Tag Archives: Manga

Mysterious Girlfriend X, Volume 1 – Review

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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!

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My Hero Academia, Volume 4 – Review

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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

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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.

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One Piece – Volume 6

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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.

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UQ Holder, Volume 4 – Review

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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!

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One Piece – Volume 5

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I’m pretty stuck on this train at this point. One Piece’s fifth volume concludes the fight with Kuro’s cat-themed pirates, and adds one more member to Luffy’s humble crew. In doing so, it consistently demonstrates the two-pronged atmospheric attack that I assume has made One Piece such an unstoppable institution. The volume opens with Luffy fighting Kuro on the slopes while Usopp’s pirates attempt to stop Django, who react to his new weapons with the wonderfully absurd “he’s not a typical traveling hypnotist after all!” It’s absurdity and action all the way down, a ride that doesn’t let up for the first two-thirds of the volume.

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One Piece – Volume 4

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One Piece’s fourth volume is action-packed from start to finish, wholly dedicated to the protracted battle between Usopp, his new friends, and the former Captain Kuro. And it’s all very fun stuff! There isn’t necessarily a continuous heightened level of tension throughout these chapters, but there’s certainly plenty of momentum, and no sense that anything is being dragged out. I’d worried in discussing the last volume that Usopp himself would be more aggravating than endearing, but whether it comes down to the speed of manga versus anime or the simple execution of his character, Usopp is actually turning out to be one of the highlights of the manga.

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A Girl on the Shore – Part Two

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“It’s so good to learn that from right here, the view goes on forever.”
– The Mountain Goats

A Girl on the Shore’s second half opens with more of its slow, wide-open panels, images of Sato and Isobe’s empty town shot from the distance it’s experienced. Sato’s tedium comes across in long sequences of repeated shots, as she slumps at her desk or stares out the window. Isobe’s self-hatred clutters pannels together, as the teacher reaches out to him and he slaps her hand away. The contrast of intimate cuts and wide-open spaces suits these characters; Sato sees herself as a willowy non-presence, whereas Isobe is claustrophobic, labeling himself unlovable and struggling to breathe.

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A Girl on the Shore – Part One

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“We used to wait / We used waste hours just walkin’ around / We used to wait / All those wasted lives in the wilderness downtown.”

– Arcade Fire

Inio Asano certainly has a way with words. Or it might be better to say he has no way with them. His stories seem translucent, any wisp of authorial voice appearing only in the fringes of unvarnished naturalism. He gives his characters’ interiority the drama they believe it deserves, but any magic in his stories is the magic of the world as it is. Characters interrupt each other and start again, tossing out simple observations and losing their trains of thought. You can feel the wind blowing between the staggered refrains of his mixed-up kids.

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One Piece – Volume 3

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The battle between Luffy and Buggy’s pirates concludes in this volume, across a trio of chapters that basically split the difference between slapstick and traditional action. While Buggy came across as intimidating in the earlier Nami chapters, Luffy outclasses him pretty handily, and so any attempts at tension here are mostly about Buggy putting either Nami or Luffy’s hat in danger. Even Buggy’s special power no longer comes across as dangerous – it’s more a tool for slapstick, where Buggy’s ability to send his top half flying becomes a lot less powerful when Luffy can still kick his bottom half in the junk. Buggy’s power kinda sucks, but it sure is good for gags.

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