Manga the Week of 8/8

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Midtown and Diamond are conspiring against me. Their list is wrong. It’s missing Viz. Perhaps they will add it later. In the meantime, I’m adding it to mine, as it makes up 3/4 of the list.

Gen manga has a collection of their manga Wolf, which seems to be a boxing manga? Intriguing, though I admit to knowing nothing about it.

Kodansha has the first volume of their new Phoenix wright spinoff manga, this one starring prosecutor Miles Edgeworth. They’ve also got a new Deltora Quest, as well as the 5th Negima omnibus. For those buying for updated translations, they apparently end with Vol. 4, so if you were just double dipping, I think you can safely stop.

Vertical has a power trio of manga finally hitting Diamond’s shops. Volume 2 of creepy high school mind game manga Flowers of Evil; and a 1-2 punch of Onizuka, as he struggles with high school in GTO Early Years 13 and then proves his badass qualities as a teacher in GTO 14 Days in Shonan 4. Be warned, though. There may be a dick joke. Or two.

Given Kaze Hikaru is on Viz’s once-per-year schedule now, I think its release deserves an image. Other shoujo and josei manga coming out includes Ai Ore!, Dawn of the Arcana, A Devil and Her Love Song, the final volume of Haruka Beyond the Stream of Time (sorry about not getting the image, Haruka, but hey), Kamisama Kiss, and La Corda D’oro.

On the shonen side, there’s also plenty to choose from. Two more volumes of Bleach, a new Nura, some Slam Dunk and Tegami Bachi. Toriko hopefully moves past that endless fight and back into food. Ultimo gives you your Stan Lee, manga-style. And Yu-Gi-Oh GX is… still about a card game, right?

Now, it’s possible Diamond won’t ship any of these, in which case I apologize. My shop is at least getting Kamisama Kiss and Nura, though, so maybe some will appear. In any case, I’m just tired of saying ‘another small week’. So, big week! What’re you getting?

Jiu Jiu, Vol. 1

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By Touya Tobina. Released in Japan by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazines Hana to Yume and The Hana to Yume. Released in North America by Viz.

Those who follow my reviews know that I tend to be very fond of shoujo manga published by Hakusensha, despite the fact that most of my favorites were put out by companies which them folded. Astute readers may also recall my #1 complaint with said Hakusensha manga, which is that the artists need more editing than they are really given, and that much of their work, especially in early volumes, tends to be messy, unfocused, and uneven. Unfortunately, Jiu Jiu is a classic example of this sort of manga.

The author, Touya Tobina, has been seen here briefly before – her story Clean Freak: Fully Equipped had one of its two volumes put out by Tokyopop before they shuttered down. That story was more grounded in the real world. Jiu Jiu is a full blown fantasy, featuring a girl who aspires to be a demon hunter and her two wolf pets/bodyguards/whatevers, who can assume human form when they want to. It ran for two volumes in Hana to Yume, then for reasons unknown moved to the quarterly publication The Hana To Yume, where it recently ended last month with Volume 5. The premise involves a young woman who’s trying to block herself off from emotions in order to deal with her tragic past, and the two wolf boys, who want to be helpful and discover these new feelings of love within them, but are foiled by their playful natures.

I think I make that sound better than it actually it, unfortunately. Takamichi ends up being more of an emotional wreck than a stoic hunter. While this makes sense given she’s a teen who’s undergone a traumatic experience (which we still don’t get all the details about in this volume), it is a bit of a disappointment seeing her fall into the traits that I’ve associated with the basic ‘tsundere’ type. As for the two wolves/wolf boys, this falls more into the sort of shoujo romance tropes that were cliched 15 years ago. She constantly wakes up with them naked in her bed, they continue to act like wolves (well, OK, dogs really) even when in human form, etc.

The biggest problem, I think, is that this ends up being far more comedic than I’d assumed given its premise, and the comedy just isn’t all that funny. When it turns to serious matters, its quality improves significantly. Snow and Night, the two wolf boys, have a tough job, given their mistress is trying to shut out anyone close to her but they need to protect her (and make her understand why they want to). My favorite scene in the volume is where the three have to track down a werewolf (an evil one, let’s make that clear) who has been killing people during full moons. After reaffirming their devotion to their mistress, who seems to want them to remain innocent puppies, we cut back to the now defeated and transformed werewolf, who is a salaryman type. He begs for mercy, but Takamichi coldly informs him that her family are killers, and orders the man executed. It’s chilling stuff.

Unfortunately, there was more ‘wacky high school comedy with hot guys behaving like dogs’ and less ‘family of demon slayers’ here. Now, given that I am a big proponent of ‘never judge a series by its Volume 1’, I am hoping that things improve down the road. For the moment, Jiu Jiu is an excellent example of average Hakusensha shoujo – good plot, interesting ideas, but desperately needs an editor to take a firm hand.

Soul Eater Not!, Vol. 1

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By Atsushi Ohkubo. Released in Japan by Square Enix, serialization ongoing in the magazine Shonen Gangan. Released in North America by Yen Press.

It didn’t really dawn on me until I’d finished the first volume how accurate the title would prove to be. It sounds odd, given it’s a Soul Eater spinoff with many of the same characters, including cameos from the two heroes, and that it takes place at the same Academy. But this is an altogether different type of reading experience, and I felt that the author was smiling at me as I finished it and saying, like a little kid, “Enjoy Soul Eater – NOT!”

This is not to say that the manga is bad. The author has skills, and I was entertained throughout. The basic premise is that we follow the life of a new Japanese student, Tsugumi, who’s found out that she’s a weapon, and therefore transfers to the Academy (which is in Nevada, something I’d forgotten – you keep thinking Soul Eater is on a different planet with that sun and moon) in order to meet her partner and find her place (and not be thought of as a danger to others). There she meets two new friends, the bubbleheaded yet strong Meme and the tsundere princess Anya. They have cute classes, run into occasional cute danger, and in the end Tsumugi is even confessed to! … well, not quite, but a guy asks to be her partner.

This seems to begin shortly before the actual Soul Eater manga does. Sid, their teacher, isn’t dead here, and Medusa is still the school nurse (although apparently her younger sister will be the main antagonist). The first volume consists entirely of what I’ve come to think of as typical shoujo situations – the three girls have to deal with some classroom jerks; the three girls get part-time jobs as waitresses; etc. All of the heroines are drawn with very broad strokes – Tsumugi is polite yet worried and with low self-esteem; Anya is such a cliched tsundere that I wouldn’t be surprised if she were artificial. Even Meme’s ‘big-breasted airhead with secret skills’ has been seen before.

There’s also what I tend to call ‘fake yuri’, i.e. close female friendships with lots of hugging and lovey-dovey feelings without the actual relationship behind it. Meisters and weapons tend to be thought of as couples, and both Anya and Meme want to pair up with her. (This is in addition to Akane, the serious-looking young man who asks her to partner with him at the end. So yes, Tsumugi is also the star of a harem manga as well, something else that Soul Eater proper most decidedly isn’t.)

This is the big problem with the series to date. There’s nothing new or challenging here. And for those who enjoyed Soul Eater for its weird design or its occasional graphic horror, so far there’s none of that either. It reads as if Square Enix asked the creator to rewrite the series, only make it more like K-On!. There’s nothing bad about this – it’s a fun story well-told. But compared to its parent series, so far it feels like there’s nothing there.