Alice in the Country of Diamonds: Bet on My Heart

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By Sana Shirakawa, Quin Rose, and Nana Fumitsuki, based on the game by Quin Rose. Released in Japan by Ichijinsha. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

The Alice spinoffs, which is to say everything but the 6 main books that Tokyopop/Yen Press put out, have always had an issue to deal with which is to say that they’re made for readers in Japan who have played the original games that the series is based on. North America hasn’t really had that luxury, even though we do now have a somewhat machine-translated tablet version of the Hearts game. So there’s always a risk that you read something that requires, if not prior knowledge, at least passing familiarity with the game world you’re in. Or, as in the case of this light novel, you have a product that lots of times seems to read like an advertisement for a game you can’t get over here.

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That isn’t to say this isn’t a good novel, it’s quite well-written. The prose flows well (excellent translation by William Flanagan), and Alice and Blood, the main stars, sound like themselves. The premise, as you may have guessed, has Alice dropped in another world, a la Clover or Joker. But whereas Hearts had Alice looking for a passionate love, and Clover had Alice develop a relationship based on friendship turning to love, here she’s further in the past of Wonderland, no one knows who she is, and everyone starts out disliking her intensely. (Hence “Diamonds”.) Alice has her hands full trying to deal with this, and it’s not helped by ending up at Hatter Mansion with a Blood Dupre who’s far less adept at being aloof yet teasing than she remembers.

This book is drenched in the Blood/Alice ship, and fans of other ships won’t get much here. Eliot fans should particularly stay away, as he’s abused and beaten by Blood throughout, usually when he’s trying to shoot Alice. As for new characters, the White Queen and her Black Rabbit barely get a look, so most of what we get is Jericho Bermuda, the Gravekeeper, who seems to be based on Carroll’s dodo bird. He’s Alice’s oasis of calm in the excitement of dealing with Hatter mobster wars, and it’s frustrating that most of the hints we get about him being a “walking dead man” are not answered here.

There aren’t the sharp edges I like in some of the other Alice spinoffs – Alice doesn’t think of Lorina once, and most of her worries once she’s fallen in love come from a fear that she’ll switch countries again. The Hatter family are more battle ready and drenched in blood than the earlier games, as they’re still gaining power. But mostly I think this is a good book that makes a reader yearn to play the game. We want to see what’s up with the White Queen switching between child and adult form, like the Twins used to do. (They’re just adults here.) We’d like to see why the Black Rabbit seems to hate Alice (inverse of Peter, I expect.) Joker was mentioned to be here as well, but remains unseen. Jericho looks to be the author rewriting Mary Gowland to be less irritating, but who knows?

So this is a very good novel for Alice fans who want to dip into prose, or Alice/Blood shippers. But it also frustrated me, as it offers many questions without answers as well.

No Game No Life, Vol. 1

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By Yuu Kamiya and Mashiro Hiiragi. Released in Japan by Media Factory, serialized in the magazine Comic Alive. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

Ah, Comic Alive, my old nemesis. We meet again. I see this time you’ve brought a title that I would probably find quite interesting were it not for the grotesque fanservice that is sprinkled throughout and unavoidable. Again. In fact, that seems to be your only weapon, really, though I was pleased by your one victory in the ‘yuri’ genre. Can’t we have more like Whispered Words and less like this? And so as ever, I’m left to figure out if there’s enough remaining in the title to pull me in, or if I’m going to be driven off by an excess of panty flashing, underage nudity, and boob groping. All of which No Game No Life has plenty of.

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This is another in the increasingly popular genre of ‘gamers suddenly find themselves in a game world’, but with a slight twist. Our brother/sister heroes don’t find themselves in the game they were playing (and crushing everyone – they’re master gamers), but in a fantasy world where war has been replaced by games – any games, and the stakes can be quite high. As they struggle to figure out the history and rules of this new world, they meet the story’s designated victim, Princess Stephanie, who has just lost her kingdom due to being too naive, honest, and tsundere. Luckily for her, they’re not only master gamers, but total savants – with a few minor quirks.

