Ongoing Investigations: Case #089
June 11, 2010
Wildstorm sent us a copy of the Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles prelude book. It is a graphic novel that helps link the Robotech TV series and the Shadow Chronicles movie. Rouge officer T.R. Edwards has allied himself with the Invid. Rick Hunter must catch this traitor before he can use his newly stolen technology to strike back at the Earth Forces. The first thing I noticed is that the book has a really American comic feel to it; being a DC Comics imprint and made for American Robotech fans this is unsurprising. Overall the story was nothing objectionable but also immediately forgettable. It seemed mostly for Robotech fans so I felt like an outsider listening to a conversation between old friends to which I was unaware of many points of the undiscussed history. I clicked a good deal more with the characters from the first part of the Robotech saga partially because those are the strongest characters and partially because that is the part of Robotech I remember the most. T.R. Edwards came off as a mustache twirling villain despite the fact that they did make an honest effort to give him some depth. I enjoyed the mechanical designs more than the human and monster designs which seemed bland to me. It was nice to see them dedicating the book to the memory of Carl Macek pretty prominently on the credits page though.
We went to Vertical Vednesday this week which featured the up and coming (and sure to be great seller) Chi’s Sweet Home as well as a look at pet manga in general. Ed even brought along copies of the book for us to peruse which is in full-color if you aren’t familiar with Chi. There is pet manga that stretches back to Tezuka, I urged him to license his dog manga, but Ed felt it really started to get a foothold in the 80′s along side the beginning of josei. And most pet manga today runs along the josei and seinen lines. It was a quick introduction to a small but popular genre, and you’ll be unsurprised to learn cats are the most popular animal. Near the end we also got to take a look at the second book of Twin Spica which I was infinitely more excited about! Vertical Vednesday’s are a relaxed night with the industry making it well worth a short trip.
Ongoing Investigations: Case #066
November 11, 2009
I received a copy of the first book of The Lizard Prince from CMX last week. It seems to follow in the footsteps of many of their shojo fare of late, not bad but not great and a bit forgettable. In this short (just two books) story we follow the misadventures of Sienna a Prince who was turned into a lizard only to have the spell (semi)broken by true love. And we and his new love Canary find out quickly he can still transform into reptilian mode though getting back to human is a bit dodgy. This is a running gag and makes up for a good portion of the incidents in the book. Woven into these frantic moments are some cute trials and growing affection between these two young members of royalty. Though they keep trying to make Canary into this tomboy princess it rarely comes through. Sienna’s kind of a weenie but very trying and sweet though he a lot more amusing in lizard form. The humor, like the love story, is kind of just middling without really making you laugh out loud nor moving you to cheer. There is also a one shot about a girl who is always burning hot and a boy with nice, cool hands. This story I liked a bit better than the main but that might owed to it being just a one off. As a whole The Lizard Prince is cute but nothing that seems all that special.
With the gentle urging of a fellow Hitohira fan I finally decided to go and watch the anime. I prefer the manga but the anime is a wonderful adaptation. Hitohira is the story of a painfully shy girl who after being roped into joining one of the two competing drama clubs learns to be more confident and peruse her dreams. The anime captures all the powerful moments of the manga with the added force of voice acting for any of the scenes where they play is taking place. I enjoyed the manga a little more because I feel it was a tighter story. Everything happens pretty much the same they just take more time to do it in the anime. Also Mugi Asai seems less hopeless when we spend less time with her running away from her problems. I was glad to see a bit of resolution to things that were only coming to a peak in volume three of the manga, which is the last volume of the manga that has been released in English. The anime has a good stopping point but I know that the manga continues the story. I wish that we could finish the manga in the US but I am not holding my breath until that happens.
Ongoing Investigations: Case #027
January 9, 2009
I started watching Patlabor on my own because I’m pretty sure Narutaki would start watching Akikan before he watches Patlabor. Not that anyone should watch Akikan. I myself have always been curious about Patlabor being one of the important foundations of the real robot genre. It’s about as real as your going to get. The show takes place in the near future where bipedal robots called Labors have advanced to the point where they are commonplace. With robots being so common they need a police force specializing in Patlabor related crimes. The anime revolves around the cases that Tokyo Metropolitan Police Special Vehicle Section 2 have to handle. The main draw of the show is Noa Izumi who is a major mecha otaku and new recruit to Section 2. Most of the cast is entertaining, too. She has an energetic charm and an infectious love of her job. The show is never really fast paced even during many of the action scenes. I would go as far as to say it is almost a healing mecha anime. You are watching Patlabor to get an insight into the lives of the members of Section 2 more than to see robot fighting action. I would even classify the mecha porn as softcore as opposed to the hardcore of Gundam or GaoGaiGar.
