manga mania

I bought some manga!

Now that may not seem anything particularly unusual -surely I buy manga all the time, right?

Well normally that would be the case, but for about the last year I've been on something of a "fast".  There have been a couple of reasons for this.

The first, and most important, was financial.  Unfortunately, with the adjustments to the VAT laws, the little loophole that amazon was exploiting to discount its manga has disappeared.  This means that all the mange I buy has gone up by several pounds.  This isn't a lot individually, but obviously if you buy dozens of them it soon adds up.

It also makes the situation a bit complicated in that the amazon prices now aren't guaranteed to be cheapest.  Also, I've had a few problems with the free postage service recently so if the free postage is now basically not worth using then shopping around becomes wise, and I couldn't really be arsed.

However, also, more obviously I've been struggling financially, so I didn't really have money to spare for manga.

The other key reason was that I wanted to catch up with some of the normal books on my shelves.  I've got quite a few that I hadn't read, but in particular there's a couple of series I've been reading that I was getting way adrift on.  I'd gotten to the state where I was reading so many manga series that they were all I was reading - whenever I got the pile low, new volumes would turn up (all pre-ordered on amazon, you see).

So why have I bought some manga?  Well, it's been a long time since I read any and I have been doing okay with the normal books, so I fancied a change.

Also, for Christmas I got quite a few amazon gift vouchers, so I needed to spend those anyway.  I also got a bonus payment so I figured I could loosened the belt a tiny bit and it would be okay (I actually only spend about £60 to buy £120 of stuff, so I figure that's not a bad deal.

However, the manga I bought was quite focused on series that have either ended or that I have been collecting and selling the volumes as I go.  That means that I will recoup some of the outlay later - indeed, it sort of helps me down the road, as selling incomplete series is particularly tricky on e-bay and it can be a little risky to leave it too long to buy volumes that have been released in case they sell out.

a (long) short list

I'd obviously put together one of my famous to do lists for my holiday.

One of the main things I wanted to do was watch some of the fansubs I have failed to keep up with.  I did watch a few things, although not as much as I'd hoped.  However, I was sensible to watch things that haven't been licensed since they take up more room (for licensed stuff I generally only download a couple of episodes to sample them).

I also watched Nausicaa and Howl's Moving Castle on DVD.  I've had them for ages but have failed to find time to watch them.  I liked both, but they won't be going into my permanent collection - for Nausicaa I think he's done the same basic themes better elsewhere (Mononoke in particular) and Howl's was enjoyable, but lacked depth.

One of the things I wanted to try was my new portable Blu-Ray drive.  This is an external type drive for a computer, rather than a stand-alone portable player.  Weirdly it has a thing that says you can essentially run Blu-rays directly into TVs from it via USB, but then contradictorily it requires two USB sockets when you plug it in to a computer in order to power it, so how can it run okay on a TV when you only plug it into one USB slot?

Also, it moaned horribly about my laptop's graphics card not providing hardware acceleration (fair enough, it is an old laptop) so how can a TV run Blu-Ray disks direct?

Anyway, my laptop wasn't really man enough for the job of playing Blu-Rays.  The drive came with Power DVD, which basically refused to play the disks at all without the hardware acceleration and even when using the other player (the open source Korean one - I forget the name) the playback was horribly jittery.  However, the other thing this drive gives me, which in some ways is more important, is the ability to play DVDs multi-region.

Well, the drive itself doesn't, but AnyDVD is able to get around the region coding issue.  I discovered last time I took a holiday with the intent of watching some anime (the vast majority of my collection being Region 1) that my laptop's internal DVD drive is essentially built in such a way that it can't be gotten around - once you use up your allowed number of changes, that's it.

The other thing I wanted to do was catch up on reading - I've ended up with a lot of manga that I wanted to read.  I'd also managed to accumulate several magazines, all of which I finished.  I also read World War Z, which I got on the kindle.  It's really very good - even if you don't like zombies it's done in such a way that the fact it's zombies is mostly sort of incidental.  It's difficult to explain, but I can see why it's been such a hit.  Quite how they'll make a film of it and make it exciting I'm not sure, though.

I say I read them all - I read all that I took, which is the majority, but I've some more manga at home I need to read.  Most of this is actually in hardback or very large size format, which is why it was difficult to take with me.

shelves of doom

I mentioned last week I would take some pics of my shelves, so I thought I'd present those today.

There are actually two shelves.

First is the one on the right.

A: Ink Cartridges
B: Some of my important documents.
C: Stack of important (and non-important, to be frank) documents that I haven't sorted out yet (though I'll need to go through them soon as I need to find something).  Plus this is where I keep my TV listing and all my remote controls.
D: These are basically piles of anime where I've bought and imported the original Japanese anime version (and I wonder why I'm skint).  I'm also in the process of collecting the western versions and my hope is that this combo will sell quite well on e-bay.  I'm somewhat afraid that actually they won't sell at all well, so I'm also kinda ignoring them.

E: This shelf is where I keep all the unscanned Japanese anime magazines.  As you can see, it's a fair pile, but it's a lot smaller than it was.  There used to be so many that they lived on the shelf below, which is much taller.
F: These are my PC games.  The ones in the front row are those I haven't really played much yet, if at all, and the ones in the back are ones I have played and want to hold on too or want to play a bit more, but feel I should really do something about those unplayed ones first.
G: And this is the core stack of anime.  As you can see it's quite a deep shelf and you have to remember that these are stacked in two piles, one in front of the other.  That's a lot of unwatched stuff.  It's also the stuff I've prioritised to watch "first" which obviously means I have a couple of other stacks of stuff I want to watch "after" :/.

H: This stack (again, double depth) is the real life TV series (or at least non-anime and non-film) all unwatched (well, I'll have watch the majority of the actual shows when they were broadcast, but I've not watched the DVDs).
I: This stack is "films".  Again, double depth and featuring a mix of live action, foreign and anime.
J: This is my cheater stack, where I've stacked up all those series I'm in the middle of.  It's yet another way of excluding stuff from the to watch pile because I like to marathon things.
K: These cake boxes contain all of the audio books that I've already listened to.  I like to listen to audio books while I walk.  as you can see I walk quite a bit.
L: This is the main chunk of box files containing important documents.
M: My digital radio which wakes me up in the morning.  I got it as a present from my Dad and was worried I might not be able to get a signal, but actually it's great.  My digital telly is problematic, but I think it's because the aerial is pointing at the London region antennae, rather than the Meridian, which is a lot closer.  Also we've still not switched over to full digital service in either region, so signal strength is lower than it could be anyway.
N: These stacks are original Japanese manga that I'm disassembling in order that I can scan the big spreads and dramatic images.  It's really a hang over from when I used to make wallpapers and I used to find new/different/original content by doing this.  Now they're just stuck in the huge scanning backlog (they're sell for a pittance on e-bay, so this way they at least get put to some use before being chucked away)
O: My right speaker, perfectly positioned so I get great stereo effect when watching DVDs or Blu-Ray... except of course I stuck a bunch of stuff in front of it :/.


