Manga the Week of 4/11

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THERE IS ONLY ONE MANGA OUT THIS WEEK. BUY EXCEL SAGA 23. THAT IS ALL.

…OK, there are a *few* other manga besides Excel Saga. Hrmph.

Dark Horse has the sequel to Magic Knight Rayearth, with our heroines returning to a Cephiro much changes. Expect ship wars between Ascot and Clef fans, lots of cute fluffy romance between Fuu and Ferio, and one of the few workable threesomes in all of manga with Hikaru. Guaranteed to be good CLAMP-y fun! In the genuine way, not the postmodern ironic CLAMP fun way

DMP seems to finally be releasing the 8th volume of Itazura na Kiss, with … did Vol. 7 ever come out via Diamond? They skipped it, didn’t they? God. Anyway, enjoy your favorite shoujo couple be prickly and worried at each other. There’s also another mini-manga of Moon and Blood. And for yaoi fans, Vol. 2 of Countdown 7 Days and Vol. 2 of Replica.

Kodansha has the 7th volume of shoujo thriller Arisa, and the 14th – and possibly final – volume of Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei. Please don’t Gintama this series on me, Kodansha. I will nag you hard.

NBM is releasing a single volume manga called Rohan at the Louvre, which I know nothing about but which I hear has some amazing art.

Udon is releasing the first volume of Sengoku Basara Samurai Legends, which sounds like it’s related to the series of video games based around feudal Japan.

Aside from EXCEL SAGA 23, Viz is releasing a bunch of other stuff. We get the penultimate volume of Cross Game, which I understand may have some baseball in it. A new Case Closed, a new Itsuwaribito, a new Kekkaishi. The final volume of Maoh: Juvenile remix (this last volume remixed by Junior Vasquez) (hey, if you’re going to tell a joke, tell it all). Vol. 8 of Nura, which did not ship last week for some weird reason. And Vol. 20 of 20th Century Boys, which no doubt will confuse some bookstores.

So, yeah, some other stuff. But mostly EXCEL SAGA 23.

The Drops of God, Vol. 3

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By Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto. Released in Japan as “Kami no Shizuku” by Kodansha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Morning. Released in North America by Vertical.

The third omnibus of Drops of God sees the first major plot advancement in the series. After spending so long trying to guess which wine was described in the will, one of our heroes finally gets it right. Of course, that does leave eleven more. And there’s still a few other problems to solve along the way…

(Incidentally, my cover for V. 3 is different from the one above. Last minute change? Or multiple designs?)

Once again, we have a plotline about how wine is far more than just an alcoholic beverage. We left off at the end of the last volume with an amnesiac woman who only had a description of wine to link her to her forgotten past. The trouble is, she’s now married – and both she and her husband are worried that if she recovers her memories, she’ll remember she was in love with someone else. Even though it relied on a contrived coincidence (two car accidents in the past leading to tragedy?), I really enjoy the way the authors used this, showing that it doesn’t necessarily take amnesia to avoid the past. And indeed, that the future can also shape the past – when Kaori recovers her memories and discovers her old love, we see that she and her husband are not the only ones whose lives are shaped by the tragedy. Throughout this plot, wine comes into play, acting almost as a mnemonic in order to be a gateway to prior events.

We then get the battle for the first apostle, which comes down to a very interesting point: these are not ‘the 12 best wines’ that Shizuku’s father has been describing, but 12 wines that he wanted to describe. This means that the first apostle revealed here depends on it not being an outstanding wine, but rather a wine that you have to work at to enjoy. Not only can I empathize with this, but of course it opens the playing field of wine even more to the cast. As with previous volumes, we get lovingly detailed depictions of the scene they’re imagining (and that his father described), which allow you to see the similarities and differences between the two wines picked, which differ only in the year made. It’s a good scene.

