Monthly Archives: March 2013

New Licenses from Dark Horse and Yen Press

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Another week, another con. Two cons, in fact. Sakuracon was the place to be for manga folks, though, as both Dark Horse and Yen had panels with brand new announcements! (Viz had a panel as well, but they already did their big announcements last month, so did not have anything new on the print manga front.)

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New print titles to start. Fans of Lone Wolf and Cub will be pleased to see that Dark Horse has licensed the sequel, New Lone Wolf and Cub. Old-school manga followers may note that they announced this back in 2006, but it got put on the back burner for reasons that have to do with the Japanese licensor, I’m guessing. It has the same writer but a different artist, and ran in the magazine Jin till that folded, whereupon it moved to the online magazine Katana. Expect much samurai action.

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Vocaloid is a fandom that has taken off both here and in Japan to an unprecedented degree, so it’s no surprise that someone was going to pick up a cute comic manga featuring the leads, though Dark Horse being the one may be a bit of a surprise. They’ve tried to shed their grim ‘n’ gritty manga image quite a few times recently, so my guess is this is another opportunity. Maker Hikoushiki Hatsune Mix ran in Comic Rush magazine a few years back, and sounds like it’s cute slice-of-idol life stuff.

The big news from Dark Horse may be on the digital front, though. They’ve already added quite a few of their Kadokawa titles to their online store, including Evangelion spinoffs, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, and Ghost Talker’s Daydream. Trigun and Hellsing are also now on there, as is Appleseed, the classic Shirow title. That said, two of their biggest series were still missing. Well, that’s going to change. Starting next month we’ll be seeing Oh My Goddess! and Blade of the Immortal digitally. Given the length of both series, digital may definitely be the way to go in order to gain new readers.

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Yen, meanwhile, had three new announcements, a couple of which will be quite exciting to fans who’ve seen the anime adaptations of these. Inu x Boku SS is a Gangan Joker series, still ongoing at 8+ volumes (I smell an omnibus release from Yen), and it’s got everything. Yokai schoolgirls, Fox-tailed secret service butler bodyguards, reincarnation, star-crossed love, and boarding houses. It also has quite a plot twist halfway through, which I won’t spoil here.

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Do you love long drawn out manga titles that end in an exclamation point? Japan certainly does, and lately North America has started to as well. So on the heels of Oniichan no Koto Nanka Zenzen Suki ja Nain Dakara ne!! and Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai comes Gangan Online’s Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dou Kangaete mo Omaera ga Warui!, aka WataMote, aka It’s Not My Fault I’m Not Popular!. This one stars a high schooler who is a master of otome game life, but fails at real life, possibly as she looks like a giant Gloomy Gus. The humor comes when she resolves to try and turn her life around and become sociable. This was a long-awaited title, and does not seem, at first glance, to be filled with incest, so I’m hoping Yen is on to a winner here.

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And for those who enjoyed the Wolf Children movie, Yen has licensed the 3-volume manga adaptation of it, Oukami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki, which ran in Kadokawa’s Young Ace. It’ll come out in a convenient one-volume omnibus, and is the touching story of a young mother trying to bring up her children… who are part-wolf. Judging by the cover art, I think ‘heartwarming’ is the word of the day for this series.

Lastly, they’ve rescued the Kingdom Hearts manga titles, and plan to start releasing those, with both stuff that already came out via Tokyopop and new material.

2013 solicits are almost over, as we’re seeing November release date news now! What’s your top license of the year?

Higurashi: When They Cry, Vol. 21

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Story by Ryukishi07; Art by Hinase Momoyama. Released in Japan as “Higurashi no Naku Koro ni: Minagoroshi-hen” by Square Enix, serialized in the magazine GFantasy. Released in North America by Yen Press.

And so we come to the end of the penultimate Higurashi arc, and – no surprise here – everyone is dead. And I do mean everyone, as this volume, having finally given away most of the secrets, goes into great detail how the “disaster” that wipes out the village actually occurs. Things are not particularly improved by Takano, who is waving her arms around during all this as if she’s a conductor, and has a final face that is perhaps the template for all “crazy Higurashi faces”. But let’s jump back a bit and see how we got here.

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Rika and Hanyuu both feature on Yen’s chosen omnibus cover art (sorry, Takano, you just aren’t cute enough), with Rika having a resolved, determined face and Hanyuu looking depressed and dead inside. Most of this volume is showing us how Rika gets that determined, as getting the news about Tomitake’s death just seems to take all the fight out of her. Especially when she hears Oishii’s theories about who did it. A lot of fans have gotten on Rika’s case about being unable to figure out the killer, who seems really obvious in retrospect, and that she should have pieced it together after so many worlds in a row. Of course, as we see here, this is the first world where she’s not drugged up at the time of her execution. More to the point, she may have a hundred worlds of experience, but they’re the experience of a girl who only gets to about 12 years old. Rika has years, but not maturity, and it shows clearly here, when she resolves to hide everything from her friends so they don’t get killed.

That’s hardly going to work, however, given what happened with Satoko just a few days ago. Indeed, Satoko points this out to Rika directly, and Keiichi and the others make it clear that they’re not going to sit there and let Rika be sacrificed. We even have Rika quoting one of Bernkastel’s poems – usually reserved for the start and end of each arc, and indeed we get one at the end as well – which talks about who has a right to happiness. It’s easy to stand up against someone when it’s for the sake of others. When you do it for yourself, it can seem selfish, especially if it will put your friends in danger. Rika has to break through that barrier before she can accomplish anything.

