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22 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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Nightmare Inspector wants to be The Twilight Zone so badly that it hurts. It also wants to be Pet Shop of Horrors. It’s a noble effort and it’s an entertaining little series, but it’s simply not as good as what it aspires to be.
The setting is the Silver Star Teahouse in pre-WWII Japan, in the 1920’s (the setting might be confusing to some, but one story mentions the Great Kanto Earthquake as happening a few years previous, so there you are). The proprietors of the teahouse are a young woman named Mizuki, and the baku (a spirit that devours dreams) named Hiruko. Baku are traditionally depicted as looking like tapirs, but this one looks like a regular guy- well, as regular as any manga character looks. After all, if he was a tapir he couldn’t be dressed in a ridiculous ensemble dripping with buckles, right? The Teahouse for some reason serves mainly coffee, but no one comes there for hot beverages anyway, so whatever. They come to see Hiruko, to ask him if he can help them get rid of their nightmares. He usually does, and the only payment he asks is to eat the nightmare afterwards, so it’s a pretty sweet deal.
Each chapter is a story revolving around a new customer, and with few exceptions the stories are only a chapter long. In volume 1, the clients include a servant who dreams of his mistress’ death, a man so obsessed with a popular actress that he can’t bear seeing her character die in her latest movie, a girl who’s sick of her daily routine, and a man who has fallen in love with a mysterious woman who calls him on the phone, and desperately wants to see her face, if only in his dream. This last story ends volume 1, and is a cliffhanger leading into the next volume. In volume 2 the new customers are a woman who wants to live in the last painting her dead lover made, and a blind girl whose keen hearing is picking up a repetitive sound that is driving her crazy.
The stories are mostly self-contained, but not entirely; there are threads that run through the manga that tie things together. Volume 2 sees the addition of Hifumi, a weird rich kid who visits to see where a baku lives, but ends up taking a room above the teahouse when he falls in love with Mizuki. Hiruko’s job also takes him pretty frequently to The Delirium, some kind of club where people’s deepest desires can be brought to life. As the series progresses you learn who/what Hiruko really is: a baku who took over the body of Mizuki’s emo brother when the brother decided he didn’t feel like living anymore.
There are some neat things about Nightmare Inspector; more than once the human clients turn out to be animals or even objects in disguise (the blind girl, for instance, is a cat). The historical details are scant but interesting, and the twists inherent in every story sometimes work and sometimes don’t, but they’re rarely predictable. After a while though things start to feel terribly repetitive; customer comes in, Hiruko sends them to sleep, solves their problem, all is well, and THEN the twist pops in.
The characters, unfortunately, are right out of the Catalog of Manga Archetypes. Mizuki is sweet and polite and secretly sad about her brother. Hiruko is reticent and rude and secretly angsting about something not mentioned in these volumes. Hifumi is annoying as hell, dopey and silly. The guy who runs The Delirium is all secretive and flirty, very reminiscent of Pet Shop of Horrors’ Count D.
The art is pretty standard; the clothes are the most interesting thing about the designs. Most everyone wears historically accurate garb, except the aforementioned Hiruko, who looks like he fell into an s&m shop and then accessorized at Claire’s. Backgrounds are decent; not crowded but not too spare either.
So how does Nightmare Inspector stack up against its influences? The Twilight Zone was an innovative series that made viewers think; many of the episodes have so permeated the culture that even people who have never seen them can recognize references. Pet Shop of Horrors was a series of striking Japanese morality tales, often haunting and compelling.
Nightmare Inspector is entertaining, but ten minutes after finishing a story, I couldn’t remember what had happened in the chapter (which makes writing a review a pain in the ass, let me tell you). Do I feel like continuing the adventures of Hiruko and crew, and ferreting out their various secrets.
The Verdict: Not really.
| Category: Print Reviews, Reviews | Tag: japan, manga, nightmare inspector, review |
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19 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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Forbidden Dance is a manga about a high school girl who has to work hard to achieve her dreams and get with the incredibly hot and perfect guy she loves. Because, you know, no manga has ever done that exact storyline before. Even worse, Forbidden Dance indulges in every tired cliché of the genre; the gorgeous ex-girlfriend, the mean girl(s) who pick on the heroine, the apparently arrogant and cruel dude who turns out to have a sad, sad past…it’s enough to make you gag.
