Archive for the English Manga Category


Street Fighter Legends: Ibuki (English)

May 12th, 2016

SFLII know you know that I don’t really game all that much, but even living under a gaming rock as I do, I know Street Fighter. I remember seeing the first versions of this in arcades in my youth and I’ve seen, although never played, any number of the iterations since. ^_^

Well, when Okazu Superhero Louis P offered to sponsor today’s review, he made a very charming pitch. Warning me about the art, he suggested that the characters make up for the visual pandering. I find him to be pretty spot on about that kind of thing, so I took him up on his offer and here we are talking a look at Street Fighter Legends: Ibuki,  put out in full glossy color by our friends at Udon Press.

The premise is a bit similar to DC’s Super Hero Girls series, (which follow key DC female characters as teens at school. Never been done before, you know.) in which we see the private life of teenage ninja Ibuki. Ibuki is balancing ninja training and life as a “normal” teenage girl and that balancing act is, for the most part, the bulk of the story. We meet Sarai, her utterly non-powered friend, and transfer students Makoto, a martial artist with a chip on her shoulder, and Elena, a not-at-all African looking African princess. I found Elena’s portrayal endlessly fascinating as a foil to the issues around casting Scarlet Johansson as Major Kusanagi in the Hollywood remodel of Ghost in the Shell. It does not comfort me particularly to note that we are not alone in erasing ethnic identity and un-darking skin. If I had been drawing Elena she’d have looked more like a young Grace Jones, ala Red Sonja, sans bullshitty fur bikini. But no one asks me.

Ibuki is herself an admirable heroine, working hard at both school and fantasy ninja training, even with an entire rival ninja clan after her, tests of courage and will and college exams in front of her. The main point – one that I actually appreciated – wasn’t whether she won, but that she tried. The culture of “trying” is still seen as weak in many parts of the world, and while sincerity isn’t always a valid replacement for competence, we also have to learn how to deal with failure.

Of course our rivals become our allies and the cute guy ninja is at the college she is going to attend, so bonus!

The story reads very tween-aged audience, and even the pandery gallery art isn’t explicitly oversexualized, but it still is pretty pandery. Apparently Capcom thinks 12 year old boys and girls will both be able to enjoy this book. Girls can, but they have flip past some of the pics to be able to do it. As usual. Sigh.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 7, +1 for lessons that make sense
Characters – 8 Definitely the strong point
Yuri – 0
Service – 2 Mild by the game’s standards

Overall – 8 More enjoyable than expected, you were right on the money Louis!

…sometimes I fantasize about a media and entertainment complex that didn’t compulsively sexualize women, an industry that cast black-skinned and Asian people in roles without controversy. It’s not just a fantasy. All we have to do is be a little less lazy and we could change this.





Seven Seas Licenses “Yagate Kimi ni Naru” for Valentine’s Day

February 15th, 2016

YKNN-275x390As a Valentine’s Day present, Seven Seas announced that they have licensed Nakatani Nio’s Yagate Kimi ni Naru, Bloom Into You.

Seven Seas is planning to release the ongoing series as single volumes (as opposed to omnibus volumes), the first of which will be available in January 2017.

Here is the Okazu review of Volume 1, which I both enjoyed quite a bit and had one mild concern about the story itself. ^_^

The Japanese edition is available on the Yuricon Store.

I’m far more positive about this license than recent previous additions to their catalog. I know that a few of you already really like this series – now you can look forward to getting it in English!

 





Time Fiddler, Volume 1 (English)

November 20th, 2015

tumblr_nxbmj6UwXa1so0o5uo1_1280Samantha is a relatively normal girl who one day follows a stray cat into an abandoned building. What happens to Sam is not normal at all, as she is thrown through a rift in time to the late Cretaceous Age, where she meets Caroline, a girl who claims to be a time-traveler.

The tagline for this series is “Time Travel Girls Love Feels” so, as you can imagine it interested me greatly. And, as it’s currently in the middle of a Kickstarter, I thought it suitable to mention it on the Yuricon Facebook Group, right after I supported it myself. In return, creator Ellis Kim has kindly sent me an advance PDF to share with you. ^_^

There’s a fair amount of Dr. Who-esque hijinks in Time Fiddler, and the Whovian in me thinks that’s perfectly cool. Sam is a companion-type character (you know, nice kid, seemlingly normal life) who suddenly gets dragged into a time-traveling adventure that involves dinosaurs. Only – and this is a big sell for me – instead of being just another companion, Sam becomes a time traveler herself. Very little time is spent in explicating what “The Agency” does or why or how or…anything. The specifics of pretty much every plot point must be accepted as such with no discussion so far. Even the repeated line “read the manual” is given to Sam without an actual manual. (Which blew the chance for an old-school RTFM joke, but Kim seems too young for the reference anyway. Oh well, guess I’m just old. ^_^)

On the less-good side, the plot is uneven, with TV pacing, (you know, spurts of action followed by explication while we wait to run some more) and a few odd throwaways, like Caroline’s “boyfriend” Ulysses, who was introduced clearly wearing “I’m a future plot complication” expressions. When we suddenly have a confession from Caroline that she likes Sam, it becomes even more crystal clear Ulysses was introduced to be broken up with and get pissed off, which is wholly unfair to him. The art is manga-inspired. It has moments, but still Kim’s style is still evolving. One sees it more in his color art his black and white pages thus far.

