I found this episode a little less exciting than the first two. There’s some discussion of relationshippy stuff, a mission that deliberately excludes Iku, wheelchair hijinks, and a bit of a cliffhanger at the end.
So part of the reason why Iku joined the library task force is that when she was a schoolgirl, a mysterious guy saved her from the thought police. So she’s on a quest to find the “prince” from her past. Is it a coincidence that Dojo appearers to be addicted to a soda with a very particular name?
I’ve read and enjoyed You Higuri’s Gorgeous Caratand read a couple other yaoi titles for another reviewing gig. So Tea For Two is probably just the fifth yaoi title I’ve read, and it was pretty good.
Tokumaru is so rambunctious, he’s always fighting or breaking something. His sister decides to force him to attend the tea ceremony club after he breaks one of her picture frames. Tokumaru is extremely dubious about being forced to learn to be refined, but he’s strangely drawn to the cool and collected president of the club, Hasune.
Tokumaru spends more time with the tea club, partially because he enjoys napping on tatami mats. The club room is a perfect place to ditch a few classes. He finds himself reacting in an unexpected way to Hasune’s occasional teasing. Tokumaru finds himself jealous of Hasune’s relationship with Keigo, the sweets supplier for his tea ceremonies. After Hasune engages in a few random ear licks and kisses, Tokumaru concludes that Hasune is madly in love with him, and since he doesn’t seem to mind, he they must be in love too. But things are thrown into question when Tokumaru givs up the tea ceremony for baseball. Tokumaru begins to take sports more seriously, and Hasune starts being slightly less reserved about showing his own feelings.
The art has an angular quality to it - all the guys have jutting chins, broad shoulders, and large knobby hands. Since the character’s personalties were interesting and their relationship showed some evolution and forward progress, I thought this was an above average yaoi title.
There are two brief side stories at the end of the book. One features Tokumaru’s sister Nagomi and Hasune’s sister Kotoko. The other story details the relationship problems of Keigo and another one of his customers. The production quality for the manga is good, with plenty of footnotes sprinkled throughout identifying terms used in the tea ceremony and two color pages in the front of the book.
A Wise Man Sleeps Volume 1 by Mick Takeuchi (amazon)
Takeuchi’s other series Her Majesty’s Dog is one of my regular reads, so I was curious about this earlier work. A Wise Man Sleeps is a little more lighthearted than Her Majesty’s Dog, and has much of the charm that I’ve come to expect from this author. Miharu is in a bit of a pickle; her mother has died and her father has vanished, leaving behind nothing but a pile of yakuza debts. When the local mob boss comes to collect, he promises that he’ll always “take care” of Miharu. In the meantime, she’s accosted by a creepy looking guy on the street who remarks that she’s been having bad luck. Rintaro is dressed entirely in black, wears one glove, and wants the ring Miharu’s mother left her because the jewel in the ring is a powerful alchemical agent called a Wise Man’s stone.
When the yakuza find out about the stone they want it too, but Miharu impetuously swallows the ring before Rintaro or the mob boss can get it. Rintaro is horrified, because the ring’s powers are unknown. Rintaro reveals that he also posesses a Wise Man’s stone. When he activates it, he turns into an outgoing blond man with a penchant for calling girls endearments like “my little kitten.” Blond Rintaro easily defeats the yakuza with his alchemical powers.
Rintaro’s timid Eyeore-like personality makes an amusing contrast with the outgoing ladies’ man that is his alter ego. Miharu is boisterous, outgoing, and totally willing to try to manipulate men with crocodile tears in order to get out of the predicaments she finds herself in. She also possesses a unique fashion sense, as this is the first manga where I’ve seen someone wearing arm warmers and a slightly off-kilter cowgirl outfit. Miharu ends up metabolizing the Wise Man stone, becoming an alchemical agent herself. She and Rintaro team up to track down mysterious jewelry pieces.
