L♥DK, Vol. 1

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By Ayu Watanabe. Released in Japan by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Bessatsu Friend. Released in North America by Kodansha.

God knows that I am not the type of person to fault a manga for being too predictable. The industry runs on predictability, and anyone looking for a good adventure, comedy or romance title knows from the start at least the gist of what they’re going to get into. I’m used to many shoujo romances having the same sort of shape. But there’s an agreement you make with the author there, which is that there’s something in this series that will pull you in despite the predictability, be it dialogue, depth of characterization, degree of exaggeration, etc. If everything about a series is something that you can connect the dots, where you guess what’s going to happen 4 pages before it does… well, you probably have something like L♥DK.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Our heroine confronts our hero, who has just rejected her best friend’s confession, and they exchange words. She then goes back to her apartment to find that he’s now living next door. Though a not-so-amazing series of coincidences, his apartment gets ruined and they wind up living together as she feels it was her fault. Now she must keep it a secret from everyone she knows, which is hard as she’s starting to fall for him. It’s also hard because he enjoys flustering and teasing her to such an extent that it would be called bullying if this weren’t a shoujo romance.

Shusei is the guy, and oh my god. I haven’t thrown a book across the room in frustration in quite some time, but when he climbed into her bath and situated himself behind her while her best friend was knocking on the door, I did just that. I get that ‘bully the girl you love’ is a popular trope, and being a straight white male, I am absolutely not the one who gets to say whether it’s good or bad. As always, tropes are good and bad depending on the writing. But this seems a bit over the top even for this genre. Things aren’t helped later on when the two are accidentally handcuffed together by their landlady’s kid, and my first thought was ‘he has the key and is just doing this out of amusement and a really bizarre desire to stay with her’. And sure enough!

Now, this could be OK if we had a really good heroine, and Aoi shows flashes on occasion, mostly at the beginning. But honestly, I think she falls for this guy way too fast, particularly given this series is 18 volumes and counting in Japan. Most of the character beats are “Argh he is so frustrating” – he does something intimate – blushing and flustered – he is rude. Repeat as needed. And I’ve gotten to the point where if I have a blushing, flustered heroine who spends most of her time wondering why she’s in this situation, I can’t also have a guy who is ‘I tease and bully because I love’. This is a very popular shoujo type, and I suspect this series will do quite well here. But it’s just a no-sell for me. I’ve seen it all too often before. And not in a good way.

Kiss Him, Not Me!, Vol. 1

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By Junko. Released in Japan as “Watashi ga Motete Dousunda” by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Bessatsu Friend. Released in North America by Kodansha.

It’s always tricky trying to do an over the top comedy that plays with tropes. You run the risk of people not getting the joke, or latching on to the very thing that you’re making fun of, or simply not going far enough. This new title from Kodansha sometimes falls into that pitfall trap, as occasionally it sympathizes with its heroine’s plight a bit too much, or doesn’t hammer hard enough on its basic premise. But for the most part Kiss Him, Not Me! manages to mock reverse harems while avoiding being a copy of The Wallflower, a series that ran in the same magazine and which has a lot in common with this.

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The author, as she says in the afterword, has basically been a BL rtist before this title, drawing smutty titles for Gentosha and Prince of Tennis and Haikyuu! doujinshi. Now she has a mainstream title about a chubby girl who loves her BL pairings until one day her favorite character is killed off, whereupon she doesn’t leave her room or eat for seven days, and comes out looking thin and gorgeous. It’s the sort of plotline I’d recently criticized with Let’s Dance a Waltz, and I don’t like it here either – stop doing this sort of thing. That said, Let’s Dance a Waltz read like it was saying “if you too dance for two weeks straight, this can be you!”. Kiss Him, Not Me is telling readers “This is completely ridiculous, don’t do this”.

