Aigaaru: I-girl Manga (あいがある)

July 31st, 2013

You all know GTO, Great Teacher Onizuka, right? No? Well you *should*! It’s a classic – and I mean that in the sense of “this book practically redefined a genre.” GTO is being published in English by Vertical right now, so you should at least try the first volume. It’s fun and melodramatic and over the top. The story, in a nutshell, is that an ex-punk decides that he’ll be the best high school teacher evar. He’s given a class of broken, tortured and dysfunctional students, but his street wisdom saves them – and helps him to realize his dream. It’s a series that highlights some real issues kids deal with, in a crazy, over-the-top, charming way.

Aigaaru: I-girl (あいがある) has a premise that is sort of vaguely similar to GTO, and in pretty much every possible way fails to execute it well. Kaga Maki is a 27 year old OL with a not-cute personality, and so is basically kicked to the bottom of the office hierarchy. When the cute, bubbly OLs get forgiven for their mistakes, she’s punished for hers – and theirs. So you’d think she’d be okay with it when one day her identical twin brother shows up asking her to take his place at his job for a week. Where Maki is prickly, Miki is clearly gregarious. Someone has asked him to go on a trip and he can’t say no, so please, Maki…?

The next thing Maki knows, her hair is cut and she’s wearing a man’s suit and there she is in homeroom at a girls’ high school…where she learns that the girls address her as “My Darling” and proclaim their love for her, well him. I know – this doesn’t sound like GTO at all, but give me a chance. As she meets each of the girls, she learns something about them and then she tries to help with the situation – that’s the GTO-esque angle. Only where Onizuka  is dealing in abuse, bullying, drugs, self-loathing, Maki is dealing with a girl being too sexy for her shirt, and the students having crushes on her.  Hard to take seriously – and way out of proportion with the OTT facefaults, sweatdrops and “zOMG!! “postures.

Maki runs into one of the girls, Hina, on the grounds and is shocked to find the girl kissing her. She’s already livid at her brother’s behavior, but to think he’s having an affair with a student?!? But then she spots Hina and another student, Subaru kissing and rushes to assure them that they make a great couple! Onna-doushi is terrific! Yay them! But we, the readers,  know something is up between them and it might not lead to a happy ending. When the book ended, I felt kind of relieved.

This manga ran in Cookie magazine – I was not comfortable with the readers of Cookie learning about the word “Bitch” or about sexy underwear.  Maki looks great in a suit, but her level of discomfort with herself as woman or man made it hard to like her. This could have been a fun gender-bendy GTO, but it just wasn’t.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 5
Characters – 5
Yuri – 7
Service – Underwear and female crossdressing – 5

Overall- 5

When I’m reading through a shipment of manga, the stuff I like least falls down to the bottom of the pile. I’ve had this manga through three piles, because I just kept putting it off. This came yesterday:

DSCN6505

 

So it just had to go. (Sorry for the mess…my wife took the picture before I had a chance to straighten up. Even the pile is crooked. ^_^;)

Posted in Miscellaneous | 13 Comments »


Wandering Son Manga, Volume 4 (English)

July 30th, 2013

WanderingSon4We’ve covered a few volumes of Shimura Takako’s Wandering Son, published in English by Fantagraphics here on Okazu, but it hasn’t been featured regularly.

We’ve covered Volume 1 and Volume 2 and I hope those reviews were enough to encourage you to buy and read Volume 3. The early volumes introduce us to Shuuichi, a boy who wishes to become a girl and Shuu-chan’s classmates, friends, enemies (among whom I have to count his sister, the aspiring model) and Yoshino, a girl who wishes to become a boy.

In Volume 4, the story remains complex and emotional as always. By this point, Shimura-sensei’s characters are finely wrought, so the tension in each panel is palpable. Manga scholar Matt Thorn has gotten out of the way of his own translations, so the story flows as smoothly as a story as jangly as this can possibly flow.

The children are just beginning to enter puberty, and their bodies are not necessarily their friends. In this story we see the complexity of sex, gender, gender roles and sexuality laid out in the messy mishmash that it is. After reviewing Anything That Loves last week, I found myself paying attention – for the first time – to Anna, another aspiring model and peer of Shuuichi’s sister, Maho.

Anna is not presented to us as a nice person. She’s mean to Shuu-chan…but then her introduction to him was dismissive and unkind and Maho is selfish, not supportive of her brother and uninterested in him as a person. (The last, admittedly, pretty common among siblings.) Anna, taking her cue from this, has teased Shuu-chan in an immature way – but also in a way that clearly indicates to the audience that she is interested in him.

