Manga the Week of 4/4

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It’s a first week of the month at Midtown, and we’ve got the usual Viz suspects, some Kodansha runoff from last month courtesy Diamond, some new Vertical titles (also a week late, also courtesy Diamond), and… two very odd releases.

Bandai may be dead, but it apparently had quite a backlog of titles to keep releasing. Thus we get Vol. 5 of both of their Code Geass doujinshi anthologies – Queen for the male readers, and Knight for the female ones. I’m going to take a wild guess that these are the final volumes we’ll see from Bandai here.

Kodansha has another volume of the Negima re-release, which updates the translation with its current version provided by the Nibley twins. This volume has Vols. 10-12 of the original, covering a great deal of the tournament battle, which, unlike many shonen tournament battle arcs, was really where Akamatsu came into his own. There’s some great stuff here.

I didn’t get a chance to use GTO as my featured image when Vol. 1 came out, so it goes here. The second volume of 14 Days in Shonan is almost nonstop action, and really packs a kick. As does its hero. There’s also the 3rd omnibus volume of Drops of God, containing the original Vol. 5 and 6. It looks as if we may finally get to see the First Apostle. As well as lots more wine.

Then there’s the huge pile o’ Viz. A Devil and Her Love Song got the image last time instead of GTO, but Vol. 2 excites me just as much as Vol. 1 did. There’s also a new Dawn of the Arcana, Kamisama Kiss, Sakura Hime, and Skip Beat!, giving you lots of shoujo goodness. If shonen is more your thing, well, this is Jump week. New Bakuman, new Bleach (still not at all caught up with the online releases), new Blue Exorcist (man, this and Kamisama Kiss come out FAST), A new Rosario + Vampire Season 2, a nicely retro new Slam Dunk Vol. 21, and the 9th Toriko. Lastly, they also have the first volume of that Voltron Forge graphic novel to excite sentai fans.

As an aside, this is my 100th post tagged ‘Manga The Week Of’. I hope it’s proven of interest to you, as it’s mostly just an excuse for me to geek out, and also keep track of what’s been coming out when. What whets your appetite to read over the Easter weekend?

Bunny Drop, Vol. 5

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By Yumi Unita. Released in Japan as “Usagi Drop” by Shodensha, serialized in the magazine Feel Young. Released in North America by Yen Press.

Quick note: Please do not write spoilers about this series in your comments. They will be deleted.

When we last left our heroes, Rin was a cute 6-year-old, enjoying school, and starting to come into her own. Daikichi was still bumbling along, but generally had gotten the hang of being a good parent and was making inroads on getting closer to single mother Nitani. And so we come to Volume 5… where ten years have passed.

Yes, it’s a giant time skip, and Rin and Kouki are now in high school. Well, I had said that the series needed to shake itself up a little, and this certainly does that. More to the point, however, it manages to shift things to an entirely different place. The basic premise is still the same… we’re seeing Rin grow and Daikichi parenting. But Daikichi has raised Rin to be a self-sufficient, strong young lady. She can take care of the cooking and cleaning when necessary. No, being the parent of a teenager brings fresh new issues. Like romance.

It is fairly obvious throughout this volume that Kouki is completely in love with Rin, and that it seems to be mostly one-sided. Not that she doesn’t like Kouki, but they get compared to brother and sister, and Rin doesn’t think that’s far off. Plus, in some of the gap filling we get in this volume, Kouki apparently has an ex-girlfriend who was not very fond of Rin, and this seems to have soured her opinion of Kouki and romance a bit. Rin is at a point where she’s not sure what she’s feeling. Honestly, the person she’s closest to is still Daikichi, whom she asks for advice. His advice is not particularly helpful, but it’s from the heart. Which sometimes is all that matters.