Watched Tokyo Marble Chocolate. If you haven’t heard of this film, the gimmick is it’s the same story told twice but one perspective is the girl and one is the guy. So it is split into two 25-or-so-minute segments. They get points for thinking outside the box but it wasn’t executed very effectively. One of the major problems is after watching the first half you have a total grasp of what happened. The story rests on a few misunderstandings and one big coincidence (which is really bizarre) but everything is already explained so seeing the second half is virtually useless. The duality would have been more effective if they were constantly cutting between the two. I liked the artistic style and the actual love story is sweet though.
Make More Love & Peace by Takane Yonetani has a shojo art style but josei content. All the stories revolve around women with some sort of complex that makes them doubt themselves and complicates their relationships. The first three chapters deal with an insecure girl named Ayame and her handsome boyfriend Koichi who is a police officer. Their life is complicated by a bratty young girl who wants to steal away Ayame’s boyfriend. The other two stories are stand alone stories that involve and shy librarian and a girl with a horrible scar. I did not read the original Make Love & Peace but I feel you don’t really need to have read it to understand what is going on. Ayame and Koichi relationship is rather easy to understand and if no one had mentioned that there was a book before this I would have assumed that this was a stand alone series. All the guys are easy going nice guys in Make More Love & Peace. They are generally flawless and willing to work with their girlfriends until they can sort out their issues. I liked this story of the girl with the scar the most. I understood why she would be insecure more than the other two girls. I feel Narutaki would have liked the story with the librarian the most because it involved a pretty blonde goofy guy who seems like a playboy but is really dedicated guy. As with any redikomi you are going to have at least one graphic sex scene in every chapter. The more I read redikomi and reviews I feel your enjoyment comes down to one simple fact: Do you enjoy the type of guy the book is about? It seems that every redikomi book I read will have multiple unrelated stories but all of them will have a very similar type of guy in every story. So if you like that sort of guy you will often enjoy the book.
I am continuing my foray into the Brave Story novel, which I haven’t been taking on the train with me because of its enormous size. I am about to embark on the real part of the journey, I think. I am about 115 pages in before anything really starts to happen and while we’ve had hints of goings on, it has been mostly mundane exposition that could have been taken care of in a couple chapters.I am still looking forward to where it is taking me, I just wish I could have gotten there a bit faster. Now onward, “Beyond the Door.”
I was super happy to see that Live Evil and Freelance Fansubs teamed up to work in the Dirty Pair TV series. I have always loved the Dirty Pair but the only fan-sub I have ever found digitally is someone’s rather grainy VHS rip of a 20th generation tape. Seeing the first episode in crisp clear quality reminded me how much I loved the show and how much hard work went into making the Dirty pair look good. We’ll Teach You How To Kill A Computer is the standard premise of Yuri and Kei solving a major problem with as much collateral damage as possible but being too sexy to blame for it. Fun girls with gun action. Also I have to say that Ru-Ru-Ru-Russian Roulette is just an awesome opening. It is such a catchy song. If you are cool and willing to watch a show fan-subbed that is an extreme long shot at being licensed I suggest you try out Dirty Pair. There is a reason I put it on our Best Anime You Have Never Seen panel.
I read the one book BL Take Me to Heaven by Nase Yamato. It is a cute, fluffy, and mostly silly supernatural story about two childhood friends. Fumiya has the ability to see ghosts and they are constantly appearing in his room. Shogo’s family owns a temple and they want him to become a monk someday, to which he resists. Nevertheless he always helps Fumiya out of jam with his own spiritual abilities even if he doesn’t want them. They are always running into crazy ghostly situations thanks to the school’s occult club. These two are major opposites, Fumiya being short, dark-haired, and shy and Shogo being tall, light-haired, and outgoing. Shogo also picks on Fumiya, but while all the girls in school recognize it as love, Fumiya is slower to catch on. There is a constant push and pull between the two of them as Fumiya usual doesn’t see Shogo as serious. As Shogo is mostly coming to Fumiya’s rescue, it was fun in the last story to see the tables turned. Though a little melodrama rears its head near the end, this story is light as air and funny. There is almost no sex in this story and what little there is is brief and ungraphic. A quick read that will make you smile. And luckily for all, there is a preview of it online.
