Category: Ongoing Investigations

Ongoing Investigations: Case #214

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narutaki I started reading the new Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin comic The Private Eye (issues 1-2). The distribution of this comic is worth talking about. It is released digitally as a download of either PDF, CBR or CBZ. And it is a pay-what-you-want pricing model.

I love that the art takes into account that screens are vertical and not horizontal like a book. So when you look at a page at maximum size it literally fills the entire screen.

The setting of Private Eye caught my attention, it is a post-internet future but not a post-apocalyptic dealie. Technology has advanced in different areas while the internet has died out after “the cloud” spewed out every bit of everyone’s information into the world for all to see 60 years prior. The aesthetic is futuristic such as changing your appearance with the push of a button but mixed with things like rotary phones. The world is such that identity can be very malleable.

P.I. is hired to dig into his client’s past to see if he can unearth all the dirt she tried to bury, but before he can even start she gets murdered. Her sister, a former client, ropes him into finding her killer. A simple mystery setup with all the peripherals make it engaging.

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I’m going to pretend that we have a huge dedicated audience that constantly asks us to do things because they love us so much. (As opposed to a small audience that only occasionally asks us to do things as horrible jokes.)  I’m then going to pretend that this fictitious vocal fan base asks for my Ongoing Investigations entries to have a consistent theme to all the items I talk about. And since I’m making this up whole cloth they have also asked for a week were I talk about nothing but non pornographic Type-Moon doujinshi.

Since everyone asked for it (no one) here it is.

If anyone has been around in Type-Moon fandom long enough they know there is one simple phrase that can spark such fierce arguments that it has reached divine meme status. That phrase is “Shiki Can Kill Servants.” The comic that has inspired this phrase more than anything else is the ongoing doujinshi series T-Moon Complex X. I finally sat down and read the current seven books that have been released as it seemed like something I should do.

T-Moon Complex X is the classic Japanese Vs. formula. You take two series and mix them together, have the heroes meet and clash, then introduce a big bad guy they both fight so they have to put aside their differences. In that respect it follows the formula to the tee. Team Shiki clashes with Team Shiro but they have to stop their bickering when they discover that a certain dead apostle has tapped into to a resurrected Holy Grail.

And that also means it goes into full on fan fiction mode. Who would win in a fight between Shiki and Shiro? What if crazy powerful magic circuited Ciel were a Master? Could Saber defeat Nrvnqsr Chaos? What sort of food would kid Gilgamesh buy everyone for dinner? Would Bazett instantly fall in love with Shiki if they ever met?

I did notice that team Fate/Stay Night sort of gets the short end of the stick as opposed to the powerhouses that are Team Tsukihime. Shiki kills Berserker like Hercules was a jobber in professional wrestling. And most of the important villains are Tsukihime characters who slap around Fate characters for the most part. Hell a bunch of Fate/Zero characters mostly show up so they can die a few pages later. But so is the preference of the author. At least everyone get a little chance to shine on both sides.

The major question with this series is do you consider an evening of browsing fanfiction.net a fun diversion or a prison sentence for a minor vandalism charge. Because this is what it reads like. It is a good piece of fan fiction but it reads like fan fiction none the less. It is sort of wish-fulfillment with a plot to hold it all together. If you can handle that then it is all fun.

The Ongoing Investigations are little peeks into what we are watching and reading outside of our main posts on the blog. We each pick three things that we were interested in a week and talk a bit about them. There is often not much rhyme or reason to what we pick. They are just the most interesting things we saw since the last Ongoing Investigation.

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Ongoing Investigations: Case #213

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As a Type-Moon fan there are a lot of major parts of the company’s works that are relatively easy to find. All of the anime can be found with only minor difficulty (and a good deal of it legally), the visual novels are at least partially translated, and most of the manga has at least a few chapters available in English. But there are still a few rare gems for the truly hard-core. One of them I finally found are some translations of some of Takashi Takeuchi’s old Valkyrie Profile doujinshi Valkyria.

Valkyria, Valkyria 2, and Valkyria NEAV SAGA each focus on a different Valkyrie who follows around a chosen hero in hopes that they might be able to capture their soul to make them their Einherjar before they die. All the heroes are slightly (and often rightfully) worried that their Valkyrie might be tempted to kill them to make sure they can properly capture their soul as opposed to just waiting for them to die normally.

The Valkyrie series is interesting to see for a variety of reasons. The first is that the series is a clear look at Takeuchi’s art style before Tsukihime. While his art style has clearly evolved from this, to this, to this you do not get a full understanding of his journey as an artist until you view his even earlier work. When you realize that Ciel was heavily based on Clobette from Valkyria 2 it is easy to see a straight line of progress.

It is also one of the few times you get to see Takeuchi do his own story and artwork in a manga format. That means you see the stories that Takeuchi would tell without working together with Nasu as well as how he lays out panels when his art is not just character designs and mostly static images in a visual novel. It does make me wonder what a long running manga series from Takeuchi would look like. It also might provide some good clues into what parts of Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night are Nasu’s and which parts are strongly Takeuchi influenced.

The stories themselves have a distinctly short format. But considering these were sold at Comiket it then makes perfect sense. You have to quickly tell your story to an audience that you may never see again. Therefore all the stories are very self-contained even when they have a slightly bit of a shared story. On the other hand there is an assumption that you have at least a passing familiarity with Valkyrie Profile. But that is a common conceit in a good deal of doujinshi.

