manga update

I' started watching Baccano! at the weekend, but I've not managed to carry it through this week. There seems to be quite a lot of new stuff on telly, so I've been trying to keep on top of that, plus with Dad phoning yesterday that blew a couple of hours.

I'll hopefully watch a bit more this weekend, though.

I have been reading manga, though, so I thought I'd give a quick update today as to my thoughts.


Hayate the Combat Butler

I was a little surprised by this one.

It appears the manga is weekly in Japan and the chapters are quite short. I'd actually encountered Hayate in anime form and the initial chapters matched the first couple of episodes quite well.

However, in the anime the pace is a bit faster. I mean within the short fansub sample I did, they went back to school, but it was several volumes before this happened in the manga. The slightly odd thing was that this meant a lot of content was skipped.

Given that the anime eats content at a much faster rate, this seemed a bit odd, but what it did mean was that the anime and manga weren't identical and it gave me a chance to appreciate the manga more.

And appreciate it I did, as it's quite funny.

It also breaks the fourth wall a lot and I like things that do that.

I mean if I'm honest there are a few niggles. For example, there's a lot of referencing of other anime/manga and so I don't know what they're talking about sometimes. This isn't helped because they part-censor the references, making it difficult to decode sometimes, even when I know what it's referring to.

Also, it's a little bit light-weight, story-wise, but then it is primarily a gag manga so that's not a huge criticism.

So yeah, overall, I like it.


Note that the rest of these are first volume impressions.


Bamboo Blade

Bamboo Blade seems quite enjoyable.

I liked the anime, though it looks like they've tweaked the story quite a bit. They've definitely tweaked the artwork and while I don't dislike the manga art, the anime's character designs are a bit better.

The manga has some quite good gags in it, and they definitely retained pretty much all of these.

It's definitely not high-brow entertainment, though, and if I hadn't liked the anime I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have thought this one was worth perusing.


Maria Holic

I'm not entirely sure why I bought this.

A while back an anime adaptation came out in Japan. It was made by SHAFT, who did Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei and a few other things I liked, so I had high hopes, but in the end it was a bit of a disappointment.

I think the main problem was that the main character talked really fast and was shouty and a bit annoying. Also, the main point as I'd seen it was the cross-dressing boy, Maria, what with the title being Maria Holic and all. And yet she virtually wasn't in it.

It did have all the natty visual hall-marks of a SHAFT production that I love, but this wasn't enough to make up for the poor underlying story.

Well it turns out that this story is coming pretty much from the manga. In other words, unlike Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei and Bakemonogatori, where they've clearly worked on the story as well, here, they left it alone. And unfortunately it needed work.

Still, I'm going to give it a few volumes to see if improves I think.


Gestalt

Here's a manga that flattered to deceive.

The cover art is gorgeous, but there's a reason for that - it's a modern picture drawn by the artist for a manga that must be around 20 years old. Certainly the art inside is unrecognisable from the cover art and fits very much with the styles prevalent in the eighties and early nineties.

If I'd done my homework I never would have picked it up as it's by Yun Kouga, who did Loveless. Simply put I hated the first volume of Loveless when I read - it was just so badly written.

This is worse. Not only is it badly written but the art, although pretty enough, is confusing. It's really difficult to tell some of the characters apart, not least of all because the hair colour of one of them is inconsistently portrayed.

It also has a tendency to spooge out tonnes of boring exposition and even has little boxes explaining stuff that nobody really cares about and, indeed, wouldn't need explaining if the art was clearer.

Rubbish.


Ichiroh

I was kinda surprised by this.

I bought it on a whim with Gestalt, mainly because the cover looked good, and given how bad that was I was prepared to be disappointed. But actually I quite enjoyed it.

It's another one of those four-panel gag mangas and it's actually quite funny. The artwork is nice too.

In terms of criticism the only real problem is a lack of originality, but it's quite good at doing what it does.


Kimikiss

Again, another one bought on a whim at the same time as Gestalt and Ichiroh. And oddly, this kinda sits somewhere between Gestalt and Ichiroh in that it was okay, but I decided to not keep buying it.

It's basically a romantic-comedy, but the comedy is very light, with the focus very much on the romance.

The problem was that it wasn't, well, it wasn't complicated. Basically, it makes romances more interesting if there are proper barriers or obstacles to overcome, but here these were so minimal it meant there was virtually no plot.

The art was pretty, but that wasn't enough to make me want to keep reading.


DMC

DMC stands for Detroit Metal City. It's meant to be a band name, but it's a bit of an odd title for a band. Especially when the band in question is meant to be a death metal band.

And just like the name, in theory, this manga should be rubbish. Let's look at what goes against it:

1) The artwork is awful. I mean really bad - it looks like a four-year old drew it.
2) Rather odd representation of death metal.
3) When you get down to it, the basic joke in each chapter is exactly the same.

And yet it's one of the best manga I've read in ages.

The reason is that one central joke has a heck of a lot of mileage. The basic idea is that the main character, Soichi, is a wimpy nerd musician who's into indi-pop, but has ended up the front-man of a death metal band called Krauser.

Now if I was to make one real criticism it's quite how he ended up in this position is not explained, nor does it seem like a sensible thing to happen. But then, this is a comedy so maybe over-analyzing it isn't the thing to do.

The real strength of DMC is that it pokes fun at everything, and yet there's also an affection there that makes it all seem like good fun, rather than nasty.