This manga ends up becoming a variant on the spooky shop genre, as Miharu and Rintaro encounter a variety of people with cursed jewels. Where A Wise Man Sleeps differs a little bit from other manga of this genre is that with each short story, we learn a little more about the characters’ background and the relationship between them progresses. Takeuchi’s art easily details Miharu’s dynamic action scenes, Rintaro’s dual personalities, and his favorite doll (!) Beatrice. While I think that Her Majesty’s Dog is a stronger series overall than A Wise Man Sleeps, this was still a well-done shojo manga which is worth checking out if you don’t have spooky shop genre burnout.
Bookmark:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
I was excited to see that Dark Horse picked up the CLAMP title Clover. This is one of my favorite CLAMP series, and I always thought it was too bad it was out of print. Heck, even though I have the four volumes from Tokyopop, I might have to buy it again.
Bookmark:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Knights Of The Zodiac (Saint Seiya), Volume 1 by Masami Kurumada (amazon)
Long long ago, when I was a wee lass in high school the only way I could watch anime was to go to the nearby university’s anime club. And there I saw a truly awesome show, filled with random references to astronomy, Greek mythology, and lots and lots of punching. It also had a hilarious Japanese pop metal opening song:
Sure, it probably looks primitive now, but in the late 1980s Saint Seiya was a pinnacle of awesomeness.
In the first volume of the manga, Seiya is a lone Japanese boy training in Sanctuary, a training ground for the warrior Knights of Athena. Seiya’s trainer is a masked woman named Marin. By defeating his rival Cassios in battle, Seiya obtains the Pegasus cloth, a type of armor that can protect its wearer and magnify his powers.
After lots of punching in Greece, Seiya returns home to Japan where the reader learns that a powerful family was recruiting one hundred orphans to fight in order to bring cloths back to Japan so a crazy tournament between knights can be staged. Seiya was one of those orphans, and only nine others survived. Now, they all get to fight each other!
Knights of the Zodiac is great because:
Sometimes I get all nostalgic for chunky 80s manga art, where everyone had big eyebrows
The Knights’ cosmic power gives them the ability to punch someone 100 times in one second. That’s a whole lotta punching!
It has lines like “I sense a terrible Cosmo flooding this whole area” and “Taste my Pegasus Meteor Punches!”
T Is for Tugboat: Navigating the Seas from A to Z by Traci N. Todd and Sara Gillingham (amazon)
There are plenty of alphabet books out there, but T is for Tugboat is a handsomely designed book with a nautical theme that will appeal to any fans of boats, oceans, or maritime trivia. The color palette of red, blue, white, and tan sets off pages that list several items for each letter of the alphabet. For example, N is for Neptune, Navigate, and the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria and A is for Anchor, Ahoy, and Aground. The illustrations seamlessly combine historical photos, line drawings, and more detailed illustrations of the items that represent the alphabet. The reference librarian in me particularly appreciated the detailed pages on maritime flag code, knots, and Morse code. It would be easy to use this book as a jumping off point to further explore other related topics. There’s a mini quiz on the back flap of the book that tests the reader’s knowledge. T is for Tugboat is more sophisticated than the typical alphabet book, the publisher recommends it for ages 4-8.
There are two other books in this series, A is for Astronaut and C is for Caboose. So if you have a space buff or train hobbyist in the house, you might want to check those books out as well.
White Night Melody Volume 1 by Selina Lin (amazon)
I have to confess, I found the first few pages of this manhua confusing. What I thought were elaborately dressed toddlers fight over some tiny glass slipper charms, the charms fall into a fish bowl, and suddenly the kids are teenagers, saying that they’re happy to be human again. It turns out that Colleen and Jing Ping are dolls, hosting the bodies and personalties of a princess and her protector from the past. Colleen and Jing Ping’s human family don’t seem to remark on the fact that they have fighting, talking dolls so this required a bit of an adjustment to my usual healthy suspension of disbelief. I’m not sure if something about the translation could have made the introduction to the story more clear, or if it was just the way the manhua was written originally.
Once I got over the sentient doll thing, I followed the adventures of Colleen and Jing Ping as they adjust to teenage life in modern life. They go outside to explore, and Colleen is dismayed to see that her elaborate dress and ringlets are attracting the wrong type of attention. Jing Ping is quick to act as her protector, since he’s been trained in martial arts. As they begin to meet new friends when they start school, some of them seem to recognize them from the past, and a shadowy figure menaces Colleen.
