Manga the week of 5/25

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Hope you enjoyed your lull, as we have quite a few manga coming out next week! Including the direct market getting a few Kodansha titles at last. The lull is over!

First up we have Bandai, giving us the debut of Kannagi. The subtitle of the anime was “Crazy Shrine Maidens”, but “crazy” turned out to be a word that the fandom decided to take literally. I wonder if the manga itself is interesting divorced from the whole “virgin” controversy?

Dark Horse has the 6th volume of Ghost Talker’s Daydream, which I keep having to remind myself that yes, it is shonen. (It ran in Shonen Ace.) No doubt there will be ghosts, and sadomasochism. Possibly not in that order.

DMP has the 2nd volume (and final, I believe) of Fafner, as well as three new yaoi titles, including Volume 3 of the ever-popular The Tyrant Falls in Love (which runs in the BL magazine Gush – I think I’ve mentioned that before, but really, I wanted to mention it again.)

Kodansha has a few long awaited volumes, though no debuts quite yet. Arisa proved surprisingly popular with bloggers, and its 2nd volume is finally here. There’s new Fairy Tail and Negima volumes, for those who like shonen fights and fanservice. And Shugo Chara keeps trucking along with shoujo magical girl goodness.

Udon has a new Mega Man spinoff out, this one called Gigamix. I know nothing about it, but if Megaman spawned Gigamix, can Teramix be far behind?

Lastly we have the latest from the folks at Yen Press. The news here is the debut of the long-awaited A Bride’s Story, from the author of Emma. This is apparently in a deluxe edition, and Yen is really pulling out all the stops. There’s new Cirque Du Freak, Spice & Wolf, and Sumomomo. There’s guilty pleasures Haruhi-chan (for Suzumiya fans only) and My Girlfriend’s a Geek (for those who love fandom). And there’s a one-and-done omnibus sidestory of Higurashi When They Cry, which will allow us to take a break from the madness of the Eye-Opening Arc. Well, at least I hope it’s a break. It’s Higurashi, so no doubt there will be blood.

So what are you picking up this week?

Naruto Volumes 1-3

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By Masashi Kishimoto. Released in Japan by Shueisha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. Released in North America by Viz.

Really, I was starting to feel a bit guilty about the whole thing. Here is the top manga in America, the title that outsells everything else by a considerable margin, and I’d never read it, or seen the anime. I remember that I did buy Volume 1 when it first came out, but I never did keep up after that, and now it’s up in the 50s. So, as with Kekkaishi, I used Viz’s omnibus re-release as an opportunity to close the gaps in my reviewer knowledge and see what the fuss was all about. Unfortunately, the first 3 volumes of Naruto were a lot harder to slog through than Kekkaishi was, and reminded me that most series *do* start off slow.

For those of you living in a cave, the basic premise is that Naruto, our hero, is a ninja trainee who’s disliked by his town as he holds the spirit of a fox demon within him… something Naruto’s been unaware of his whole life, thinking that he’s just naturally disliked. As a ninja trainee he’s a bit of a class clown, but he certainly holds genuine skill, and finally manages to pass his exam. Of course, that’s just the start, as now he’s an apprentice, going through hellish training along with his crush Sakura and the moody Sasuke. Can he overcome his past and become an amazing ninja?

To start off with, I’ll note that the three leads all begin as very difficult to like. This is not uncommon in manga, and always leads to character development later on, but the author also has to be able to keep a balance, as you don’t want them to get so unlikeable that the reader decides not to continue. (I recall trying to sell people on Teru Teru x Shonen, only to be told Shino was such a brat in Vol. 1 they didn’t care if she got better.) So Naruto is a bit of an impulsive brat, Sakura comes across as shallow and petty, and Sasuke is blunt, grumpy and rude. And through these three volumes, even as they do start to learn to work together, that mostly remains the case. It made the volumes a bit of a slog.

I also found the battles to alternate between confusing and boring. While not nearly on the level of, say, Trigun Maximum, the art here during combat doesn’t always make it immediately clear what’s going on, or translate well to action in my mind’s eye. And honestly, I may just not like ninjas. The doppelgangers and special secret techniques rolled out here made me long for people to just start beating the tar out of each other face to face. (Yeah, I know, ninjas…) That said, the 3rd volume’s battle was considerably better than the others in the volume, and may point to bigger things in the future.

There were things I enjoyed a great deal in the book, rest assured. Kakashi is fantastic, and a breath of fresh air amongst the sullen teenagers. First off, he has droopy eyes, which I’ve noted in previous Banri Hidaka reviews is a personal favorite of mine. He’s clever and tricky and basically exactly what I want a ninja to be, which is why he makes an excellent teacher. I did feel the “he’s failed everyone before” plot was overhyped, especially when he passed Naruto & company simply for ignoring his instructions and caring for each other’s well-being, but I suppose that speaks more to the poor quality of prior ninja trainees in the past than anything else.

