Monthly Archives: March 2012

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Vol. 4

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By Naoko Takeuchi. Released in Japan as “Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon” by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Nakayoshi. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

The fourth volume of Sailor Moon, and Jupiter gets the cover! Unfortunately, we’re also in the middle of a ‘have the senshi get abducted one by one’ arc, so she gets the first chapter and not much else. As with the Mercury and Mars chapters, we see Jupiter bonding with a friend of hers, this one male. It seems pretty platonic, though, at least on her end. We also get the revelation that her parents are both dead from a plane crash, so she lives on her own in a swank apartment. No idea where she gets the money… Rich relatives? Settlement from the crash? Honestly, most of the senshi are well-off. Even Usagi and Minako, the two most likely to be whining about not having any money, don’t seem to be hurting.

But in any case, soon Jupiter joins her friends in ‘captured off screen’ land. Venus is theoretically the next chapter, but honestly she’s not in it much. Presumably as Minako had an entire manga series devoted to her own personal life, she didn’t need a chapter that shows who her friends are and what she does on her days off. What we’re more concerned with is Chibi-Usa and the new enemies (who I will just start calling the Black Moon Clan, as that’s who they are). Chibi-Usa is settling in nicely in the past, and has even made a new friend (Momo will be Chibi-Usa’s designated friend till Hotaru basically replaces her in SuperS and Stars). But she’s still in denial about what’s going on, and actually seems to have some sort of PTSD (and with good reason, as we shall find). So Usagi is worrying about that, to the point where Naru and Umino are concerned. Remember them? Naru here even admits she knows Usagi is part of “another world that she can’t enter”. True enough, Naru, the author will forget you again soon.

Venus is abducted as we expected… but this time Usagi and Mamoru get there in time, and Mamoru gets a bit of powerup (albeit a ridiculous one: Tuxedo La Smoking Bomber is not in the anime, which tended to make Mamoru less powerful and more jerkassish). So Venus gets to stick around and help question Chibi-Usa, who has finally broken down and admits the truth: she’s from 1000 years in the future. And the future is in danger from the same folks abducting senshi. So, after a brief stop at Mamoru’s to get it on… oh, yeah, about that. Chapter 19 has Chibi-Usa basically terrified, so she wants to stay at Mamoru’s apartment. Usagi goes along, and after discussing things and various reassurances, they start to kiss and fall onto his bed. Then it’s the next morning, and Chibi-Usa is looking out the window. Usagi and Mamoru come in, Usagi wearing the same dress she had on last night and Mamoru’s dress shirt. So, nothing may have happened… or something may have happened. Most fans of Usagi and Mamoru’s romance think of this as their ‘first time’.

So we’re off to the 30th Century, something which is basically forbidden. So forbidden, in fact, that another senshi arrives to stop them! Yes, Sailor Pluto debuts here, though at this point in the story she’s still basically trapped in one place, at the Gates of Time. She’s devoted to stopping intruders, even if that means Sailor Moon and company (which makes no sense, but we’ll assume it’s some preventing paradox thing). Luckily, Chibi-Usa shows up, and it’s revealed that she and Pluto are close. In fact, the 30th Century, for all its crystal utopia, seems to be a very lonely place, as Chibi-Usa is mocked for being relatively powerless by the other children (she’s also 902 years old, something so gratuitously broken I don’t even want to get into it. Pretend that line doesn’t exist.), and Pluto’s stoic duty is only relieved by visits from Chibi-Usa (who she dotes on) and Endymion (who she seems to have a small crush on, as noted by her blushes here.)

Ah yes, Endymion. Arriving at the desolate wasteland of corpses that is the 30th Century, we meet King Endymion, aka Mamoru, who is a phantom but can at least interact with the others. We also meet, encased in crystal, Neo-Queen Serenity, aka Usagi, the future ruler of the planet. This is not really a surprise today, and honestly I don’t think it was meant to be back then either. Chibi-Usa is their daughter, and we also meet Luna and Artemis’s daughter Diana. Unfortunately, Usagi is still having difficulty with the whole ‘Mamoru loves his daughter more than me’ thing, and runs off to get captured.

I haven’t talked much about the Black Moon Clan here, but Prince Demande deserves a special mention here as being a loathsome creep. He’s not the true big bad in this arc… that would be Wiseman, who gets the cliffhanger for this volume… but he’s the equivalent of Beryl, and it seems appropriate that he has an obsession with Usagi the way that Beryl did with Mamoru. He even forces a kiss on her, much to her horror. (One note about the odd continuity here. After going to the future and getting told the plot, the senshi quickly go back to their home era… only to pretty much immediately have to return after Usagi storms off and gets captured. Why bother going back at all? No wonder Pluto gets annoyed when they arrive… the Time Gate must be a revolving door.)

We end this volume with Cibi-Usa being the one doing the running off, and running into a fortune-telling black cloud of evil called Wiseman. As with all black clouds of evil in Sailor Moon, this is not going to prove to be a good thing. Not for our heroes, not for Chibi-Usa, and especially not for Pluto. But that’s for Volume 5.

