Nichijou, Vol. 10

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By Keiichi Arawi. Released in Japan by Kadokawa Shoten, serialized in the magazine Shonen Ace. Released in North America by Vertical Comics. Translated by Jenny McKeon.

I haven’t reviewed Nichijou in full since its first volume, it not being the sort of series that lends itself to deep discussion. This is the final volume, though, and I think that it’s worth looking at to see how far the series has come and how abstract it is now. The creator almost seems to be hiding it with the final cover, which features the cast in class paying attention stoically, but it’s meant to contrast with the first volume, which had a random deer on Yukko’s desk. The cast does still feature, and there is, believe it or not, character development of a sort, particularly in the ‘flashforward’ chapters, but for the most part Arawi has honed his surrealist art skills here, and knows what his audience wants: randomness and reaction shots from Mio. We get those in abundance in this volume.

Let’s look at that character development. Some of it can be seen at the start, where Mai and Yukko team up to prank Mio over and over again in a game of musical chairs. But then this is followed by a chapter, seemingly set moments later, which features Yukko rapping for pages on end and embarrassing her friends. Nichijou is not a title you want to read if you get frustrated by randomness – it never stays in one place too lo0ng, it’s quite happy to toss aside reality when it wants to, and in the ‘short panel collection’, sometimes the stories are only a panel or two long. The flashforwards, however, are a bit more developed. We saw one of them in the prior volume, showing a Professor who’s actually attending school, and Yukko apparently returning from America. Here we see more, as we have Mio as an actual manga artist, with an overworked assistant, begging for last-minute help from Mai, who now teaches preschool. This is mostly fascinating because of Mai, who has always been the quiet stoic “troll”. She’s still quiet here, but seeing her smiling and showing genuine emotions is both startling and heartwarming.

In the ads afterwords, Vertical mentions Helvetica Standard, the two-volume series coming out in the fall that’s connected to Nichijou (it’s the manga Yuna is reading all the time), but it’s apparently more of an artbook with occasional comics and diaries. The “successor” to Nichijou is Arawi’s current work City, which Vertical has also licensed. What these licenses tell me, besides the fact that Nichijou must have sold better than I expected, is that it’s Arawi’s art that seems to be the big pull. There are some startling frames in this volume, particularly in the aforementioned “Mio reaction shots”, where he really goes the extra mile in making things weird yet fascinating. In the end, Nichijou oddly reminds me of Short Cuts, the old manga series by Usamaru that Viz released back in the day. The characters are fascinating, and we like them, but in the end you tend to read Nichijou for the art and the really, really weird humor. It’s been an experience.

Accel World: The Carbide Wolf

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By Reki Kawahara and Hima. Released in Japan by ASCII Mediaworks. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Jocelyne Allen.

After last volume’s short story collection, we’re back to the main plotline, as Silver Crow is (finally) cleared of the accusation of hosting the Chrome Disaster. Of course, now that they know he’s not evil, the leaders all get together to try to use Silver Crow for their own purposes. It’s a very Haruyuki-centric book as he tries to gain a new ability, learns his companion’s tragic backstory, prepares for the upcoming culture festival at school (yes, Accel World has a real life aspect as well), and worst of all, deals with getting utterly humiliated in a duel against a Level 1 who has super strength hard armor. This lets all his previous doubts and self-hatred come to the fore, though thankfully he has allies now who won’t let him slip too far into that. Essentially, it’s a good, solid volume of Accel World.

Kawahara does apologize in the afterword for Haruyuki getting all the character development so far in this series, and promises to work on developing the others soon. It’s a fair point – even Sword Art Online paid more attention to its other cast members than Accel World does at times. We do get to learn more about Utai here, and as a drama major, I appreciated the fact that she came from a family of Noh theatre performers – though that also meant that I could guess why she was so upset as a child, Japanese theatre being very male exclusive. The death of her brother is one of those freak accidents that sounds a bit more ridiculous than it probably was, but once you learn about him, the way he died, and the life she grew up with, almost everything about Ardor Maiden comes into clear focus. If this is the sort of character development we’ll get in the future, I’m looking forward to it.