Second is the one on the left.

P: The other speaker
Q: The overspill pile.  It's mainly anime, but there's plenty of normal TV stuff in there too.  My intention is to watch this stuff after the other stuff... yeah, because I'm ever going to get through all that other stuff :/.
R: My unread books.

 S: VHS Tapes - burn the heretic!  They're old anime VHS tapes that I felt guilty about chucking away without rewatching at least once.
T: Supposed to be my unread manga pile, but they actually spill down on to the shelf below.  I've actually not being doing so bad recently with keeping on top of reading manga.
U: This is ostensibly my western comics to read pile, but it also has a bunch of CD old/empty jewel case I intended to use as spare parts to replace broken ones, but have never gotten around to.
V: These are the CDs I'm hanging on to for now.  There's two stacking crates into eh kitchen of CDs I either want to e-bay (god, the effort required) or sell on one of those "sell your DVD sites" (bound to be a rip off).
W: These fans were headed out to the garage.  Well, until this current heat wave so now they're sort of back in use.
X: I'm rapidly running out of letter, so, from left to right we've got: The DVDs I plan to take to watch on my upcoming holiday; CD cake boxes containing fansubs (I'm supposed to be sorting through them but got distracted half way); my Blu-Rays (I promised myself I wouldn't let it grow :() and a box of software.
Y: These spindles are the blank ones with DVDs and (out of picture) CDs for burning stuff on too.  Oh, and some pants.

So there you go.  The perfect shopping list for burglars.  Well, burglar nerds.  Which is very different to nerd burglars.

taking the good with the bad

Delayed from yesterday, due to snow!

And here's the continuation of the manga catch-up:


Something I really should drop is Asu No Yoichi: Samurai Harem. This is another series engaged in artificial story extension, and it's also making a real bad job of it.

I mean we've just been through a whole thing of the main characters joining the dram club at school and putting on a play. The whole section was dull and uninteresting and after a chunk of chapters ended up with them leaving the drama club. So, in other words, the whole thing was essentially pointless!

At least the fanservice has stayed away from being creepy. Well, what fan-service there's been - it's noticeably tailed off over this recent arc.

I really should drop it.


Anyway, on a brighter note, there's been some really good news about Tenjho Tenge. Basically, Viz have announced that they've picked it up after CMX dropped it - http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-11-15/viz-adds-tenjo-tenge-school-fighting-manga .

Overall, I'm really pleased, although it is tinged with a bit of annoyance. See, famously (or I should really say infamously), CMX's release of TenTen was really heavily edited. And Viz have announced that they will be releasing the series uncut.

This is great in that we get to read the proper series, but annoying because it means I will have to buy the whole thing again. This is slightly tempered by the fact that they will be releasing the series as double-volumes, but then that's undermined by the fact that I now need to e-bay the entire series and I bet it will be really difficult to sell, because everyone knows a better version will be coming out soon.

So yeah - real mixed bag of feelings.


But not really any good news for Moyashimon, which I'm pretty sure is yet another series I was enjoying that Yen Press have dropped. To be frank, their serial offending on this front is really starting to piss me off. A bit of commitment on their parts would not go amiss.

And okay, I know they tend to release quirky, niche titles, but seriously, if the business case for putting them out is so weak that they get dropped after only a few volumes, I'd rather they didn't bother in the first place.


A new series that I've picked up but that I've got a strong feeling won't work out is Cross Game. The ray of hope is that the show is coming out via Viz, who are bigger and more able to cope with poor sales. Also, they're putting it out in three-volume collections and there are only 17 single volumes, so they might be able to sneak the whole thing out before anyone realises it's a Baseball manga.

In actual fact, it's hardly a baseball manga at all. Really it's a coming of age and slice of life type series that happens to feature baseball. It' also really good, although perhaps a little slowly paced. I think it deserves to do well, but that not the sort of thing that means it won't.


The other new series I started is Omamori Himari. I picked it up because I quite liked the episodes of the anime I watched. However, while the plot seems to be the same, I have to confess I think I prefer the anime.

The manga is... I dunno, oddly drawn. The artwork isn't bad as such, it's more that the character design is very reminiscent of that generic porn game/dating sim style. It's difficult to explain, but it's just not a style I particularly like. I think I'll give it a few volumes, but I may well simply watch the rest of anime (it's another one on crunchyroll) and leave it at that.

What certainly doesn't help is that the story is extremely generic instant girlfriend harem type stuff with a rather dull and uninteresting protagonist. If it had had more going for it than that I think I might have overlooked the art, but to be frank, the artwork was most of what I liked about the anime and it's radically different to the manga.

full metal manga

Last week I was going to do a round-up of some of the manga I'd been reading but ran out of space and energy, so I though I'd go though it now.


First off, as I mentioned, I've been reading my way into Fullmetal Alchemist. I don't think I really need to explain what FMA is, as it's one of those ubiquitous shows that everybody's either seen or read. Well, except for me.

I've seen a couple of episodes of the Brotherhood version and will probably buy that somewhere down the line, but although I knew of the show it never really crossed my path. But then I decided I should get it, bought the first volume, which I thought was good enough to pursue, and so bought the rest.

Obviously I was therefore in big scale catch-up mode and there are now 23 volumes released in English, so I've quite a bit to get through in order to be current. I'm up to book 10 and I'm generally enjoying it.

I have to confess I have been a bit struck by my traditionally feeling of "Is this quite as good as everyone proclaims it to be?"

Don't get me wrong, I am enjoying, but I'm not sure it's at the top of my favourites list, shall we say. One thing I do think is clever is that it has a consistent, ongoing narrative that advances at a decent pace. With a lot of manga like this you get artificial story extension (I'm looking at you, Naruto, Bleach and DBZ), but here, while that is definitely going on, it's handled in a much more intelligent and well done way.

It' snot so much artificial extension, as sensible, well considered extension.


Next, a couple of ongoing series I'm still enjoying. First there's Kimi Ni Todoke (From Me to You). I'm definitely still liking this, but I think this is also engaged in story extension and I'm not sure it's being handled in as good a way. It struck me actually to be having a similar issue as Kare Kano.

In that manga, the main characters were really interesting and it was a clever story, but really that story resolved itself within a few volumes. There was then a big middle section that mostly focused on the (less interesting) peripheral characters before coming back to finish off the main character's story.

I'm pretty sure Todoke is going to do the same and we're just switching focus to the other characters. It's still well done, so I'll stick with it, but part of me wishes it had just wrapped itself up in a few neat volumes.


