Cafe Kichijouji De Volume 1 (v. 1) by Yuki Miyamoto

Cafe Kichijouji De is a cute ensemble comedy about a group of hot men with extremely quirky personalities working together at a cafe. Taro is the harried glasses-wearing supervisor who has a secret collection of cleaning products. Jun is the cute and slightly feminine looking waiter with a secret talent of super-strength. Maki is a womanizer, and Shuta is the “normal” one who lives in a horrible apartment. The waitstaff are often intimidated by chef Minagawa’s habit of playing with voodoo dolls.

The waiters deal with typical cafe events in their unique way. Preparing for a visit from a reporter results in wholesale destruction of the cafe with a boulder. A innocuous shopping trip ends up triggering bad luck and concludes with cow wrestling and catfish battling. A cursed scone batter emits an unearthly wail. There’s plenty of slapstick action as the waiters attempt to do their jobs. The main focus is on the relationships between the staff instead of on yummy recipes or serving customers. While I didn’t laugh out loud while reading Cafe Kichijouji De, I did smile often. There are mini-chibi episodes interspersed with the longer chapters.

I haven’t read anything from DMP in awhile, and I’d forgotten how nicely their volumes are produced. Cafe Kichijouji De is oversized, with high quality paper stock, and a funny color board game mini-poster featuring the staff of the cafe is included in the front of the volume. While this manga isn’t very substantial, it was a nice light read. I recommend this manga if you’d like to turn your brain off for a little while.

Flower of Life by Fumi Yoshinaga (amazon)

Antique Bakery was a gem, so I had high expectations when I picked up the first volume of Flower of Life. I wasn’t disappointed. Flower of Life uses a series of vignettes to showcase different aspects of friendship in high school. Hanazono is enrolling in school a month late, and he’s a year older than his new classmates. He spent the past year recovering from leukemia. Hanazono quickly makes friends with the roly-poly Mikuni but he’s annoyed by Mikuni’s other friend, an otaku named Majima who delights in lecturing people about his favorite anime and manga characters.
Yoshinaga is great at capturing small moments that define her characters – Mikuni notices Majima slamming manga down at his desk, Hanazono’s lunches evolve as his sister tries to fix him just the right meal, and observing an exchange between teachers leads to the revelation that they are having an affair. Hanazono’s boisterous outspoken personality meshes well with Mikuni’s more retiring nature, and it is nice to see their friendship develop. Hanazono’s family life is entertaining, as his sister reminds him that she’s his savior for giving him her bone marrow, and he calls her an old hag when she’s trying to coerce him into running errands for her.
So many manga series set in high school end up incorporating story lines where there’s bullying taking place or a sub group of students is really mean. So it is refreshing to read a manga set in high school where everyone is generally nice, working through the typical misunderstandings of teenagers while being supportive of each other. Yoshinaga’s deceptively simple drawing style excels at portraying her character’s emotions. After reading one of her books other manga looks crowded and overdone with too much screentone. I’m looking forward to reading the next volumes of Flower of Life.

Antique Bakery (amazon)

One of the things I loved about Japan was all the neighborhood bakeries. You can stop in and get a little piece of cake or some bread like melon pan. I don’t tend to read much yaoi manga, but I thought the idea of a series set in a bakery sounded quite charming.

Antique Bakery is a little shop run by the resolutely heterosexual Tachibana, the gay “fatally charming” pastry chef Ono, and a retired boxer turned apprentice baker named Eiji. The major weakness of Antique Bakery in the first volume is the plot. The first 2/3rds of the book features a series of “customer of the week” vingettes, where we get a glimpse into the lives of some of the people who stop by the shop to buy some cake. The last third of the book is much more interesting as it shows how Tachibana, Ono, and Eiji got together to start up their bakery. Ono’s over-the-top charm is pretty hilarious. I was expecting more boy-on-boy smooching since this was a yaoi title, but there wasn’t very much going on. Overall, it was a cute but uneven book. I’m not sure if I’m going to be picking up any more volumes of this, although if I hear that the plotting improves in later volumes I might give it another try.

Bambi and Her Pink Gun (amazon)

This is a mature readers title that is a bit hard to describe, but I’ll attempt to summarize it with the following words – “hyper-violent pink acid trip tinged with social criticism”. Bambi is a teenage girl with the aforementioned pink gun, and she’s very concerned with maintaining the purity of her beautiful body, so she always shops organic! She kidnapped the son of a deranged pop star and is on a mission to deliver the boy to the mysterious “Old Men”. She’s got a five million yen bounty on her head, but Bambi shoots first and doesn’t bother asking questions, leaving a trail of slaughtered assassins in her wake. Kaneko’s art uses thick lines and a cartoony style that I think should appeal to fans of American indie comics. Bambi is a bit of a cypher, as her primary vocabulary is “Me Bambi!” followed by a gunshot. How high will the body count be at the end of the series?

Both Antique Bakery and Bambi and Her Pink Gun are published by Digital Manga Publishing , the books are larger than the standard manga format, and both feature slipcovers. The slipcover for Antique Bakery is scratch-n-sniff (strawberries). Both of these titles were a bit out of my usual comfort zone for manga, and I’m glad that there are more options available for people than the standard fantasy, action, or teen romance story.