Category: Reviews

Manga of the Month: Billy Bat

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Billy Bat (ビリーバット) by Naoki Urasawa and Takashi Nagasaki

There are certain artists who you can assume by default create things worth looking into unless advised otherwise. One of those people is Naoki Urasawa. Pluto, Monster, 20th Century Boys, and Yawara! are all critically acclaimed series with near universal praise. So in general you can bet good money that if you see a new series by him it might be not be worth buying the whole series sight unseen but it is always worth checking out the first book especially when Takashi Nagasaki is involved as well. And his current ongoing series (alongside Master Keaton Remaster) is Billy Bat.

Billy Bat starts after World War II with a popular Japanese-American comic artist, named Kevin Yamaga, trying to discover if his smash hit comic is actually a copy of a manga he might have seen when he was in the service. He soon discovers that his Billy Bat character is not just simply a copy of an obscure manga but an ancient symbol used by a variety of dangerous secret societies. Soon the ancient conspiracy surrounding this nigh incomprehensible bat god sucks in Kevin Yamaga to a world of ninjas, faked moon landings, magic, and people like Lee Harvey Oswald and Albert Einstein.

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A Pair of Angels, A Pair of Devils

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Certain shows get this unfair reputation because like Icarus they dared fly too high at the wrong time. A show like Turn A Gundam played with the Gundam formula in a way that was a bit too radical to be appreciated at the time but in reflection is now well regarded as innovate and enjoyable (if a bit strange). Distance helped prove that the show had a good deal of depth and innovation with the changes it made to the “standard” Gundam show. But not every re-imagining is this diamond in the rough that is unfairly judged to a contemporary audience only to fully be understood by a later audience. Some shows just take what was awesome or endearing about the original and totally amputate it in an attempt to modernize a show. In trying to cater to a new audience they totally miss what made the original so enjoyable.

Dirty Pair Flash is a classic example of just not getting the point when it comes to a remake. I would venture to say that Dirty Pair Flash is more infamous for just how much it is hated by original Dirty Pair fans than anything about the show itself. They radically altered the characters designs when they made Dirty Pair Flash so that alone can easily turn hardcore fans against all things being equal. But the fact of the matter is that Dirty Pair Flash is just inferior to the original. The main purpose of this article it to determine why that is. The easy point to state is that Dirty Pair Flash fails as a successor to the legacy. The harder question is why does it fail.

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Gunslinger Girl: IT IS SO SAD

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 2011 lulled me into a false sense of security. Metal Fighter Miku was far from the best anime I ever watched but it was not horrible. In fact we loved episode ten. And we actually had to CHOOSE between that and Rune Soldier. It was so nice to participate in secret Santa and not make it into Sophie’s Choice when we decide what to watch. This year sadly was a return to the normal grind we have with secret Santa.

Our choices were Kaiba, Mysterious Girlfriend X, and Gunslinger Girl. There was a palpable sense of dread between Narutaki and I when we were trying to pick which of the three shows to watch. Kaiba was out because it would have meant the Kickheart diehards would have won and that is like letting the terrorists win (also WE watched an episode of the series in the past and were colossally turned off). Narutaki could not watch Mysterious Girlfriend X partially for personal reasons and partially BECAUSE PEOPLE LICKING EACH OTHERS SPIT IS DISGUSTING. So all we were left with was Gunslinger Girl. We had already read the first three volumes of the manga so in a way we were going over territory we had already crossed. But this let us see if the anime did anything different that might let us enjoy it more. Also we had already been bitten by this snake so we hoped we would be slightly more immune to its poison.

I had read a bit of the manga for Gunslinger Girl a while ago so it wasn’t too big of a deal to retread the ground with the anime. But I didn’t enjoy the manga so I wasn’t very enthusiastic.

Everything I said about the manga ends up going for the anime as well: some politics and plots are interesting but isn’t the focus enough of the time; the girls lives are so so so sad that I stop caring almost immediately; and it has a tendency to be quite talkie.

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