The second ongoing series is Natsume's Book of Friends. Weirdly, having just complained about story extension of a main over-arching plot, my slight criticism of Natsume is that it doesn't really have an overarching plot.

The series is essentially a collection of short stories and it works well at doing that, but it can make things feel very bitty. I still love the book, though, and dearly wish someone would license the series for DVDs. It's actually on crunchyroll, but is region locked to the US :(.


Next I though I'd mention Toshokan Senso: Love & War. I was seriously considering dropping this, but the second volumes was a lot better than the first. I think part of the problem was that because the first volume covered what I saw of the manga, but radically shifted things about, this disconcerted me. Now that it's into stuff I haven't seen I think it's easier for me to understand, though it still has the problem that a lot of shoujo has of poorly flowing speech and panel layouts.


Okay, as usual when I do one of these catch-ups, the post is getting huge, so I'm snipping it in half and I'll post the rest later.

no, I've definitely lost it

I appear to have lost a volume of manga.

The manga in question is called Bakuman. It's a manga about being a manga artist, but that's not really relevant. What's relevant is that I remember it arriving from Amazon. And I remember opening the parcel, flicking through the pages.

I then don't remember what I did with it.

My flat is actually quite small and I've had a really good search around and can't find it. I've even done what I think of as the classic of going back to the same place (in particular, the shelf on which I keep my unread books and manga) and rechecking it "just in case". Just in case what, I wonder? In case I was suffering temporary blindness, maybe? Or in case I was suffering a mental black spot?

I've a horrible feeling that what I've done is put it in the recycling. I keep a big box that I chuck things for recycling in. I then sort this box out every couple of weeks when they come to pick up the recycling and put it in the appropriate bin outside.

However, where I am the collection service is shit, and they're really pissy about what they collect. In particular, paper but not cardboard is the one that really erks me. Especially since when you go down the local community recycling place they've got a single big storage thing that you can out all paper and cardboard in.

So a while back I started saving cardboard up in my big box too and then taking it down there myself. This isn't too much hassle as it's easy to drop off on the way to get my food shop every Saturday. And I don't do it every week - maybe once or twice a month, depending on how much stuff I've got.

The point is that I think I may have put the manga in that box. This isn't as retarded as it sounds, because Amazon sends its stuff in cardboard packaging, so that has to go in the recycling box and I keep that box in my kitchen and usually when I get in I take my mail into the kitchen with me and sort it there - the bits of it I want and need, keep, the rest of it in the recycling box.

Only I've a feeling I got a lot of stuff and maybe rested the manga on the top of the box stuff just to put it somewhere out of the way and then forgot to pick it up again and it got covered with stuff.

The trouble with this theory is it means that when I've then sorted through everything in there to put it in the right bins for collection, or to take it down the recycling centre, I've completely ignored the fact that it's a book of manga and just chucked it away. Even for me that's amazingly dumb.

This post was meant to quickly turn into a quick manga review one, but I've prattled on so much, I'll have to save that for another day. I've read a few new things and dropped some things I was collecting. Plus I started on all the FMA volumes I had saved up, so I've plenty to talk about, just not the desire to keep going at the moment.

more manga catch-up

So, yes, new stuff I've read:


Toshokan Senso: Love & War

I have to say I was a bit disappointed with this.

A while back there was an anime adaptation, as it's originally a series of Light Novels and I quite enjoyed what I saw of them, so I figured I'd pick up this manga adaptation. The premise for the series is a bit daft, but what I really liked about it was that it had some interesting characters. It was also pretty much a shoujo series, which was interesting as I'd always thought Light Novels pandered to the male otaku crowd.

Anyway, the problem I had with the first volume of the manga was that it was poorly laid out and difficult to follow. I've encountered this a few times with Shoujo stuff, where the panels aren't really logically laid out and speech crosses over panels in weird and confusing ways.

I think I'll give it one more volume, but if I don't like that I'll probably drop it.


Polyphonica: Cardinal Crimson

I was also really disappointed with this.

Again, I saw an anime adaptation that I quite liked, so I figured I'd pick this up. Well, it turns out that the adaptation and this seems to have almost completely different stories and the story here is really badly done.

I dunno - the whole thing is badly set up and not very well written.


Seikon no Qwaser

I wouldn't say I was disappointed with this, as such, more I was disappointed with myself for picking it up.

Basically, it's got one of those totally bizarre set-ups where the writer has just made up a load of old cobblers. But really this is just a framework for lashings of fan-service.

The reason for the self-disappointment was that I watched a bit of the anime version and new it was all a load of old toot, yet I bought the manga anyway. And I'll probably keep buying it.


Natsume's Book of Friends

You'll probably notice the theme now when I say that this was another one I saw an anime version of and enjoyed, so I thought I'd pick up the manga. However, unlike the above two, there was no disappointment involved.

Well, I say that, I have to confess I'm not the biggest fan of the artwork. Shoujo stuff can often be rather stylised - people are often lanky with oddly exaggerated features - and this is no exception. It kinda works for the ghosts that feature in the series, but for the humans I'm not so keen.

My main issue is with the faces, I think - they can look a bit pinched.

But what makes up for that is a very nice set of stories. The mangaka explains that the series is an occasional one, so while the same basic idea is across all the 4 stories in the book, they're actually pretty much independent short stores and each one works well.


Kimi Ni Todoke (From Me to You)

And this one too is a manga I picked up having enjoyed my sample of the anime. It's also yet another shoujo series - perhaps I'm getting in touch with my feminine side or something? I think really it's more a reflection of the fact that women do more reading than men and are, by some account, basically propping up the entire publishing industry.

But back to the manga. I think of the stuff I'm reviewing here, this is my favourite. It has decent artwork that is pretty much like most shoujo stuff, but unlike Natsume Yuujincho above, it doesn't go too far down that road. Also, the panels are fairly well laid out - certainly there's generally a bright and breezy feeling to the panels, which tend to flow reasonably well.

The real strength, though, is with the characters and the writing. The story is basically about someone who's been ostracised because they look and act a little scary. They're actually a really nice person, though, and the story is basically about them gaining friends and becoming more integrated.

To be frank, I'm a bit of a sucker for that sort of story, so I'm probably biased, but I'm really enjoying it.

manga catch up

I don't think I've talked about what manga I've been reading for a while.