It’s hard enough as an adult to understand the mechanism for “showing interest in” another person. As a tween/teen, there is pretty much no socially acceptable mechanism for this at all.  Any expression of interest of any kind is grounds for teasing. And here is Anna, interested in a boy who would prefer to not be a boy….she’s got to be asking some questions about herself in the middle of the night. Is her interest in Shuu-chan in the boy-girl he is or the person he might become? There are no answers for this at this point, and as we saw in Anything That Loves – there may never really be an answer. Anna is immature enough to take her confusion out on Shuu-chan…which puts us in a bad place as readers. We might be sympathetic to her if she was merely angry at Shuu-chan for not being what she wanted, or at herself for having confusing feelings, but in her (and Maho’s) hurtful words and actions we’re seeing something that is way too close to bullying and bashing for us to be sympathetic at all.

Next volume they start middle school with the addition of the rigid gender-identifier, the school uniform. What, for so many shoujo heroines is a looked-for right of passage, will be for Shuu-chan and Yoshino-kun, a political and social statement. This gender/sex/sexuality/ thing is really complicated. I’ve already got my fingers crossed tightly for them and I don’t even have Volume 5 yet.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story – 9
Characters – 9
Yuri – ?

Overall – 9

The best, perhaps the only real way to  describe Wandering Son, is that it is compelling story-telling.

Posted in English Manga, LGBTQ, Shimura Takako | 10 Comments »


Yuri Manga: Ohana Holoholo, Volume 5 (オハナホロホロ)

July 29th, 2013

OMG you guys. Ohana Holoholo, Volume 5. (オハナホロホロ)

So, we left Michiru and Maya split up at the end of Volume 4. It sucked, but it kind of made sense, as Michiru was very focused on growing the fuck up already.

Maya is doing her best to live alone; she’s not doing a good job of it, though. She’s grieving for two relationships – the possibilities of a life with Hidesuke and the realities of life with Michiru and Yuuta. Niko-kun comes home one day to find her unconscious on the floor.

But there’s a character in all this who forces the climax and it’s not Michiru, nor is it Maya. It’s Yuuta. Yuuta, who does not understand grownups, but knows he loves Maya and wants to see her. He asks Michiru if they’ll ever go home and he really does not understand the answer…so he decides to go see Maya on his own.

Unbeknownst to any of the adults, he ends up taking a train to the only name he can remember. He wanders the seaside, gets distracted by a million things and pulls himself back on track. After a long day, he finds himself at Shinjuku station (which is complicated enough if you’re a grownup, mind you) surrounded by strangers.

What happens next is, yes, a handwave, yes it is a deus ex machina, but a very welcome one. ^_^ With a series of hints as to where he might be, eventually our intrepid 3 year old is safe in the arms of a panicking Maya and Niko-kun. He’s fast asleep when Michiru makes it to Maya’s place. With Yuuta being watched over by Niko-kun, Michiru and Maya are able to have it out between them.

Maya asks for another chance at being a family.

Michiru says they already are a family.

They kiss.

“To Be Continued”

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 9
Characters – 9
Yuri – 9
Service – 1

Overall – 9

I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see “To Be Continued” in my life. ^_^

Posted in Yuri Manga | 13 Comments »


Yuri Network News (百合ネットワークニュース) – July 27, 2013

July 27th, 2013

YNN_Lissa *Loads* of news this week. I probably won’t get to it all, honestly.

Yuri Anime

YNN Correspondent Arca Jeth wants everyone to know that all 40 episodes of Rose of Versailles are up on Crunchyroll. Free users will get eight episodes every Thursday at 5:00 pm PST, Arca says. Bruce McF wants to clarify that this “North America only, as the Viki Stream has been, as both of these streams seem to be arrangements with Rightstuf/Nozomi, which only has North American rights.

He goes on to say, “For North American Crunchyroll members, this is good news because of Crunchyroll’s quality streaming options and broad device support, but especially for those who are not Crunchyroll members, remember that the whole series is still up at Viki.com.” Yes, as with almost all legally streaming anime, region restrictions apply. ^_^;

Bodacious Space Pirates won an award at  Japan Sci-fi Con. I’m very much looking forward to the movie, as I chug along slowly in the third novel.

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Yuri Game/VN News

This popped across my desk this week: Analogue: A Hate Story, is a woman-created manhwa-esque Visual Novel on Steam. I’m told that it’s intriguing, interesting, slightly slow and it has Yuri. With luck, we’ll have a review of it.

Gaymer X, a convention for “queer geeks and everybody” is coming to San Francisco in August. Click the link for the Mashable article which will have details and more links.

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Yuri Manga

YNN Correspondent Vivi C. is totally stoked to let German-language readers know that EMA will be releasing Takasaki Hiromi’s delightful Yuri romance Asago to Kase-san as Ipomoea (which, I realize must be a kind of Morning Glory.) And she wants to remind us all that Carlsen will be releasing Morinaga Milk’s Kisses, Sighs, Cherry Blossoms Pink as Cherry Lips. Let me know if you’re planning on picking either of these up and want to do a review!

