Category: Manga

Manga of the Month: Yamada and the Seven Witches

Leave a comment

Yamada and the Seven Witches (山田君と7人の魔女)
by Miki Yoshikawa

As I don’t read Japanese it is extremely hard for me to be any sort of taste maker when in comes to manga. By the time I usually know about a series it is fairly in the thick of things in its run. The rare exception comes when I know to check out a series because I have enjoyed something by the author in the past so I know to keep an eye on their current work. In a previous Manga of the Month I talked about Miki Yoshikawa’s Yankee-kun to Megane-chan. It is a great comedy series but it can be hard to recommend because you are asking for someone to commit to reading 23 books. But with a new series you can read a handful of chapters and be up to date. Since Yamada and the Seven Witches started in February it is a great time to start a Miki Yoshikawa manga.

Ryu Yamada and Urara Shiraishi are as different as night and day. Ryu is a rough a tumble delinquent while Urara is the class brainiac. One day the accidentally kiss as they fall down the stairs and discover they can exchange bodies by kissing. When the student council vice president get involved with their little secret they learn that they can exchange bodies with other people as well. So the three of them restart the school’s supernatural club to figure out why this is happening. But how long can the three of them keep this under wraps?

Continue reading →

The April Line-Up

Leave a comment

Thanks to Anime Boston and Sakura Con there was a deluge of license announcements this past month! And on top of that the new season of anime so you can imagine there was a lot of news for April.

Oh my Good Golly Miss Molly this is a lot of news this month. Have Anime Boston and Sakura Con always been big licensing cons like this or have I just not been paying attention?

The Line-Up is a monthly rundown of newly licensed in the U.S., newly streaming in the U.S., and newly announced anime and manga projects.

Continue reading →

Hayate the Combat Butler: A Butler Always Takes Care of Loose Ends

Leave a comment

SPOILERS FOR HAYATE THE COMBAT BUTLER

If you remember recently Hayte the Combat Butler went on a hiatus for short time. Kenjiro Hata made sure to mention that the break was not for health reasons or burn out. He just had a project he had to work on. But just before his time off started he mentioned that Hayate was 60% complete.

And then he recently asked his fans on twitter if they had any unresolved plot threads that they absolutely need to make sure get resolved before the manga ends. Reactions to this have generally been mixed whenever I bring it up. Everyone seems to appreciate an author who is dedicated to making sure as many plot threads get tied up in the end but most people also seem a bit worried that it means that the author also clearly does not remember half the things they wrote.

I, being a bit of a fanboy of Hata, I am going to assume the best of him. I have to wonder if he went on hiatus to sit down with his editor and carefully plot things out so they could wrap up all the niggling little details for the end of the series. It would be nice if we were all insane like Eiichiro Oda but I am sure that the weekly serialized schedule makes it easy to forget a plot thread or two. Even the best author and editor team will miss some minor point that an eagle-eyed nerd will remember as if rote.

Hata has repeatedly shown that he embraces social media platforms to interact with fans. You might as well use that encyclopedic database of otaku to see if there is anything important you overlooked in your grand strategy meeting.

Continue reading →