Monthly Archives: December 2010

Manga the week of 12/22

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‘Tis Christmas! And what better way to celebrate than with some worthy Signature manga from Viz! Not to mention a few treats from other publishers.

Dark Horse has the 7th volume of the Evangelion spinoff Shinji Ikari Raising Project. Unlike a lot of other Dark Horse titles, this one has been coming out fairly consistently, so I suspect sales are quite good. The fact that they’re picking up several other Evangelion spinoffs also lends credence to that theory.

Tokyopop has a 6th volume of the hardcover, 2-in-1 omnibus edition of Fruits Basket. There’s no added content here, but those who want a larger and more durable Furuba might check out out. This has the original Vol. 11 & 12.

Vertical has the final volume of Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo, which wraps up its Japan-meets-America cultural satire with gusto. It’s also has more cute cats, with the fourth Chi’s Sweet Home.

And Viz has a veritable Christmas Stocking worth of cool titles. Vol. 2 of Gente, by Natsume Ono, featuring more far-too-perfect-for-their-own-good Italian gentlemen. Vol. 4 of Children of the Sea, which will likely once again have absolutely incredible art and force my brain into tying itself in knots. Vol. 5 of Ooku, which possibly may finish its flashback? Pretty please? A new House of Five Leaves, with its wussy yet awesome samurai. For the slacker in your life, there’s I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow Vol. 2, which I’m sure will have its hero making many resolutions about his life and not quite following through. And there’s a new 20th Century Boys, which finally gets to the halfway mark with this volume.

What interests you?

GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class Volume 3

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By Satoko Kiyuduki. Released in Japan by Houbunsha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Manga Time Kirara Carat. Released in North America by Yen Press.

I can’t imagine how fierce the competition must be at Houbunsha to find the next new 4-koma hit… given that most 4-koma have to all obey certain rules, at least the ones I’ve seen. “This group of girls are music students!” “This group of girls are teachers!” “This group of girls are sparkly vampires!” All of which are different, but share a similar mindspace: are they teenage girls? Are they cute? Are they funny? If so, they can be Ninja Pirate Zombie Robots for all we care.

The girls we see in GA happen to be art students at a school devoted to the Arts in general. They’re in the Art section, which is division A (B being music, though sadly it does not contain the girls from K-On!). They are a band of five; our naive and clumsy yet sweet heroine; the ‘big sister’ tsukkomi girl; the hot-head who speaks and acts without thinking; the eccentric weirdo; and the emotionless deadpan genius. This being Manga Time Kirara rather than Asuka, together they do *not* fight crime. Instead, they go about the daily life of art school, learning about layout, lettering, textiles, illustrations for advertisements and the like, and so forth. There’s far more color pages in here than in most manga; of necessity, as so much of the talk relies on the colors we can see.

There’s a lot of fun humor here, which is what you want in a title like this. Nothing laugh out loud hilarious, but several moments that make you smile. I liked the spontaneous organization of a haunted house in the class, and found it refreshing that it didn’t stem out of a culture festival like all other manga. It’s also good to see the topic of art is a constant focus; there is the occasional mundane chatter about favorite types of cake, or girls being sick, but mostly it’s about their art, and the jokes come out of that, be it trying to please an unpleasable teacher with fashion designs, or visiting a museum to try to ‘get’ modern art. Even the non-art strips are a bit different than most high school 4-komas; the girls are learning etiquette by getting tea ceremony training (our heroine is the best at it, but also the most clumsy.)

I also appreciated the fact that we see other students being just as strange as our heroes. Frequently in series with eccentric girls at school as the leads, we find the other students around them being depressingly normal and boring, sometimes staring in disbelief at the antics of the wacky group. Here in GA, the 1st years may be our focus, but frequent attention is paid to the third year girls, who have a different group dynamic but can be just as bizarre; in fact, the president of the Fine Arts Club, Awara, may be crazier even than the crazy girls in first year! (I loved when Noda, the flakey one in first-year, is walking around with a bunch of boxes on her head with faces drawn on them. As she staggers blindly through the halls, everyone thinks she’s Awara.)

