New August Manga!

Rachel's been filling out some of the series we don't have as many volumes of this month, or completing others! For your reading pleasure this August, we offer:

Nightschool: the Weirn Books volume 3, by Svetlana Chmkova.

Karakuridoji Ultimo volume 4, by Hiroyuki Takei (based on the idea by Stan Lee).

Arisa volume 2, by Natsumi Ando.

Ghost Hunt volume 2, by Shiho Inada and Fuyumi Ono.

And finally (a pun!), Death Note volume 13, a.k.a. the "How to Read" book or the guide to the series, complete with profiles, mangaka interviews, 4koma previously not published in English, and the original pilot chapter Ohba and Obata used to shop the series.

Enjoy!

Genshiken, by Shimoku Kio

So if Lucky Star is in the upper echelons of Japanese culture-based manga and requires leveling up to fully enjoy, Genshiken would be the final boss battle.

Genshiken is a comedy-with-some-romance series set in early 2000s Tokyo. It's the story of a college club composed of otaku. (The word "otaku" is mainly used by U.S. speakers to refer to anime/manga fans, for obvious reasons; but in Japan it's more of a catch-all for anyone really really into something, and it has more of a negative tone--like calling someone who's really big into history and does reenactments of the Civil War a nerd. For Genshiken, the club members are otaku of multiple things: manga, anime, cosplay, doujinshi, and computer and video games. It's a plot point, in fact: "Genshiken" is an abbreviation of the club's full name, Gendai Shikaku Bunka Kenkyūkai, a.k.a. [in English]: The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture. This sort of well-rounded geekery makes them outcasts even among the other clubs that have a more 'nerdy' bent, like the Manga or the Anime clubs. Okay, this parenthesis has taken over the paragraph.)

Genshiken follows the lives of its club members over the course of four years, using the arrival and graduation of the main character, Kanji Sasahara, as the jumping off and ending point, and delving into the friendships, enemy-ships, relationships, and unrequited-love-ships [I'll stop, I'll stop] that develop between the individual members over the course of those years. This summary really doesn't do it justice, though: Genshiken is incredibly enjoyable if you're a big geek of any part of Japanese visual culture, whether you like anime or Japanese video games or cosplay, because it's clear that Shimoku Kio is too. This isn't moe jokes like Lucky Star--this is a slow-developing, deeply compelling story that's full of love for its source material: all the good and bad that the otaku world contains.

And it's often hilarious, to boot.

Genshiken is complete in 9 volumes, which were published from 2002-2006 and translated into English by Del Ray. There's also a new series, Genshiken II, which began in 2010 and is currently ongoing; but so far no one's officially translating it. There's also--of course--an anime: two seasons at 12 episodes each, and a 3 episode OVA, which ran intermittently from 2004 to 2007 and all of which were licensed for English by AnimeWorks. There's also--if this post hasn't been meta enough for you yet--an OVA, 12 episode anime series, and two volume manga for Kujibiki Unbalance, a (once-)fictional manga and anime series within Genshiken. Kio-sensei, creator of this fictional series, created a fictional series within it and then brought that series out into the real world.

Yeah.

When you read Genshiken, never doubt that you're holding something of great metatextual power in your hands.

Lucky Star, by Kagami Yoshimizu

Lucky Star is another 4koma--4-panel comic strip--slice-of-life series revolving around the lives of a group of contemporary Japanese high school girls. (When Japan hits on a theme that sells, it stays the course.) It's also one of those series that plays heavily to its moe aspects, though not to the level of Strike Witches (as that would be impossible). Lucky Star's approach to moe is more meta, partly because it contains characters--otaku, a doujinshi artist--who recognize their own types and those around them, and who discuss them in a pretty fourth-wall bending manner.

(If that last sentence was incomprehensible to you, just wait until I get to Genshiken. All will [hopefully] be clearer then!)

If I were ranking manga on a scale of approachability, I'd definitely put Lucky Star in the upper echelons. It's based very heavily in certain subsets of Japanese culture, and has a definite current events feel to it. If you're just getting into this whole "backwards Japanese comic books" thing, you may want to level up some more before looking into it. (In the meantime, if you want to give the 4koma format or slice-of-life genre a try, I highly recommend Azumanga Daioh, Sunshine Sketch, or Yotsuba&! respectively! We've got the first and the last of these available here at the Mooresville Public Library.)

Lucky Star has been running since 2004, and has 9 volumes so far, 8 of which are available in English. There's also a 24 episode anime from 2007 that was licensed for English by Madmen Entertainment (the people who dubbed Noir and El Cazador de la Bruja! Their praises, let me sing them), as well as an OVA from 2008 that, so far as I know, has not been dubbed in English.

