Everyone’s Getting Married, Vol. 1

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By Izumi Miyazono. Released in Japan as “Totsuzen Desu Ga, Ashita Kekkon Shimasu” by Shogakukan, serialization ongoing in the magazine Petit Comic. Released in North America by Viz.

The ruke of thumb, be it in a shoujo comic set in school or a josei comic set in the workplace or really in any other piece of fiction ever, is that happy people are boring. Conflict is what drives a story, and anybody who insists that they know exactly what they’re going to get out of life is likely due for cruel disappointment. Of course, the goal after this is to make sure that the main characters read like real people and that you aren’t constantly slapping your forehead. We’ve seen quite a few Petit Comic titles over in North America over the last few years, and while I’ve enjoyed them to a greater or lesser degree, there has been quite a bit of forehead slapping. Everyone’s Getting Married, though, seems to be made of sterner stuff.

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Our heroine, Asuka, is a highly successful businesswoman, but what she really longs to do is settle down, get married, and be a housewife. The narrative points out several times that this is because of her own home upbringing and a definite choice she wants to make, rather than anything like “women shouldn’t be working” or other tropes you’d expect to see at this point. The guy who breaks up with her at the start of the book says she’s looking for “anyone who’d put a ring on her finger”, but we see over the course of the volume that’s not true – she has standards, and most guys fail to live up to them. The trouble is, this is modern Japan, and most guys she meets aren’t looking for a wife to stay at home and keep house.

Enter our hero, Ryu. He’s a highly successful newscaster with a reputation as a playboy, but he’s actually just the sort of man that Asuka is looking for. There’s just one problem, of course – he is absolutely not looking for marriage, for both professional reasons (as a handsome face who gets female viewers, ratings would drop if he was “unavailable”) and personal reasons (a hinted bad relationship with a married woman before the book begins). However, aside from that, he’s basically exactly what Asuka is loking for. And it’s mutual, as he’s quite attracted to Asuka as well, but both of them are holding themselves back due to their insistence on marriage/no marriage respectively.

The characters in this book are what makes it. We see Asuka’s friend begin to date Ryu’s roommate in here as well, and there relationship proceeds far smoother, even though Asuka’s friend has said, much like Ryu, she’s not looking for anything permanent. But, because she’s also open to compromise and not locked into stubbornness, things can move forward in surprising ways. This is a title you read to see how the hero and heroine can compromise their principles in order to gain the happiness that’s right in front of their nose – after which, no doubt, the story will end, because the conflict is over. Definitely awaiting the next volume.

Black Clover, Vol. 1

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By Yuki Tabata. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. Released in North America by Viz.

If you’ve been reading manga for a long time, you not only start to read series that are clearly influenced by another, but also series that are influenced by their successors. When Fairy Tail debuted, a lot of people were highly amused at how blatantly it wore its One Piece influence on its sleeve (despite the author not remotely being a newbie, as Rave Master fans can tell you). Well, now Fairy Tail is 54 volumes and counting, and it’s starting to have artists who are influenced by its own plot and attitude. Which brings us to Black Clover, a story of a firey hothead who ends up in a magic guild that’s home to a bunch of eccentrics. But in Jump, not in Magazine, so it’s OK.

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As I’ve noted consistently in these reviews, unoriginal and cliched does not always mean bad, particularly in the manga industry, and Black Clover did hold my interest throughout, and was a good deal of fun. But it was highly amusing coming up with a drinking game on the fly when each previously overused cliche kept dropping into the bucket. Asta, our hero, is a kid who in any other series would be happy, upbeat and relaxed, but in this particular series suffers from having no magic talent in a world where magic talent defines your place in life, and therefore he is defined more by extreme frustration adn slight obnoxiousness, which thankfully gets a bit better when he actually discovers what he can do – anti-magic.

The other characters are also types, but they seem to be the sort of types that will grow and develop into real people as the series goes on. Asta’s best friend is cool and collected, and has a giant pile of magic talent – needless to say, there’s a seemingly wide gulf in their friendship, but this is Jump, so it’s only seemingly. We also meet the supposedly terrifying master of the “evil magic guild”, who actually turns out to be the master of a lovable gang of magic users who are Just Misunderstood (TM). And then there’s Noelle, who’s from a royal family but is running into the same issues Asta has – she has magic, but can’t control it, so is thought of as useless. Putting on a haughty princess attitude to mask feeling worthless – again, not unfamiliar.

I suspect that defending the ‘have-nots’ will make up a good chunk of this manga. We see a group of villains toward the end who think nothing of using a village of commoners simply as they’re in the way, and they’re typical good, sneering villains who inspire our hero and heroine to level up. One thing I did like is Asta’s response to not having any magic for years and years – he’s been developing his body to the point where he’s freakishly strong (though he still looks like a typical wiry Jump hero), which manages to surprise many. (He also hits on nuns, but I suspect that aspect of him will go away as the series goes on.)

Black Clover may be trying to be Fairy Tail for Jump, the same way that Fairy Tail was One Piece for Magazine. but it’s off to a decent start, and I’m happy to see where it goes next.

Anne Happy, Vol. 1

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By Cotoji. Released in Japan by Houbunsha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Manga Time Kirara Forward. Released in North America by Yen Press.

There is a sort of subgenre of school life manga that flits across all genres, be it shonen, seinen or shoujo. This is the ‘separate class filled with special students’ genre. They can be special in the bad way, as with Assassination Classroom’s 3-E class of low-graders, special in a superpowered way, with both Medaka Box’s Class 13 and Class -13, or special in the doomed way, as with many a survival game manga where the class finds itself in a situation where they all die one by one (Battle Royale, Dangan Ronpa, etc.). And now we have Anne Happy, a mostly lighthearted comedy about a group of girls who are all ‘unlucky’ in some way, be it poor health, misdirection, or what have you. The title character (though not, oddly, the protagonist so far) is Anne, a girl whose bad luck is SO bad that it almost comes out the other side.

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Our heroine is Ruri, who at first seems out of place in this class, till we realize that she has a fetish for the construction sign of a cartoon worker who directs you to move out of the area. I hesitated to reveal this, as honestly it’s the best joke of the volume, and it’s really the only thing keeping her in the class at all, as otherwise she’s a fairly normal, if dour, young girl. Anne is just like you’d expect from a series like this: overly upbeat and peppy to an unreasonable degree, whether she’s being picked as 49th most lucky in a class with only 40 people in it or accidentally falling into a river and almost getting mauled by a bear. There’s also Botan, who is the ‘calm airhead’ sort (apologies if I call her Mugi by accident) whose body is so fragile that a mild handshake can break all her fingers.

Everyone in this class has been put there supposedly to change their bad luck and find happiness, which mostly seems to involve a series of endurance tests given by their semi-sadistic teacher (who seems to have a split personality). There’s a sense that Anne is worse than the others – she is the title character, after all – and at one point she loses her hair clip and her luck turns to negative fifty zillion. Honestly, though, the plot is mostly an excuse for a series of school gags based around goofy, unlucky girls. We also meet Hibiki, a tsundere sort who seems to be in love with her Takarazuka-esque classmate Ren. I assume that everyone will get to know each other better in the 2nd volume.

This isn’t really a must-read, even for fans of comedies like this one. But it’s pleasant enough, and there weren’t many points where I was irritated or wanted to stop reading. And, aside from a few jokes about Botan’s chest, there’s less fanservice than you’d normally expect in a title like this, possible as Kirara Forward lacks that sort of thing in general. Anne Happy falls into the category of ‘Not bad, will try another volume’ for now.