In my review of Volume 1, I expressed a certain level of awe (and revulsion) about the predominance of hair in the narrative. To be honest, I did not think that hair could play more of a role than it did.

I was wrong.

In Mayu, Matou, Volume 2 ( 繭、纏う) hair does indeed play a bigger role than it did in the first volume. It even gets a speaking part. I am not kidding.

The characters also get significant development, and we get a few more characters. At the end of Volume 2 we have a far, far more complicated scenario that we did in Volume 1, which was more of a pastiche of a elite girl’s school with Yuri and a hair fetish. Volume 2 is setting up to become a game of chess in which only one side has a queen, the king has no interest in the game and a pawn is well on her way to queened, with a bishop who isn’t sure who she serves – the soon-to-be-queen or the king. And we have another pawn who serves the queen without conflict. The chessboard is filling up; the game is likely to begin next volume.

The entirety of this series is inexpressibly weird, and creepy and interesting and beautiful and off-putting. I find myself rooting for Yokozawa because despite the mystery cult-like indoctrination (in this case, in honor of the Norns) and behavior and at this school, she seems pretty grounded.

While we get to see the school from more students’ perspectives in this volume than in Volume 1, we’re still mostly looking at it through the curtain of hair. Hair has taken over the pages once again, but there may be a plot outside the hair, and not just about freedom and fate, but also about power. I find that despite my occasional desire to gag at all the hair…I am here for whatever confrontation we are moving towards.

Ratings:

Art – Hair
Characters – Both queens and the bishop are an 8
Story – Hair
Service – Absolutely still hair
Yuri – 7, a love triangle, a chess game and hair

Overall – 8 I wonder if the creator is as surprised as I am to find that there’s an actual story here. (This was rhetorical, no explanations required.)

This series is available in English as Cocoon, Entwined, Volume 1 from Yen Press. Volume 2 will be released in Spring 2020.

Cleaning duty still must be a nightmare.

In Luminous= Blue, Volume 1 (ルミナス=ブルー ), Tarumizu Kou loves photography. She loves taking pictures of landscapes and buildings, but most especially, of people. On her way to her new school, she discovers two girls from the same school who immediately become her favorite subjects to photograph.  She’s come to this high school specifically to join the renowned Photography Club…only to learn that its been dissolved. Unfazed, Kou accepts a challenge from  the former club president to reform it if she wins a competition. 

More importantly, Kou meets her new muses, Amane and Nene. As she spends time with these two close friends, Kou find herself inspired artistically, and moved emotionally. After a photo shoot with amateur model Nene, in which Kou learns Nene’s secret and her pain,  in time-honored fashion, Kou finds herself falling for her muse.

Meanwhile, we can see the club president and Amane also have some kind of relationship. Amane is modeling, but is it something more?

This series has now completed in the magazine, but this beginning was a so strong that I had a hard time purchasing this volume, as it kept being sold out! I can understand why, too, as this is an unusually compelling story for which I honestly could not imagine a good resolution. (Spoiler: it had a great resolution.)

Ratings:

Art – 8
Character – 8
Story – 8
Service – 4 The visuals are occasionally erotic, whether they read as salacious is up to you.
Yuri – 6

Overall – 8

Iwami Kyouko’s work is already familiar to us, Transparent Light Blue was licensed early this year. I’m hoping that we’ll see this series, which is vastly superior in both art and story telling.

Hayama-sensei to Terano-sensei ha Tsukiatteiru by Ohi Pikachi is absolutely adorable and I unconditionally adore it.

Hayama Asuka and Terano Saki are teachers at a school and they are going out with each other. The kids know it, their peers know it, the administration knows it and everyone thinks they are absurdly adorable about it. Because they are absurdly adorable.

This series is not about real-world trials of being a lesbian couple in a society that has no legal standing for them. It’s not about workplace harassment or homophobia. It’s a shiny, sparkly fantasy series in which two adult women who never expected to fall in love, have, and are painfully cute about it. Volume 1 details how their relationship begins.

Crises do exist, of course. In Volume 2 they struggle with how will they match their gait in the two-legged race at Sports Day?!? Or what to do about birthday hickeys? Let’s not forget the time that they had a misunderstanding at the school festival! And how about the time Hayama-sensei was late to a date because she was helping a lost child, and then she fell in a puddle and…

As you can see, this series is absolutely chock-full of not-at-all particularly tense scenarios. Instead, it’s a charming, soft, fuzzy series that also includes sex scenes, which are no less sweet and adorable for being somewhat explicit.