Gunslinger Girl

Gunslinger Girl is a scifi series set in a near-future Italy, though it makes use of a lot of political issues that occurred in the country in the last decade (so really, it's more like a past-future Italy). It focuses on Section 2, the Social Welfare division, the real meat of which is composed of a group of cybernetic girls, their handlers, and a handful of support staff. Social Welfare ostensibly does what its name implies--and to a certain extent it does, to keep up appearances--but it's really a covert agency designed to take out terrorists and other people who oppose the government. The two anime series, Gunslinger Girl and GG: Il Teatrino, are adapted from the first five volumes of the manga; and there's a very big difference between the two.

Gunslinger Girl focuses primarily on a newcomer to Section 2, Henrietta, and her handler Jose, though the later episodes start to expand on the other girls in the group. The episodes in this series are more standalone than anything, aside from the last 5. It focuses heavily on the girls and their relationships (or lack thereof) with each other and their handlers; to be honest, the first season's pace has more of a slice-of-life feel to it than any other genre--and while I'm not opposed to that (given my fondness for K-On! and Hidamari Sketch), there were times while watching that I was thinking "For a series about cyborg assassins in Italy, this is really slow."

Il Teatrino does not suffer from this problem. While the first episode is something of a refresher on the world and the Social Welfare Division, from 2 onward there's an underlying plot arc to all the individual episodes. This was the season I was referring to when I mentioned the use of political issues earlier (they never actually name the Prime Minister, but it's pretty obviously Berlusconi. It's a little odd to see him in anime-style animation, honestly): the plot is driven by the political dissention between the northern, industrial half of Italy and the poorer, but more tourist-friendly, southern half. There's a lot going on in the background, but the main plot is on Section 2's efforts to thwart a northern faction-affiliated group of terrorists who've hired a pair of bombers to blow up a southern bridge in response to a northern separatist supporter going on trial for tax evasion.

Unlike Gunslinger Girl, Il Teatrino makes a serious effort to invest you in characters on all sides of the issue, both the northerners, southerners, and the government sections, while also showing the damage caused to them all by the cycle of revenge they're caught up in. Episode seven, especially, does this; and since this kind of nuanced, no-easy-answers storyline is why I'm so fond of anime in the first place, that's why I'm pretty much singing Il Teatrino's praises here. That it also fleshes out the other girls in Section 2, has improved writing to the point that there are some truly unsettling moments (almost the entirety of episode four has a Pulp Fiction feel to it, where a sense of completely bland normality wars with the fact that these two men who're talking about their family and girlfriend and lack of vacation time are doing so while acting as body removers for a northern gang, or that when a little girl who just got out of the hospital and is feeling kind of down about being slow asks for a favor from her friend, what she asks is "Will you let me kill one of the bad guys tomorrow?" That one in particular was a salkdfh;lsk moment for me. Unsettling!). And the fact that it also has (what I personally think, I admit) a much more appropriate opening song doesn't hurt!

The manga for Gunslinger Girl started in 2002 and is still going; it's being translated into English by Seven Seas Entertainment and, previously, ADV. The first of the anime series ran from 2003-2004, and the second in 2008. Both have been licensed for English by Funimation (they're everywhere), as has the 2 episode OVA. I haven't read the manga yet, so I don't know if the difference between the two is based on a change in the manga or the fact that a different animation studio and producer created the second one. The change in animation style does take a bit to get used to--and the OVA has a much more different style than either of the anime, which is really odd to adjust to, visually. We don't have the anime here, but both series are available just down the road in Plainfield!

Ouran High School Host Club, by Bisco Hatori

I mentioned my Strong Feelings toward the anime of this series in my last post, so I figured I ought to clarify.

I've been asked before to explain why I dislike the anime so much, when I really do like the manga. I cannot! Seriously. I can't put a finger on what drives me so nuts about the anime, aside from the occasional sloppy animation and changes from the original--but honestly, if those things got to me that bad, I'd never be able to watch any anime based on manga. This is not to say the anime is bad, or even that it doesn't have its good points; it's just not for me. Ymmv.

Ouran is a shoujo reverse-harem high school (obviously) romantic comedy set in a contemporary, if fictional, Tokyo. I don't know if "reverse-harem" is the technical term per se, but considering the set-up similarity to Negima or Maison Ikkoku, only here with one girl and a plethora of guys, I think it's apt.

The star of the series, (I'm not calling her the "heroine" for reasons that will soon become clear) is Haruhi, who's attending the uber-prestigious, ridiculously high class and filthy rich Ouran High School. The daughter of a widower, she's on a merit scholarship; and when she accidentally breaks a vase worth 8 million yen (roughly 80K in U.S. dollars--$1 to ¥100 is the typical translation, ignoring fluctuations in value), she finds herself roped into working at the school's "host club"--a club composed of six guys who meet in the music room and act as hosts to their female classmates, serving them tea and snacks and chatting with them. This is actually reflective of a common entertainment industry in Japan, although hostess clubs are more prominent there than host ones (a lot of Japanese will, in fact, argue that host clubs are designed solely to serve the women who work in hostess clubs, on the basis that they would prefer to relax around professionals--the assumption being that 'normal' women would never frequent them. Uh-huh).