Lim’s art occasionally looks a little stiff, but it has an extremely high cuteness factor in an old fashioned shojo style. The costumes of the characters, especially Colleen, are intricately detailed. The breezy style of the narrative reminded me a little bit of the works of Arina Tanemura. This was the first manhua I’ve read, and I was hoping for a few more Chinese-specific details shown in the plot or characters.White Night Melody is rated for ages 13+, but I can see it appealing mostly to younger teens and pre-teens who like their shoujo manga extra girly.
I remember seeing plenty of buzz when it was announced that Honey and Clover was going to be added to the Shojo Beat line, and after reading it, I think the hype is mostly justified. I was intrigued by this title because although it runs in Shojo Beat here, in Japan it ran in a josei magazine. I’m always on the lookout for titles that skew a little older.
This manga details the trials of a group of Tokyo art school students. Takamoto lives in an apartment with some of his fellow students - senior Mayama who studies architecture and the mysterious Morita who has a habit of disappearing for several days at a time with no explanation. The boys are joined by their Professor Hanamoto’s cousin Hagu who starts at school as a freshman sculptor. Takamoto falls in love with Hagu at first sight, but he doesn’t do anything dramatic to act on his feelings. Morita also develops a crush on Hagu, but his way of expressing his feelings is to stalk her with a camera, forcing her to pose holding giant leaves and sit on a toadstool. He later sets up a web site featuring her as a koropokkur which earns him a tidy sum of money. The loose character-focused style of narrative reminded me a little bit of another josei title, Nodame Cantible.
I was surprised to see in a manga targeted towards women that there were so few female characters, and the main point of view in the story is Takamoto’s. The main female character Hagu remains a bit of a cipher. She’s presented as almost painfully cute, but the reactions of the male characters to her is what’s focused on instead of her own thoughts about attending art school for the first time. We see a little more about her in later chapters. Her talent seems to set her apart from other students, leaving her with few friends other than the ones she gains from her relative Professor Hanamoto. She does seem to like shoes an awful lot, which naturally marks her as a women of great understanding. I enjoyed the introduction of another girl, Yamada aka Ironman (she runs with her dog to school), but was a little disappointed that we only see her pining over Mayama while he has a crush on an older, unattainable woman.
The students struggle with finding proper nutrition and attending classes, but they still manage to find the time to work on art projects, set off fireworks in the summer, and get horribly drunk at a Christmas party. I enjoyed the slightly scratchy art style and the meandering narrative of Honey and Clover, so I’ll be checking out the next few volumes of this manga.
Bookmark:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Teru Teru X Shonen: Volume 1 by Shigeru Takao (amazon)
Sometimes when I do my monthly DCBS manga order, I’ll throw in a first volume of a series randomly just to try out something new. Sometimes I luck out and find series that I really enjoy, and other times I end up with a dud. Teru Teru X Shonen is a dud. I thought this series about a girl in high school and her ninja protector might be cute, but it was just not very good.
This manga is a broad comedy, and while I understand that in comedies often the characters do not have a great subtly of characterization, every character here was so unsympathetic that I found the manga ore annoying than entertaining. Shinobu is just the type of girl I would have hated in high school She has long blond hair and an imperious manner that causes most of her classmates to find her incredibly annoying. She’s living under the cloud of a threat on her life, so isn’t it lucky that her childhood friend Saizou has shown up at her school after becoming a ninja? Shinobu’s idea of using Saizou’s ninja powers is to send him after a cat that stole her hair ribbon. Saizou is so besotted that he will do whatever Shinobu asks, while constantly calling her “Princess” and “My Lady.” Although he’s a ninja, he abhors violence; he takes off his glasses when fighting so he can’t see what he’s doing. I found him just as annoying as Shinobu due to his blind devotion to her, I would have hoped that a ninja might find something better to do.
The art for Teru Teru X Shonen is nice, with plenty of capably rendered fighting scenes. I just found the characters so annoying, I have no desire to read any more volumes of this series.
Bookmark:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
