likes practical jokes, they joke with each other. Because she treats Jonah like a son, they can all take responsibility for him.

In this volume we get a little bit of background for Lehm, the artillery expert, there’s a few chapters of fighting and, at the end, we see Valmet attempting to sneak away on her own.

Nothing in this volume is much different than in the previous four volumes, so if you are not already enamored of reading a story about people having fun killing other people, then you’re not going to be convinced to keep reading.

But for those of us who do like the series, this is more of the same – and has the added benefit of the team taking turns seeing who can throw Jonah the farthest, which made me laugh out loud.

Valmet is still Team Yuri as she proclaims her breasts only for her own and Koko’s use. I’m interested to see the spotlight turned on her next volume. I bet she’ll knife fight and people will shoot things, but that’s just me projecting. And I’m 80% convinced that Schokolade is besotted with Koko as well.

There’s a short omake with Koko’s female harem that tickled my funnybone. But overall, this ain’t high art. It’s just a dumb manga that I really like.

Ratings:

Art – 3
Story – 5
Characters – 8
Yuri – 4
Service – 5

Overall – In reality, this manga is a 4, but I like it 8





Ichiroh! Manga, Volume 3 (English)

November 30th, 2010

Ichiroh!, Vol. 3As in Volume1 and Volume 2, Ichiroh!, Volume 3, follows the wacky daily life of a number of ronin – college-aged students who failed to get into university and are now studying at supplemental schools in a second or third bid to make it to upper education. And, as in Volumes 1 and 2, the trials and travails of Nanako, a serious-minded, hardworking student are meant to be hilarious.

They might be, too, if you can overlook the basic premise that Nanako, a hard-working and serious-minded student somehow failed her attempts to get into university.

Also side-splittingly funny are meant to be the many references to how little money Nannko has and how careful she is with her money. Because poverty is always a laugh and a half.

Ichiroh is a 4-koma, with a reasonably formulaic set-up for the panels:

Panel 1: Somebody shouts or declaims. Often inexplicably.

Panel 2: Request for clarification or explanation

Panel 3:  Set-up for…

Panel 4: Punchline, which is almost always delivered in bold, italic, large font.

Slide whistle, clown horn or trombone going bwah-~wah~waaahhh~  must be supplied by the reader.

Side characters are becoming more numerous now which, like Lucky Star, allows for more combinations of jokes. Mai-chan’s fujyoshi leanings are kind of “uh-huh” for us, but when she has to come out to Nanako and Akane, it allows them to sort of develop as characters. Same when we learn that Shino’s obsession with Nanako has actual made her less selfish, in an entirely selfish way.

I had noticed towards the end of Volume 2 that the entire series was giving off more of a harem vibe than it had begun with. This is not lessened in Volume 3. If anything, with the appearance of Kozue (another student at Nanako and Akane’s school) this feeling is increased significantly. Kozue has no reason to want to be around Nanako, but always is. And the addition of yet another tsundere character was a bonus for those people who like tsundere characters. This series has, like, 5 of them at this point.

Overall, Ichiroh! remains an unmemorable, but nice enough for a few evenings’ read, comic strip.

If you’re living the poor student life, have a miko or maid fetish or just like cute 2-dimensional girls standing around shouting punchlines at each other, you’ll probably enjoy Ichiroh! 

Art – 7
Story – 6
Characters – 7
Yuri – 3
Service – 3

Overall – 7

Many thanks to Yen Press for providing a copy for today’s review and for being able to make a go of 4-koma here in the west.