The truth is that's mainly because a lot of what I've been reading has been the continuing volumes of series. These have included:

• Biomega 2 & 3 - Tsutomu Nihei's art continues to impress, but unlike Blame it's not really work for me. I think its because the sparse style doesn't really suit the type of story.
• Black Lagoon 9 - this finished up the Roberta arc, which has been okay. I like the story and love the artwork and characters still, but Rei Hiroe needs to take a leaf out of Nihei's book and reign in the word count. If these two ever both hit a happy medium between the extremes they seem to operate at, they could rule the world.
• Gurren Lagann is up to volume 5 - this volume was pretty good as it had some original stuff that wasn't in the anime. I mean, it's not a slavish adaptation anyway, but this volume has some properly new stuff, and it's another where the artwork continues to impress.
• Which isn't something that can be said about DMC, where I also have to admit the charm has started to wear a bit thin, as it keeps redoing the same jokes and lacks a longer story arc. There are hints that there may be a longer and more developed story coming up in volume 6, though.
• And Gantz's art continues to be a bit flawed, but with a brutal story that makes up with. It's a little more frustrating reading it at a more normal release pace (we're up to 11 volumes, I think), but I'm still enjoying it.
• I'm also still enjoying Bamboo Blade more than I expected to. It's up to volume 5 now and is still going strong.
• Ichigo 100% is at volume 13 and continues to do what it does - lots of fan-service and a main character who just kind make his damn mind up (pick Aya, you moron). If I didn't know this series ended in 6 volumes time I'd probably be thinking about dropping it by now, as it's getting a bit repetitive - a good thing taken too far.

And speaking of dropping, there are a couple of other titles I've been reading that I'm seriously considering dropping. I'm unsure because they're okay, but also I'm not sure I want to keep spending money on them as they're all ongoing series:

• Dogs: Bullets & Carnage - I really enjoyed the prologue "volume 0", but the ongoing series is not really impressing me. The arts nice, but gets confusing during the many fight scenes and the story just feels like a big old mound of clichés.
• Asu No Yoichi: Samurai Harem - the problem with this is it's a giant cliché. Everything in it is a recycled idea and if it wasn't for the hawtness of the chicks It'd probably bore me (and even that is tainted a bit by having a really young girl who's subjected to just as much groping as the older girls).
• Hayate the Combat Butler - this is the toughest one to drop. I still really like it, but we're already on volume 15 and there are apparently 24 released in Japan and it's not finished. That's a lot of volumes considering it's basically a gag manga where the story is going nowhere (deliberately, mind - it's not really meant to go anywhere).

What's most annoying, though, is that there also appear to be some series I'm following that seem to have been dropped. I say seem to have been because for 3 of them I can't find any official announcement saying they've been dropped, it's just that it's been ages since last volume came out, they're behind Japan and you can't pre-order any future volumes:

• Tenjho Tenge is the most annoying of these. They recently published volume 18 in English and Oh!Great and then CMX basically announced it was stopping publication, only for Oh!Great to announce the end of the series at volume 22 - so there were just 4 volumes left! And with the recent clampdowns on scanslations I've no idea whether I'll ever get to tread the end of the series.
• Kurohime is the second most annoying, not least of all because it's Viz. I always thought Viz just pumped out volumes regardless, but the last volume they did in English was 14 and that was years ago and it's on 18 in Japan, so I guess they've dumped it.
• Yozakura Quartet got to volume 5 and seems to have stopped (it's on 9 in Japan), although I'm not too fussed by this as, while the art was gorgeous, the storytelling was piss-poor.
• Similarly I'm not badly miffed that Princess Resurrection seems to have bitten the bullet at volume 7 (it's on 12 in Japan) as, while I enjoyed it, it wasn't anything spectacular.

Those last two are releases by Del Ray, which is a smaller company, but apparently prides itself on catering to the hardcore fan. That also seems to mean not really telling people what's going on, so I'm not hugely impressed, and I wasn't that big a fan of there's to start with.

But generally this is the most annoying thing with manga - anime, if someone picks it up you can be pretty much sure they'll release the whole series (it takes going tits up to stop them), but with manga they can just drop it, so where does that leave us fans?

Christ, I've wibbled on! And I've not even started on the new volumes I read, which was the point of this post, so more later.

failed

Continuing on from yesterday, the big disappointment area of the holiday was getting stuff done.

Where I made fairly good inroads into the sorting out of boxes, it took far longer than I'd thought it would and so I didn't even look at doing half the stuff I'd hoped I could.

One of the main things was I'd hoped I could do a bit of scanning, but I didn't do any at all. I therefore didn't watch any anime fansubs, as I generally do that so I'm way behind on that too.

Well, I say that - just before my holiday I did sample a couple of new shows:


Kimi Ni Todoke

Well this was a surprise.

I had absolutely no expectations when starting this and what I found was a sweet and charming romantic show.

The basic gist seems to be something along the lines of a misfit finds her place type of show. This is a theme I've always had a soft spot for, probably because I am a total misfit.

If I was being brutally honest, the show does have a slightly benevolent inevitability to it. By that I mean that, despite the main character basically being picked on (bullied is probably going to far), she isn't too badly affected by it and the whole show has an air that things aren't ever going to get worse for her.

I suppose you could say that the story starts with her at the low point and charts her breaking through that, but it's more that you get the feeling the writer wants to tell a warm, affirming story, rather than a dark one.


Kiddy Girl-and

One of the big problems with the original Kiddy Grade was its structure. The first half of the series was very light and fluffy - sort of like a more modern Dirty Pair. However, about half way through it suddenly developed a proper plot. And I don't mean it was one of those shows were you realised there was a plot underpinning the early episodes - you could easily have started watching half way through and missed almost nothing.

The difficulty with Kiddy Girl-and then is that this sort-of sequel, sort-of spin-off also starts in a very light and fluffy way. Indeed, it' possibly more light and fluffy than the original. My problem then is that because I only sample the first few eps on fansub, I've no idea whether it will also develop a substantial plot.

There are hints given in the prologue, but they're not very useful hints. My default position is that if it were ever licensed I'd probably pick it up, but it would be more due to the fact that I quite enjoyed the original than because the eps I watched blew me away.


But those are from a while ago and I was simply to lazy write them up for the blog before now.

I also didn't read any manga until Sunday, when I was basically taking the day to rest and recuperate. The manga I read was the latest volume of Ikki Tousen, so nothing interesting. I did read a lot of manga before the holiday - I'm now totally caught up with Oh My Goddess, but I've talked about that before

I also didn't get the chance to do any sorting out of files or backing up, which are things I usually take the opportunity to do when I'm on holiday.

So yeah, in terms of getting the usual stuff done, it was a bit of a failure. The consolation is I did make a lot of progress with non-usual stuff.

omg!

I've been reading more manga this week.

Both of my renaissances of anime and scanning seem to have fallen by the wayside for some reason. It's not a conscious decision, I've just found myself constantly in the situation where I just haven't had the time.

Next week is my last week before I take a weeks holiday and I'm hoping I'll get a bit of anime watching and scanning done then. However, I was compiling one of my 'to do' list and it's got a hell of a lot of stuff on it. See, the problem is I really want to get rid of a load of crap.

