One sunny day, a cat and her brood of kittens go for a walk in the city. One little kitten, a gray tabby. Meanders off and becomes separated from her family. After dodging giant dogs and rushing cars, she collapses in a park, where a mother and her toddler son pick her up and take her home. They can’t keep [...]

We’re readers. When we moved a couple years ago Shapiro Keats did a quick count of our books; it was something like 1,700 and since then we’ve bought more. Gohan is quickly amassing collection to rival ours, though. At least they don’t take up as much space because they tend to be very short. Here are the Asian-themed picture books [...]

Mariko Koike’s The Cat in the Coffin (Vertical Press, June 2009) opens with the young housekeeper of an admired, elderly artist bringing a stray cat to her employer’s home. She expects Masayo, the artist, to perhaps feed the cat and then put it back out. But to her surprise the sight of the animal brings to the surface long-buried memories [...]

This is Part Four of my ongoing quest to review manga that I would normally never, ever bother reading. This session’s genre: the sports manga. I’m not a sports person, really. I enjoy the occasional sumo match or baseball game (and, head hung with shame, I admit to enjoying Princess Nine). So sports manga rarely even register on my radar. [...]

Summer’s here, and the time is right for grabbing your 20-sided die and indulging in a weekend of frenzied gaming action at GenCon. The massive gaming convention returns to Indianapolis in August. Musashi and I plan to attend and enjoy the con’s many gaming- and anime-related attractions. Here’s a press release giving a preview of all the action. Gamers Prepare [...]

One of the unique creations of Hong Kong action cinema is the Chinese vampire flick. Beginning in 1985 with the wonderful Mr. Vampire, Hong Kong cinema enjoyed several years of cranking out genre horror-comedies featuring those dreaded manifestations of restless spirits, hopping corpses and walking vampires (with maybe the seductive female ghost thrown in for good measure). Although this trend [...]

An outdated Chinese-to-English computer translation program resulted in a rather, um, egregious error on a couch label. Wow. Just…wow. The label in question lists the couch’s color as “N—— brown”. Apparently, when using the program, the couch’s Chinese manufacturer was not aware of the word’s significance. OK, it’s shocking. But honestly, I wouldn’t expect someone from China to know all [...]

Ah, gender-switching. It seems to be an almost purely Japanese thing; off the top of my head, I can think of at least four manga or anime titles built around the idea, including the legendary Ranma ½, but no Western comics (and only a couple lame comedy movies from the 1980’s). It’s not a sub-genre that really interests me, and [...]

An Artist of the Floating World (Kazuo Ishiguro) Ishiguro isn’t really a Japanese author; though he was born in Japan his family moved to England when he was a baby, and most of his books are set there. But this one is set in post- WWII Japan. The main character is an old man, pining for the prewar days when [...]

I admit, for the second part of my manga experiment (in which I read a variety of manga that I would normally never, ever, ever touch- and report back to our readers)  that I cheated a bit. I was determined to make myself read something from the new Viz Kids line, which is aimed at children ages 6-9. My choices [...]

I’ve decided to challenge myself. Throughout the spring and summer (meaning: before I go on maternity leave, while I can still read free manga at work), I am going to try reading mange in genres I normally wouldn’t touch. Sports, magical girl, high school romantic comedy, kiddie stuff, anything based on a video or card game…I’m going to be brave [...]

I guess the theatrical releases of the first two live-action Death Note films were profitable enough that Viz has decided to release the third one. Wait…there’s a third one? But didn’t both main characters die in the second one? Please, a little thing like death won’t stop such a popular and lucrative franchise! L: Change the World takes place in [...]

Hey people, I’m going to be gone until Monday so I’m dumping a review on you before I leave. Enjoy!(?)   King of Thorn is a short (six volume), tight little science fiction/horror manga. It’s a kinetic action piece with a big reveal that’s truly surprising, and if much of it stretches credibility, well, it is a sf story, and [...]

A girl in China decided making her own decisions was too much work. So she asked the Internet to tell her what to do! …that’s a recipe for disaster. Article But wait! Her requests have included things like taking care of stray cats and feeding homeless people. Obviously 4chan has not discovered her site yet… If I could find(and read) [...]

When you look at Total Surrender, it seems pretty inoffensive (by my standards, anyway). It really doesn’t contain any of the common yaoi elements that I hate; no one is underage or looks underage, there’s no coerced sex or blackmail, and no one is raped. No, Total Surrender’s mortal sin is something else altogether: it’s boring. Total Surrender is a [...]