Tag: Hayate the Combat Butler

Ongoing Investigations: Case #130

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GEN Magazine is a new online offering from small publisher GEN Manga Entertainment, Inc.. The first issue features four very different stories from sumo and boxing to oddball comedy to fantasy and finally to horror. The first Wolf was a bit hard to decipher at first, I thought perhaps it was a crime series but by the end it had a dramatic sports feeling. I’m curious how the budding friendship between Shota and Naoto will affect their separate threads. Also on the curious drama end was KAMEN where a masked warrior wakes up to find himself in a war-torn countryside. This story has a familiar, kind of like Guin Saga, feeling. But as with most fantasy stories, one chapter is not enough to get a feel for the world and mythos it is building yet. The drama is finished out with Souls where a mysterious woman confronts a girl’s mother about her past grievances. There wasn’t enough time to build the tension and emotion in the story so the resolution doesn’t produce a great reaction. My reactions were spot on for VS Aliens though with its absurd humor. Kitaro is minding his own business in school when Aya approaches him saying she believes another girl, Sana, is actually an alien. What sold me was Sana’s reaction to the whole thing, I chuckled quite a lot. The art in this anthology stands out because each series is dramatically different from each other but all leaning to the more raw end. While odd at times and indie, it never comes off as pretentious. I enjoyed three out of four stories so I call this a successful first issue!

I want to be clear what it means when GEN Magazine says it is an indie manga collection. For better or for worse this is not the AX Alternative Manga magazine. These are not radically experimental manga that break with the formula and structure of traditional manga. This is your more standard forms of manga from a small publisher that you would not normally think of alongside names like Shueisha and Kodansha. These are standard story types with artists you most probably have never heard of. But this is not a bad thing. Every manga anthology tends to have a different feel. If you had three baseball manga you can pick out which one is from Shonen Sunday, Shonen Jump, and Afternoon just by their style. So even something like the boxing manga in this anthology may have manga tropes you have seen in more mainstream titles but it also has a unique vibe. Like Narutaki said the titles contained within feel a little more raw than you may be used to. You can tell the artists don’t have many (if any) assistants due to smaller budgets so the backgrounds are very infrequent and some of the art looks less polished than you would see in bigger magazines. On the other hand, the titles also seem freer structure and less merchandise controlled than selections from the big boys. The two titles that stuck out for me were VS Aliens and Souls. I just had to say that VS Aliens in my opinion feels very influenced by Haruhi without being a carbon copy. Not exactly sure where it is going but I am curious. I also did not like Souls but I freely admit that horror is my least favorite genre so very few horror manga tickle my fancy. Wolf and KAMEN were enjoyable but I would need a few more chapters before I could give any sort of definitive opinion on them. Wolf reminded me of Ashita no Joe while KAMEN struck my as a fantasy version of Parasyte. Reading GEN left like reading original concept doujinshi with the benefit of the structure and reliability of a professional magazine. It is a magazine for people who want something outside of the mainstream without going into avant-garde pretentiousness.

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Chiharu Harukaze and the Straight Talk Express

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hisuiconI recently mentioned how much I have enjoyed the comedy in Hayate the Combat Butler but Kenjiro Hata occasionally decides to drop some hardcore truth on us as well. In chapter 319 we learn the truth about the doujinshi market. Only 5% of doujinshi sell over a thousand copies, about half sell less than 50 copies, and 70% lose money on their efforts. In one page it shatters the idea that people are casually making themselves famous or making a casual living through doujinshi. When you sit back and think about it the reality of the situation is quite obvious but sometimes you need it laid out in plain black and white. It is easy to see CLAMP and Type-Moon create a career out of their amateur work and assume this happens more often than not. You always hear stories about doujinshi artists who turn down professional work because of  the insane hours and might conjecture they are making a living doing their independent projects. I guess I always assumed the success rate was higher even if that was a very naive notion.

hisuiconOn the other hand I am curious how different this is from trying to make a living off of doing an independent or web comic. I am sure there are a great number of people who try their hands making a living off of their creative talents but only a select few that ever become anywhere near successful. I just wonder if a career via doujinshi has any higher or lower success rate versus other forms of independent comic art.

March’s Manga of the Month: Hayate the Combat Butler

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Hayate the Combat Butler (ハヤテのごとく!) by Kenjiro Hata

Hayate the Combat Butler is hardly an obscure series but I wanted to bring it up for two reasons. The first is that as far as a I can tell Hayate, much like many other Shonen Sunday titles is hardly doing gangbusters in the English-speaking world. Viz has already slowed down the release schedule on the series. While I don’t think it will be canceled anytime soon I would like to see its schedule speed up rather than slowed down further.  The other reason is the is the lull between the end of the second season and the movie. Manga seems to generate less conversation when there is no anime running at the same time. So I have decided to hopefully get some conversation going before the movie comes out.

Hayate Ayasaki has the worst parents in the world. One day he comes home to discover they have saddled him with a 156,804,000 yen debt. Through odd circumstances he winds up in the employ of the insanely rich Nagi Sanzenin as her butler. Nagi has  fallen in love with him but sadly Hayate is blissfully unaware of this fact. At first Hayate had to protect Nagi from people who would try to steal her fortune. Recently Nagi renounced her inheritance and is running an apartment complex with the little money she has left. So Hayate tries must keep the apartment complex afloat while dealing with the strange residents within and their equally troublesome friends.

People often ask me why I like Hayate the Combat Butler so much. My answer is that it is refreshing. Whenever I read the newest chapter of the manga I just feel my worries fade away. Kenjiro Hata has a gentle writing style that is both soothing and invigorating. The series is consistently funny and mixes high level otaku humor with your more standard comedy elements. There is also a mixture of romance, action, and drama in the story but every chapter is sure to have some laughs to balance it all out. The other major appeal is that the characters are very endearing to me. While I wrote a whole article on why Nagi is such a great character I could write similar articles on the rest of the cast.  I think since our review of the anime I have realized that the otaku level for the series might be a little too high for some but I think any decently experienced anime fan will find something to enjoy in Hayate.