Let’s break down the quirks, which are really the best and worst reasons to pick up this title. Sora is another overly perverse virgin whose first thought on winning a ‘ask anything of the pretty girl’ game is to ask the girl to fall in love with him. Shiro, while occasionally playing the jealous sister card, seems OK with him groping and assaulting said girl as long as it goes through her first. They are supposedly siblings (I will be very unsurprised if this turns out not to be true later on) but Sora professes he has no sexual desire towards Shiro… but that doesn’t stop them being all over each other anyway, thus gaining the best of both worlds for those who like that fetish.

So where’s the good? For all their smug confidence, much of which is justified, Sora and Shiro are two very broken teens (Shiro is 11, but whatever). If they’re apart from each other at all, they both have crippling breakdowns – we saw at the start they were a NEET (him) and a truant (her). Indeed, Shiro may actually have some sort of disorder – I’m not sure if her broken speech is meant to be a cute affectation or something more basic. And Ias I said earlier, they really do seem to be as good as they say they are – Shiro memorized a book almost instantly, and Sora, while not as good as that, is still said to be able to pick it up in a few hours.

So the question remains, what will the story do with these two? If it develops as a tale of how they deal with this world and its inhabitants while working to get over their social phobias, that’s quite a good possibility. That said, I expect the service is not going away and may even get worse. There is a light novel coming this spring, too. In the end, I suppose if you read Comic Alive stuff, you’ll enjoy this. If not, it might be interesting for the siblings, but I’d wait a few volumes to see if that pans out.

Manga Dogs, Vol. 1

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By Ema Toyama. Released in Japan as “GDGD-DOGS” by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Aria. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

Ema Toyama’s career over here in North America has been a bit slow to build. Pixie Pop came out back in the Tokyopop days, and if I recall had a heroine who was a bit flat. Del Rey then brought over I Am Here!, whose heroine, while slightly better, was still not quite there. Then came Missions of Love, which introduced us to the love quadrangle from hell. Yukina is on a whole other level from her other heroines, and even though some fans are grumping about her losing her ‘snow princess’ facade as she falls in love, there’s no doubt she’s fascinating. And now we have Kanna, the heroine of Manga Dogs, a high school girl who’s also an active manga artist with a story in the back end of a shoujo magazine. What will her character development be like?

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As it turns out, any character developemnt is completely irrelevant! Because Manga Dogs is not another shoujo romantic comedy. Toyama has said in the past how Kumeta Koji is one of her favorite authors, particularly Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei and Katteni Kaizo. It shows here. Manga Dogs is an episodic gag manga mocking the manga industry, with Kanna surrounded by three pretty but vapid young men who are determined to become rich and famous drawing manga. The goal here is not to see which young man in the reverse harem Kanna will end up with, but to see if she can keep her sanity and health (already somewhat iffy given her weekly deadlines).

I’d joked on Twitter that, like Missions of Love, Manga Dogs had a main cast who were basically horrible, but Kanna is the Tsukkomi here, which makes a difference. By now the Western audience should be used to this type of humor, but I will say that if you dislike jokes that are framed as “Character A says something stupid, character B shouts at them that the thing they said is stupid”, with optional table flip, this isn’t the title for you. Kanna is mostly the straight man, though even she backslides at times, such as when she’s gathering reference photographs, or forgets she’s not drawing a BL manga.

Toyama jokes in her endnotes about Bakuman, and there is the occasional nod at showing what the life of a manga author is like, but it always takes a backseat to the gags. There are also many little references that fans of manga will get interspersed throughout – my favorite was the gentle mocking of the magazine Manga Dogs runs in, Aria. Aria is a smallish, cult shoujo magazine (though the Levi manga may have changed that), and the boys comparing it to Shonen Jump and Shonen Sunday is ridiculous (we do, at last, get a new guy who mentions Magazine – but he turns out to be a villain).

There’s not much to this manga in the end – so far the emotional depth is zero – but no one’s going to read it for that anyway. They have Missions of Love for that. This is 100% stupid comedy, and it does it quite well. It’s also only 3 volumes long, so won’t risk going on long past what folks expected, like… well, also like Missions of Love.