Aya is a high school kid and devoted ballet student. She’s the pride of her ballet school, until she chokes up at a competition and falls off the stage. After that she can’t bring herself to dance in front of an audience, despite the encouragement of her teachers and best friend, second-rate ballerina Nachan. This makes Yoshino, her main dancing rival, very happy.
Then one day Aya is chilling in the park and a random guy gives her a free ticket to a performance by a small ballet company called COOL (he’s actually not that random, turns out he’s a classmate/fellow dancer she just noticed before). She attends the show and is blown away by the athletic performances of the dancers, especially the lead dancer, Akira, who is apparently unbelievably attractive. Aya decides that the only way on God’s green Earth that she will ever ever ever be able to dance again is if she can dance with unbelievably attractive Akira. She approaches him after the show and asks to be allowed to join COOL. Unfortunately, she was so obsessed with Akira that she somehow failed to notice that every single member of the company is male. Amused by her pathetic desperation, Akira says he’ll let her in if she can win the National Ballet Competition.
Which she does, despite her rivalry with Yoshino and the fact that Nachan secretly envies Aya’s talent and tries to sabotage her performance. Along the way Aya makes peace with everyone and impresses Akira with her drive and learns about his sad, sad past and blah blah blah.
But then she discovers that she’s kind of out of her league with COOL, and Akira has an ex-girlfriend who is a famous ballet star and who visits Japan and makes Aya jealous, and she has to save COOL’s anniversary performance and gets mixed signals from him and whatever. Honestly, I’m just too bored to write the rest of the summary. You can probably figure out what happens anyway. Luckily the manga is only four volumes long, so it didn’t waste too much of my time.
You might wonder why I am so down on this manga. Sure, it might be familiar, sure it’s packed with clichés, but it’s silly, harmless fun, right?
Wrong. Aya is every bit as bad a role model for girls as that stupid bitch in the Twilight books. Wah wah wah, she fell and lost her confidence. Oh look, she can learn to dance and follow her dreams again, but ONLY if she can dance with this douchebag who treats her like shit but eventually comes to love her because she is so incredibly clingy and pathetic. Oh look, this asshole secretly has a heart of gold or some shit, and he said I made him hit me and he’d never do it again…(OK, the only hitting in this manga is by accident, or chicks slapping each other, but you can totally see where their relationship is going).
And the art? Ick. Unbelievably attractive Akira is…not attractive. None of the characters are. Hinako Ashihara’s characters look like mutants. Their foreheads are huge domes, their eyes are large as squid’s eyes, and all their features are crammed into the bottom 1/3rd of their faces. Her sketching of dance sequences is nice, but while dancing the characters only seem to have three poses apiece.
Maybe that’s because in the (frequent, boring) mangaka’s notes, Ashihara admits she knows sod-all about ballet and doesn’t know why she chose it as a subject. Now, I also know sod-all about ballet, which is why I don’t write about it. I don’t know how accurate her information about ballet is, but with her confession of ignorance being right there in the first volume, I don’t really trust her.
Besides the author’s notes, volume three contains a very long instructional manual on working out like a ballet dancer, which I read while cramming Fig Newtons into my piehole, and a short story called “Princess Line”.
The Verdict: Please God, give me back my two hours of time. I promise I’ll never randomly pick a manga to read out of the library again.
| Category: Print Reviews, Reviews | Tag: forbidden dance, japan, manga, review |
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15 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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Mai, the Psychic Girl is a misleading title. The titular character is not, in fact, psychic. She’s something even cooler: telekinetic, meaning she can manipulate inanimate objects with the power of her mind (though the manga calls it psychokinesis, which is also correct, ‘telkinesis’ just sounds neater).
