Category: Manga

August’s Final Denouement: Why Risa and Otani just make sense.

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The school romance is a staple whether you are talking about shonen or shojo but when speaking of modern girls manga alone, there is an overwhelming amount of it. It is easy to say that you’ve seen it all before, that nothing can surprise you, or that they are just plain silly and unrelatable and for the most part, even as someone who reads a lot of them, you wouldn’t be far off the mark. They are fluff but every once and a while you come across one that makes the familiar feel so very special. Maybe Lovely Complex isn’t the most original school romance you’ll ever see, but it is a pillar on how to do it justice.

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Paradise Kiss’s Hiroyuki: One Point on Two Triangles

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Paradise Kiss is all about relationships. Friends. Co-workers. Family. Lovers. And Paradise Kiss goes a long way to showing that all of these relationships, minor or major, make a difference and effect your decision, consciously or not. Growing through experience plays a solid tune throughout the series. As each character goes down their paths, some having a better idea of where they are headed than others, no one is alone on their journey. Hiroyuki, the seemingly average man among men, plays pivotal roles in much of the story despite being not quite part of the group.

hisuiconI always took away the message of Paradise Kiss being that what we think we want, what we actually want, what we need, and what we get are all very separate things. No matter how much we may try to get them to be the same we discover life is about dealing with the fact that these four things may never meet up no matter how much we try to make them. All the member of Paradise Kiss kiss deal with these clashes of desires and realities both romantically and professionally throughout the series. But there is one character who on the surface seems out of place. Hiroyuki Tokumori seems to be a minor character who is both above this and apart from this. But on further analysis we see that he is not only a key player in all the lives of the main characters but also just as torn and effected by these conflicts as everyone else.

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Ongoing Investigations: Case #093

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hisuiconChi’s Sweet Home may be the greatest possibility of being a mainstream success with an older audience that manga will ever have. Everything about it is extremely friendly to the casual reader. It is flipped and in color which gives it a distinctly high end American newspaper comic feel. It is cute and delightfully innocent. The book is superbly designed. Everything is crisp and clean and the whole book is as well designed as the Japanese version if not better. So rightfully you will see tons of praise for this series on the Internet and it deserves all the praise it gets. That being said I ultimately found the series utterly boring. The whole books is kitten moe. The book utterly relies on you finding Chi adorable. But the problem with Chi is the problem you see with any moe show. People who love K-ON! love it with their heart and soul and everyone else wonders what the heck that crazy person is babbling on about. Now moe for humans quickly gets into weird and uncomfortable sexual issues for some people which thankfully are nonexistent in Chi. But the underlying problem still remains. If you collect cute pictures of kittens, post in Caturday threads, and/or are just in love with felines in general this book will be catnip to you. To me it was like one of those extremely profitable newspaper comics that I read and then just shrug my shoulders. I understand why it is so successful but I just seem immune to it’s charm.

As far as I know Kekkaishi 22 is my last pre-ordered volume, I must remedy that! In this installment we see the consequences of Tokine’s actions at the end of volume 21 plus the mysteries surrounding the scared sites just keep getting thicker. We also meet a character that I kept seeing in fan-art who is a member of the Shadow Organization’s special unit. As per previous suspicions and hints, someone in the Organization is behind the murders going on but we are still no closer to finding out who. There’s a decent dose of humor in this book despite the very serious circumstances of Tokine’s predicament. And this time around Yoshimori atleast asks first to be reckless before leaving, a step in the right direction maybe. We end mid-stream as Yoshi finally connects with Tokine and a major battle is slated to ensue. A good, solid volume.

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