"So, Haruhi starts working as a hostess?" Well, no. Like I said, I didn't call her the heroine of the story for a reason--she starts working at the club as a host. They get away with this pretty much because Haruhi doesn't give a rip for proper gender roles, and her clothes when she initially started attending Ouran were baggy secondhand threads (the club sets her up with a spruce new uniform--guys', of course). In fact, the guys in the club initially thought she was a boy (some were a little slower on the uptake than others); and the girls who frequent the club and become patrons of hers do as well.

The series from that point on is pretty much "Haruhi Tries Not to Strangle These Guys in Exasperation and Also Learns Some Things About Herself (But Mostly Tries Not to Strangle Them)." Hatori pretty gleefully twists and mocks standard harem tropes, both within the plot--the guys play very caricatured versions of themselves while hosting (the Silent Type, the Shota, the Twins, the Uber-Smooth Prince, Whatever On Earth Anyone Sees In Kyoya [okay, that's mean])--and without, like the arc where fangirl Renge shows up and tries to force everyone to act the way they would were they more stereotypical. It is a romantic comedy, though, and later volumes start to get more serious as the romantic part begins to outweigh the comedy one.

I haven't read the final volume yet, though (at the risk of spoilers?) I think we can all make an educated guess at who of the six--Tamaki, Kyoya, Huni, Mori, Hikaru and Kaoru--she's going to end up with. Me personally, though, I'm going to keep shipping Haruki/Kasanoda--because 'Haruhi the yakuza wife' would be the most awesome thing ever.

The series is complete; the manga has 18 volumes and went from 2002-10, while the anime ran for 26 episodes in 2006 (meaning the anime made up its ending, since the series was still ongoing, as these things so often do). Viz is publishing the manga as part of its Shojo Beat line, while Funimation licensed the anime for English. We don't have the anime at the library, but we do have volumes 1-17 of the manga--and we've got volume 18 on order!

Kingdom Hearts, Shiro Amano

"Wait," I hear you saying, "isn't Kingdom Hearts a video game?" Yes, yes it is. It is a video game series spawning just about every game system out there, from the PS2 to the GBA to the PSP and DS and--when Dream Drop Distance (a.k.a 3D) comes out--the 3DS, not to mention mobile phones, if you for some reason played Coded in Japan and not Recoded on the DS like a normal American, because Nomura is clearly in the pay of Nintendo and Sony.

But that aside, Kingdom Hearts is also a manga series!

Overall the manga follows the same linear story line of the games, though it adds some things and presents other events from different angles. It also takes a more light-hearted and comedic approach--for example, Naminé wearing a hard-hat when Sora and Riku are running around tearing up Castle Oblivion. For those of you who've played any of the games, you probably know who I'm talking about. For those of you who haven't, well, let's see if I can encapsulate the continuous plot of six games into a relatively reasonable-sized post.

...Okay, I can't. For real, guys, this entry has been sitting on my computer for a month waiting to be posted while I try to figure how to cram the storyline of KH into a paragraph or two. It's about the forces of light battling the forces of darkness! Except when it isn't. It's also about monsters that have names that make no sense--Heartless are made solely of hearts, Nobodies are bodies without hearts, the Unversed...well, that's a spoiler (if you haven't played BBS), but they still don't make much sense.

So far there are translated versions of Kingdom Hearts 1 (4 volumes), Chain of Memories (2 volumes), and Kingdom Hearts 2 (3 volumes, technically. Volume 3 of the KH2 manga exists, and believe me we here at Mooresville Public Library are trying to get it; but the print run on it was much smaller compared to the ones on all the others that it is, shall we say, an extended [and extensive] process. It's not even for sale on Amazon at wallet-gouging prices! That's pretty bad. I'm not discounting the possibility of simply trying to buy the blasted thing at a con and donating it to the library, but currently that is plan Z.) Volumes 4 and 5 are not available in English, and the translation was cancelled when TokyoPop restructured in 2008, so those are only available via scanlations.

There are several light novels adaptations of the games, but only Kingdom Hearts 1 and the first volume for 358/2 Days have been published in the U.S. The other novels (for CoM and KH2) are not officially available in English, though there are fan translations.

There is no anime version of Kingdom Hearts, which is kind of a shame.

Sunshine Sketch, by Ume Aoki

I’ve been posting a lot of four panel comic series lately. I blame it on this past winter: when you have a record snowfall from December on, it makes you want to read something that’ll make you laugh.

Sunshine Sketch is a slice-of-life comedy set in modern Japan. It’s about six girls who live in the Hidamari (Sunshine) apartment complex and go to Yamabuki High School across the street. The main characters are Yuno and Miyako, their upperclassmates Hiro and Sae, and their underclassmates Nazuna and Nori; but the central character is Yuno.