And then we have the titular Carbide Wolf, aka Wolfram Cerberus. No, he’s not related to Wolfram and Hart from Angel, but he does seem to be related to Accel World’s big bads, the Accelerated Research Society. I enjoy the themes between personality and armor that Kawahara gives us – the name is wolf-themed, the armor has a wolf’s head… and the actual player sounds like a big friendly puppy when he’s dueling other people, or rather when he’d kicking other people’s asses. It’s hard to fight against something when you can’t do damage to it, and that also gives us the opportunity to dwell on various metals – this had also come up earlier, when Haruyuki was being asked to learn about mirrors in order to master a new ability. Haruyuki being who he is, of course, he grows and learns, with the help of some harsh training, and the rematch, though it ends in a cliffhanger, is another solid fight scene.

Accel World has always been the more consistently written of Kawahara’s two series, and that remains the case here. There’s occasionally some tortured exposition (the animal club member teaching Haruyuki about the different kinds of reflective mirrors really seemed like a reach to me), and Haruyuki’s self-deprecation can wear on the anime fan who wants all cool all the time, but overall this is another very good entry in the series.

Hayate the Combat Butler, Vol. 30

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By Kenjiro Hata. Released in Japan as “Hayate no Gotoku!” by Shogakukan, serialized in the magazine Shonen Sunday. Released in North America by Viz. Translated by John Werry.

This is the first volume of Hayate the Combat Butler to be released in North America after the manga has already ended in Japan, and it will be interesting to see how it does going forward. (ominous thunder rumbles in distance) We are, of course, nowhere near finished here in North America, where Hayate is not quite Kaze Hikaru, but pretty close. Last time we were discussing how long Hata would drag things out before Hayate’s true gender was finally revealed to Ruka, and we get an answer here. It’s actually a good question when you’re dealing with Hata, who is a master – for good and ill – at dragging things out long past when you’d expect the punchline or point to be. Sometimes this works well for comedic effect, sometimes it feels like his editors are forcing him to extend things forever, and sometimes you sense he’s a bit of a troll.

The missing suitcase of money is dealt with fairly quickly at the start (and does a good job of inserting Fumi and Sharna, everyone’s favorite characters (it’s a shame sarcasm is hard to show in text), into the narrative. The majority of the volume, though, continues the interlocking narrative of Nagi and Ruka’s doujinshi competition. Ruka gets the benefit of a stern critic in Hina, who not only gives her honest opinion about what’s wrong, but goes on to do research into popular kinds of manga so that she can give better advice. Hina is a good, honest girl who I sometimes feel deserves better than this comedy harem manga. Speaking of girls who deserve better than this, Nagi has Ayumu giving advice, and while it’s not nearly as good, it does seem to inspire her. Whether this will actually lead to good manga remains to be seen.

And yes, Ruka does eventually find out that Hayate is a guy. The reaction is more low-key than I was expecting, but then Ruka in general tends to be more low-key than I’d expect. As a late arrival harem girl, you can’t avoid the sense that she’s being added to the narrative because the series is too popular to wrap up this quickly – Hayate may be a twice-a-year series here, but it did really well in Japan, and there are references in the volume to the movie Heaven Is a Place on Earth, which was due out in 2011 when this volume came out. (Yes, we are now six years behind.) I like Ruka, but there’s not really much she adds as a romantic lead that Hayate could not also get from Hina, or Ayumu, or Maria, or Athena. Or Nagi, I will reluctantly add, but we’ll get to that 20 volumes down the road.

And so Hayate the Combat Butler’s strengths remain its humor, and its romance can be a strength or a weakness depending on Hata’s writing. We get a bit of both in this volume, making it a fairly average volume in the series. See you in the winter for Vol. 31.

Also, the back cover says that Ruka is ‘plumb worn out’, and I feel sad that they didn’t go whole hog and say ‘plumb tuckered out’.