I've discovered there's a council recycling place just down the road and I believe they'll take loads of the big stuff I've been reticent to throw away because it would just end up in landfill. The council collections are shot where I am - they take virtually nothing and you get nasty notes and threats of fines if you get it wrong.

So yeah, I'm hoping to clear that stuff, plus I want to finally get a load of stuff from my childhood on e-bay. I'm pretty certain it won't sell, but at least I'll have put it on there and then I'll know for definite it can go in the bin.

Trouble is of course both of those things will just eat my time and on top of that I'm going to visit my Dad and there's all the regular crap I do.

Anyway, the point today is I have been reading some new manga. Specifically I've started back reading Oh My Goddess.

OMG was one of the first manga I ever read. Indeed, I think it was one of the first manga ever released in America. Back in those days it was 'flopped' - printed back to front, which probably seems a bizarre thing to do in the modern era.

Anyway, the point is because it's such a long series (it's still ongoing in Japan!) there came a point with OMG where the fashion had very much shifted to printing manga in the original right-to-left way and Dark Horse where still playing catch up. That meant they decided with volume 21 to revert to the original format.

But also, it turned out Dark Horse had played silly buggers with the earlier volumes, skipping out and reordering some chapters. So they therefore released several of the earlier volumes in with the correct chapter order. But then they also announced that they would re-issue all of the already released volumes in unflopped format.

And that's why I think I stopped reading - I got very, very confused.

But now, many years later, I thought it was about time I caught up, so I bought loads of volumes and have started ploughing my way through.

I've gotta say I still like OMG. I was a little worried my tastes might have changed, but it still pretty much works. I will say I'm still a little frustrated with it - Keichi and Bell's relationship still remains weirdly non-intimate and stagnant, but the stories are sufficiently full of other goings on that it kinda gets around that issue.

Still, it would be nice for it to at least start to explore the implications of a man and goddess pairing, and who knows maybe it does in the volumes I need to catch up, but I kinda doubt it.

america, but not as we know it

Recently I've been reading Gunsmith Cats: Burst, which is a sequel to Gunsmith Cats by Kenichi Sonoda.

The original Gunsmith Cats manga was one of those that just sort of stopped. By that I mean, because the series never had an overarching plot, but was instead a series of consecutive stories, there was no 'final wrap up' to the last story.

I liked the original GSC a great deal. It had a bit of warped view of America, but the stories were good, the characters generally interesting and the artwork very nice.

After GSC, Sonoda went on to do Cannon God Exaxxion. This was more of a SF show, but with the typical Sonoda touches. I also liked this series a great deal, but I guess it wasn't as popular as Black Horse basically pulled the plug on publishing it and I never got to read the end. To be honest, I've never really forgiven them for this, especially as they were just 2 volumes from completion.

Anyway, I guess Exaxxion was one of those 'I've got to get this story out of my system' sorts of things, because afterwards, Sonoda went back to GSC with Burst.

And to be perfectly frank, I'm not really quite getting it.

I dunno if my tastes have changed radically or I'm just not quite in the mood for it, but I'm finding GSC not to be up to the high standards I remember of GSC. I think part of the problem might be that it's so long since I read the original and this is a proper sequel.

There was no re-introduction of characters or gentle ease you in approach - I think it just picked up from where the original left of. And I don't remember where that was, so I've been a little lost.

What I'll probably do is dig out the old GSC and give it a read.

One thing that is definitely annoying me, though, is the errors in Burst. For example, there's one bit where Rally refers to a magazine as a "clip". Now for a normal person that's a perfectly okay excuse to make, but Rally is supposed to be a total gun-nut, to the extent that she owns a gun store.

There is no way someone like that would erroneously refer to a magazine as a clip. Now to be fair, that could be a boo-boo on the part of the translators, but I dunno. I mean, there's another bit where a huge error is made in relation to blanks, saying that a blank could never be used in an automatic as it wouldn't cycle the action.

This is clearly wrong - I mean, they don't constantly fire live rounds in films. Plus I know someone who was an army cadet and they use blanks all the time with no problems.

Now maybe there are different grades of blanks and some work and some don't, but that's not what it says.

manga snippets

I don't really know what to talk about today.

My car's in to do the new wheel today, so I'll be £200 lighter by the end of the day. Sigh...

It's actually depressed me a bit, cos it just seems to yet another thing that's gone not well. I mean, I could have hit the pothole and simply burst the tyre. Don't get me wrong - that would have been a pain the arse, and expensive, but it would have been a lot simpler and cheaper than what I've ended up with, which is having to buy two new wheels and all the inconvenience that's gone with it.

So I thought I'd just do some mini-reviews of some manga:


Gurren Lagann (manga version)

This is the manga version of an anime I love.

Overall I'd say it works - there's quite a lot of tweaks to the story, which is good, but it retains the core of the story. Also, the artwork is pretty good.


Dogs: Bullets & Carnage

I read the first volume, which was actually a collection of short stories, that's then been continued in this series, and that was really good. The ongoing series is less so, because where the short stories were quite imaginative and interesting, the ongoing series seems to have fallen back on a lot of clichés.

The artworks' nice (if a little confusing in the action sequences), though.


Bokurano

I used to really like a manga called Shadow Star/Narutaru. I say used to because my enjoyment of it was spoiled a little by the poor treatment it got from Dark Horse. Basically, it used to be published in a monthly manga comic called "Super Manga Blast" with then anthology volumes put out subsequently. Well, SMB died a death and I'd assumed that the manga it contained would still be released as volumes. But nope, that was it - no more releases, you don't get to read the rest of the mangas!

Bokurano is by the same guy and it's very much in the same style - a very dark undercurrent underneath what seems like normality. There's actually been an anime version that I sampled but has never been licensed.


Biomega

Biomega is by the guy who did Blame, which is one of my favourite mangas of all time.

Biomega's strength, and, to be honest, it's weakness is that's it's more of the same. Saying that, there is one big difference here - there's more of a tangible story, and if I'm honest I'm not sure if I like it or not yet. An aspect of Blame I really liked was that, although there was clearly a story there, it was kinda lost and in many ways didn't matter. Biomega's story is more familiar, being roughly a zombie apocalypse deal.

ooh, in't it nice

This week has been veritably lovely weather.

I often tend to say about the British weather that it tends to come with exclamation points. By that I mean that when a new season rolls around the weather will change without much warning.

So up until last week we've I've been freezing my knackers off, but then suddenly this week it's been all gloriously spring sunshine and temperatures in the teens. So it wasn't any kind of gradual build up, but a sudden shift from one type of weather to another.

Of course, there's no guarantee that the weather won't flip and we'll get a sudden cold snap, but I think it's safe to say we're pretty much over the worst of the winter. And thank Jesus H Chrimble for that, to be frank.