As for its cast, they’re well sorted out by personality, if not always by art – I sometimes had trouble telling the two blond and two brunet guys apart. There’s no sense yet that one of them is the obvious romantic lead for her, mostly as, well, that’s the premise – she doesn’t really want to date any of them, she wants to ship them. She and her BL friend (who makes a decent straight man) argue about who should go with who, and who’s the seme and who’s the uke. Of course, they’re discussing real-life people rather than characters in a fictional universe. I’m not sure if future volumes will show the discomfort that can arise from this sort of thing, but if so, I doubt it will be hammered on very long – the purpose of this series is laughs.

If there’s one big weakness to this series, as I hinted earlier, it’s that I don’t think it quite goes far enough in its attempts to be over the top. I was expecting more BL tease than what we got here, frankly – it’s all in her head, of course, but we need to see a bit more of it. As for Kae herself, she’s basically placed in the position of female fantasy, as a gorgeous girl who suddenly has the four hottest guys in school all going after her. As such, I’d like to see a few more obstacles in her way. Sports and Study plots come up towards the end of this volume, but both are taken care of in such a way that she wins out completely. Compared to, say, Sunako in The Wallflower, Kae doesn’t exactly have it tough here. Still, if you want silly shoujo that will make you laugh, and don’t mind more magic weight-loss, this is a decent title to try.

Tokyo ESP, Vol. 1

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By Hajime Segawa. Released in Japan in two separate volumes by Kadokawa Shoten, serialization ongoing in the magazine Shonen Ace. Released in North America by Vertical Comics.

Sometimes it’s quite pleasant being totally ignorant of a title before digging into it. It’s very much unlike me, as I’m the sort who always spoils himself and reads the endings first, so when I preorder a title there’s usually a certain amount of research done on my part. Tokyo ESP is, I found, by the creator of Ga-Rei, another Shonen Ace volume about ghosts and demons that ran for about a dozen volumes and is available on Bookwalker’s online site. But I didn’t really look into Tokyo ESP much before I read it. It also involves ‘kids with powers’, but in this case they’re full fledged superhero powers. I’m not sure if there has been an uptick in Western-style superhero manga recently, or if we’re just actually seeing the titles licensed over here, but it’s interesting to compare My Hero Academia, which trains people to use their powers in a school, to Tokyo ESP, where the heroes are outcasts and have to hide everything.

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There’s a lot I enjoyed in this first omnibus volume. The heroine is great throughout. The daughter of a cop who’s fallen on hard times, much of the humor in the title comes from her obsessive penny-pinching and attempts to hold down jobs – attempts which get far more difficult when she suddenly finds she can pass through walls, floors, etc. This turns out to have been the result of her seeing a swarm of flying fish in the sky one evening, one of whom went through her and seemingly gave her said powers. Now she teams up with an eccentric but handsome guy who seems to have a tragic past (and who can teleport) to fight off villains who want to become supervillains, and mysterious girls who want to change the world, in a totally ominous way.

There’s a lot of humor in this volume, as I said before. The art helps – much of the fun comes from watching the goofy reaction faces that Rinka and the other characters put on. Sometimes the humor slips over into outright parody, such as when the Ghostbusters show up to attempt to capture the penguin you see on the cover, who’s also involved in this to a degree. And by that I mean the actual cast – they’re clearly drawn to be Harold Ramis and Dan Ackroyd (the Bill Murray likeness is less clear.) And there’s also the usual hijinks based humor you’d expect in a title like this – the superpowers can be hilarious, particularly Rinka’s dad, who winds up causing chaos due to his being able to attract things to him – i.e., cars.

That said, there’s a lot of death in this volume as well, and I would not be surprised if this is one of those series that gets darker the further it goes on. But it’s a solid series to start with, particularly if you enjoy supernatural action-adventure type stories. The action is well-handled as well, as Rinka’s been trained in various martial arts which she uses in addition to her superpowers, and there’s lots of fire and explosions too. I look forward to seeing what faces Rinka makes in the next volume.