Category Archives: Review

Goodnight Punpun – Volume 1

Posted on by

Solanin is a story about young adulthood, written by Inio Asano at the point when he was experiencing the feelings he was transcribing. It’s a great story, but it is very much about that moment – that specific kind of freedom, that specific kind of fear. A Girl on the Shore is similarly concerned with the specific emotions of a listless, emotionally deadened adolescence, and that story ends when its exact emotional moment concludes.

Goodnight Punpun is a work that seems to be striving for true emotional universality. And so Goodnight Punpun is about a bird.

Continue reading →

A Silent Voice, Volume 6 – Review

Posted on by

A Silent Voice just continues to be intimate and painful and heartfelt and all that juicy feely-weely stuff that kills me every time. This sixth volume actually pulled one of my favorite dramatic tricks, something I maybe first fell in love with while watching Evangelion – drawing back from the overt narrative momentum in order to spend some time exploring each individual character, and giving their own internal world the time and respect it deserves. Shoya’s fall is a perfect moment to cut the drama short, and the results are as consistently enlightening as they are heartbreaking. A Silent Voice is the best manga I’m reading, and dear lord does the upcoming movie ever have a high ceiling.

You can check out my in-depth review over at ANN, or my chapter notes below!

Continue reading →

UQ Holder!, Volume 5 – Review

Posted on by

My journey through Akamatsu’s latest continues with volume five. This one couldn’t quite match the either character or battle-based entertainment of the fourth volume, but it does seem like the manga at least has a solid platform to stand on now. There are definitely plenty of ways to give a story dramatic stakes even if your protagonists can’t really die, and Akamatsu seems to be figuring them out one at a time. It’s still not as compelling within its genre as something like My Hero Academia, which is basically the essence of good shounen, but I know Akamatsu has some smart ideas in there. I’m on for the ride.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!

Continue reading →

Mysterious Girlfriend X, Volume 1 – Review

Posted on by

Today I reviewed Mysterious Girlfriend X, that weird manga with the spit-bond premise. I’d actually watched the anime a while back, and enjoyed it more than I expected too, even though the second half kind of fell apart. But this volume didn’t get to any of the show’s weaker material, and thus was more or less strong from start to finish. At its best, Mysterious Girlfriend X uses its fundamentally uncomfortable premise to explore how adolescent sexuality really is fundamentally uncomfortable, full of weird jolts of intimacy and difficult navigation of personal boundaries. The manga isn’t always able to make good on that premise, but there’s enough strong stuff here to make at least this volume an easy recommendation.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my progressively lazier chapter notes below!

Continue reading →

My Hero Academia, Volume 4 – Review

Posted on by

My Hero Academia is in absolute peak form all throughout this fourth volume. The school competition premise allows all of the manga’s characters to just wail on each other for eight chapters straight, which is pretty much all I could ever wanted from this series. The setup of the competition’s second round really facilitates having the characters both find new uses of their powers and see how they can work in concert with each other, making for the most consistently thrilling battles of the series. Individual unique powers are cool enough, but forcing these very imbalanced characters to play off each other is just a far better application of the manga’s premise. It’s nice to see an author so aware of what makes their own story compelling.

No notes this time, since I just sped through this one without taking a breath. But you can check out my full review over at ANN!

My Hero Academia

 

Dead Dead Demon’s Dededededestruction – Volume 1

Posted on by

Dead Dead Demon’s Dededededestruction opens with a kooky children’s comic, clearly reminiscent of Doraemon. A child protagonist has a problem, their mushroom-shaped friend has just the invention to solve it, and trouble ensues. The camera then pulls back to reveal this text as an in-universe comic, one of countless objects strewn across a teenage girl’s messy, cluttered bedroom. It’s a fair enough metaphor for Asano’s work, which consistently transposes the purity of tiny emotional fragments against the inescapable messiness of everyday living. And it’s perhaps even more appropriate for this story, given Asano has outright admitted that Demon’s more cutesy character designs are intended to trick young people into reading his work. Dead Dead Demon isn’t exactly Doraemon, but it could well be intended as his version of a story for children.

Continue reading →

Garo, Part One – Review

Posted on by

Today I dipped back into one of the few shows I slept on in 2014, a show whose CG suits and slightly hair metal aesthetic initially put me off. As it turns out, Garo’s first episode wasn’t really indicative of the production overall; Garo is a confident and polished adventure serial, full of solid drama and compelling fight scenes. It’s a little too purely archetypal for me to say I was all that emotionally invested, but it’s certainly a well-told story, perfect for anyone starved for fantasy that falls outside of the usual light novel wheelhouse. A fine time all around!

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episode notes below.

Continue reading →

One Piece – Volume 6

Posted on by

One Piece has been chugging merrily along so far, gathering crewmates and engaging in one-off adventures, but it’s been a fairly self-contained story. We know this is the “era of pirates,” but that doesn’t really feel tangible outside of the fact that all of the bad guy groups have been pirates or naval officers. The story doesn’t really have a sense of coherent scale – it’s largely felt like episodic adventures were just being invented one after another, which is quite possibly true. On top of that, very little so far has felt legitimately threatening; though Luffy and his friends have certainly been in danger, there’s been little threat of actual consequences or death.

Continue reading →

Love Live! S2 – Review

Posted on by

Yep, I finally got around to reviewing Love Live S2’s physical release. The show pretty much stuck to its same strengths and weaknesses in the second season, leaning even more heavily into its strong dorky comedy early on, falling once more into unearned and overplayed drama in the last act. It’s not a truly great show, but it’s an extremely enjoyable one, and that’s a fine thing to be. Love Live is basically the default idol show – fun and polished, perhaps just a bit impersonal, but still a very endearing time overall. I hope Sunshine can live up to the original’s legacy.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episode notes below!

Continue reading →

UQ Holder, Volume 4 – Review

Posted on by

We’re there! We’ve arrived! UQ Holder is finally good! For the first time, I actually enjoyed a volume of this manga from start to finish. The conflict was actually engaging, the application of the new version of immortality was really creative, and Tota’s rapport with this volume’s new character was actually engaging. It’s honestly just a relief to see Akamatsu can still write – I was really worried for a while there, and figured this manga might just ride entirely on his polished-but-kinda-sterile art chops, but here we are back in the kind of inventive shounen storytelling that made Negima so much fun. Of course, this volume rode almost entirely on how much Kirie adds to the story, so I guess I’ll just have to hope she either sticks around or the manga finds other ways to stay this fun.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my chapter notes below!

Continue reading →