Mai Kuju is a regular 14-year-old school girl- because all manga heroines are regular school girls…at first- who hides her powers at the request of her beloved, widowed father. She’s silly, doesn’t pay attention in school, gossips with her friends, all the things teenagers do. She’s not particularly concerned when a group of strange men tries to follow her home; after all, she can use her power to cause a traffic jam to hold them up. But then the strange men come to her house and fight her dad, who has awesome mystical martial arts skills. It seems Mai is wanted by a mysterious international organization called The Wisdom Alliance, which is trying to collect people with ESP powers so they can somehow use them to keep world peace (although, considering they are a mysterious international organization, that’s probably a big lie). And Mai is the most powerful ESPer they’ve ever seen. To this end The Wisdom Alliance has made a deal with the Kaieda Agency, some kind of underground information network run by a creepy old dude with amazing martial arts skills. He needs to get Mai for the Alliance, and he personally wants to test Mai’s dad’s kung fu against his own.
Mai and her dad flee to a shrine where he tells her that she inherited her power from her dead mother. Then the Kaieda guys close in; Mai and her dad nearly escape until Kaieda drops in their trump card: a giant demon-like guy with Saiyan hair who knocks Mai’s dad off a cliff and is promptly destroyed (maybe!) by Mai’s powers. She takes off into the woods, where she meets a college boy named Intetsu who is out hiking. He’s huge (like, Kenshiro in Fist of the North Star huge) and has some blazing martial arts skills of his own. He helps Mai get back to Tokyo and lets her stay in his dorm room, where she quickly becomes the mascot/little sister for all the guys. She even adopts a puppy that turns up, but the Kaieda and Wisdom Alliance guys are still after her. And as Mai starts to use her powers more and more, she learns that terrible things can happen unless she gets her emotions under control (like gruesomely killing a big dog that attacks her pup).
By the end of volume one, Mai and Intetsu are on the run again- with their animal sidekick, of course. Volume two gets even more frenetic, with the interesting twist that Kanieda has no intention of turning Mai over to the Alliance, and the appearance of a German girl named Turm Garten, who is the second most powerful telekinetic in the world, and who really doesn’t like being number two. A battle of the minds (literally) ensues, tearing the city apart. Meanwhile, Mai’s dad is alive after all, but he has amnesia.
Mai, The Psychic Girl was released by Viz in 1995, and it acts its age. The art belongs to that school of realism that is no longer popular (similar to Sanctuary), and everything from the outfits to the hairdos to the cultural references (Mickey Mouse and Garfield show up in almost unaltered form)are early 1990’s to the max. Size is relative in this world; Intetsu towers over most of the other characters, while elderly characters are tiny and wizened. There’s a lot of detail, which is nice- you’re always noticing little things-, but it can make the action scenes seem crowded and confusing.
The characters are not terribly interesting. Mai is a typical teenage good kid (in the classic manga mold), so all her reactions to events and revelations are predictable. Her dad has some secrets, as does creepy old Kaieda. Intetsu and his college pals are amusingly stereotypical, Turm Garten is nothing but pure malice without personality. Possibly the most interesting character in the manga is the giant demon-creature-person Kaieda keeps in a cage. What the hell is this guy, after all?
The story is layered enough to keep a reader’s interest, but the whole secret-organization-that-runs-the-world-thing is overdone. The whole telekinesis thing is cool enough to make up for it, though. It’s a nice change that there are lots of people willing to help Mai, instead of everyone being against her like you’d usually see in a story like this. It adds a nice element to the story; how the people who have become concerned will lose or gain by their involvement.
It’s not a series for the kiddies, by any means. There’s a lot of gruesome violence, and a couple bathtub scenes whose only apparent purpose is to show off Mai’s naked, sleek, barely-pubescent figure.
The Verdict: Mai is definitely not the kind of manga that would be popular today, but if you have a craving for something old-school, check it out.
| Category: Print Reviews, Reviews | Tag: japan, mai the psychic girl, manga, review |
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10 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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If Tsutomu Nihei is a prophet, the future is going to suck ass, but at least it’s going to look awesome.
In Blame! and its companion manga, Noise, people are repressed by bizarre cyborgs and have to live in an endlessly-ascending cyber-dungeon. In Biomega, they get to go outside, but there are zombies everywhere. And in Biomega, the last hope of saving humanity isn’t…even…human.