Then there’s Daikichi and Nitani-san. I had noted in early volumes that I wanted them to hook up, and now ten years later it hasn’t happened. This is quite frustrating to the reader. And to Kouki. And indeed to Daikichi and Nitani-san, both of whom clearly have feelings for each other. We get a flashback in the last chapter to a moment a few years back, where Nitani-san is trying to deal with Kouki acting up and being a delinquent (he’s gotten better by the present day). This scene is one of the most awkward, heartfelt yet also heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen in manga, an encapsulation of everything that doesn’t go right in romance. Sometimes even when everyone wants to… you simply can’t quite make that final leap. There’s several volumes to go, but after this, I honestly no longer expect these two to get together. Which is a shame.

When this series began, we had four volumes of cute, which fit very well with cute little six-year-old Rin. But now Rin is a teenager, which means we’re at that awkward period. And true to form, this entire volume is filled with awkward. People not quite saying the right thing, not getting their point across, unsure of how to handle something. And this is the entire cast, not just the actual teenagers. Bunny Drop has grown with its heroine, and now asks that you stick around while she deals with all these pesky feelings. I suspect I may cringe on the fallout from all of this, but I’ll be riveted nonetheless.

Hana-Kimi, Vols. 1-3

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By Hisaya Nakajo. Released in Japan as “Hanazakari no Kimitachi e” by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazine Hana to Yume. Released in North America by Viz.

Yes, I know, Viz is drawing me in again. Another long series I haven’t read that Viz teases me with easy to collect omnibuses of. And yes, I am aware that after the 3rd omnibus Viz will stop and tell me to find the rest in backorder. And I won’t, as I am lazy like that. Still, this is a shoujo series that I had never really gotten around to when it first came out, so I thought I would give it a try.

At the time this first came out in North America, it must have been a lot more original to readers than it seems now. Girl dressed as a boy… love triangles with perky blond and serious brunet guys… what are these strange feelings in my chest… attempted rapes (I wish that last wasn’t a cliche). But a good 7-8 years on, we have to sort of retrofit our brain and read Hana-Kimi as something that influenced a lot of other shoujo manga doing similar things. And to be fair, as I read Hana-Kimi I kept thinking to myself “Wow, this reminds me of Here Is Greenwood”, a series that ran in Hana to Yume ten years before Hana-Kimi.

There are a few notable things that make Hana-Kimi stand out. First of all, to the delight of female readers no doubt, there’s a lot more “queerness” in this manga than you tend to find in most cross-dressing shoujo manga. Sure, Oresama Teacher and Ouran High School Host Club tease that people think that their alter egos are gay, but it’s almost entirely used for comedy, and is basically brought up then forgotten about. Here the theoretical homosexuality of the characters is right up front, and a constant presence. The school’s doctor is perhaps the only genuine gay character, but Nakatsu is hopelessly confused about his feelings for Mizuki. Still mostly used for comedy, but having it out there and in your face a lot is rather refreshing. I wonder if we’ll see any genuine gay relationships in the future?

The other guy in this triangle, by the way, becomes aware almost immediately that Mizuki is a girl. However, he doesn’t actually tell her. This leads to an interesting tension – Mizuki is constantly trying to hide her gender, and Izumi is trying to hide from her that he is aware of it, thinking that she basically must have a good reason and will tell him when she’s ready. This makes things a lot of fun, though I do note that this series is 23 volumes long, and I’m not sure how much fun it will be if they’re still doing this dance by the end of the series. In any case, Izumi is the serious young man with the (relatively) tragic past, and matches well with Mizuki – as with most love triangles in shoujo, the actual couple is never in doubt. Especially as Nakatsu is always used in comedic situations.

There’s a lot of ‘old school’ 90s Hana to Yume style in this series, which was familiar to me from my reading of I Hate You More Than Anyone!. It’s not as messy as Hidaka’s early work, but you still see a lot of extraneous text outside bubbles, etc. Despite that, this is a fairly easy read, and I finished it fairly quickly. If you enjoy breezy shoujo comedies with a focus on gender blending… and don’t mind that Viz is likely to end this re-release at Vol. 3… then you should pick up this omnibus.