I bit the bullet and renewed my insurance yesterday. As mentioned, I decided to protect my no claims, which cost about £41 to do, but as noted, given how my luck's been going, if I do need to make a claim I

I finished Dragonaut. The nosedive into total rubbish that I'd heard mentioned in reviews failed to materialise, although if I'm being totally honest, the end was a little bit of a mess.

The problem, though, seemed to bee very much one of ambition outstripping talent. I was actually struck by quite a few resemblances to Evangelion towards the end, but unlike that series, the writing just wasn't good enough to pull it off.

I think the main thing I'd say was it was a little heavy handed in putting across its message, and the dialogue was rather clunky as a result. Admittedly, I ended up pretty much sticking to the dub version as it was quite well done, so that may be a part of it, but still, glances at the subtitles suggested it wasn't all that different.

The other problem is they were left with a few plot holes you could easily drive truck through, but that's nothing new for anime, I'm afraid. Especially Gonzo anime.

I also finished the first volume of Gantz. I was unsure quite what to expect from Gantz. I'd heard it was rather violent and that was it. While it was pretty violent, that's not something that really concerns me, so overall I liked it and decided to order the remaining volumes.

One thing I would say is I'm not sure about the artwork. I don't think I'd classify it as 'bad' in the same way I would, say, DMC (which I think is meant to be like that, btw), but it's not the greatest. The characters don't always look consistent and some of the faces are off and stuff. It's nothing I can't live with, though.

And I also started Ouran High School Host Club last night. Too early to really give an opinion as I've literally watched 2 episode, but I enjoyed them, so it's looking good.

even more scanning

This last weekend I did some more scanning.

I actually completely scanned two whole issues of megami, which I was fairly pleased with. Now the reality is that this isn't a rate that means I'm really catching up - the latest Newtype, Animedia and Animage turned up on Friday, giving a net increase of 1 magazine, but it does mean I've not given up, and that really id the most important thing.

From memory, I've 4 more issues of megami currently unscanned and it's my sincere hope that I'll be able to do some more of them this next weekend. I'm not going to promise myself or anything, because you never know what might happen, but the main point is that last weekend there were additional distractions.

For example, it was one of my cleaning weekends and of course I had to pick up my glasses and buy some petrol, but mainly it was the Bahrain Grand Prix. Any Grand Prix weekend adds a minimum of 3 hours to my viewing schedule - the race is normal about 1.5 hours and qualifying about 1, but spread over about 1.5 hours. Normally, however I also like to watch a good chunk of the punditry, although not all of it.

Anyway, the point is, next weekend is free of most of those types of things, so in theory I should be able to at least get a couple more megamis done like last weekend. Who knows I may even do more, but again, no promises.

Anyway, while I scanned I did watch a bit more anime, although I also had the F1 punditry on for a good chunk of it. I've therefore not watched as much as I might have done, but here's the mini reviews:


Sweet Blue Flowers (Aoi Hana)

I really liked what I watched of this, although it's a bit odd that it appears to be another Yuri (lesbian) themed show. I guess Yuri must be the flavour of the month or something, because there have been a lot of shows featuring it recently.

The take here is quite a gentle one, and it works very well. It's also basically a slice of life show set in high school, so I guess it doesn't win any marks for originality, but it seems well executed and intelligent, so you can't really ask for more.


GA: Geijutsuka Art Design Class

I enjoyed this, overall, but it felt a bit like I'd seen it before. I don't actually know, as I've never read the manga, but it had a strong feeling of being an adaptation of a four-panel comic. By that, I mean that the episode was almost divided up into a series of vignettes.

I was also unsure what the target audience was - the art design bit in the title isn't just a framing thing, it kinda teaches you about art techniques and stuff. I was therefore puzzled if that meant it was mean to be aimed at a younger audience, or if that was just the style the manga-ka liked.

I can't say it didn't work, but also it felt too similar to the likes of Sunshine Sketch and Azumanga Daioh, but it looses out to them a bit for me because there wasn't really much in the way of character development.


I also watched a bit more of Dragonaut (6 whole eps at the weekend and then 4 more last night in fact) and I continue to find it reasonably entertaining. Unless it takes a real nosedive towards the end I'm really not sure why so many reviews have crapped all over it. I mean, it's not the greatest thing ever and there are a few clunking episodes (one I dubbed "the power of love" was particularly heavy-handed in terms of spelling out 'the message', but then hey - at least there is a message) but it doesn't seem to match up with the pannings its gotten.

On the manga front I've mainly been catching up with my re-reading. I've discussed it before I'm sure, but I like to read stuff twice, but I also like to read things in chunks. What that means is that I don't immediately re-read a volume, but instead wait until I've a small stack of the same series to re-read and then I tackle them all together.

It means that while I might not get to update my MAL with stuff, I am still consistently plugging away at reading manga.

The only new manga I have read is the first volume of the adaptation of Gurren Lagann and a little bit of the first volume of Gantz. It's too early to really be sure if I like them, but the signs are pretty good.

commence floggery

My main goal this last weekend was to get some stuff on e-bay.

I have a box that I keep next to my bed and as I finish reading or watching something I dump it in the box. When the box is overflowing with stuff is usually my cue (I had a real thicko moment there where I couldn't remember how to spell cue!) to get some stuff flogged.

The thing about this pile though is that it can be a little deceptive. Although it often gets the point of overflowing, sometimes there's not actually much in it that I can actually sell.

The reason is that often the majority of the pile is made up of manga volumes and while I will eventually sell them, I've learned that manga sells best when you sell it as a complete collection. That's particularly true at the moment where I've got a lot of ongoing series that I'm collected, but that aren't really keepers.

I mean, they're not bad, but equally they're not ones I want to hang onto in the long term. That means I have to put them away in boxes until the series is complete and I can sell them all in one go.

The other thing that does work is if I dump a series and I'm up to date. They usually sell quite well if it's a case of "all released so far" as you're effectively kick-starting someone else collecting them. The thing that doesn't sell at all well is single volumes in the middle of a series.

The problem, I guess, is that you're relying on several people being on that same volume in order to get multiple bids and also that they'll be looking on e-bay for that specific volume. It's usually fairly unlikely.

But what that does mean is you can't sell, say, volumes 1-10 in a lot and then try and sell the individual volumes as you read them. I've tied something similar to that before and I just cannot sell them at anything like a reasonable price. Where I would at minimum get a third back from selling multiple volumes or a complete series, with individual volumes I'm lucky to be getting 5% back.

When you consider postage and e-bay fees, that means it's almost guaranteed to be a loss-maker. And while I don't mind selling stuff and not making a lot of money so that other people can enjoy the series, I'm not happy about loosing money for the privilege.

