Category: Comedy

Dengeki Stryker Demo: Hard Working Foreigners For World Domination

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Tokusatsu and eroge are not necessarily the first two things you might think of combining together but they actually complement each other better than you would think. Dengeki Stryker mixes in tales of hot-blooded courage with transforming cyborgs and combines it with sexy time adventures. I first became aware of this series when Mike Dent mentioned it in his Friday Ace podcast. The opening video with a song by Masaaki Endoh of Jam Project and animation directed by Shinichi Watanabe immediately told me this was something to watch out for. Since MangaGamer does some rather robust demos so I was really looking forward to what they would release for Dengeki Stryker since they were doing the English adaptation. After playing it I learned it was not exactly the game I originally thought it would be. The question was did I enjoy what I discovered it to be.

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Manga of the Month: Yamada and the Seven Witches

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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?

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Manga of the Month: Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro

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Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro (棺担ぎのクロ。～懐中旅話～) by Satoko Kiyuduki

Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro had the pleasure of showing me there are 4-koma manga that I like! But then again, Kiyuduki doesn’t use the format in a traditional sense. Her low-key humor and simple but precise art makes this series a real charmer.

Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro follows the story of a haphazard group of travelers headed up by the mysterious, coffin-carrying, black clad, girl going by the name Kuro. She along with a bunch of bats (one snarky one in particular, Sen) pick up two little cat girls along the way. Where they are headed remains a rather amorphous concept though they do seem to be looking for someone. Along the way we learn bits of pieces of character’s past. Each traveler plays off the others; Kuro being none too talkative while the kids are little balls of energy and mischief. The series has a melancholy undertone, not unlike Kino’s Journey but also not that heavy, though it is balanced out by the adorable art style and banter.

The way Kiyuduki plays with the format is of particular interest from using one giant panel to tell a story to expanding an adventure to two or three times that of usual 4-koma. At times she is using the format merely as a structure but still these adventures feel like quick bites. The printing is also nice with many color pages to enjoy.