I’m not going to pretend this is the greatest work out of what would go on to be half of Type-Moon. The stories are charming but ultimately very light stories. It was nice on the other hand to see the humble beginnings of Bamboo Broom and think about how that would eventually become the larger machine it is today.

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 I was sent a review copy of the self-published e-book book An Otaku Abroad which is a travel guide for first timers heading to Japan.

There is a great overview in this book from deciding when and how to travel all the way to visiting temples. And a whole section is dedicated to studying abroad which I thought was a very thoughtful piece and a really common way a lot of young people get to Japan, too. This was the author’s ticket to Japan so she had a lot to say on the subject.

Since this book is written by an individual there were some sections that she didn’t have as much advice for such as flying domestically within in Japan. While she did research the subjects she was less familiar with, it might be helpful to have another contributor or two to add to these portions to round things out.

Since it is a digital book, one of the cool things is having links right in the text that can take you to handy supplemental sites. I learned of a few places and added them to my bookmarks for my mythical trip to Japan someday.

Even though the title says otaku, the guide doesn’t really focus on anime/manga related things which I found a little disappointing. There are a few mentions throughout the locations section and a very nice Top Ten Anime Sites list at the end. I’d like to see the anime/manga part of the guide bulked up to really give it that special hook.

The Ongoing Investigations are little peeks into what we are watching and reading outside of our main posts on the blog. We each pick three things that we were interested in a week and talk a bit about them. There is often not much rhyme or reason to what we pick. They are just the most interesting things we saw since the last Ongoing Investigation.

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Ongoing Investigations: Case #212

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I finished the second volume of Vertical’s beautiful release of Message to Adolf. I didn’t expect it to span well past the years of World War II.

Most of this volume involves characters caught up in a tense back and forth of who will end up with the information on Hitler’s birth and more importantly how will it become public knowledge.

Adolf Kaufman’s descent into full Aryan-superiority is, as one might imagine, unsettling and surprisingly heartbreaking at times. I guess for a good portion of the story I was expecting him to maintain his heart despite the horrible things he did. But he only further breaks down as he makes his way to Japan as an adult reuniting with his remarried mother and childhood friend Adolf. It really feels like true madness as Adolf tries to reclaim the documents because Adolf is not full-Aryan, neither is Hitler, and neither is the girl Adolf is in love with!

I really enjoy stories where minor characters pop-up again and again in important capacities that you weren’t expecting. It makes it feel cohesive and Message to Adolf has that.

And the ending? Fatefully tragic.

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The A Certain Magical Index series is one of those strange series were people make a big deal about how much they can’t stand the series but continually watch it season after season. To a lesser degree this also happens with the spin off A Certain Scientific Railgun series (it might be the yuri undercurrent that cause it to be slightly better received) . But as a legitimate fan of the series who genuinely enjoys it I was looking forward to the first two episodes of A Certain Scientific Railgun S.

I did go into this arc with a certain expectation. I had heard that this was being called A Certain Scientific Railgun S with the S being a reference to the Sister Noise arc. Apparently it is an arc that tells the original Sisters Arc from A Certain Magical Index from Misaka Mikoto’s perspective. While that seemed like an interesting idea I was a little worried it might feel a bit recycled. But so far it mostly seems like all new material. We are getting a much better idea of how Misaka got involved with the whole Level 6 Shift experiment and we have new characters like Nunotaba Shinobu who never appeared in the original story.  So far it does not just seem to be the Accelerator fight from a different point of view.

The new series begins with a one off story that proves that Edasaki Banri and Haruue Erii have not disappeared off the face of the earth once their arc has ended (to the point where like Saten Ruiko they have started to make cameo appearances in the main Index series). It is mostly an episode to bridge the last arc of Railgun with the new series and show that life goes on for everyone. The big highlight of the first episode is action scene at the end with a teleporting Kuroko and a hotblooded Railgun vs. a helicopter. It is a nice little set piece that reminds you that Railgun is mostly about psychic powers even though it has cute girls doing cute things moments.

The second story starts setting up the sisters arc in quite a unexpected way. It seems that people have been finding cash cards all over Academy City. After a bit of treasure hunting Misaka find the source of the cards and witnesses a rather theatrical fight. But this seemingly unrelated story turn to be about the Level 6 Shift experiment in the last few seconds.

I am interested to see how this all blends together. The problem with stories like this is that gaiden tales have to walk a find line between being interesting and making us wonder why we never knew about any of this in the first place. It is clear from the opening that the rest of the Railgun gang, some characters from ITEM, and Shokuhou Misaki are clearly involved in the story. While there was always a little more hinted at going on with Misaka during the Sister Arc this seems like more than some minor scenes. Thankfully they are not just showing us the same story with some minor additions but it could lead to some odd  plot holes if they are not careful.

Then again “everyone” hates trash like A Certain Magical Index so who really cares outside of the Japanese audience? I mean other than me who looks forward to the next episode.

The Ongoing Investigations are little peeks into what we are watching and reading outside of our main posts on the blog. We each pick three things that we were interested in a week and talk a bit about them. There is often not much rhyme or reason to what we pick. They are just the most interesting things we saw since the last Ongoing Investigation.

Continue reading →