After an insane week this week, the manga world has decided to take pity on us. Well, mostly. Except for this giant pile of BL. Let’s start with that.
There’s a bunch of stuff from DMP out next week. There’s a volume of short stories by prolific artist Minase Masara, released under the title Ambiguous Relationship. Beast & Feast has smoking hot police officer on yakuza love (or is it the other way around?), as well as a great title. Blue Sheep Reverie hits Vol. 5. (It used to run in Betsuhana! Honest! Can you picture it next to Otomen? Well, yes, actually…) Depression of the Anti-Romanticist also has a great title, and I think that it needs to have a cage match with Beast & Feast to see who’s best. Lastly, we have another volume of the novel series Yashikiden Demon Princess, which I know little of except it’s by the Vampire Hunter D author.
Kodansha Comics wraps up a series, as we get the final volume of Monster Hunter Orage, from the Fairy Tail creator. We also get the 18th volume of Fairy Tail, which I hope to like more than the 17th.
Vertical has a final volume as well, with Vol. 12 of Twin Spica. This contains Vols. 15 and 16 of the Japanese series, and means I finally get to decide once and for all if it’s heartwarmingly uplifting or crushingly melancholy. I suspect I’m going to pick the former. If you don’t get this series, you missed out on something special.
Viz has two Pokemon volumes. I know I give these short shrift here, but… if you like Pokemon, get these! That’s about all I can say.
Lastly, in non-manga news, Fantagraphics is finally releasing the first in a series of collections of the comic strip Nancy, by Ernie Bushmiller. This isn’t the first chronologically – like Carl Barks, they’re picking and choosing what years to begin with – but that doesn’t really matter. The comic we all thought was even duller than Garfield as a kid turns out, when our parents were kids, to have a certain zen brilliance that’s hard to sum up in words. If you like classic comic strips, check this out and be amazed what one artist did with just minimalist art and vaudeville gags.
So what would Sluggo buy this week?
RightStuf has shipped my Twin Spica 12 to me today and I am quite happy! It should be here early next week! I actually ordered 9-12 during the Vertical sale late January, so I’m clearly behind, a poor idea as the melancholy makes me want to cry after just a few chapters but it’s so awesome that I can’t stop reading it either. I think that of all of the stuff Vertical has published thus far, Twin Spica is probably my very favorite (and seeing how I’ve loved most of their Tezuka releases and usually throw my money at anything they publish, it’s a pretty high set bar. Thanks to stuff like this and Tezuka, Vertical makes up almost an eighth of my manga collection in just a couple of years). I also got one of my friends into the series by making her read it at my house. Really, I can’t express my gratitude to Vertical for putting out this series!
The only question is if I want to start re-reading it from the very beginning, seems a solid plan, except for how the manga makes me want to cry most of the time, and if I start at vol 9, I can get on with the new material (I think I haven’t read Twin Spica since I got vol 7 and 8 at Otakon). Also, not sure I understand why they increased volume thickness from US vol 7 on.
For some reason after publishing 6 volumes of Twin Spica, Vertical decided to start publishing the remaining volumes in omnibus format so it wound up being 12 volumes rather than the original 16 it was in Japan. Seems odd to make the switch midway through publishing but I guess it’s worked out as we got to the ending faster!