Toradora! Volume 1

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By Yuyuko Takemiya and Zekkyo. Released in Japan by ASCII Media Works, serialization ongoing in the magazine Dengeki Daioh. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

There is a certain subgenre in the anime/manga/light novel world that involves short, young, angry girls meeting rather nebbish reader stand-in guys and arguing/whining at them until they fall in love. When made into an anime, the girls tend to be voiced by Rie Kugimiya. Of these, Toradora! is possibly the simplest and purest of the ones we’ve seen over here, if only as there is no magical powers, or supernatural content, or ridiculous situations (see: Zero no Tsukaima, Shakugan no Shana, and Hayate the Combat Butler). We just have the simple story of an incredibly pissed-off girl and the guy she slowly falls for.

Our hero here is slightly less nebbish than most love comedy heroes. He’s Takasu Ryuuji, a nice young man who is unfortunate enough to have ‘thug eyes’ – in other words, he always looks like he’s angry and glaring at you, thanks to the genes of his dead yakuza father. He lives in a small house with his hostess-club mother (more on her later), and is looking forward to a new school year with a new class… well, not looking forward to a new group of students misunderstanding him, but… see, there’s this girl in class he has a crush on. She’s cute, she’s happy, she’s kind of a ditz. He doesn’t have the guts to converse with her, but at least they’re near each other.

This is when he runs into our heroine – literally. Aisaka Taiga is very pretty, with long, flowing hair and a cute face… which is usually twisted into a snarl, as she’s inevitably angry at the world. She’s also 4’8″ or so, and therefore makes an amusing contrast with the average-sized Ryuugi. She immediately takes a dislike to him, and I was expecting the plot to be their slowly getting to know each other over the course of the series while interacting at school. Little did I know… one afternoon, Ryuuji goes to retrieve his schoolbag, and meets Taiga, who’s suddenly panicked, and tries to take the bag from him. We find out why when he gets home – she had put a love letter in the bag… for his best friend. What’s worse, the letter is only an envelope, she had forgotten to put the letter in it. And then she shows up in his room at midnight to get the letter back.

Yes, it turns out that our angry girl is secretly (or rather, not-so-secretly, as we see as the volume continues) a “complete spaz”, as Seven Seas translates it. What’s more, like all anime angry girls, she has a soft, sweet side, that so far only her friend Minori has ever seen. But Ryuuji gets to see a bit of it here too. What follows is, to be honest, a bit ‘tsundere-by-numbers’ as Taiga and Ryuuji team up to help each other win their true love (her best friend is, naturally, HIS crush). Each successive attempt is a giant disaster, and it’s noticeable to everyone in the whole world (except the two of them) that they’re made for each other. Indeed, since she lives in an expensive apartment next door to his house, and he goes over to make her breakfast/get her up (as she’s sort of useless that way), the rumor is they’re lovers…

There’s next to nothing here that’s original. Taiga is another young-looking tsundere girl, Ryuuji, despite his eyes, is the typical harem manga lead, with a vague sarcastic streak to him that you see in such leads nowadays. Taiga’s friend Minori, meanwhile, makes me wonder if the writer had been reading Bleach before she came up with this, as she’s eerily familiar to Orihime Inoue, the head in the clouds girl from that series. The one exception I can think of is Ryuuji’s mother who is… well, a blonde, big-breasted hostess girl who looks about 16 years old but is clearly about 33 or so, works all night and sleeps all day, and is dependent on her son to do everything for her. I’ve seen this type occasionally in anime and manga, but rarely in so… pure a form. I kept waiting for her to give out pointed advice or something against her type, but no, there’s even a final side-story that shows us that she is exactly what she seems. Ye cats.

Despite the lack of originality, there’s nothing here that’s actively annoying, provided you don’t mind the tsundere archetype that Taiga/Shana/Louise/Nagi provide. If you do, you likely already planned to avoid this series anyway. Otherwise, it’s pretty much a manga that knows its audience, and delivers what its audience wants. Be warned, though, there may be shenanigans, and perhaps a zany scheme or two.

Excel Saga Volume 18

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By Rikdo Koshi. Released in Japan by Shonen Gahosha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Young King OURS. Released in North America by Viz.

