Tag Archives: Manga

UQ Holder, Volume 6 – Review

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UQ Holder arrived at another peak in this volume, with the Santa arc’s second half offering both big visual thrills and some legitimate emotional sensitivity. The manga deliberately and somewhat unexpectedly sidelines basically all its established characters in order to give Santa’s story more room, a choice that really ends up paying off. Santa is one of the most compelling characters introduced in the manga so far, so I hope this is a sign that the central dynamics will continue to improve.

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

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Goodnight Punpun – Volume 1

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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.

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A Silent Voice, Volume 6 – Review

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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!

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UQ Holder!, Volume 5 – Review

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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!

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One Piece – Volume 7

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The battle against Don Krieg continues in One Piece’s seventh volume, hampered only by one small but somewhat significant problem – Don Krieg himself is not an intimidating villain or interesting character.

Part of this comes down to his fundamental design. If Krieg has any character or power-related gimmicks, they are “weapons and ruthlessness.” His personality is based on only looking out for himself, which somewhat works in the context of this particular arc, but doesn’t make for a particularly engaging character. And his battle tricks lack the unique style or cohesion of Kuro and Buggy – he’s just a guy in a big metal suit who shoots a lot of cannonballs.

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Yuureitou – Volume 1

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There’s something ugly lurking in Yuureitou. It seeps in from every corner, lurking in too-close panels of drifter Amano savoring his darkest instincts, or his new friend Tetsuo reacting with uncommon violence or disdain. It’s there in the way the panels themselves fetishize Tetsuo, who seems uncomfortable in his own seemingly unwanted skin. It’s ingrained in the manga’s horror tones and exploitation roots, the way it crosses sex with violence so callously that you’d almost guess the mangaka thinks they’re one and the same. And it erupts in vivid, hideous bursts, as the story’s characters are made instruments of fear by lurking, bag-faced men.

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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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