Yuno moves into Hidamari apartments when she’s accepted to the art department of Yamabuki H.S. In fact, the majority of the people in the apartments are artists: Miyako, Hiro, and Nori all are, and Sae is a writer attending the art department in order to learn how to draw her own illustrations. Only Nazuna attends the "normal" department--a Hidamari first!

The story mainly follows Yuno’s life as she interacts with her friends in the apartments and improves her art--unlike some of the other characters (like Miyako, who despite being a flighty sort of girl is a super impressive artist), Yuno’s drawing skills are a little below par. But she works hard to make up for it, and improves over the course of the series.

Sunshine Sketch is another Yen Press translation. (Can you tell I have a favorite company? Okay, not really, but their wide genre range means there’s a lot to like.) It’s currently ongoing with 5 collected volumes, 4 of which are currently available (volume 5 will be out this month!). There’s also a two volume light novel, and three anime series: the original Sunshine Sketch that ran for 12 episodes in 2007, x365 that went for 14 episodes in 2008, and xHoshimittsu that had 12 episodes in 2010; and there’s also a two episode OAV for each series! Only the original series and x365 are currently available; they’re both licensed by Sendai Filmworks and are English subtitles only--no dubs. The light novels, as usual, have not been translated.

Black Butler, by Yana Toboso

I mentioned Black Butler in my post about Yen Press, and since it’s one of our new series here at Mooresville Public Library, I wanted to bring it up!

Black Butler is a supernatural adventure/dark comedy series, slanted towards girls but definitely not shojo. It’s set in Victorian England, specifically in the late 1880s--the time of Jack the Ripper. The main characters are Ciel Phantomhive, 12-year-old head of the Phantomhive earldom, and his butler Sebastian. While the Phantomhive family (such as it is, since Ciel is an only child and an orphan) heads a toy and candy empire, it’s also secretly the watchdog of England’s seedy underbelly for Queen Victoria. This means Ciel must track down any criminal threats that drift up from the underworld into polite society (like the aforementioned Jack the Ripper) and eliminate them. Ciel typically accomplishes this via Sebastian, who is not really your typical butler, on account of he is a demon.

Literally.

When Ciel’s family was murdered, he was kidnapped, and the anger and pain caused by his mistreatment at the hands of his captors summoned Sebastian. Ciel then entered into a Faustian compact, promising Sebastian that if the demon helped him avenge his family, he would have his soul in return. While hunting for the truth behind the murders, Ciel continues to fulfill the Phantomhive duties of destroying threats to the British crown, and Sebastian continues to obey his orders until the final day comes. (Funny as this manga is--and it is--there’s a reason I called the comedy dark. This is an older teen series.)

Black Butler is translated by (obviously) Yen Press. It’s currently ongoing, with 5 volumes available in English; we have the first four here at MPL! It’s also serialized in the magazine Yen Plus. In addition, there are two anime series, both complete. The first ran for 24 episodes from 2008 to 2009; and the second ran for 12 episodes in 2010. The first anime has been licensed and dubbed by Funimation as “Black Butler season 1,” but so far the second has not been brought over.

K-On, by Kakifly

K-On is a slice-of-life comedy series set in modern Japan, about four girls who join the pop music club at their school to keep it from being disbanded. Like Azumanga Daioh or Hidamari Sketch, it’s in a four panel comic format.

Ritsu, drummer and club president, is the one who sets everything in motion to ensure the club won’t be disbanded before she can join: she literally rips up her friend Mio’s application to the choir club and drags her into joining the pop music club as a bassist instead. Tsumugi, keyboardist and super-rich girl, joins them at the same time; but that leaves one space still blank. Enter Yui, who kind of gets sucked into the club. Yui doesn’t know how to play an instrument (other than the cymbals), so part of the club’s activities involve teaching her how to play the guitar.

The club continues to be plagued by troubles, however. The president isn’t really on the ball about things like turning in the official application, or engaging in visible activities; and they acquire a faculty sponsor by blackmailing a teacher into doing it: Sawako was a former member of the pop music club, back when it was a death metal band. Because she now presents herself as a mild-mannered woman, she doesn’t want her past to get out (plus, she likes having a place in the school where she can drop the act and show off her ability to thresh and play the guitar with her teeth. Seriously, she really does that). Plus, Yui has a bad habit of slacking off when studying for tests, so she’s often teetering on the edge of being kicked out of the club.

K-On is translated by Yen Press. It ran from 2007 to 2010 and wrapped up with 4 volumes, only 2 of which are currently translated. There’s also an anime series that ran for 13 episodes in 2009, which will be brought over in April by Bandai in with subtitles and a dub (maybe; the product details for the DVD are conflicting).