Everyone in the school is rooting for them…and so am I.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Characters – 10
Story – 9
Service – 5 There is nudity and sex, but it is sweet rather than salacious
Yuri – 10

Overall – 10

This volume we get Terano sharing an “Ok-saurus” with Hayama on LINE and I think I might have squeed out loud.

Looking forward to next month when Tokyopop’s English-language edition of Akashi’s Still Sick, Volume 1 hits retail shelves, I wanted to take a moment to jump back into this series.

Last spring, we met Shimizu Makoto, an office worker who has a secret life as a doujinshi-drawing otaku, and Maekawa Akane, a coworker who knows the truth. The setup was a bit worrisome. I was afraid that Maekawa was going to torture Shimizu, but nope…instead the story flipped itself over when Shimizu learns Maekawa’a even larger secret – she was once a popular manga artist! Shimizu wants very much to help Maekawa restart her career but to say that Maekawa is erratic, is a gross understatement.

In Volume 2 of Still Sick, (スティルシック) Maekawa does torture Shimizu, but not the way we expected. Shimizu, in an unguarded moment, admits that she likes Maekawa, who then reacts in the most passive-aggressive ways possible. On the one hand she forces Shimizu to admit she’s always liked women and hid it from everyone, and on the other won’t let her hang out and help, demanding she stay out of touching distance – and in between, throwing herself into Shimizu’s arms. Shimizu is hurt and confused and, above all, really wants to help Maekawa.

On a company onsen vacation, Shimizu turns to a coworker for advice and pours her heart out over ping pong (as one does,) not naming names, of course. He’s super sympathetic and offers some solid advice. As he goes to leave, he notices Maekawa standing in the shadow of the door, having obviously heard all of what was said.

Maekawa tells Shimizu that she wants to talk with her….

…in Volume 3.

What?!? Yes, we’re not going to know what Shimizu wants to say until next volume. Although, honestly, I think we can guess. ^_^ Maekawa is suffering from the same problem Shimizu was – inability to admit the truth-itis.

I don’t much care for the ham-handed way Maekawa is being handled here, her passive-aggressiveness is falling flat because the motivation is obvious and the behavioral swings are so huge without accompanying mood changes, but I really like the way Shimizu was portrayed; less dramatic, but more deeply felt.

The art is pretty tight, and adult characters look like adults, which I always appreciate. Most appreciated is that the onsen scenario is not played for service, but for emotional tension. Phew!

Ratings:

Art – 7
Characters – 8
Story – 8
Yuri – 3, LGBTQ – 4
Service – 0 so far – even in an onsen

Overall – 8

True, Maekawa is being annoying – and worse, some of it is being played for a comedic beat, but Volume 3 should resolve some part of all of that.  In the meantime, I’m bookmarking the series over on MAGxiv, the MAG Garden comic site on Pixiv!

If there was one defining feature of previous volumes of Hisona’s Goodbye Dystopia that I truly loved, it was not learning a damn thing about either of the protagonists.

Yes, we got the vaguest idea that Asami travels to find things and Mizuki was running away from home in Volume 1 and in Volume 2, we learned that the world they inhabited had people in it, and that they both had past loss they weren’t thinking about.

In Goodbye Dystopia, Volume 3 (グッバイ・ディストピア), I was desperately afraid that the story would give too much away. I am pleased to say that we know only a very little bit more.

Asami’s loss is a sister. A sister, old friend Uzuki points out, that MIzuki is taking the place of.

Mizuki lets us – and no one else – learn that she’s not running from home, but from a failed romance with a schoolmate, in which she was the only one who was serious. We had guessed as much for Mizuki and while it was news about Asami, when all of that has been pulled out and aired, we really know very little about either woman other than what we’ve seen.

Nonetheless, having had what of their dirty laundry we’ve seen laid out, both women seem lighter and more able to face what is ahead of them. As the manga draws to an end, they discover an abandoned amusement park at which they abandon the last of their worries, and head on into the unknown, together.

Ratings:

Art – 9 This is my kind of art
Story – 10 There is none. I love it.
Characters – 9
Service – 0
Yuri – 4 We learn what we already had guessed

Overall – 9

I loved this series and would have been glad to follow it for decades through dilapidated buildings and abandoned places. I loved the art, the sketchbook quality of the physical locations, Mizuki’s wind-blown hair and the unpaved tracks of the landscape. I loved that we’ll never know their full names or whole histories. I love all the things we don’t know and just enjoyed the heck out of the journey.