Anyway, the upshot of going through the pile was that I've ended up with about a dozen things on e-bay. The pile had a lot more stuff in it that I've boxed away for the time being, but a dozen things isn't bad all things considered.

Hopefully I'll have more stuff to get rid of soon as well, because for the first time in ages I sat down and marathoned a load of episodes on DVD on Sunday. And that was on top of playing a load of Anno 1404: Venice, so a fairly successful weekend.

off the boil a bit

Last night I was re-reading the latest Air Gear volume (the latest translated into English this is) and it occurred to me that Oh! Great's (OG's) stuff has gone off the boil a bit.

As well as Air Gear, OG does a manga called Tenjho Tenge. They're both very much in a similar vein, although TenTen is a bit more adult that Air Gear. Both are essentially that speciality of boy's manga - fighting/tournament series.

I won't go into too much detail as I've reviewed both over at trismugistus.com, but basically TenTen is about people properly fighting fisticuffs style and Air Gear is about skating teams who use special powered skates called Air Treks.

There are still plenty of things I like about both series. The artwork is amazing - OG's stuff seems to just get better and better. Going along with that, the echhi fan-service is also pretty top notch. OG's girls are pretty damn hot and there's plenty to enjoy on that front.

Also the way he draws the fights and battles is good and generally speaking I enjoy the characters. I have to admit that slightly oddly I tend to prefer his supporting characters to the main characters, but then to some degree these are ensemble series.

The problem is that both appear to be disappearing up their own backsides.

In TenTen there was a part where it flashed back to show you the recent history of some of the characters. We're not talking far - a couple of years, back when they first joined the high school.

Now this was a double-edged sword - he seemed to get really carried away and this flashback went on for loads of volumes. So may that when we got back to the present it was like he'd gotten bored of his original story and decided to bugger about with it.

Unfortunately this meant a flashback even further to Samurai times. One of the big problems here was it was involving all sorts of new characters who'd never been explained to us before. I think the main problem is that many of these were characters from proper Japanese history, and, never having studied it, I got completely lost. Plus it involved a hell of a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo.

And unfortunately this story is essentially now that the manga is back to the modern day. So we've not only got the original threads and the first flashback threads, there's now this mystical mumbo-jumbo thread.

And it's this mystical mumbo-jumbo-ness that is also making Air Gear a bit naff too.

Part of the problem here is that I hate what I think of Dragonball-type stories. In these, a new, more powerful enemy keeps appearing and in order to beat them, the hero must learn a new technique or otherwise "level up". I find this sort of thing predictable and rather tedious.

Now fair enough, Ten Ten and Air Gear have both always had that sort of aspect to them and I've just lived with it.

The problem now is that OG has gotten a bit carried away with it all. So where previously the hero might have had to simply practice a lot to learn how to jump high and build up his muscles, now he has to learn something that's mumbo-jumbo-ish about, I dunno, controlling the flow of chi or walking on air pressure or some other nonsense that OG has read in a book and made weird.

Now if this was just once n a while it wouldn't be too bad, but it seems to have gotten to that Dragonball Z stage where it's happening all the damn time.

a half-arsed anime catch up

I've found the time to sample a few series over this last week or so.

Normally I would aim to watch 3 episodes as a sample, but I'm so far behind that I only watched 2 episodes of these to help me make some inroads. Not that I've watched a lot of stuff, just that I've been having a go.

Seitokai no Ichizon

I wasn't really sure what to make of this. It seemed... I dunno - insubstantial?

The basic idea seems to be sort of a bit like Haruhi. In Haruhi, you've got quite a clever idea whereby Haruhi is interested in aliens and time travel and anime tropes like that, and she's surrounded by characters who are those things, yet she never realises.

In Seitokai no Ichizon I think it's supposed to be playing with the idea of Harem and Moe tropes, but to be frank, it just doesn't work as well. It kept falling into its own clichés and while I think this was deliberate, it's just not as well done as Haruhi. Plus it doesn't really help itself by skimming on the edge of being a "whacky" comedy and so not being very funny.

I guess it's the sort of show I could watch if there weren't a million other (better) things and I wouldn't really remember it after it was over.


Hanasakeru Seishounen

This is essentially what I believe is called a reverse harem show, which essentially means that instead of a male protagonist surrounded by gorgeous women, there's a female protagonist surrounded by gorgeous men.

As far as that sort of thing goes, this seemed like a perfectly okay show, but to be frank, it's not really my cup of tea. I mean, although the focus is on romance, rather than boobs as it would be in a harem show, they're not generally a particularly realistic genre. Not that normal harem is, but at least there it's feeding me fantasies that I can appreciate.


Sasameki Koto

Sasameki Koto seemed quite good. It's one you need to be in the right frame of mind for, though, I think.

The story is one of unrequited love, I guess you would say. The main character is clearly in love with her best friend and her best fried is an 'out' lesbian, but the problem is her friend likes cute girls and she's not very cute. Weirdly, the main character actually fits more into the mould of those strong women you get in girls animes that all the other girls fall in love with. She's very tall and athletic and clever.

The reason it's one you need to be in the right move for is because it's very melancholic. The friend keeps falling for all sorts of other girls and the main character never tells her how she really feels - that sort of stuff. So it's sad, but well done.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

I guess this show highlights just how far behind I am with watching anime - Brotherhood started airing in April of 2009, so in a few weeks it'll be a year old and I'm only now sampling it.

I'm also pretty new to FMA full stop. I've never seen any of the previous version of the anime and although I've bought all the manga, I've only read the 1st volume, with the other 20-odd sat in a big pile awaiting my attention.

I believe Brotherhood is a re-telling of the original anime that's closer to the manga, but as I say, I've not seen that, so I can't really comment. What I would say is I really enjoyed these first few episodes I sampled and I can definitely see why it is/was so popular.


One thing I have been doing is continuing to read manga. I find it a lot easier to keep manga reading going, as I can easily stop half way through chapters, or only read for 10 minutes. And I can read it at breakfast and lunch, of course. I can't really do that with anime - episodes don't work well if you only watch a bit of them and I have to sit and watch them on telly.

Also, I tend to always feel I need to watch a full disks worth when I watch it, which is part of the problem. Doing that means it's going to be an hour and a half of my time (4 episodes on a disk, on average) and when I start thinking like that I start thinking stuff like "I don't have the time, I'll do X instead".

Anyway, one of the manga was a new series:


Sunshine (Hidamari) Sketch

I picked up Sunshine Sketch because I enjoyed the anime adaptation. It turns out the manga is one of those 4 vertical panel jobs. Really I should have guessed from the anime, which is staged like a series of short vignettes, which is a common approach when adapting these types of manga.

The manga is pretty good. It's very Japanese, though. There's one of those translators notes sections at the back and it's written in tiny font with loads of stuff crammed in. I also get the feeling they've deliberately tried to keep it to one page and there's plenty of stuff that could also be explained.

