Archive for the English Manga Category


Before You Go, by Denise Schroeder from Chromatic Press

December 21st, 2020

In 2012, Sparkler Monthly had a bold vision – it was going to be the jousei manga and comic magazine we needed. For years, it was. In print and online, Sparkler Monthly incubated new creators whose work would be focused towards female readers. They paid creators and put out a wide variety of interesting work. Among the stories in their pages was Denise Schroeder’s Before You Go, a girl-meets-girl Yuri story. You can still read this comic for free online, just click the link.

As part of a wrap-up Kickstarter campaign, Chromatic Press put out a collected edition of Before You Go. I wanted to to take a moment to look at this collected volume, to memorialize Sparkler Monthly and thank everyone on the team at Chromatic Press for being ahead of their time.

Sadie and Robin meet one rainy day, waiting for the train. They see each other from time to time, get to know one another and end up going out. They move in together, have communication problems and resolve them. They live happily ever after,

In the final chapter, in which Robin introduces Sadie to her parents, we can see the kernel of less happy, more fraught story that was set aside for the much more light-hearted and happy one we end with…I thank editor Lillian Diaz-Przybyl for suggesting the baggage be shed, before we were burdened with it. The little black hole of Robin’s near hysteria at Sadie meeting her parents becomes an ignorable personality trait, rather than a dismal plot complication. So may years have passed since Yuri came to our shores and a story about self-loathing and parental disapproval might be real…but it’s a drag and what place does it really even have other than self-flagellation in our entertainment? Yes, of course, some people may want to see their experiences and their trauma represented, but I could also argue that there is a place for that and a light-hearted Yuri romance might not be that place. Surely not every queer romance needs to wallow in the old toxicity or stereotypes? (I say this, knowing full well that I’ll be writing a review shortly about this very topic. ^_^)

Schroeder’s art visibly improves as the story goes on, which is really quite charming. Sadie and Robin at the end truly are not the same people they were at the beginning of the story. ^_^ The creator has some nice insight to her artistic choices in the back of this volume.

When I spoke with Denise Schroeder many years ago, she said at the time that she wrote this because she hadn’t seen anyone else do it. Of course, here at Okazu, we had already at that point, reviewed many stories like it, but there were fewer in English. Now of course, I can barely keep up with all the Yuri coming out of Japan, much less English…and we’ve got sub-genres(!). Even so, there’s something admirable in Schroeder’s efforts in bringing together a female couple in an English-language magazine that had a large audience of BL fans, and her shifting the story away from a predictable dramatic pathway to a much appreciated one of acceptance and love.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 7
Characters – 8
Service – 0
Yuri – 9

Overall – 8

Thank you to all the folks at Chromatic Press for making this volume reality. Your work was always something I looked forward to. ^+^





Night and Day by Akegata Yu on Manga Planet

December 17th, 2020

I’ve talked about Tsuki to Suppin by Akegata Yu a few times. Here on Okazu, I’ve reviewed Volume 1 and Volume 2, and I mentioned this series as a “someone oughta license this” in my Recommendations video. About fifteen seconds after I mentioned this title in the video, Manga Planet licensed the series and has now released it as Night and Day.

Akari is fashionable and trendy and Shiho isn’t…in fact, her collection of utterly meh t-shirts is a running gag in the series, in part because her day job brings her to concerts by small, less-well-known bands. In part, because she’s just like that. The two have been together for a while now and, they are very much a solid, comfortable couple. As you will see.  They get each other.

This is not a series with high drama, and workplace shenanigans, like Hitorigoto Desu Kara!, which Manga Planet also has licensed and cleverly titled It’s Personnel!. This is a quiet, simple story about two women who are as different as the moon and turtles, as different as chalk and cheese, who just…work…together.