YNN Correspondent Muda-kun has written in with some pretty interesting news. Apparently, in November 2009, I mentioned a Light Novel, Murasakiiro no Qualia. Muda-kun says there is now a manga of the series and offers this short review: The manga treatment appears to be radically different. There is some mild Yuri, but as the story progresses, it goes from a simple making-friends-with-the-odd-girl-in-your-class story to a dark homage to western scifi, all while becoming grimly, heroically obsessive.

I find myself floored by it. It borrows a bit of plot conceit from the Stein’s Gate franchise, but it answers a question that was nagging me after watching The Girl Who Leapt Through Time anime:  What does she do afterwards, with such knowledge?

Consider writing up a full review for us, won’t you?

Megan Rose Gedris has opened a Kickstarter for a two-omnibus volume set of her breakout work, Yu + Me. With more than a month to go, she’s already hit her goal.

I really want you to read this review of Batwoman 1 by Robin Brenner of No, Flying, No Tights.

All I can say is that the cover of this manga, O-Hime Margo (王妃マルゴ), has me intrigued. I got a “Queen Christina” vibe off her, if you will.

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Other News

The Doubleclicks have created a lovelymusic video, Nothing To Prove, for all us geek girls out there. I’ve pretty much been watching it over and over all week:  And, following the viral success of the video, they’ve turned one of the signs used into a t-shirt. Proceeds from There Are No Fake Geeks Only Real Jerks t-shirt sales will go to support AppCamp4Girls. I’ve already ordered mine.  It’s  less nasty than my own design, Kill All Fanboys. ^_^

If you really loved me, you’d all get together and buy me this fabulous Utena doll that will cost $600 and has no chance of ever making it over here. ^_^

Speaking of dolls, the protoype for the S.H. Figuarts Sailor Mars figurine has been captured on film at Wonderfest.

There are only a few hours left, but the Creamy Mami DVD set fundraiser is, at time of writing, has made its goal on animesols. This early shoujo anime is a classic magical girl series, I’m very glad to see it’s getting so much interest.

As so many of you have noted, Serial Experiments Lain Director Nakamura Ryutaro passed away this week after a long illness.

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That’s a wrap for this week! Become a Yuri Network Correspondent by sending me any Yuri-related news you find.

Emails go to anilesbocon01 at hotmail dot com. Not to the comments here, please, or they might be forgotten or missed. There’s a reason for this madness. This way I know you are a real human, not Anonymous (which I do not encourage – stand by your words with your name!) and I can send you a YNN correspondent’s badge.

Thanks to all of you – you make this a great Yuri Network!

Posted in Yuri Network News | 11 Comments »


Summer Reading: LGBTQ Comic Anthology – Anything That Loves

July 26th, 2013

Northwest Press, publisher of The Legend of Bold Riley is once again bringing it, this time with a comic collection that looks at non-binary sexuality, Anything That Loves.

This was a fascinating – at times, uncomfortable-making – book. Folks who are lesbian and gay are just as likely to be awkward or rigid when demanding  the appropriate label be applied to a person’s sexual identity. But what does it mean when a person doesn’t fit the 0 or 1 model? What happens when a woman who likes women falls in love with a man, or a man who has always considered himself gay falls for someone transitioning to female? This book is for everyone who feels under-served by “gay” or “straight.”

“The anthology features work from  Erika Moen, Ellen Forney, Randall Kirby, Jason Thompson, Kate Leth, Leia Weathington, MariNaomi, Bill Roundy and many more.

The comic artists here are not apologizing; they are exploring, poking, asking questions (that may or may not have answers) of themselves and their readers.  As society is largely all about coupling people, we tend to focus on the other half of the relationship, saying “Oh, you’re gay” or “Oh, you’re straight” because partners are one sex or the other. It’s not hard to see how annoying that would be to someone who was neither straight nor gay (or, as NWPress’s buttons say, “wibbly-wobbly sexy-wexy.” Fascinatingly, when Zan Christensen of NWP gave me one of those buttons at TCAF, I received a lot of interesting looks from people. Mostly approving nods…maybe some interest? Lots of people who gave it the ol’ eyebrow wiggle/”me-too” nod.  ^_^)

It is clear to me, after reading this book,  that “bisexuality” has much less to do with who specifically a person is attracted to and is much more about self-identification.

I called the book “uncomfortable-making,” as well. It was. All of these comics are intensely personal. Like The Big Feminist But, these artists were letting me inside their heads to explore some of their most intimate ideas about themselves. And, like TBFB, there were more questions than answers. Whatever your sexuality, Anything That Loves will pose a few questions that will get you thinking.

Ratings:

It’s an anthology, so everything is variable and personal taste is going to determine whether you like any of it or not.

Overall – 8

Posted in LGBTQ, Western Comic/Comix | 4 Comments »