Knights of the Zodiac

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!”

    • Saint Seiya was featured as part of Shaenon’s Overlooked Manga Festival, so head on over there for some manga scans.

T is for Tugboat: Navigating the Seas from A to Z

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.

Review copy provided by Chronicle Kids Books

White Night Melody

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.

Review copy provided by Tokyopop.

Honey and Clover

Honey and Clover Volume 1 by Chica Umino (amazon)

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.

Teru Teru X Shonen

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.

Your & My Secret

Your and My Secret Volume 1 by Ai Morinaga (amazon)

Your & My Secret is the craziest gender-bending manga I have ever read. Granted, I have not investigated the genre throughly, but it seems like it would be very hard to top this book. I can see now why people were so excited when Tokyopop picked up the license for this manga after ADV dropped it!
Akira is a cute guy, but he has an extremely dull personality. He’s very shy and passive, so people generally tend to walk all over him, or ignore him as a non-entity. Akira has a crush on Nanako, who is a cute girl, but she’s extremely abrasive and aggressive, to the point where most of her classmates are afraid of her. Thanks to a scientific experiment gone awry, Nanako and Akira switch bodies.
Nanako delights in her new male body, seizing the opportunity to slam dunk and sign up for karate. When Nanako’s best friend Shiina is sick during P.E., she picks her up and carries her to the nurse’s office. The result of the personality switch is that everyone is impressed with the new and improved Akira, and Shiina quickly develops a crush on him, not knowing that her female friend Nanako is inhabiting his body.
In the meantime, Akira struggles with inhabiting the body of the girl he has a crush on, dealing with changing in locker rooms, and cleaning up her pigsty of a room. Akira’s best friend Senbongi starts to notice the new, shyer Nanako and wonders why she suddenly seems more cute. Akira thinks that he’s turning more girly the longer he stays in Nanako’s body. Soon, Nanako decides to start dating Shina while Senbongi is making passes at Akira.
Most of the humor in the book is found in Nanako’s matter-of-fact acceptance of the shift, combined with Akira’s dismay at the female-centric situations he finds himself in. He thinks that Nanako is a better man than he is, as she quickly ingratiates herself with his family and turns into a very popular boy at school. Your & My Secret effectively satirizes the traditional gender roles found in shoujo manga.
Morninga’s art is attractive, and she easily captures the shift in body language and facial expressions that occurs when Akira and Nanako switch bodies. My only quibble with this manga is that since it is told mainly from Akira’s point of view, we don’t really see any of Nanako’s thoughts and it would have been interesting to see more of her internal emotions as she adjusts to a boy’s body. But then, Akira’s reactions to her probably wouldn’t be quite as funny.