Kobato, by CLAMP

Kobato is something between a slice-of-life and a mystery series, with a touch of fantasy (more along the lines of xxxHolic, where the story is set in current Japan with supernatural events occurring, rather than Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, where supernatural events occur in strange worlds). On the surface it's the story of a girl named Kobato Hanato who gets a job working at a kindergarten plagued by money troubles; but below that is the mystery of why the yakuza threatening to close the kindergarten is married to the woman running it, and who Kobato really is.

Because Kobato has a wish: she wants to go somewhere. And in order to do so, she has to fill a magic bottle with the fragments of injured hearts that she has healed. I'd almost say this series has a magical girl angle, except Kobato (so far) doesn't transform and hasn't fought anyone. But the reason she asked for her job at the kindergarten was to try and help the owner of it with her problems, thereby healing her heart and making Kobato one step closer to her wish.

In addition, there's another story going on: Kobato has some kind of spirit guide (this is the best term I can think of to explain the abusive, animate stuffed animal who is helping her on her quest--think Cerberus with a lot of rage), Ioryogi, who has his own motives for wanting to see her wish come true. He has no chance of being freed from the form he's currently in unless Kobato succeeds. And Ioryogi isn't the only supernatural creature stuck in a body that isn't his own; there are other creatures, too, and it's been implied that Kobato herself isn't human (or at least, sure isn't a normal one). There's clearly something going on in the spiritual world, and Kobato is involved, regardless of whether she knows it or not.

Kobato seems like a sweet, fun read; but if you're like me and you've read a lot of CLAMP's works, a warning light probably went off as soon as I mentioned that she had a wish. The series is cute and sweet; but there's a darker undercurrent to it that has me counting pages until we learn that one character is blind in their right eye. After all, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye: then it's CLAMP.

Kobato is translated by Yen Press, which is something of a newcomer in the field of manga, but which is a company I've always admired for both their diverse titles and their translations. The series was put on hiatus by CLAMP in 2005, and then was not so much resumed as restarted (opening at an earlier point in the timeline) in 2007. There are 5 volumes so far; 3 have been translated into English, with volume 4 coming out in May. There is also an anime of the series that ran for 24 episodes from 2009-2010, but so far it has not been brought over in subtitled or dubbed form.

New December manga!

You may have noticed already, but there is a ton of new manga in at the Mooresville library! Some of these are new volumes to series we already have, like Tsubasa, Case Closed, ./hack, and (waiting to be laminated) Kingdom Hearts, but others are completely new: Death Note, Hellsing, Kobato, Deadman Wonderland, and Bokurano: Ours are just a few.

A lot of the titles were those requested by the anime/manga club (sorry, guys, we couldn't order Spice & Wolf because it's rated M), so stop by and check it out. The new manga are on the bottom row of the shelf closest to the reference desk, and are now labeled with new book tags.

Plus, several volumes and series are still waiting to be laminated so they can go out on the shelves, so there'll be even more manga available in January!

Case Closed, by Gosho Aoyama

Ironically, I haven't been updating this blog lately because I've been so busy reading manga!

Case Closed is primarily a murder mystery series, in the sense that the main character runs into a dead body practically once a week. (I'm getting a little concerned that Japan will be depopulated by the time the series ends.) It's set in modern Japan and centered in a fictionalized and nameless Tokyo, although the characters sometimes travel to other parts of the country, and the main secondary characters are located in Osaka.

Since the English translations gave many of the characters English names--even more so in the anime than the manga--I'm going to go with those to avoid confusion.

Case Closed is the story of teenaged super-sleuth Jimmy Kudo, a huge Sherlock Holmes fan who dreams of becoming a P.I. But he gets in over his head when he runs afoul of an crime syndicate whose members all dress in black--Jimmy catches them in the middle of a crime, but is knocked out and poisoned before he can stop them. However, the poison he's given is a new type that the organization was working on, and instead of killing him, it reverts him back to his eight-year-old self.

Yeah. I'm not gonna lie; this series is kind of cheesy. Jimmy even has a family friend who's an inventor and gives him a bunch of gadgets to help him continue to fight crime even as a kid, including a bow-tie that is actually a voice modulator, a pair of super-powered sneakers, and fake glasses that are a screen for tracking devices. It's pretty great.

Jimmy's best friend Rachel Moore's father, Richard, is a private detective himself, so after Jimmy has been shrunk he takes the name Conan Edogawa (taken from the creator of Holmes and from a famous Japanese mystery writer, Edogawa Rampo--who himself created his pseudonym to sound like "Edgar Allen Poe") and lives with them. There, he starts solving mysteries in order to make Richard famous enough that he'll begin receiving cases tangled up with the crime syndicate. He does this by knocking out Richard (using a watch that shoots tranquilizer darts! I'm not making this up) and using his voice modulator to imitate his voice and solve the cases. As time goes by Jimmy does begin getting closer to the organization, and acquires more allies who know his secret: some likely, such as Harley Hartwell, son of a famous Osaka police officer and who's known as the great Detective of the West (Jimmy, unsurprisingly, is known as the Detective of the East, making him and Harley rivals when they first meet); and some not so much, like the retro-thief Kaito Kid (a tie-in to one of Aoyama's previous series) or Anita, a former member of the crime syndicate who fled their ranks after also being shrunk to kid-size.