Characterization of the regulars continues to be the weak part of the series, but to be fair this is a manga about wine, not about Shizuku and Miyabi. We do get a little more development of her character here, showing her first love from high school returning and shocking her by being a cold businessman, but honestly I thought the best part of the manga for her was her superdeformed jealousy of Shizuku having lunch with Sara. Any love story that happens in this series will take even longer than Oishinbo’s did (and that took 47 volumes!), mostly as when it comes to love Shizuku seems to be thick as a brick. Something lampshaded by the other cast members. Speaking of the rest of the cast, the Italian wine snob, Chosuke, gets a rather sweet little backstory showing why he dislikes French wine so much.

The volume ends with the first half of the story I mentioned above with Miyabi’s old love. It involves trying to show that brand name doesn’t always mean quality, but to do that they have to note that in terms of wine, it frequently does. Lafite and Rothschild aren’t the top names in wine just due to marketing and publicity. They’re the cream of the crop, and I liked the scenes where Shizuku and Miyabi realize what a big hurdle they have to overcome. In the meantime, they’re also searching for the second apostle. Given this is a manga series, I have a sneaking suspicion Shizuku is going to fail hard at finding it, but we shall see.

This continues to be a good solid foodie manga. The broad points (p;lot, characters) are cliched, but the writing is what makes them stand out, and shows the work of two long-standing professionals. Definitely one for your shelves… though maybe the drinks cabinet instead?

Is This A Zombie?, Vol. 1

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By Sacchi and Shinichi Kimura. Released in Japan as “Kore wa Zombie desu ka?” by Kadokawa Shoten, serialization ongoing in the magazine Dragon Age. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Now, let’s be fair. I knew I wouldn’t like this title when I ordered it. As I’ve noted before, I sometimes get things I hate in order to bring more ‘balance’ to my blog – see my review of Qwaser of Stigmata as an example. And honestly, any title that ran in Dragon Age is guaranteed to get me looking at it warily, similar to Champion Red. Sadly, though, Is This A Zombie? is merely bad, and not laughably bad.

This is essentially one of those manga where the premise is ‘guy living with lots of cute girls of various tyes’, but the author can’t really be bothered to give us much backstory on them. character development for Haruna and Sera in particular is minimal, with the two of them fulfilling the usual moe fetish tropes – Haruna is the loli tsundere, and Sera is the violent kuudere. Amazingly, by the way, this is not actually the worst of the adaptations – there’s an ‘alternate universe’ manga running in Comp Ace called ‘Yes, She’s Your Bride’ that is basically this only with less monster fighting and more naked harem antics. The mind boggles.

There is meant to be a certain amount of self-parody here, I suspect, but it’s the kind that’s done by people who think putting ‘ironic’ in quotes is ironic. The sleazy fanservice winks at you, but wants to have it both ways so the wink doesn’t fulfill its function. There’s also our hero’s magical girl outfit – excuse me, ‘magikewl’ girl (Yen explains why they translated it that way, and I agree it works, but I still hate it) – which of course is designed for laughs. Even the layout of the manga itself screams ‘self-aware comedy!’. It’s just not very good at that.

This is actually a shame, as there are a few moments in the manga where it briefly gets serious, and they show a definite leap in quality. These tend to revolve around the third girl, Eu, who is the quiet Rei Ayanami-esque character. She’s the one who resurrected Ayumu and turned him into a zombie in the first place, and like many other emotionless girls in anime/manga, her emotionless state is actually a plot point. Ayumu’s advice to her, and his decision to take whatever fate throws at him in order to make her life easier, is about the only time in the entire volume I liked him (he is otherwise a sarcastic pervert, one of the new breed of harem leads who are a reaction against the nebbish “Tenchi” type, but seeing a perverse guy not sleeping with all the women chasing after him is even more irritating than seeing a ‘pure-hearted’ type not do so).

Yen’s translation is fine for this type of series – it’s very colloquial, and at times read like a dub, but the original was no doubt just as colloquial. There’s lots of sentai and giant robot references, all explained in Yen’s copious endnotes. Sadly, absent from the endnotes is an explanation of why they licensed this at all. Admittedly, it *has* an audience here, unlike Sasameke. This title will appeal very much to the harem-anime-downloading, body-pillow-buying, waifu-proclaiming males out there. For everybody else, read pages 130-145, realize that the rest of the manga is nothing like that, and find something else.