So yes, it’s been a few months. I got distracted by other things, and honestly the Teriha storyline is not filled with Excel goodness for obvious reasons. But even a non-Excel Excel Saga volume is still great, so let’s look at what’s going on here. We have four plot threads that run though this volume…

First, we have the continuing adventures of Kabapu trying to regain his power and prestige. He notes that Il Palazzo is running for Mayor of the prefecture, and immediately announces his own candidacy as well, despite the fact that only a volume ago he was arrested on about 147 fraud and conspiracy charges. Needless to say, the public has a short memory, and the resulting race is actually quite close. Best part of this chapter is the posters each candidate uses to promote themselves, all of which parody various anime movies. Kabapu tells Watanabe and Sumiyoshi to try to sabotage Il Palazzo’s campaign somehow. Watanabe, still in his new ‘evil’ persona, decides the best way to do this is by a car bomb. Sadly, he only takes out Elgala (who’s hospitalized) and Hyatt (who’s absolutely fine).

Rewrite line of the volume, courtesy Carl Horn, regarding Elgala’s opinion of Hyatt’s recuperative powers: “What are you, Steel God Jeeg?”

Kabapu wins, surprisingly (possibly as Il Palazzo gives the impression of a ‘foreigner’). We don’t have time to pay attention to his antics, though, as Elgala, drugged up and with a broken arm and leg, is having fantastic dream sequences. This is the second long dream sequence in 2 volumes, and is far more cracked-out than Teriha’s. Elgala is reimagining her own life while parodying The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and we can see that she enjoys making her past memories better in her head, as we see memories of her giving perfect snarky comebacks to Excel (she didn’t), or dragging Excel naked through the streets (it was the other way around). Oh yes, and Hyatt hanging out at the forest just before the lands of death, noting that Elgala shouldn’t be here as she isn’t used to it. All this leads to Elgala coming to a stunning revelation – President Excel is a different person from the Excel she remembers!

Having come to that conclusion, and realizing that she can’t pretend to make nice with President Excel due to her bad habit of saying her thoughts out loud, Elgala waits till Excel is away and then goes right to Il Palazzo himself. This is a mistake, naturally, as Il Palazzo is well aware of exactly who President Excel really is. Elgala quickly finds herself transferred to the 5th subbasement, where she does meaningless busywork that then gets shredded, and realizes that she has made a ghastly mistake.

This also contains the sweetest scene in the manga, which features Hyatt. Elgala has told Hyatt about her suspicions, and notes the main difference between the Excels – this impostor is perfect and superhuman. Hyatt is rather puzzled by this, and notes when talking with Menchi (who is terrified at the mere mention of Excel’s name) that “Senior Excel has always been a hero since the old days.” In a manga where people’s allegiances tend to fall into the ‘me-first’ category, it’s lovely to see Hyatt’s simple admiration of her best friend.

Next up, Iwata and Misaki go on a date. Yeah, I’m as surprised as you are, and it takes Misaki a while to even realize that’s what it is. I like the fact that Misaki has actually progressed to not minding that she’s on a date with Iwata when she realizes it – in fact, her main concern is that she has no idea how to behave on a date. We’re so used to Misaki being the normal one of the group that we forget that her social skills suck just as badly as the others. On the date they run into Umi and Teriha, and Misaki gets a strange feeling she’s seen Teriha somewhere before… but with Teriha’s shy, passive personality, Misaki is unable to place her. The date ends badly as Iwata runs out of power – he’d been ignoring all efforts to warn him about it as he was in love Misaki mode – and has to be rescued by Shiouji and Ropponmatsu 2, who is wearing a vaguely pornographic nurse costume.

Shiouji and company then go off to the baths, where we discover that Teriha can’t stand being in hot water for more than a few seconds before she completely overheats (Umi notes she has an aversion to water in general), and that Shiouji is still a pedophile no matter how much backstory he’s given to explain it. The main final plot, though, is that Ropponmatsu has broken out of Shiouji’s base and attached herself to Sumiyoshi. And what’s worse, she’s accidentally downloaded Sumiyoshi’s H-games into her system. So now she’s trying to sexually assault him while calling him “big brother”. Watanabe just laughs (Sumiyoshi asks what happened to the old, pure Watanabe, to which the response is “Oh, he’s dead”), so it’s Misaki who comes to help, despite finding Sumiyoshi and Ropponmatsu 2 in a very compromising position. Sadly, Ropponmatsu is SUPER STRONG, so they can’t really do anything. Iwata to the rescue! After much breaking of robot neck, and trashing of Sumiyoshi’s apartment, peace is restored once more.

