Today I’m looking at a couple books from CMX’s mature line – these manga are a slightly larger size (8 1/2 x 6) than the typical book. They also have a few color pages in the front, which is rare for CMX. I tend to order my manga way in advance from previews, so sometimes when I’m getting a new title I’m just guessing that I might be interested in it. Unfortunately it sounds like Presents is the most interesting of CMX’s new mature imprint, and I didn’t get it!

Variante by Iqura Sugimoto (amazon)

There are a few plot lines that I’m inexplicably attracted to. One is any story about vampire vampire hunters. The other is any story about people with sentient limbs. I’ve been somewhat disappointed with recent vampire hunting manga (Trinity Blood, Vampire Knight) so I was hoping that there’d be some amusing sentient arm action in Variante. It isn’t exactly bad, but I didn’t find it very compelling. I read the first third of the book, put it down, and then forced myself to finish it a few weeks later.
Aiko is a typical high school girl who wakes up in a morgue after her parents were killed. Her arm seems mangled and odd. It turns out that there are giant fleshy monsters called chimeras preying on the populace. A secret police/research organization called Atheos is battling the chimeras and Aiko is their newest lab rat. A sympathetic detective named Sudo tries to look out for Aiko, but she’s having a tough time adjusting to her new reality.
When reading Variante, I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’d read it all before. Although there were a few amusing lines about Aiko’s condition – “Aiko’s arm has a mind of its own!” the most compelling thing about the whole volume was Sudo’s habit of wearing a bandanna around his head along with a suit. And unfortunately creative accessorizing isn’t really enough to sustain my interest in this series. Maybe if Aiko’s arm had more of a sassy personality, I might have liked this book more. If you like horror stories about fleshy monsters and the yucky arms that kill them, you might enjoy this manga more than I did.

Orfina by Kitsune Tennouji (amazon)

This is a pedestrian fantasy story involving dragons and dopplegangers. The female warrior Fana escapes from battle only to wind up in the kingdom of Codia. She happens to be a mirror image of the princess Orfina. Fana settles in to life in the castle, but danger lurks because the evil kingdom Granze is going to attack with the ultimate weapon – dragons.
The best thing about the art in this manga was the detailed backgrounds. The facial expressions of the characters often looked wooden, and something about the flow of action from panel to panel was off – I found myself flipping backwards a few times just to figure out what was going on. There isn’t much authentic character development. The King and Queen seem to have a special regard for Fana, but this isn’t really explored much other than in a few throwaway lines. I don’t think it was really necessary for Fana to fight in her skimpy pajamas, but I’m not the intended audience for this book.