The anime follows the manga pretty closely, without as much filler as you'd normally expect (unlike those months and months of Naruto filler episodes while the anime waited for the manga timeskip to occur and then scrambled to catch up to it). The main difference is that the storylines are told in different orders. The whole crime syndicate plot is basically a way to tie together a lot of individual murder mysteries, and only come up every few volumes or a couple of times per season.

The Case Closed manga is being published by Viz, while the anime is licensed and translated by Funimation. Volume 36 will be coming out soon in English, but in Japan the series is at 700+ chapters and nearly 600 episodes (!) and still going strong--putting it on the same level as Naruto, Bleach, or Inuyasha.

Pluto, by Naoki Urasawa & Osamu Tezuka

I mentioned that Pluto was one of our new September manga. But the summary for it in that post doesn't really do the series justice.

Now, I have to admit that I haven't watched Astro Boy, so I don't know the original version of "The Greatest Robot on Earth" storyline. Urasawa's version was my first introduction to it. But reading Pluto has really made me consider tracking down the original!

Pluto is part murder mystery, part robot battles, and all suspense. While Atom (the Japanese name of Astro Boy) and his sister are the most prominent characters in the series, the actual plot of the story revolves around an Europol robot detective named Gesicht as he attempts to solve a string of robot and human deaths. It is set in several locations, mostly Germany, Japan, and Persia.

Initially the deaths are assumed to be a violent outgrowth of anti-robot fervor, since all the victims, human and robot, were with two exceptions participants or otherwise involved in the 39th Middle East War; but soon it appears that it's a robot doing the killing--meaning these are the first robot-caused murders in nearly a decade. Because robots exist in a sort of second-class citizens state (like that in Penny Arcade's Automata project, but not quite as bad), the idea that a robot is now killing humans causes Gesicht's superiors to put a lot of pressure on him to solve the case and present the public with a suspect, fast. But he also must deal with politicians who are trying to deflect attention from the war crimes that occurred during the 39th Middle East War, scientists who are attempting to conceal the illegal research in robotics that led to the creation of the murderer, and a human supremacist group with a member who is out to destroy Gesicht for personal reasons, all while trying to protect the remaining robots who fought in the war from being destroyed.

Pluto is published by Viz in the United States. It is a complete series at 8 volumes, all of which have been translated. So far, the Mooresville Public Library has volume 1. There is currently no anime version.

Higurashi: When They Cry

Time to wrap up this month of scary series with Higurashi: When They Cry, an anime that I am still trying to work up the courage to watch the final episodes of.

Higurashi is a suspenseful murder mystery with a heavy psychological angle, mainly exploring paranoia and the consequences when it disrupts friendships and turns family memebers against each other. The "they" in this series' title refers to cicadas ("higurashi," or ひぐらし, is Japanese for 'evening cicada'). Because the sound of cicadas is synonymous with summer in Japan, the name is apt since the series takes place in June, 1983, and often a lot of action occurs at sunset and dusk.

The story is set in a rural village called Hinamizawa. A teenage boy named Keiichi moves there and makes friends with the handful of other kids around his age; and at first everything seems to be peaceful. But when the village holds its yearly festival honoring the local god, Keiichi learns that there are a lot of dark secrets under the town's plesant exterior: for the last four years, after the festival, one person from the village has disappered and another has been murdered. When the same thing happens again this year, to two people Keiichi knows, he finds himself entangled in mystery, distrusting his friends, and usually not coming to a good end.

I say "usually" because Higurashi is split up into multiple story arcs--nine in the anime, thirteen in the manga--and the story tends to reset after each arc. This can obviously be confusing at first because when the next arc begins, you're sitting there thinking "Wait, didn't you die? Didn't you disapper? Who is this new person? Why is that guy acting so differently?" But despite the story arcs seeming so unrelated, they slowly begin to reveal secrets about the characters, and the village, that tie them all together.

There's a reason for all of this: Higurashi originally began as a video game, so often when the arcs are different, its because Keiichi--and to an extent the other characters--did something differently from the previous arcs.

After the game came out, the story was translated into a manga, then a series of light novels and regular novels, then a set of drama CDs (those are kind've like audiobooks, except the voice actors for the characters act their dialogue out instead of having just one person read a script of the story), then it was made into two animes and an OVA (an original video animation, the term for an anime that is not long enough to be a series; they usually cover only a single storyline from a manga or novel), and finally it was turned into a live-action film. When you consider that all of these different takes on the story show a new secret about the village or the characters, it starts to look like Higurashi surpasses even Fullmetal Alchemist in terms of complicated plot.

