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Kitty Hawker

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By Takao Saito. Released in Japan by LEED Publishing, serialized via Shogakukan in the magazine Big Comic Special. Released in the United States by LEED Publishing on the JManga website.

(Note: Despite saying Vol. 1 on the JManga site, I believe the series is complete in one volume.)

The main player involved so far in JManga’s site has been Futabasha, but there are several other companies who also have made previously unseen content available. LEED Publishing was created by Takao Saito in the early 1970s to market his manga empire, which was already monumentally successful due to his action thriller Golgo 13. I’m not certain how many of his titles are done by Saito himself and how many are his huge team of artists – he’s sort of the Jim Davis of Japan, if Garfield was a stone-faced assassin, of course. (Yes, I’ve read that fanfic.)

This particular title, Kitty Hawker, dates from the mid-1990s. It ran sporadically from 1995-1998 in the magazine Big Comic Special, and is the story of Oki, a Japanese hotshot pilot who gets stranded in the United States after he accidentally breaks an incredibly expensive flight simulator due to his hotshot antics. Forced to take on jobs so he can pay off his debt and return home to his wife and child, he signs on with a tiny airport in Texas, and takes on dangerous political jobs that no sane pilot would ever take on. All the while, of course, while enduring the casual racism and looks of hatred from his immediate superiors (though he does also gain some friends as well).

Oki looks a lot like Golgo 13 (not a huge surprise – Saito’s heroes tend to have similar features), but certainly doesn’t act like him, and it took me a while to get used to him actually talking and having conversations, not to mention showing emotion. Oki is likeable enough to be a hero, but lacks Golgo 13’s super-perfection – Oki’s cockiness and tendency to mouth off to people get him in trouble quite a bit. As for the other characters, everyone in the manga is painted with rather broad strokes – there’s enough depth to keep you reading, but this is in no way a manga that lives and dies by its characters.

What it is is another action thriller, with added political content. Oki gets a job that needs to be done hush-hush, has massive political implications, and will require superhuman flying skills. And he manages to pull it off, usually with the help of his copilot and mechanic Bud. Again, we get stock characters from Action Thriller 101 here: the sexy and mysterious government agent, the nervous CIA guy who hinders more than he helps, and of course the sexy Latin American native who has an affair with the aforementioned Bud. (Oki is married, and though occasionally remarking on the attractiveness of his clients, does not stray.)

So, what you see is what you get here: a political thriller with lots of wordy dialogue followed by lots of awesome scenes of planes doing difficult to impossible stuff, all to save the world. By the end of this volume, Oki has come to terms with his exile, and tells his wife that he’ll be staying a little longer. Kitty Hawker may appeal to those who like old Westerns – it has much the same feel. Very little pretension or attempts to be anything more than a good yarn.

Bloody Monday, Vol. 1

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By Ryou Ryumon and Kouji Megumi. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Weekly Shonen Magazine. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

Take a typical John le Carré novel, only have it star a bunch of Japanese high school students, and you might come close to what’s going on in Bloody Monday. This sort of story demands a certain suspension of disbelief (indeed, this particular story might need an entire suspension bridge for your disbelief), but once you get past that and accept the premise, there’s a lot of fun stuff to be found here.

The basic premise has our hero Takagi, who is an ordinary high school student – except he has absolute world-class hacking abilities, and his father appears to be a super-spy. But other than that? He goes to class, he worries about his sister, who apparently is hospitalized often, and he spends his spare time decrypting mysterious files that are vital to national security. His friends (who, at the start of this, are mostly unaware of his talents) are a typical shonen bunch: handsome laid-back best friend, tsundere childhood female friend, shy girl who probably has a crush on him, and geeky guy.

Unfortunately, his worlds are about to intersect. There’s a virus going around that makes folks cough up blood, collapse and die, and it would seem to be engineered by a nasty enemy agent (that’s her on the cover in her lingerie)… who now shows up at Takagi’s school as the new teacher, and gives off a lovely aura of ‘I am not an enemy spy honest’ for the rest of the book. What’s more, his father has disappeared after calling to tell him “Bloody Monday” (how cryptic… if it weren’t the title), and he’s getting special deliveries of boxed agents sent to defend him from mysterious foes.

Much of this volume is simply setting up the premise of the series, so things move pretty slowly at first. Takagi and his friend Otoya are the only ones who we really get to know, though we also get a nice impression of Takagi’s father before he is forced to leave the manga for reasons of plot. Takagi seems a bit too perfect, so I actually liked them undercutting this by having him reveal everything he knows to his friends… and the new teacher who mysteriously arrived there recently. Hey, she’s an authority figure! And stacked! I imagine as the series goes on this lack of precaution will become less common.

I was reminded of last year’s aborted Del Rey series Code: Breaker a bit with the style of this manga, which is very much in the thriller style. It may seem startling that it runs in Shonen Magazine, given the children coughing up blood and dying, as well as the enemy agent in her underwear, but honestly the magazine has always been like that – it’s the most fanservicey of the three, and also sometimes hardest to pin down in terms of genre.

In the meantime, we have a series that I suspect we won’t really know how good it is until three or four volumes in. Not that there’s anything really wrong with this first volume, but it’s much like reading Chapter 1 of a le Carré novel, then having to wait two months to read Volume 2. This may be a series to collect in batches.

Bunny Drop, Vol. 4

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

Another volume of Bunny Drop, and another volume where we see Daikichi struggle with the joys and stresses of being a single dad. What’s more, life doesn’t stop just because you’re having difficulty keeping up. Will he be able to cope on his own?

I thought the start of the book was easily the strongest, with two chapters dealing with Daikichi’s cousin Haruko leaving her home for a bit and taking her daughter over to live with him and Rin. Daikichi is not generally a talkative and inquisitive person, so while we see him thinking about the awkwardness this creates, or wondering about what Haruko is going through, there’s very little actually said. The author’s strengths are frequently in the unsaid and absent, and although Haruko does reunite with her husband here, we get the feeling that her struggles will continue.

Honestly, Daikichi seems to have it pretty easy by now, even if he may not be aware of it. Rin’s a good kid who generally does what she’s told (we once again see Kouki’s still unnamed mother stressing out about getting constant meetings with the teacher), and even a bad cold doesn’t really put her down that much. She does get a few faults, such as her lack of physical ability… but even that’s dealt with here with the jump rope training, and she manages to overcome it a bit in a nice, heartwarming moment.

I will admit that the heartwarming moments are nice, but I could do with some forward plot motion. Rin’s mother wasn’t in this volume at all, and I’ve come to suspect that any potential romance between Daikichi and Kouki’s mother will mostly be hypothetical. What this means is that we get a volume that is, after the first two chapters, more ‘adorable kid raised by goofy yet nice dad’ stories. It’s perfect for Feel Young, the josei magazine it runs in, and likely worked better in monthly installments, but I admit I am starting to get weary of it.

That said, once again I get the feeling that I am not the audience for this series, and that forward movement of the plot is not the point. ‘The day passes, something else happens’ is a very common genre in Japan, especially in manga with children, and even though Daikichi is our viewpoint character here, that’s exactly what we get. We sympathize with him, grow frustrated sometimes, but mostly we’re watching Rin grow up alongside him. And while Rin may not have quite enough faults, she’s certainly cute as a button. Let’s see if Volume 5 can bring something new to the table, though.

(No spoilers in the comments, by the way. They will be deleted.)