I greatly enjoyed this volume while reading it, but can’t help but be reminded that this series is still greatly missing its lead character. And we still have at least one more volume of amnesia to go. Still, any Excel Saga is good Excel Saga, and I definitely recommend this to any fans of comedy.

Oresama Teacher Volume 1

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By Izumi Tsubaki. Released in Japan by Hakusensha, serialization ongoing in the magazine Hana to Yume. Released in North America by Viz.

First of all, Viz, if you’re going to keep the original title, perhaps you might want to actually define Oresama somewhere in the book. (For the record, it translates to “My Teacher”, sort of, but with the ‘My’ in an over the top way.)

I was a big fan, as readers of this blog are well aware, of Tsubaki’s previous release from the Shojo Beat line, The Magic Touch. In fact, at times it seemed I was one of the only fans. After The Magic Touch ended, I had hopes that Viz would pick up her new series, still running in Japan, which no doubt would learn from the flaws of her first manga (lovable yet messy and scatterbrained) and give us a powerhouse shoujo manga that takes no prisoners!

Well, can’t have everything. :) In its defense, I found Volume 1 of this series a lot of fun, with a highly amusing and kickass teacher, and the addition of not only a smirky guy but also a grumpy guy – two stereotypes for the price of one! Her art has evolved so that it looks more polished, though the panels are still as packed as ever. Magic Touch sometimes had trouble figuring out if it should focus on the massage or the romances – here, the author tells us straight up she’s writing a comedy, and is quite happy that she doesn’t have to worry about the love. And there’s tons of funny stuff here, exactly as you’d expect from a comedy. The bunny mask was a highlight.

But oh my god, it’s as messy as ever. This is not helped by the oversharing in the author’s sidebar notes, where she tells us how the manga came to fruition. This is not untypical in manga sidebars, especially with HtY titles, but the overall feeling is that the author is a giant ditz. Now, most of this is the author writing in such a way that it paints her as this deliberately, and we do get a good sense of the editorial process here – submit idea, rejected, try again, editor suggests a type of plot, suggest ideas around that, editor leads you towards what they want from you – but it combines with the breathless quality of the first volume itself to make you imagine the author is telling you the story as fast as she can speak after running 2 miles to find you, while backtracking every few minutes to toss in something she just remembered.

This can actually work in favor of the series as well. Possibly my favorite part of the volume is in the chapter where Mafuyu (our ex-delinquent heroine – though the ex is in question after only a few pages) gets the suspicion that her teacher Takaomi might have been the high school boy she fell in love with as a child. After trying various amusing yet dumb ways to get her teacher’s personal info, he finally confronts her. He then flat out tells her “Since you’re already looking into it, I’ll tell you – yes, I was the boy next door.” What would be, in a normal shoujo manga, one of the longer-running subplots, where our heroine finally realizes the truth around Volume 7, is stated flat-out on page 106 of the first volume. The anticlimax is wonderful.

That said, we then get the background for this, which starts with a suspiciously false-sounding explanation that she fell from the parallel bars the day before he moved away and had memory loss, and then shows us that their real-life past interaction seems to be him bullying and torturing this nice, sweet little girl into becoming a thug. It’s totally played for comedy, but the suggestion is still there. What’s more, it’s laid out in such a way that I had to read it 3 times to get it – the “Mafuyu, go!” running scene especially needed something in Chapter 1 or 2 to lead up to it, so there’s more of an ‘aha’ moment for the reader.

So yeah, it’s another series from Tsubaki that looks like she simply sits down every week, starts drawing whatever, and then stops 30 pages later. Luckily, the whatever is great fun, with another in a series of Hana to Yume heroines who are strong as an ox and about as dense. And with the romance de-emphasized (though I’m sure it will be there), we get to see the denseness play out in terms other than “What is this strange feeling in my chest?”. I look forward to more.