Likewise, while I disliked Sakura herself, the ‘inner Sakura’ schtick was great, adding some nice humor into the middle of any situation. Hopefully this either continues, or she learns to speak her mind and we get to see Inner Sakura blend together with outer Sakura. The other choice bits of humor through the volumes were also well-handled. And I like the fact that our first big ninja villains are getting their own backstory, showing that (as I noted with Kekkaishi as well) nothing is really 100% black and white or good and evil.

When I expressed my ambivalence to this omnibus on Twitter and with my friends, I was generally told that I needed to keep going through the ‘Chuunin Exam’ arc, so I’ll get the 2nd omnibus and hope it starts there. I’m sure it must pick up, because come on, this is the best-selling manga in North America. But honestly, reading this omnibus I was simply reminded why I didn’t get it after Volume 1. It’s just okay, but needs improvement.

Kekkaishi Volumes 1-3

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By Yellow Tanabe. Released in Japan by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz.

It is a known fact that one simply cannot read everything. Oh, maybe it was possible back in the 1990s, when most things were still 32-page floppies, but these days there just isn’t the time and the money. And so certain things get put aside. And then, after a while, when you discover that all your friends are talking about them, you go back and discover… hey, when did that get to be 33 volumes? Now, of course, it’s too intimidating to try to read all that.

So Viz has taken to doing omnibuses. Unlike the fancy large-format VIZBIG works, these have no added extras or fancy color pages. In fact, the pages are actually of lesser paper, in order to make them thinner and fit them on the shelves. This is purely a case of ‘we are re-releasing these in bunches of three to try to get more readers who didn’t buy the first time’. They first did it with One Piece, and it seemed to work out well, so we now get four more omnibus re-releases. The super-popular Naruto, Bleach, and Fullmetal Alchemist… and this one, Kekkaishi, a Shonen Sunday title that just ended in Japan earlier this year.

Like most action-oriented Sunday titles of recent years, Kekkaishi never quite caught on sales-wise the way that Naruto and its fellow Jump titles did. It didn’t get an anime premiere in North America until last year, and then it was on Adult Swim rather than Naruto and One Piece’s kiddie slots. (Of course, one may argue that in the case of One Piece, having that slot is what killed it for North America.) Sales aren’t bad exactly – it’s still coming out on a bimonthly basis, which is more than I can say for Hayate the Combat Butler – but certainly an omnibus would be a good idea to show people why this manga deserves more attention.

The plot revolves around Yoshimori Sumimura, a demon hunter from a long line of demon hunters, who uses his powers to capture and eliminate rogue demons. He’s helped in this by his familiar Madarao, a demonic dog spirit, and his childhood friend/crush/rival Tokine Yukimura, the daughter of a rival family of demon hunters, who’s older than him and better at demon hunting – at least at first. Yoshimori has a huge amount of raw power, but tends to simply use it as a hammer most of the time. After a first chapter showing him as a rather reluctant hunter when he was a child, the manga picks up on him in 8th grade, after a rtaumatic incident left him with a much greater resolve to be a good demon hunter.

Except… what he *really* wants to be is a patissier. Yes, his lifelong ambition is to make cakes. The interesting thing about this is that it’s not all that belittled or shown to be a mistake. Yes, he’s a demon hunter *now*, but just because he inherited his family’s ridiculous amount of power, does he have to let that drive his existence? What’s more, for a 14-year-old, the boy’s great at making cakes. Given so much of shonen manga is about dreams, it’s great to see the manga portray his ambitions in a positive light.

I also really liked the heroine, Tokine. Making her two years older than Yoshimori is a great move, in that it allows her to be the one more in control and reserved – as well as allowing any feelings she may have for him to remain in the background. I’ve no idea whether romance will feature in this manga, but for the moment Tokine seems to simply see Yoshimori as an exasperating friend with a ton of power who doesn’t use it all that well – which turns out to be the opposite of her own powers, which aren’t all that colossal but are very precise. There’s a great shot of the two of them separately training in an effort to surpass the other. And yes, inevitably there is a chapter that shows that Tokine is terrified of bugs, the standard “Oh look, she’s human after all” type of thing. But it’s funny.

The stories themselves in the three volumes we get here are very much meat-and-potatoes shonen, combining the monster-of-the-week with longer arcs that reveal more of the backstory behind the two main families. I particularly liked the attention that the villains received, with even the nastiest of them being shown great sympathy. Viz also has a solid translation here as well, though I did note that Yoshimori’s familiar was referred to as female in the first volume – possibly as they hadn’t read Volume 3 yet, where Tanabe-san reveals that he’s male – and gay! Extra bonus points to Tanabe-san for a gay demon dog, something I think is unique to shonen so far.

There weren’t any totally amazing moments in these first three volumes, but everything was very solidly good. For a shonen series that’s just finding its feet, this is a triumph – most shonen series I can think of start off very slowly and awkwardly, not really getting into a groove until several volumes in. The characters are less eccentric than your standard Jump heroes, but I think that makes them more realistic and human. I definitely want to read more Kekkaishi after these three volumes, though, and urge Jump readers who are looking for a nice change of pace from ninjas and pirates to give it a shot as well.