It’s 3005 A.D. Mankind completes its first manned mission to Mars in seven centuries. The astronauts find that the formerly populated Martian outpost is wrecked…except for one forlorn, mysterious human- or a forlorn, mysterious human-shaped creature.
Jump forward six months. Mankind has been devastated by the NS5 virus, which the astronauts brought back with them. Instead of killing those who contract it, NS5 just turns them into mindless ‘drones’; zombies, basically, although they can mutate into gross monsters and attck when threatened. As the story opens, Zoichi Kanoe, a ‘synthetic human’ arrives in a city on his badass motorcycle. He’s been sent by his employers, Toa Heavy Industries (a company of the same name was mentioned in Blame!, but the two series don’t seem to be connected, as least so far), to ‘purify’ the city by ridding t of drones.
But as soon as he enters the city he accidentally runs down a teenage girl. Her dismembered leg sticks itself right back on, to Zoichi’s surprise. He’s even more surprised when a bipedal, gun-toting grizzly bear bounds out to protect the girl and usher her back into the city.
The girl, it turns out, is seventeen-year-old Eon Green. She’s an Accommodator- someone who contracts the virus but doesn’t zombify; instead, ZS5 gives them incredible healing powers, and maybe other powers as well.
Toa Heavy Industries wants Accommodators for their own purposes. But other people want Accommodators too, including a mysterious organization called the Public Health Service- which doesn’t seem to be that focused on public health, considering they have something called ‘compulsory execution units’…
Biomega is like Blame! in many ways, but the little annoyances that plagued it (a complete lack of explanation for anything, almost no dialogue, and confusing action scenes) are remedied in Biomega. There’s still not much dialogue, but there’s enough to keep the reader in the loop, so to speak. In this first volume, there are tantalizing hints about the various organizations wanting the Accommodators, and why; about Eon Green herself, about the bear- intriguingly named Kozlov L. Grebnev- and the drones. Since it’s only the first volume, not much is explained, but it looks as if we’re in for some full-on government-military conspiracy shit.
Nihei’s action scene have improved immensely. They’re drawn out over several panels; so while the story is fast-paced, we can still see what’s going on. He also takes advantage of these multiple panels to show us the extent of Zoichi’s powers- in one scene he shoots some murderous drones, then holsters his gun before they even hit the ground.
The main attraction of anything by Tsutomu Nihei is his unique, distinctive art style. Biomega is fascinating to look at. The angular, fish-eyed characters, the intricate weaponry and vehicles, and his backgrounds…his backgrounds are what Heaven looks like, if God is a cyberpunk fan with an affinity for vast spaces, narrow bridges, Gothic architecture and balconies. The designs are simply awesome, and you’ll find yourself going back just to look at them again (and noticing new details every time).
It’s hard to tell how a manga will go from just the first volume, but thus far Biomega shows the potential to be seriously amazing. I just hope Nihei can carry it through.
The Verdict: Pretty damn cool. I just hope it stays that way.
| Category: Print Reviews, Reviews | Tag: biomega, japan, manga, review, tsutomu nihei |
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7 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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I haven’t actually watched this trailer yet. I am a little afraid. Will it make me angry at the way anime fans are represented? Will I shake my head, weeping for the future of our nation’s youth? Or will I just be jealous?
I am so not an otaku. I know a lot about anime, in fact, I probably know more about the history of anime than most ‘hardcore’ otaku. But I don’t watch everything that comes out just because it’s anime. And I don’t have any statues of cute anime girls in bikinis on my coffee table or anything. So I’m not America’s Greatest Otaku material.
| Category: Uncategorized | Tag: america's greatest otaku, Anime, fandom, manga, tokyopop |
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7 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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This one is spoiler-iffic!
Of all my guilty anime/manga pleasures (Najica: BlitzTactics and Demon City Shinjuku among them), Kitchen Princess may just be the guiltiest. It’s one of the hundreds of shoujo manga about poor teenagers who go to boarding schools packed with rich kids, who have to prove themselves to the Mean Girls and win the hearts of the handsomest boys. Most of these manga have some sort of gimmick to make them stand out: the kids are fashion models, or fairies, or they’re on the field hockey team. Kitchen Princess’ gimmick is food. Lots and lots of food.