Since I’m watching Patlabor, this is the pick of the week. It is the spirit of Patlabor with both Noa and Alphonse in the same picture:
Ongoing Investigations: Case #012
September 19, 2008
We started watching D.N.Angel with the misguided belief that we would review it for the blog. Well, that ain’t happening. I also read all of the manga that has been released in English, this was a much better experience. The manga is fun, cool, sweet, and even a bit heartbreaking. The anime was a weird mix of fan-service and super-filler. There were good episodes and good moments, but there was too much space between these instances. They don’t explain much and some things just plain don’t make sense. They also seem to throw out the whole phantom thieving at one point. Uh? And yeah I’m still pretty bitter that Dark is in love with Riku in the manga but not in the anime. Read the manga and don’t watch the anime!
I liked the Riku and Daisuke solo dynamic but I feel that adding Dark into the mix makes it interesting to read. Since the manga was not completed they decided to simplify the story in order to adapt it. The problem with that was two fold. First they simplified it too much so you were left with large amounts of filler, wasted space, and uninteresting new additions. I’m looking right at you Mio Hio. Ironically several of their attempts to simplify things made several points more complicated or just plain confusing. Secondly we are cruising along the story pacing highway speed limit at 30 MPH and then the anime original ending cranks up the speed to 110 mph. The last two episodes feel rushed and somewhat unexplained at crucial points. It’s not a bad anime but it’s clearly an anime that is inferior to the manga it was based on.
Ghost in the Shell SAC first season finished! Really amazing show, jumped up into being one of the best things I have watched lately. It had a great climatic ending with some serious emotions emerging. I have heard that it is debated whether or not Batou has feelings for the Major, not sure how this could be debated unless you are blind. Whether the Major actually reciprocates is a different story. Seriously though, the sexual tension in the room (you know the scene I’m talking about) was so intense I thought it was going to crack the windows! As for the Laughing Man, I was pleased though I would love to see him again. And as promised I have a Laughing Man wallpaper.
I want to meet the cool dude or lady who fully got Ghost in the Shell SAC the first time through. I wish to shake the hands with such a genius. I got most of it but I am still fuzzy on several of the details of side cases. I thought everything involved with the Laughing Man was awesome. He is such an awesome character. It was well written and well executed. They could have thrown in some more complex episode in between Stand Alone episodes in the middle but that is a minor flaw. The Stand Alone episodes were often as good as the main plot. Good filler, will the wonders ever end? Oh, I would go as far as to say blind and deaf to miss Batou’s feelings.
Read Kekkaishi volumes 13 and 14. The latter ends the first arc of the series and wraps it up quite nicely while leaving a few lingering villains to show up later on. We also get a glimpse of the tremendous power that is housed in Yoshimori. This is also where the anime ends so I am now reading totally new material. I love that the first thing Yoshimori does when he gets home after this whole ordeal is to bake a cake. I am glad to see this aspect of his personality in tact. The rest of book 13 and most of 14 is mostly short adventures but the end of the book looks to be the start of something.
I read Parasyte book 4. Even though it has a high school student as the protagonist it clearly straddles the line between shonen and seinen that makes it hard to categorize some of the titles in Afternoon. It seem like a shonen manga with it’s high school love story. On the other hand it can be placed in the seinen category just by the number of gory deaths of several important characters and countless unnamed ones. I was a little saddened by the death of the major character in this book but I can’t say it was not interesting.
So when you go to the Live-Evil fan-sub group’s website, the top banner changes and I kept seeing this cute picture but it didn’t say what it was. Finally decided to go through a process of elimination to figure it out, turns out it was a show called Ask Dr. Rin. Watched the first couple of episodes so far. It is essentially a magical girl show with Feng-Shui. Meirin has incredible fortune-telling powers using Feng-Shui, she has a secret identity of Dr. Rin who is becoming famous thanks to her website. Her fortune-telling seems to be dead on for everyone but herself. But when the guy she likes is in trouble her power manifest themselves into a dragon like spirit and she is able to save him. Looks like a major baddie caused this and his motives are yet to be revealed. Cute and fun show that promises nothing more than that.
I watched the Dirty Pair OAVs this week and they are just so much fun! I really like that the science fiction elements are there each and every time to make the story cool. Science is not there to be explained or deus ex machina. It’s just there to enhance the story. I like my hard sci-fi anime like Planetes but some times you need to kick back with two hot girls with big guns and watch them kill God in one episode and upper cut children in the next. Kei and Yuri have a fun dynamic that makes them like sexy versions of the stereotypical buddy action movie characters.