The first anime has been licensed and dubbed in English by a combination of Geneon and Funimation; the manga has been translated by Yen Press. Even the game, separated into individual arcs, has been translated by MangaGamer! However, the second anime, OVA, and drama CDs have not been made available in English. The movie has an international title, Shrill Cries of Summer, but I haven't heard of a copy in English or with subtitles.

I hope all these series have given you enough chills to combat this record heatwave!

Ghost Hunt, by Shiho Inada & Fuyumi Ono

Since it's been a real scorcher this summer, especially this last week, let's cool down with a month of ghost stories.

(There's a method to this madness: in Japan, a popular summertime tradition is telling ghost stories. Supposedly, the chills you get will help with the heat. xxxHolic dealt with this theme in volume 2, which the Mooresville Public Library has in its omnibus collection of the series.)

The Ghost Hunt series began as "light novels," a term for novellas geared towards jr. high and high school students, written by Fuyumi Ono--an author best known for her Twelve Kingdoms series, four of which have currently been translated into English. It was then adapted into a manga by Shiho Inada, and later turned into an anime as well.

Ghost Hunt is a horror series with a heavy focus on eastern religions, specifically Buddhism and Shinto (a specifically Japanese religion), and on Japanese superstitions. It's set in modern Japan and centered in Tokyo, although the characters travel around the country to solve cases. It's the story of the Shibuya Psychic Center, a ghost hunting company which investigates and solves supernatural phenomenon. The company is run by a teenager named Kazuya Shibuya (nicknamed Naru) and his assistant Lin. He employs part-timer Mai Taniyama, the heroine who met Naru when he came to investigate an old building with more than its fair share of accidents at her old school; and he also hires a core group of other people on a case by case basis, including a Buddhist monk, a Catholic priest, a Shinto miko (also known as a "shrine maiden;" a miko is a girl who serves ceremonial roles in Shinto shrines), and a psychic medium. Together, they investigate psychic phenomena and exorcise and purify places of the ghosts haunting them; however, the ghosts usually don't go quietly.

This series is a case where I was really thrilled to see the anime come out, because some of the stories are even better when animated. For example, one story is set in a mansion designed after the Winchester Mystery House in California (the house of Sarah Winchester, daughter of the creator of the Winchester guns; she was convinced that she was haunted by the ghosts of everyone who had ever been killed by one of those guns and therefore kept her house under construction for 38 years straight in order to ward off any ghosts trying to find their way in); that story was already scary in the manga, but the anime kicks it up a level because you're able to see a lot more clearly the crazy design of the house as the characters travel through it.

The Ghost Hunt manga is being published by Del Ray, while the anime has been licensed and translated by Funimation. The light novels, unfortunately, have not been translated into English.

Fullmetal Alchemist, by Hiromu Arakawa

Continuing in the shounen theme, Fullmetal Alchemist is an action/adventure story written by Hiromu Arakawa; it's set in a fictional world reminicent of pre-WWII Europe, with the major difference that alchemy is a (relatively) accepted branch of science with heavy military use. Like Naruto, it has a large cast of characters, some of whom are nearly as important as the main protagonists; but it's primarily about two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric, young men who have joined their country's army in order to gain access to research materials and labs to further their quest for the philosohper's stone. The reason they are searching for this is because, at the start of the story, the misuse of alchemy has caused Edward to lose his arm and leg and be forced to wear metal prosthetics in their place, and has left Alphonse as nothing but a soul bound to a suit of armor. Their belief is that the philosopher's stone will allow them to restore Ed's arm and leg and bring back Al's human body so that his soul can return.

This is about all the anime and manga share in common--at a certain point in the plot, when the brothers reunite with their mentor, the two diverge wildly; and unfortunately I can't give any more details on how without horribly spoiling both stories for you. However, the main difference is that the manga--the original story--just ended this month, while the first anime ended in 2004, meaning that it had to create its own ending; and the movie, Conqueror of Shamballa, which came out afterward followed the anime's storyline further. A second anime, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, also began in 2009, and follows the manga storyline instead of continuing the original story of the first anime.

It sounds pretty complicated (okay, it is pretty complicated), but in essence there are two versions of FMA, the manga and the anime; and both are really good. The cast of characters remains essentially the same in both, but the paths that they all take and where they end up in the end are the real differences.

The Fullmetal Alchemist manga is published by Viz in the United States, while the two animes have both been licensed, subtitled and dubbed into English by Funimation. The second anime is still being produced in Japan, so English-dubbed episodes of it are still ongoing, as is translation of the manga; however, the Mooresville Public Library carries the entire manga series up to the latest volume (volume 22 at the time of this writing), so if you're interested in a story about alchemy, military life, and the consequences of making choices, give it a try!

Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto

In celebration of the summer, let's get a little shounen up in here!