The story begins a little like Revolutionary Girl Utena. Najika is a little orphan whose parents have just died in some vague sort of accident. While walking one day she Jumps into a stream, and is rescued from drowning by a little boy. He gives her the snack he was carrying- a cup of flan- and comforts her. The food and the head-patting give Najika the will to live again. He leaves behind the teeny-tiny silver spoon that came with the flan.
Unfortunately, unlike Utena, Kitchen Princess doesn’t go into a delightfully weird tale of swordfights, incest and lesbianism. Instead, Najika just keeps the spoon as a reminder of her ‘flan prince’, and vows to find him someday as she grows up in an orphanage, where she learns to be disgustingly sweet and helpful.
The markings on the spoon lead Najika to an elite private boarding school in Tokyo. She applies and gets in, with a special recommendation from the Director, to the ‘A’ class. The A class is full of kids with special talents- musicians, actors, models- and no one can figure out why Najika is in it, least of all Najika herself. She’s only the best cook ever in the history of the world, after all, as all the other kids are going to find out.
The other kids in the A class automatically hate Najika because she’s poor and an orphan and she has attracted the attention of the two hot brothers Daichi and Sora, sons of the director, who are feuding over something or other. Both boys defend her from the Mean Girls, and of course both fall in love with her as well.
The head Mean Girl is Akane, aspiring supermodel and childhood friend of the brothers. She has a crush on Daichi and hates the attention Najika and her delicious desserts are getting. She tries to get Najika kicked out of school, humiliates her in front of the other students, and tells lies left and right. By the end of the second volume, Najika has made a friend of Akane by making peach pie just like her grandma’s- and thus curing her of her anorexia/bulimia! The other girls try to shut down the diner where Najika works. But every time Najika wants to give up and return to the orphanage, Daichi and Sora are there to talk her down. Could one of the brothers be her flan prince? Well, duh. The question is, which one?
Kitchen Princess is ridiculous, like almost all of the other manga that share this exact plot. Ridiculous, and predictable, and shallow- and for some reason, I really want to know how it’s resolved. Is Daichi or Sora the flan prince? How does Najika win the hearts of everyone around her? Why do I want to finish this manga?
It can’t be the characters. They’re thin as paper: Najika is lonely and loving. Akane is mean, but only because she’s insecure. Daichi is the angry one, and Sora is the perfect eldest son. The minor characters have even less depth; the head of Najika’s orphanage is the nice old grandma. The other students at the school are blips on the radar, not even important enough to name.
It’s not the art. The art is completely standard for a shoujo manga: impossibly svelte teen girls (despite the fact that Najika eats like a starving hog, she’s a skinny bitch), broad-shouldered young men with pretty faces. In close-ups, Najika’s soulful eyes are disturbingly enormous, and somehow she manages to have a wardrobe full of cute dresses with ruffles and ribbons. The clothes are neat (shut up, I’m a chick) but highly unlikely.
It must be…the food. Kitchen Princess is jammed with drawings of delicious-looking food, from French onion soup, to peach pie, to Cake Boss-complex desserts. There are cookies and sandwiches. Even in black-and-white, it’s enough to make your mouth water. The mangaka adds notes about which foods she’s personally eaten and how they were, what she likes and dislikes. The end of each volume has recipes for foods mentioned in that volume, most of which are surprisingly simple. It’s food porn, plain and simple, and it’s incredibly tantalizing, especially if you’re trying to lose those last five pounds.
Or maybe it’s because in volume 4, Kitchen Princess totally kicks the genre in the nuts by killing off Sora. Yep, the kid gets splattered all over the road by a truck. And now Najika has all kinds of grief to deal with.
So there it is. My love for Kitchen Princess is born from my innate delight in food, coupled with the tail end of a diet, and mixed with a dead teenager.
The Verdict: Silly, predictable shoujo fluff. But damn, those cupcakes looks delectable…and that kid is seriously dead.
| Category: News | Tag: japan, kitchen priness, manga, review |
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2 Feb
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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It’s Manga Wednesday!