There is not particularly any character development here – the most we get is in the final chapter, when Kisaragi (our sweet heroine) goes to see Professor (the stoic one) to drop off a sketchbook, and Professor reveals she’s already engaged to be married to a guy she’s never met… and that she’s feeling very ambivalent about the whole thing. Not only does the old Japanese tradition of arranged marriage feel out of place in a series about goofy art students (and deliberately so), but Professor is the one girl who’s always calm and emotionless amongst the chaos. Seeing her depressed is very odd (Professor even notes that it’s not like her), and I wonder if the arranged marriage plot will go anywhere in future installments.

We have now ‘caught up’ with Japan in this series, as Volume 4 is not out there yet. The series is still running in its magazine, but as with most 4-koma series, it takes a while for new volumes, as the chapters aren’t as long as your average manga series. Still I’ll wait for the next one, as it’s fun spending time with these weird yet fun-loving art students.

Library Wars: Love & War Volume 3

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By Kiiro Yumi, based on the novel by Hiro Arikawa. Released in Japan as “Toshokan Sensou: Love & War” by Hakusensha, serialization ongoing in the magazine LaLa. Released in North America by Viz.

How ironic that today is the day that I review the new volume of Library Wars, considering that today is also when Japan passed their Youth Ordinance Bill. It’s all very well trying to protect books from being destroyed by the government, but clearly the government knows the key is to ensure that controversial books never get commissioned in the first place, or that those already out don’t get a reprint. I wonder if anyone in the government reads Library Wars, and is quietly talking with the editors of LaLa about ‘ending it soon’, given its anti-censorship stance?

Meanwhile, back in the actual manga itself, we see that Dojo is having a very hard time of it. It’s hard enough that the new girl in his troop is turning out to be exactly like he was a few years earlier (something lampshaded constantly), but even worse, he’s starting to fall for her. This is rough considering that she goes on about how her prince protected her from the evil government forces when she was younger, and the fact that this was Dojo doesn’t really seem to matter as she’s not aware of that. So what’s a guy to do? Well, he *is* in a manga. That’s right, it’s time to overcompensate by being a complete jerk to her. And as we know, there’s no job worth doing that isn’t worth overdoing, so he goes above and beyond the call. To the point where his fellow officers immediately call him on it.

None of this matters to Iku, who merely notes that Dojo is more friustrating than ever, and spends much of the volume having her emotions battered back and forth. It’s not helping that an article on the library forces came out with her picture, meaning her parents may see that she’s not a quiet little librarian after all. Then the worst news – Dojo assigns her to guard duty rather than having her fight with the rest of the troops to retrieve a bequest of documents left to the library by a museum. He doesn’t think she’s good enough.

Now, Library Wars, even if it weren’t based on an already-extant series of novels, is not the most surprising manga in the world. We know, of course, that Dojo assigns her away from combat in order to protect her, as is immediately noted by both Komaki, who bluntly tells Dojo if he keeps being influenced by his feelings for Iku he should transfer her to another unit, and by Shibasaki, who points out to the hard-of-head Iku why Dojo might be doing this. None of that matters, of course, as the cliffhanger shows that the government had a backup plan, and have kidnapped the director of the library… along with Iku, who was guarding him. Whoops. Nice one, Dojo.

The manga does a good job of balancing light and dark moments. I particularly liked the brief shot of Iku learning how to push the director around in a wheelchair, using poor Shibasaki as a guinea pig. This is contrasted with the director’s memories of years ago, where we see government forces shoot his wife dead right in front of him, then shoot him (this led to the loss of his leg). The battle for the bequested materials is likewise very serious, with Dojo running into crossfire to rescue a soldier who’d been shot in the leg. Of course, this is still a shoujo romance – it’s noted that had Iku been there, she would have been faster in combat, as well as lighter to pick up should she have been injured.

The contrast between thrilling drama and shoujo comedy can be frustrating at times, particularly when you’d like Dojo and Iku to stop butting heads and get back to protecting books. But there’s still a lot of drama here to love, and what with it ending on a cliffhanger the wait for the next volume will be even longer.