On the positive side, the next adventure takes place in 1880s California and Sam and Caroline are cute, so final judgment will remain reserved until volume 2.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story -7
Characters – 7
Yuri – 4
Service – 0

Overall – 7

Time Fiddler is a fun webcomic that I hope will take itself to a more sophisticated level of writing and art, but which is worth throwing the price of a cup of coffee at in order to help it do so.

Thanks Ellis for the advance copy and best of luck to you!





Western Comics: Valor Anthology (English)

November 11th, 2015

ValorWhether they begin “Once upon a time…” or “Mukashi, mukashi…,” fairy tales all begin some time a long time ago, quite often in places without real names. The kingdoms are feudal, evil mostly comes in the form of magic and/or giant beasts that must be defeated and slayed. And, as so many people have commented so many times, they usually star a young man who achieves greatness…and gets the girl as a reward. If you’re an active, self-willed young lady, this can become irritating over time. You start looking around and you find the story of Vasalisa, who uses wits and luck to overcome the witch Baba Yaga, read Barbara Walker’s Feminist Fairy Tales or more contemporary stories like Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword by Barry Deutsch. In fact, it’s hard to not roll one’s eyes at the idea of reworking fairy tales as, by now, it seems to have been done to death. If you’re a gay girl, there’s even Melinda Lo’s Ash, to give Cinderella a much cooler lover than a prince with a shoe fetish.

In Valor, a Kickstarter funded anthology, 24 creators take a look at stories that we know, unravel them, rethink them, revamp them, reweave them and sometimes just create something wholly new and amazing. The collection spans multiple cultures, with both prose and graphic stories.

Some of the stories are merely riffs on well-known tales, such as the above-mentioned story of “Vasalisa,” retold by Kadi Fedoruk or the “Crane Wife,” rendered here by Alex Singer and Jayd Ait-Kaci, and some are wholly original tales, such as the prose “Finette” by Megan Lavey-Heaton and Ran Brown or the gorgeous no-text graphic “Nautilus” by Ash Barnes and Elena “Yamino” Babarich.

Several stories are reworkings of timeless and well-known stories. Of these, my two favorites were “The Steadfast Automaton” again by Alex Singer and Jayd Ait-Kaci, which was a steampunk/scifi version of the Constant Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Anderson with heavy shades of Offenbach’s opera, Tales of Hoffman…and “Goldie Locks,” by Joanne Webster and Isabelle Melançon, a clever and fun riff on the classic tale of breaking and entering.

So, while it may seem that this anthology has “been done,” I’d argue that there can never, ever be enough versions of timeless tales. Heck, I wrote a series of  Sailor Moon/Arthurian Legend mashups. How can there *ever* be too many reworkings of archetypes?! And in the case of Valor, we have certainly not seen this version of these fairytales done this way before.

There is a nice selection of sexualities in the collection, as well. Some of the heroines get a prince, others get a princess and all get themselves which, in many ways, is the best ending of all.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

You can buy Valor online, and frankly, I think you should. It’s an entertaining collection full of things you’ve never read before – even if you have read them before. ^_^





Akuma no Riddle Manga/Riddle Story of a Devil, Volume 3 (悪魔のリドル) （JP and EN)

November 9th, 2015

AnR3There’s almost no point in reviewing Akuma no Riddle (悪魔のリドル) as a manga series, since clearly the manga was contracted out by Kadokawa to illustrate the anime and not much more. This is frustrating, as I quite like Kouga Yun and would have liked a chance to see her flex her writing skills a bit.

Instead, we have a nearly word-for-word repetition of the anime, with no new depth or information about the characters.

Volume 3 follows arcs set around the school festival, including one about the one apparently Yuri couple, otokoyaku-like Kirigaya Hitsugi and her nemesis with whom she’s fallen in love, Namatame Chitaru. Their arc is almost tangential to the hunt for Haru, so it’s a bit of a relief when they, as Romeo and Juliet, die on stage during the school festival and make room for more actual assassination attempts.

At this point, it’s hard to not feel pity for the broken (and obviously doomed to fail) members of Class Black. Haru hasn’t been more than scared slightly and whatever baggageTokaku is carrying isn’t stopping her from being an effective bodyguard. In fact, the only reason to read this series to relive the set up, so that hopefully, we’ll get an explanation at the very end that makes some sense. ^_^;

I was able to read this book twice, in fact, to fully appreciate how silly it is. Once in Japanese and again, using the relaunched Global Bookwalker. For that one, I purchased the English edition, Riddle Story of a Devil, Volume 3. (The print edition from Volume 3 from Seven Seas has a release date in April 2016. Seven Seas clarified on Twitter that the Bookwalker edition is Kadokawa’s own content and translation.) The Bookwalker format worked beautifully on my phone. Pages were crystal clear, easy to zoom in and out, with very nice color pages of various “couples” in the series. I’ve got a Japanese light novel next on the thing and if it works half as well, I’m going to be a really happy reader.

Ratings:

Art – Competent
Story – Ridiculous
Character – Tragic
Yuri – Contrived
Service – Of course

Overall – 7

This series is brain candy, if your brain likes assassination by absurd means, pointless conspiracies, and whole plotlines that make no sense, are never developed and have no connection to the actual story. ^_^