Manga the Week of 4/4

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It’s a first week of the month at Midtown, and we’ve got the usual Viz suspects, some Kodansha runoff from last month courtesy Diamond, some new Vertical titles (also a week late, also courtesy Diamond), and… two very odd releases.

Bandai may be dead, but it apparently had quite a backlog of titles to keep releasing. Thus we get Vol. 5 of both of their Code Geass doujinshi anthologies – Queen for the male readers, and Knight for the female ones. I’m going to take a wild guess that these are the final volumes we’ll see from Bandai here.

Kodansha has another volume of the Negima re-release, which updates the translation with its current version provided by the Nibley twins. This volume has Vols. 10-12 of the original, covering a great deal of the tournament battle, which, unlike many shonen tournament battle arcs, was really where Akamatsu came into his own. There’s some great stuff here.

I didn’t get a chance to use GTO as my featured image when Vol. 1 came out, so it goes here. The second volume of 14 Days in Shonan is almost nonstop action, and really packs a kick. As does its hero. There’s also the 3rd omnibus volume of Drops of God, containing the original Vol. 5 and 6. It looks as if we may finally get to see the First Apostle. As well as lots more wine.

Then there’s the huge pile o’ Viz. A Devil and Her Love Song got the image last time instead of GTO, but Vol. 2 excites me just as much as Vol. 1 did. There’s also a new Dawn of the Arcana, Kamisama Kiss, Sakura Hime, and Skip Beat!, giving you lots of shoujo goodness. If shonen is more your thing, well, this is Jump week. New Bakuman, new Bleach (still not at all caught up with the online releases), new Blue Exorcist (man, this and Kamisama Kiss come out FAST), A new Rosario + Vampire Season 2, a nicely retro new Slam Dunk Vol. 21, and the 9th Toriko. Lastly, they also have the first volume of that Voltron Forge graphic novel to excite sentai fans.

As an aside, this is my 100th post tagged ‘Manga The Week Of’. I hope it’s proven of interest to you, as it’s mostly just an excuse for me to geek out, and also keep track of what’s been coming out when. What whets your appetite to read over the Easter weekend?

Bunny Drop, Vol. 5

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By Yumi Unita. Released in Japan as “Usagi Drop” by Shodensha, serialized in the magazine Feel Young. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Quick note: Please do not write spoilers about this series in your comments. They will be deleted.

When we last left our heroes, Rin was a cute 6-year-old, enjoying school, and starting to come into her own. Daikichi was still bumbling along, but generally had gotten the hang of being a good parent and was making inroads on getting closer to single mother Nitani. And so we come to Volume 5… where ten years have passed.

Yes, it’s a giant time skip, and Rin and Kouki are now in high school. Well, I had said that the series needed to shake itself up a little, and this certainly does that. More to the point, however, it manages to shift things to an entirely different place. The basic premise is still the same… we’re seeing Rin grow and Daikichi parenting. But Daikichi has raised Rin to be a self-sufficient, strong young lady. She can take care of the cooking and cleaning when necessary. No, being the parent of a teenager brings fresh new issues. Like romance.

It is fairly obvious throughout this volume that Kouki is completely in love with Rin, and that it seems to be mostly one-sided. Not that she doesn’t like Kouki, but they get compared to brother and sister, and Rin doesn’t think that’s far off. Plus, in some of the gap filling we get in this volume, Kouki apparently has an ex-girlfriend who was not very fond of Rin, and this seems to have soured her opinion of Kouki and romance a bit. Rin is at a point where she’s not sure what she’s feeling. Honestly, the person she’s closest to is still Daikichi, whom she asks for advice. His advice is not particularly helpful, but it’s from the heart. Which sometimes is all that matters.

Then there’s Daikichi and Nitani-san. I had noted in early volumes that I wanted them to hook up, and now ten years later it hasn’t happened. This is quite frustrating to the reader. And to Kouki. And indeed to Daikichi and Nitani-san, both of whom clearly have feelings for each other. We get a flashback in the last chapter to a moment a few years back, where Nitani-san is trying to deal with Kouki acting up and being a delinquent (he’s gotten better by the present day). This scene is one of the most awkward, heartfelt yet also heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen in manga, an encapsulation of everything that doesn’t go right in romance. Sometimes even when everyone wants to… you simply can’t quite make that final leap. There’s several volumes to go, but after this, I honestly no longer expect these two to get together. Which is a shame.

When this series began, we had four volumes of cute, which fit very well with cute little six-year-old Rin. But now Rin is a teenager, which means we’re at that awkward period. And true to form, this entire volume is filled with awkward. People not quite saying the right thing, not getting their point across, unsure of how to handle something. And this is the entire cast, not just the actual teenagers. Bunny Drop has grown with its heroine, and now asks that you stick around while she deals with all these pesky feelings. I suspect I may cringe on the fallout from all of this, but I’ll be riveted nonetheless.