I have a love-hate relationship with CLAMP. By that, I mean they’ve produced two series I love, and a bunch more that I hate (or, more usually, that I’m indifferent to). RG Veda is one of the bunch to which I am indifferent. I don’t hate it, I certainly don’t love it, and I’m not particularly sorry Tokyopop dropped it after only five volumes (originally there were ten).
I admit, I have zero knowledge of the original Rigveda, one of Hinduism’s four sacred texts. But I’m guessing that all it has in common with CLAMP’s version is the title, especially considering that the original is described as a series of hymns, and also considering that the manga is packed with a few of CLAMP’s favorite things- shounen ai leanings that are never fulfilled, people vowing to become stronger to protect their loved ones, and women committing honorable suicide for love.
The story opens post-war: the king of the gods, Tentei, has been dumb enough to get himself beheaded by a rebel god, Taishakuten. Taishakuten of course is the villain in this tale, and he destroys anyone who defied him. This means that many of the guardian tribes (which kept peace in the kingdom as well as defended it from giant monsters and demons) have been decimated, so not only is the place being terrorized by monsters, it’s also being terrorized by its ruler.
Lord Yasha, king of the creatively-named Yasha guardian tribe, comes across an exiled fortune-teller, who tells him where to find the sole survivor of the most powerful guardian tribe (destroyed by Tasiahkuten during the war), the infant heir of Lord Ashura, who is still a baby despite 300 years having passed since the takeover. It seems that six stars- six dispossessed guardians- are just waiting to be found so they can pool their powers and take down Taishakuten. But Taishakuten’s heard the same prophecy, and he’ll do anything to get rid of the Ashura kid, sending entire armies to waste him and Yasha. As a result, Lord Yasha’s tribe is wiped out except for him.
Lord Yasha and the quickly-growing Ashura go on the lam, dodging various pursuers while searching for the other four stars. They take shelter with a troupe of dancers, pick up a companion (the personality-free Souma) and throw in their lot with the brash young king of the Dragon tribe. Along the way a divine spirit/demon/whatever, in the form of a hot dude, drops in to give them tips, like they have to go to an underground city to retrieve the legendary Shura sword so Ashura can do whatever it is he’s going to do to bring down Taishakuten. In the meantime, Taishakuten’s doing everything he can to make as many enemies as possible, ensuring that his eventual downfall will be a piece of cake. Unfortunately (?), American readers will never know, since Tokyopop stopped releasing it at volume five. And I didn’t even read that far.
RG Veda has an entertaining concept, but it gets bogged down in loads of cliché and colorless characters. Lord Yasha’s purely a bore, devoted to saving the kingdom and predictably playing daddy to Ashura. He might be noble, but he’s not very interesting. Ashura is one of those earnest kids CLAMP so loves, vowing on what seems like every other page to grow stronger so no one else has to die because of him (and yet…people keep dying because of him). Every woman in the manga is ready to die for love- except for Taishakuten’s bitch wife, who also happens to be Ashura’s mother and the most interesting character in the manga.
While RG Veda is one of CLAMP’s very early works, their signature style is already on full display. Men are either super-feminine or built like mutated linebackers, everyone has hair that drags the floor (save for one of Taishakuten’s generals who, amusingly, seems to have gone to Lionel from Thundercats for styling advice), and al children have eyes the size of dinner plates. At least here you don’t see the massive amounts of wasted space that dominate X/1999 or Clover, and there are no endless pages of floating feathers or turning gears or dandelion fluff or any of that crap. Their action scenes suck; it’s usually impossible to follow what’s going on between the clouds of dust/magic fairy powder/columns of flame, so I just skipped to the last panel to find out who won. The costumes and backgrounds are the pretty cool: lots of draped fabric and huge shoulder pads, but some scenes are just overcrowded with too many people wearing too many clothes.
The first couple of volumes have a bonus feature introducing CLAMP’s four members and explaining what each does in the manga-creation process (according to the feature, as of 1989- the year of RG Veda’s release- they all lived together. In college I shared an apartment with two other chicks; if a fourth woman had been thrown in there, I would have lost my freaking mind). Each volume also has a cutesy bonus comic that casts the RG Veda characters as modern-day detective, solving what have to be the most inane crimes ever.