We are – finally! – starting to get answers here, and indeed most of the pieces are together now. Not only is Takano the villain, but so are the “Wild Dog” bodyguards, who have always resembled a militia a bit too much for my taste. (I like how they are mook enough to have Keiichi and company take them out in order to rescue Rika, but not actually mook enough to have that last more than a few minutes – in the end, the kids lose.) And Hinamizawa Syndrome, the disease that causes the paranoia and killing impulses, is explained as well. This leads to why Rika keeps getting ritually slaughtered on an altar – Takano has gone mad and believes that if she kills the Queen Carrier, she’ll gain godlike powers.

And then there’s Hanyuu. We still don’t know much about her. She’s the incarnation of Oyashiro-sama, but strangely powerless, except for her ability to reset the worlds. She’s also even more worn down than Rika, and is also terrified that if she loses Rika this time she’ll be alone again… as she was for about a thousand years. Rena calls her out on this, as she too has the reoccurring theme of the Massacre arc – fighting back hurts too many people, it’s best not to have any hope. We’ve just proven how wrong this is, even if it did end badly. What’s more, we don’t really have much background on why the hell Takano is doing this, aside from “She’s insane”.

Luckily, we have one more arc – the longest yet, 8 volumes/4 omnibuses! – that should tell us about them, and will hopefully finally give us something that the characters and readers truly deserve after all this tragedy – a happy ending. Stay tuned for Vol. 1 of the awkwardly titled “Festival Accompanying” arc, where we meet a young girl named Miyoko Tanashi, and find out what makes her tick.

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Vol. 10

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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.

In the last volume of Sailor Moon, we had chapters each devoted to the development of a senshi, be it Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, or the Outers. That having been done, it’s time for an action-packed climax to the SuperS arc. Now, this can also be a drawback. Takeuchi’s battles do tend to have a certain sameness to them, and in many ways this is just another variation on “our light is purer than your dark”. So with that in mind, let me talk about all the other things that I loved about this volume.

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First of all, the entire arc has been a look at the dreams and nightmares of the world, with the Dark Moon Circus dealing out both with impunity. We’re definitely on the nightmare end of the scale for this volume, with many grotesque, horrific images that look even better in Takuuchi’s long-limbed shoujo style. Seeing Usagi’s face melting off was what caused me to buy a copy of the manga in my comic store years ago (this was an older Japanese tankobon, I think), and it hits Venus and the rest of the senshi right where they live – the Princess is dead, they failed to protect her. (A flashback showing the very Sleeping Beauty-esque appearance of Nehelenia in the Silver Millennium only reinforces that – also, Venus and the others as chibi-Senshi are adorable.) Usagi, meanwhile, is caught in what seems an idealistic dream – she and Mamoru are the same age, and he makes her breakfast before they go to school together. But she immediately starts to see through it, even if regretfully – Mamoru was never that sicky sweet. It’s a childish Usagi dream, and she’s moved beyond that.

The other senshi mostly get to stand around and gape, but there are occasional moments of awesome. Venus and Uranus are the clear team leaders of their respective groups, and there’s a brief moment where we see they don’t really get along. We also see a magic mirror that needs to be broken, and after senshi attacks fail to do the job Jupiter goes with her Plan A – punch it really hard. (Who needs superpowers when you have MONSTER STRENGTH?) But the big winner here is Saturn, who is back, is around Chibi-Usa’s age, and is clearly the most savvy of the entire group – so much so that she and Chibi-Moon actually have to be banished from the plot for half the book (in another really creepy and well-drawn sequence where they’re imprisoned in shards of mirror). She confronts the Amazoness Quartet, abut can see them for who they really are – and almost manages to get them to remember before Nehelenia steps in and turns them into dull black orbs. (Also, she gets to do something in the volume on which she’s the cover star – a rarity for this re-released series.)

After Nehelenia is defeated (sorry, honey, no redemption for you here), we see everyone transformed into their ‘royalty’ dresses (we actually see it earlier as well, and it’s worth noting a couple of things. First, Serenity apparently has powers so vast that she can give her retinue prom formal gowns almost by default. Secondly, everyone gets white gowns bar Pluto and Saturn’s, which are black. I’d like to think there’s meaning to that beyond “breaking up the color scheme”), Saturn is still in her senshi outfit as she has another duty – have Serenity purify the orbs. And after she does so, we see the true forms of the Amazoness Quartet – the Asteroid Senshi, Chibi-Moon’s own inner retinue from the future. (This is actually not explained quite as well as I’d like, and is another weakness of this volume.) Add that to Helios, who is at last free to not be a giant magic horse and romance Chibi-Moon as himself – and one purpose of this arc is to give Chibi-Usa her own group to turn to in Crystal Tokyo that’s not simply her parents and guardians. She’s free to grow up.

For a volume that seems to be, on flip through, about half ‘senshi gape at encroaching darkness’ pictures over and over, there was a lot going on here. We’ve got two volumes of the main storyline to go, which will be the last arc, Stars. I’m especially looking forward to these as it’s the arc I re-read the least first time round, so I want to see what new insights I can find in it. (I also want a street date for the Takeuchi artbook – some of the title pages in this cry out for big color prints.) Still a can’t miss shoujo classic.