However, unlike with something like Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei, this doesn't really matter. There's the odd strip that you need the notes to understand, but overall you should be okay, especially if you have some general knowledge about Japan from other anime and manga.

Otherwise it's pretty good. It's quite light in tone and is a slice of life type show. The main character Yuno is attending an Arts based high school and once she's there it actually becomes something of an ensemble piece, focusing on all the girls who live at the Hidamari Apartments with Yuno.


The big box I need to tick this weekend is getting my hair cut. With the weather and holiday I've not had it done in ages, so it looks bloody awful.

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.

as you do

I've recently been reading Richard Hammond's new... I was going to say autobiography then, but it isn't really. It's more like a diary/journal thing, although there are some auto-biography elements.

The first part covers the race to the North Pole Top Gear did, where Hammond was racing Huskies and James & Jeremy went in a four-by-four. Later on - although I haven't got there yet - it seems to cover the Desert race they did, as well as Hammond's meeting with Evel Knievel in a documentary.

I remember those episodes and the documentary well and it's been interesting to read Richard's take on it and the behind-the-scenes stuff. I'd certainly recommend it, but probably only if you're a Top Gear watcher or interested in Hammond. It's not quite got the broader appeal of his autobiography, since it's a bit more focused on things you need to have watched Top Gear to get properly. But it's still an entertaining read.

And speaking of reading, although I've not been watching any anime (naughty Mark!) I have been plugging away with the old manga. So much so, in fact, that my pile of unread manga has almost halved. Indeed, where it actually consisted of two separate stacks, it's now down to 1 stack.

Okay - that's not quite true. Because I deliberately read all my manga twice, actually it's changed from 2 stacks of totally unread to 1 stack of read-once and 1 stack of unread. But that's a sufficiently good achievement for me to be happy.

Anyway, the point is I thought I'd do one of those summary-type list of my thoughts on some of the newer stuff I've tackled:

The Welcome to the NHK manga has been rather disappointing, if I'm honest. The main problem I'm having is that it doesn't seem to be very consistent, both in terms of plotting and tone.

I'm left puzzled as to quite what it's trying to say or to achieve. At some points it comes across as an all-out comedy, at others it seems to be trying to make more serious points about the hikikomori (shut-ins, basically, though this shut-in spends a remarkably large amount of time outside his apartment, which kinda exemplifies my issue with it). At others it seems be going for a more straight drama style.

It almost comes across as vaguely schizophrenic - switching from one idea to another as it suits the whims of the writer. Now this is either a clever representation of the psyche of the main character, or just plain bad writing. And unfortunately I've been erring towards the latter.

Samurai Harem: Asu No Yoichi is a series I picked up because I rather liked what I saw of the anime version. Whilst I wouldn't say I didn't like the manga, the anime is better. That's a raft of double negatives, isn't it?

Basically, what I mean is that the manga seems okay, where the anime seemed good. There's a lot of commonality between the two - all the same characters are featured and the set-up is the same - but the anime is slightly better written. Weirdly, this is because the anime is more happy to use already familiar harem-type devices.

Normally I'd have been rolling my eyes at this rolling out of clichés, but the thing with Harem was that the main character was actually quite likeable and not the usual loser/milquetoast they often feature. In the manga this is also true, but the writer has tried to be innovative about lost of other stuff too, and it doesn't quite work.

In other words, for the anime, they seem to have picked the best aspects and used those. Plus the tweaks to the chara designs make them a bit better in the anime, if I'm honest.

Two series I think I've mentioned before but I've now read a bit more of are Doujin Works and Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei.

Doujin Work I was a bit on-the-fence over, due mainly to the format, I think. Well I've decided I pretty much like it now. Weirdly, it actually reminds me of Garfield.

Not in the sense of sharing any plot elements, obviously, but Garfield was formatted in a rigid panel format that was designed mainly for short, gag-based strips. However, occasionally it would veer into longer stories across more strips.

Doujin works is very much like that and it suffers the same problem. Long-form comics almost demand the use of varying panel sizes. Kept in fixed formats they feel oddly contained; broken up somehow.

But the point is, when you get past that, it works as a series. It also helps that I'm now used to the weirdness of it all.

However, another series I was a bit on-the-fence about has proven to be less of goer. Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei is really leaving me cold.

And I just can't understand why - when I watched the anime I really loved it, but the manga. I dunno, I just can't explain it.

My only theory is that the manga is confusing me. A lot of the characters look very similar and the panels are riddled with obscure, Japan-centric visual jokes that I don't get.

But in the anime, these jokes are either ignorable, or they are better explained by being animated. For the characters of course, you have colour to help distinguish them and different sounding voice actors.

It's a pretty flimsy theory, but it's all I can think of.

the end of furuba

I'm on the verge of polishing off Fruits Basket, or furuba as it's known.

I've kinda not read furuba for a very long time, but now that it's finished publication I've gotten around to finishing it. That should reflect badly on the manga, btw - I really enjoy it, it's just, I dunno, I kinda stopped reading.

There are a variety of reasons for that.

First and foremost is probably that I found it very emotionally draining. I'm a bit of a soft-touch when it comes to drama and I cry all the time, like some sort of big girl's blouse, but that's how I am. Furuba is/was a veritable blub-fest for me, and not always in a sad way. A lot of it's crying for joy.

There's also quite strong emotional connection in there for me - my mum died of cancer and there's a lot of lost parents stuff in Furuba (not always through death - it's more of a general theme).

So yeah, it got to the stage that I was blubbing a lot and while I enjoyed it I wanted to take a break.

Another issue was that it doesn't really work broken up. No, that's the wrong way of saying it - it's more like it works far better read continuously. I was experiencing a heck of a lot of frustration with the 6-month wait between volumes, so it seemed sensible to build them up.

I then discovered that the series ended with volume 23 and it then seemed sensible to wait until I had them all before reading again. What I didn't really think about was that meant, with 6-month gaps, it would be around 4 years before I would start again :/.

A problem I've always had with furuba is the sheer number of characters. I mean, it's based on Chinese zodiac, so you've got at least 12 main characters for starters. When you add in the other main characters and the secondary characters, and the occasional/incidental characters, there must be 30 characters you need to keep on top of.

That's a heck of a lot for my meagre brain. Especially when they all have unusual (to me as a westerner) names. When two characters are discussing an off-screen third is when I struggle the most. I'm often referring back to the front of the book where some fo the main characters are listed out, though it's a long way from being comprehensive.

The above may all read like criticism, but a lot of it isn't really.

I mean, lots of characters has made for lots of interesting plotlines, for example. And my rubbishness with names is my own problem, not the fault of the manga.

So yeah, I've been really reading it with some gusto and remembering why I liked it so much too.