The Verdict: If you’re a CLAMP fan, you might want to check it out, if only to chart their development. If you’re a cosplayer, you may want to get ideas for costumes to show off your manly chest or shapely legs…all others, don’t bother.
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13 Dec
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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Christmas is coming, and that means I’m going fucking insane from all the carols blasting in stores and snow up to my knees and our neighbor’s house, which is lit up like a horny firefly and blasting that one Alvin and the Chipmunks song where Alvin is bitching about wanting a hula hoop- just the one song, mind you, over and over, but our neighbor is seriously old and I think he looks forward to this all year, so no way am I going to complain-and trying to wrap gifts while a cat sits on one side of the wrapping paper and the boy sits on the other (and tries to take all my pretty pre-made sticky bows apart). So, here’s some Junji Ito manga to make us all feel better and remind us of how utterly creepy and soul-crushing the world actually is, no matter what Johnny Mathis wants you to believe.
These short stories are pure Ito: human bodies twisted almost beyond recognition, awful things rising from the depths of the ocean, slime everywhere. Merry Christmas.
| Category: Uncategorized | Tag: horror, japan, junji ito, manga |
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4 Oct
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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So remember how I was spazzing the other day about the new Berserk anime? Here are the short ads for volume 35 of the manga; hopefully this footage is indicative of whatever the new anime project (Series? Movie?) will look like, because it looks pretty sweet.
And yeah, they’re narrated by Gackt, he of girly-vampire-pop idol fame. But I can dig him being into Berserk; he was in The New Fist of the North Star after all.
There are actually three ads, but for some reason I can’t find the one with Caska. It’s lame anyway. The second one is fucking sweet.
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3 Aug
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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People in Okinawa aren’t happy about the U.S. military base that’s located there, and after reading several recent articles about servicemen raping Japanese teenagers I can’t say I blame them (not that all servicemen are rapists, mind you. Most are just fine). Now the U.S. military is trying to teach little Japanese kids to love the base- through manga!
Not to knock the effort, but usually educational manga are boring as Hell and the art looks dumb. If I was a little Japanese kid I think I’d rather read about aliens fighting mecha or something.
| Category: Uncategorized | Tag: japan, manga, okinawa, us military |
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5 Jul
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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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 her, however; their landlord doesn’t allow pets. But it’s hard to find anyone willing to take in a stray, even in cat-crazy Japan, and the family is growing more attached to her by the minute. Chi, as they come to call her, is at first hellbent on escaping and finding her cat family. But she gradually begins to forget her mother and siblings as she grows used to her human, the Yamadas.
Chi’s Sweet Home is a collection of short stories about the adventures of Chi and the Yamadas. From finding the right cat food to keeping Chi from shredding the furniture to some arduous litter box training, the Yamadas have their hands full. And they have to make sure she’s kept hidden from the landlord and the nosy neighbors; they even sneak her out to the vet in a picnic basket and find an ingenious way to keep her from sitting, fully visible, in the window.
The manga is nothing more or less than a chronicle of all the triumphs and tribulations of pet ownership. Any cat owner will chuckle and nod with understanding when Chi rejects a pile of fancy cat toys in favor of a plastic bag, or when the Yamadas try to give her a bath. But the mangaka, Konami Kabata, tries to see things from Chi’s point of view as well. Things drawn from Chi’s perspective are dauntingly huge, and distractions like dripping taps or shoelaces are prominent in her eyes. The manga has no solid plot, but every vignette adds a little more to the ongoing saga of Chi and the Yamadas. Most of it is cute and funny, but there are moments when the threat of Chi being discovered- and the Yamadas forced to give her away or evicted- become very real. This may be explored further in future volumes, but in the first volume these moments don’t do much to detract from the sweet fluffiness of the stories.