Manga Planet offers a subscription service. For $6.99/month, you can read as much as you’d like on their platform, and they are investing quite heavily in Yuri right now. If that is too much, you can still read quite a lot for free. They are clearly running on a thin staff as multiple credits go to a few people. So props to Ian O’Connor and Amimaru and the whole MP team for their work on this.

Chapter 1 of Night and Day is free to read, and makes a great introduction to this super low-key, enjoyable and sweet Jousei Yuri series. Give it a try and tell me what you think!

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Yuri – 10
Service – . 5 A very little dress-up with Shiho

This is a series that gets better and better as one reads it.

I love this title, I love that Shodensha is still putting out Yuri and that Manga Planet has licensed it and the Yomuco “super light” novels. I’d been holding them all in my queue for future reading and now I’ll be able to blow through them in English instead of piecing together time and energy to read them in Japanese.  Excuse me, I have to go read Kitao Taki’s Two Guns Under The Sheet now!





MURCIÉLAGO, Volume 16

December 11th, 2020

This volume of Yoshimurakana’s series begins with a wholly gratuitous lesbian sex scene. Later in the volume there is another. Just in case you wondered if there was any reason to read Volume 16 of MURCIÉLAGO.
There are, of course, other reasons to read this volume, but they are much less lesbian in nature. ^_^ There’s also a surprising number of baths for a series that is about serial killers.

The “Comedy Writer” arc proceeds and both of the obvious culprits are obvious, so the story isn’t nearly as much about who as about why and what. One of the things I genuinely love about the series is that the creepy weirdness always has a why, but you’d be hard pressed to explain it to anyone.

Hinako is an endless source of contemplation, as well. She comes extremely close to beserkering her way to killing someone, and it’s only the timely interference of Chacha who keeps her from becoming someone she’s always far, far too close to becoming.

Once again, I find myself reminded that this series is not “good” in the sense of being likely to survive ages of literary criticism, but I will argue that it it timeless and, as an homage to Lovecraft’s oeuvre, as good as any.

We are just about caught up now to the Japanese volumes. I only just reviewed Volume 17 in Japanese last month. Volume 17 in English doesn’t yet have a pre-order up. We’re all just about as current as we can be. So the pace of creative murders and ugly sex is going to be a little slower. I don’t honestly know whether that’s good…or bad! ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 7
Characters – 8
Service – 10,000
Yuri – 10, but its ugly

Overall – 8

This series has, as I said in my review of the Japanese volume, an explicit not-quite consensual lesbian sex scene, some generic bathing scenes, and extraordinary violence and a creepy murderer. Oddly, not one of these things involve Kuroko. She spends the volume having a polite conversation before killing someone neatly and quietly. And then she has some consensual sex.

 





The Rose of Versailles, Volume 2

December 6th, 2020

Unrest is starting to build among commoners as royal spending, bankrupts the country. while Oscar is struggling to balance unrest at home, in Paris and at Versailles. Rosalie is being pressured by her birth mother to come live with her, and her sister, the grifter Jeanne Valois, is at the center of one of the greatest scandals of the Queen’s life.

This volume is full of so many tears, it almost becomes comic….almost. It never is, because the cost of human suffering is as immeasurable in the 18th century as it is now, only we’re far more likely to have a bigger-picture understanding of it.

Nonetheless, Ikeda-sensei’s work makes understanding suffering almost unavoidable in fact, as she pinpoints individual stories in the middle of the greater situation. We’re more aware of the plight of Parisians in general because we spend time with Rosalie and Bernard.  We’re meant to understand them in a way we and Oscar will never understand the lack of empathy of the noble class.

Volume 2 of The Rose of Versailles is also one of the “Yuriest” volumes of this classic series in one sense and in another, not really. Jeanne implicates the Queen in the infamous Affair of the Diamond Necklace and, while testifying before the court, insists that she and the Queen were lesbian lovers. In addition, she accuses Oscar of being Marie Antoinette’s lover, as well. Oscar is not amused.

