If I was going to describe 20th Century Boys in a high concept manner to someone in an elevator, I’d describe it as It meets The Stand. It’s a story that takes place over a vast scope of time, almost 30-40 years, with multiple time skips, and an apocalypse in-between, with a fundamental premise of a group of childhood friends being forced to face a great evil as adults. The difference is, the evil in It is a clearly supernatural, unearthly evil. The evil in 20th Century Boys is very, very human.
After Hayate the Combat Butler Vol. 25, 26 and 27 serve as something of a bridge arc. They don’t tell a complete story in their own right, but instead sort of continue in the shift in the status quo started by Volume 25.
When I reviewed Today’s Menu for Emiya Family, I was impressed not just by the charm of the story, but how well the anime depicted the act of cooking – how well it showed its work. It was a manga about family meals. This wasn’t just represented by the choices of food prepared in the work, but on how the series depicted eating. However, Food Wars Volume 1, which I’m reviewing today, kicked off a sort of boom of cooking anime and manga that lead to series like Emiya Family, and Food Wars could not be more different.
Over the past few years off and on, I’ve read the first 13 volumes of Oh! My Goddess, and I’ve written about them on various other places (including Bureau42), but never on my blog. Having finished the 13th volume of the manga, now is as good a time as any to give some general thoughts about the series.
If you think about it, superheroes have been a part of Japanese pop-culture ever since the post-war period, and in particular the 60s and 70s. Astro Boy is Pinocchio with Super-Powers. Characters like Shotaro Ishinomori’s Android Kikaider and Kamen Rider featured protagonists fighting a supervillain organizations and their superpowered minions, and so on. And, of course, there is the tokusatsu classic – Ultraman from Tsuburaya Productions.
Battle Angel Alita is a truly unique work of manga – on par with JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure in terms of being something that visually stands out from the rest of the medium. While it’s narrative it has some stuff in common with other works of SF, it’s also a manga that I haven’t seen much like.
When I was younger, there were a couple things that grabbed my imagination when it came to dungeon fantasy – there were the Monster Ecology articles in Dragon Magazine, and the descriptions of monsters in Hackmaster and KODT Magazine. The Monster Ecology articles envisioned a fleshed out dungeon ecology, where every monster, even ones created by coked out wizards like the Owlbear, had a life cycle and found a way to fit into an ecosystem – indeed, the articles presented the idea of a Dungeon Fantasy setting as an ecosystem that the monsters fit within.
As I mentioned in my overall review of the Golden Week arc, that was an arc that was begging to be animated, and sadly was not. It also thoroughly smashed the existing status quo with a literal and metaphorical nutcracker, with Nagi giving up her fortune and her house to save Hayate.
There comes a point in any manga where the status quo, as it exists, can no longer stand. Where if things stay as they are, the work will stagnate. In Battle Angel Alita, it is in the leadup to the Motorball arc. In Hayate the Combat Butler, that arc is the Golden Week arc.
A few weeks ago (as of when I write this in October) I came to learn that the most popular tabletop RPG in Japan right now was neither D&D nor a homegrown RPG like Sword World, but Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu. Also, I learned Dark Horse Comics had released a collection of adaptations of the works of H.P. Lovecraft by artist Gou Tanabe and had announced a planned release of Tanabe’s adaptation of At The Mountains of Madness. Thus, it seemed appropriate to read the first of Tanabe’s adaptations and get a feel for his take on Lovecraft’s work. (more…)
Blame! (pronounced like the onamonapia “Blam”) is the first outing by Tsutomu Nihei, the mangaka who would go on to do Biomega and Knights of Sidonia, and it’s an incredibly strong start to what has become an extremely impressive career. (more…)
Last month I was finishing up the trilogy of films adapting the Golden Age Arc of Berserk. Previously I’ve also done a Where I Watch thread on the show at RPGnet and reviewed it at Bureau42. Going though this arc again, I was reminded a bunch about the issues I have with this arc and how it treats the character of Casca. (more…)
I’m re-watching Akira again, for the first time after having seen the first part of Megazone 23. It’s interesting to compare Megazone 23 Part 1 and Akira. Both came out within 3 years of each other – Megazone 23 in 1985, the year I was born, and Akira in 1988. Both have similar leads – biker punks who get in over their heads with sinister government conspiracies. Both series have hawkish military figures who overthrow the elected government in a coup, and both figures are certainly antagonists. However, it’s interesting to see how in Megazone 23, the military figures are clearly evil, while in Akira, the Colonel’s actions are given a stronger justification.
This is kind of a spoiler for Megazone 23, so don’t read further if you’re worried about having the story spoiled: (more…)
Whenever I’ve had a rough day, and I feel like I can’t remember the last time I laughed, one of the manga or anime I turn to, in order to lighten my spirits is Hayate the Combat Butler. The blend of oddball comedy and reverentially referential humor, along with a willingness to just chip away at that fourth wall blends together well to make an enjoyable comic, and the fact that the characters are incredibly likable really helps to keep me coming back in a way that TV shows like Family Guy, which also relies on referential humor, fails to do. (more…)
The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery service is a very interesting manga to describe, in terms of being a horror manga that contains elements of the supernatural, but is ultimately bases its horror out of what people do to each other, then it does with the actions of the restless dead – though those elements are there. (more…)
This volume is causing the series to risk becoming cluttered, from a plot standpoint. Coming into this volume, the plot had the main driving conflict of “How do these characters, which are almost all infected with a disease that could kill them, survive in this post-apocalyptic world with massive thorny plants that have consumed everything, and freaking dinosaurs?” (more…)
This is a kind of slow-paced manga. This volume does a lot of world-building with regards to Terran society and Mu society, as well as our two leads views of their respective societies, Jomy Marcus Shin for the Mu, and Keith Anyan for the Terrans. (Cont. below the Cut) (more…)
Red Hot Chili Samurai is a manga that feels like it’s not sure what it wants to be. The manga follows samurai Kokaku Sento as he fights various criminals in rural Japan during the Shogunate. Kokaku’s strength and weakness is his dependance on hot peppers, which he eats regularly, and which strengthen him, like Popeye.
Like Kenshin, Kokaku and his comrades, bespectacled Ento, ninja manservant Shou, and girly-girl of action (if that makes any sense) Ran refrain from killing at all times, even if by all rights it doesn’t make sense for them to do so. However, like Samurai Champloo, the series is filled with anachronisms. Ran is introduced wearing spike-heeled knee-high leather boots with stockings and garters under her kimono. Kokaku is also introduced to a young kid who invents the Polaroid camera, the squirt-gun (modeled after the Colt M1911A), and aerosol pepper spray. Additionally, Kokaku wears a distinctive tattoo, something that would have been taboo for a historical samurai.
With the various chapters in this volume, they all have a comedic tone. Even when Kokaku is infiltrating a brothel which is drugging the women with opium (and occasionally over-dosing them), and whose owners are responsible for several murders, the tone of the story tries to stay incredibly light. This leads to a cognitive dissonance, particularly when it comes to more serious subject matter. Hopefully later volumes will take things slightly more seriously, but this volume is simply average. It’s not great, not terrible, just average.