Chi looks more like a slightly bizarre stuffed animal than a cat. She has enormous saucer eyes and a physique that suggests bonelessness rather than grace. The Yamadas are fairly nondescript, though the husband/dad resembles a hipster with shaggy hair and stylish glasses. The entire manga is in color, which is okay; but because of this the art lacks the shading and thus the depth of black and white artwork (and kicks up the price a bit too- volume 1 from Vertical is $13.95).
Vertical has done a nice job with this release, as they almost always do. It’s a quality paperback, one that even my son couldn’t immediately tear the cover off of. But they’ve chosen to do a couple things that, while not deal breakers, seriously hampered my enjoyment of the manga. One is pretty minor: the blurb on the back of the book is written from the point of view of one of the Yamada adults (it’s unclear which one). This is obviously meant to feel cozy, but I just found it condescending and annoying.
The second, more intense peeve I have with the manga is also meant to be cozy and cute. In an effort to make Chi sound like a little kid (and thus make her even more adorable), the translator has given her a speech impediment, or perhaps just a weird accent. For example, when she encounters a dog, she thinks, “Scawey!” (rather than “Scary!”), and when she encounters the plastic bag she thinks, “It’s cawling me!”. While I understand the reasoning behind this, it still irritates me. If cats think in words, surely they use the King’s English with proper pronunciation (and possibly they even use ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and call humans ‘the servants’.).
Chi’s Sweet Home is another excellent effort from Vertical. It will really only appeal to little girls, cat lovers and cat owners, but since there seem to be plenty of those in the world, I think it will do very well.
| Category: Print Reviews | Tag: cats, chi's sweet home, japan, manga, Vertical |
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21 Jun
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Posted by Musashi
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Kotaku says that Tecmo Koei will not fuck with Fist of the North Star when it’s released here in the States this Fall. In fact, word is it will be even bloodier. I am happy.
| Category: Video Games | Tag: asploding heads, fist of the north star, japan, manga, violence |
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11 May
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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Are you proud to call yourself an otaku, completely ignoring the bad connotations thanks to the “Otaku Killer”? Do you live in your mom’s basement and work in IT and cry every night because Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion isn’t real and she can’t hold you in her arms at night until you fall asleep?
Then you may just be geek enough to compete in Tokyopop’s new reality show.
Wait- that main page doesn’t tell you shit. Here is a more informative interview from Publisher’s Weekly.
This seems like an attempt to bring back anime’s popularity, which has been steadily decreasing thanks to the fact that companies like Tokyopop spent the first few years of the 21st century releasing anything they could get their hands on (and manga, like 95 % of any artistic medium, is crap) and flooded the market until it drowned. So if you’re a huge-ass otaku, keep your eyes peeled for that big Tokyopop bus coming to your town. Get your cosplay on and take pics of your room, ’cause this could be your chance at 15 minutes of fame!
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27 Apr
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Posted by AnaKhouri
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Hey hey! What do you say! It’s a brand-new trailer for the live-action version of Beck today!]
Koyuki looks kind of older than he should be. Which is weird, since he’s Asian one would expect him to look even younger than 14.
| Category: Anime, Uncategorized | Tag: Anime, beck, japan, live-action movie, manga |
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11 Feb
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Posted by Musashi
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Aint-It-Cool-News reports that directing duo the Hughes Brothers have signed on to bring Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira to the silver screen. I can’t say I’m a fan – From Hell was an abomination, but only because they jettisoned all the cool mystical stuff that made the original comic so amazing. In all fairness, I can’t see a major studio letting anyone keep all of Moore’s ramblings intact, so maybe that’s not entirely the Hughes Brothers fault.
Also – The Book of Eli was a well-regarded post-apocalypse film (still haven’t seen it, so I can’t personally vouch for it). I guess that gives them one qualification. Still – many questions remain. Will the live-action version take place in NYC? Probably. Ixnay on the apanesejay eoplepay? Probably. Those are my two biggest reservations about this film right there. Perhaps I’m being a purist, but the original anime and manga are so well-etched in my mind I have a hard time separating the story from its’ background.
Good luck, Hughes Brothers – you’ve got a monster task on your hands…
| Category: Anime, Film | Tag: adaptations, akira, Anime, film, hughes brothers, katsuhiro otomo, manga |