Her sentiment, a sneered “I Lord Oscar, lesbian? I’m breaking out in hives! To hell with you! What a joke!” is hard for us in 2020 to take at face value, when mere pages separate that and her repeated vow that had she been a man, she would have married Rosalie herself.

Volume 2 is about structural change. When the foundations of a building begin to crack, the people on the highest floors can feel the instability, even if they are initially insulated from the immediate damage. Once again, I’m reading this volume thinking it is just a little too on the money, as our society is shaking the foundations once again for all the very same reasons.

I want to shout out here to Jeannie Lee, whose lettering is so exceptional and to both Mari Morimoto and Jocelyne Allen for doing painstaking work on the translation. I’m still blown away by this gorgeous edition of a long-awaited classic manga. It was a privilege to have worked on it with them.

Ratings:

Art – 8 As Oscar matures, so does the art
Story – 8 Dense and melodramatic
Characters – 9 Everyone is flawed and human
Service – 5 Oscar in a uniform and in a dress.
Yuri – 1 No, but…kinda?

Overall – 8

 





Revolutionary Girl Utena: After the Revolution

November 20th, 2020

Tenjou Utena was a girl who wanted to become a prince. She actually did rescue a princess…and became the power to revolutionize the world. But at what cost?

20 years have gone by and the members of the student council are still trapped in their own drama. The girl who gained the power to change everything had left them behind to find their own way out. Being mere humans, not princes, they had failed to do take the steps they needed to be free. If this sounds like a fanfic, well, it pretty much is. Like so many fanfic it begins with Touga, Saionji, Juri and Miki still caught up in the same dysfunctional relationships that bound them at Ohtori. 

In Revolutionary Girl Utena: After the Revolution, co-creator of Revolutionary Girl Utena Chiho Saito, revisits the Student Council members. Touga and Saionji are finally allowed to cast off the lingering ghost of  the Chairman of Ohtori, and find the camaraderie with each other that had been twisted into a toxic rivalry. Juri discovers in herself a more honest reason to keep fighting and is able to let go of of regret and failure. Miki is finally able to have an honest discussion with Kozue about their relationship.

Viz Media’s reproduction of this 20th anniversary manga is so excellent, I’m almost sorry that they didn’t give it a hardcover edition to match the box set of the original manga. Adrienne Beck’s translation kept the voices we already knew so well. Sara Linsley went out of her way to do an award-worthy lettering job. She’s detailed how she hand-drew the sound effects to match the Japanese volume on Twitter. Designer Alice Lewis did a terrific job and I know that Nancy Thistlethwaite as editor gave it the most loving treatment possible. It looks terrific. Great job folks.

Like so many fanfic, this manga is excellent, right up to the point where it fails to do the last thing it needed to do. Because, as she says in the afterword, Saito-sensei was unwilling to allow Utena to grow up…indeed, she youthens her for this story, Utena and Anthy’s reunion is not of this world, but very much in a world that only the two of them occupy. I had read the chapters as they came out in Flowers hoping desperately that we’d get to see Utena and Anthy together in the “real” world. It’s wholly understandable why this was the path chosen…it’s just not the one I wanted. ^_^ OTOH, Juri is still with Shiori and Utena and Anthy do find each other again, so that’s something. Depending on what your fandom of Utena is rooted in, your mileage will vary. For me, this was a beautiful, but ever-so-slightly unsatisfying story.

Ratings:

Art – 9 I have repeatedly mentioned that Saitou-sensei’s art is amazing.
Story – 8 One point off for not giving Utena and Anthy the time and page count lavished on the student council
Characters – 8
Yuri – 5
Service – 3 Naked Anthy is still a thing.

Overall – 9

I guess I’ll just have to stick with my own Utena fanfic for now, since Saito-sensei and I don’t share a vision. If it were up to me Kozue and Shiori* would not have been given so much real estate. ^_^

* I don’t dislike Shiori….I just don’t like Juri and Shiori together. Juri deserves someone better.