Back in 2011, there was a surprising renaissance of shoujo Yuri. All three of the top Shoujo magazines, Nakayoshi, Ciao and Ribon were running titles with Yuri plots and characters. After those series ended, what was left was a very silly title called Sabagebu! (さばげぶっ!)I first wrote about Sabagebu!  when I was reading Nakayoshi again for Nobara no Mori no Otome-tachi.

“Sabagebu!” is short for “Survival Game Club”. The story follows normal girl Momoka as she’s recruited into the Survival Game Club by insane club leader Miou. Momoka’s adventures in surviving Miou’s crackpot plots is the bulk of the manga.

Yuri is provided in the form of extreme crushiness (everything in this manga is “extreme”) by Urara, an underclassman with a raging crush on Momoka. Momoka turns out to have some marksmanship skills and, as Volume 3 opens, the Sabagebu heads to the game center to practice shooting on first-person shooters. Momoka gets caught up in a battle for supremacy with a hyper otaku type. She wins, but not before she clubs him over the head with a real (replica) gun. Chuffed with her victory, she allows the guy to take a two-shot puricula with her, which she later regrets. Urara regrets that she wasn’t able to take a two-shot with Momoka.

I said that everything in this manga is extreme. Here’s what I meant. Meiji chocolate company puts out two snacks that are identical in all ways but their shape. Kinoko no Yama are mushroom-shaped, where Takenoko no Sato are shaped like bamboo shoots. When some members of the Sabagebu express a preference for the one over the other, war is declared with a school-wide “indoor survival game” to prove the superiority of the one over the other. (If I had to take a side, I’d be on the Takenoko team. Better cookie to chocolate balance.) Or the day Momoka vists a new dog cafe with club mascot Kamo…who is a duck. It’s all dumb and over the top, but it still makes me laugh.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 8
Characters – 7
Yuri – 3
Service – 1 (mostly for gun fetishists)

Overall – 7

Not high on Yuri, but off the scale on goofy.

No YNN today. I’m out having fun at the first of a number of comic-related events I’ll be hitting up this spring. Today you might find me at Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art’s annual event, the MoCCA Arts Festival at 68 Lexington Ave in Manhattan. If you do see me, please come over and say hi, I’ll have a few postcards to give away. ^_^

I should have been reviewing something, but spent the afternoon doing this instead.

Riff on it, improve it, meme it. Go wild.

日本語で

What a way to start a morning. I woke up to this announcement: JManga.com Retail/Viewing Service Termination and Refund Notice

This is not a hack, I have received an email from JManga expressing their regret. I have no more details about this matter than is stated on the website, so I strongly urge you to read the message for those details.

We do not know why they are shutting down. I had every expectation of continuing to do business with them this year, this was very sudden. You cannot extrapolate from nothing the “why.” Business is a series of risks, and the risk goes beyond just sales – there are so many variables here, it’s impossible to know which – if indeed any – of the risk factors were involved in this.

There will be some people who will point fingers and gloat about having not purchased any manga with JManga. To me, it’s about the equivalent of seeing a movie in the theater. I paid a price and enjoyed the media. In fact, reading a manga on JManga was less than half the cost of seeing a movie. I hope that the readers of Okazu are not the kind of people to gloat when a movie theater dies, because you still have Netflix.

I want to say that it was my sincerest pleasure to work with Robert Newman and Sahashi Yae-san at JManga, with Erin Subramanian, Elina Ishikawa, Simona Stanzani, Mari Morimoto and William Flanagan at ALC Publishing and Carl Vanderhout and Sam Pinasnski, who handled lettering . I sincerely hope to work together again one day soon.

To all the folks that made JManga happen – thank you. It was a lot of fun.

***

なんて朝の始まり方でしょうか。私が目覚めて気づいたのが、JManga.comによる販売・購読サービス終了と払い戻しについての告知でした。

これは悪戯などではありません。私にはJMangaから、彼らの遺憾の意を伝えるメールも届いていたのです。この件について、サイトで示されている以上の詳しいことは、私にも情報がありません。なので、詳細についてはそのメッセージを直接確認することを、強くお勧めします。

私達にも、閉鎖の理由はわかりません。私自身も今年中はずっと彼らとビジネスを続けていく予定でしたから、本当に突然のことでした。情報がない以上、理由を推測することは出来ません。ビジネスにはたくさんのリスクが付き物ですし、単純な売り上げ以外のリスクというものも存在します。そこにはたくさんの変わっていく状況がありますし、もし実際にあったとしても、どんなリスク要素が今回の件に関わっているのか、知るのは不可能だと思います。

JMangaでどの漫画も購入しなかったことについて非難し、悦に入る人達もいるでしょう。私にとって、それは映画館で映画を観るのと同じことです。料金を払ってメディアを楽しむということでした。実際のところ、JMangaで漫画を読むのは、映画料金の半分よりも少ないくらいです。Okazuの読者達は、映画館が潰れた時に、まだオンラインレンタルサービスのネットフリックスがあるからと、悦に入るような種類の人達ではないと思いたいです。

JMangaのロバート・ニューマンと佐橋八衣さん、私のALC Publishingを通してエリン・サブラマニアン、エリーナ・イシカワ、シモーナ・スタンザーニ、マリ・モリモト、そしてウイリアム・フラナガン, またレタリングのカールヴァーでハウトそしてサムピナンスキといった方達と共に仕事が出来たことに、心から感謝を伝えたいと思います。いつかすぐまた、共に働けることを心から願っていますね。

JMangaを実現させてくれた全ての方々に – ありがとう。本当に楽しかったです。

(小松さんによる翻訳 Many thanks to Komatsu-san for the translation)