(Shounen is the term for a specific subset of manga, also known as "boys' comics;" shounen stories are typically about, and designed for, boys, though they're read by girls and adults as well. It's similar to the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson type books, but usually with more ninjas.)

And speaking of ninjas:

On the off chance that you're one of the few people who has yet to come across Naruto, it is a story about ninjas! (Technically, it is a story about ninja; like the Japanese words manga, anime, sushi, &c., the word ninja can refer to both the singular and the plural form. However, the English practice of adding an s to denote a plural has been become accepted with some Japanese words, so ninjas works just as well. Bet you didn't think you be getting a grammar lesson in an anime blog, huh?)

Naruto is an action/adventure story written by Masashi Kishimoto; it's set in a fictional world that has a lot of similarity to Japan in some of the customs and in the feudal nature of the territories that make up the area, but otherwise the story's world doesn't share much with our own other than the fact that gravity works. (Well, sometimes. Like I said, these are ninjas; sometimes gravity is there only to be defied.) The story has a huge cast of characters, but at the core it's about a boy named Naruto, an orphan in the hidden village (a term historically used to describe villages composed of ninjas taht Kishimoto adopted) of Konoha, who just happens to have the spirit of a fox demon sealed inside him. This happened because at the start of the story, 12 years ago, the fox demon attacked the village, and its leader was not strong enough to kill it; the best he could do was seal it away, and into an infant.

Because Naruto bears scars from this--most distinctively the whisker-like marks on his face--that remind the other villagers of both the fox demon and the huge loss of life that occurred when it attacked, he has spent much of his life being ignored and shunned by everyone. This in turn has driven him to vow that he'll make people notice him--and he usually does it in bratty ways (the first time we meet him, he's vandalizing a village momument by painting graffiti all over it). But as the story goes on, he slowly begins to meet people who look past the scars and see who he really is. Some of these people are from his own village, like Sakura and Sasuke, two of his classmates who were assigned to the same team with him under the guidance of an older ninja named Kakashi (in Naruto's world, learning to be a ninja is kind of like an apprenticeship); some of them are civilians from other, normal villages; and some are even enemies from rival ninja villages, including one character who also had a demon sealed into him by his own village leader, but who--for several reasons--turned out very different from Naruto.

As I mentioned, this series has a huge cast of characters; the characters above form the core group--Team 7--that Naruto both influences and is influenced by, but the village Naruto lives in has many different families in it, all of whom pass down different ninja techniques to their children, and part of Naruto's story is winning the approval of those families via his classmates. The story is also split into two parts: after the end of the first part Kishimoto jumped ahead three years, taking the characters from age twelve to age fifteen. In the anime, the post-timeskip story is referred to as Naruto Shippuden, while the pre-timeskip part is just plain Naruto; the manga uses the name "Naruto" for both.

Naruto was one of the first titles that Viz put out when it started publishing Shonen Jump and began its shift away from adult manga titles to more young adult ones, so it's been around for a while--and in Japan the series is still unfinished, so Naruto's story is still going strong!

Azumanga Daioh, by Kiyohiko Azuma

Well, that was an unexpectedly long break between updates! But, what better way to kick off MPL's summer reading than with a manga about school?

(No, really, hang with me here. It's very good.)

Azumanga Daioh is a another slice-of-life comedy written by Kiyohiko Azuma; like Yotsuba&!, it's set in a smaller, though still urban, town in Japan; and the majority of the story revolves around school life, though there's plenty of summertime jokes as well. It's the story of a group of five friends who are all in the same class at school. (This is significant because in Japanese schools, students are assigned to one classroom and then stay in it throughout the day; it's the teachers who travel from one class to another to teach their subjects. So in Japan, the classroom you're assigned to is the one you stay in for the whole school year--just imagine what that would be like if you didn't like one of your classmates.) The story focuses on these five girls, but there are lots of other characters, some of them students and some teachers, who get plenty of face-time too.

I mentioned when talking about Yotsuba&! Azumanga Daioh is not drawn in a standard manga page format; it was originally published as a four-panel comic strip, but while in America comic strips are printed and read from left-to-right, in Japan the panels are stacked on top of each other and read up-to-down--in addition to right-to left! It's not as confusing as it sounds, though; after a few comics you'll fall into the swing of it. And it isn't all comics; each book has one or two 'specials,' where Azuma draws the story in a more familiar manga format.

Azumanga Daioh was published by ADV Manga in the middle of their switch to doing more literal translations, so in the last two of the series's four volumes there are a few notes on jokes or customs and untranslated Japanese words. The most occur in the fourth and final volume, during the students' class trip to Okinawa, a southern island of Japan that has a heavily aborigine-influenced culture (it's kind of similar to how Hawaii is a part of the US but still has its own people and customs). The majority of the jokes and the story are translated as accessibly as possible, though, so it's a great and funny read!

Yotsuba&!, by Kiyohiko Azuma

Yotsuba&! is a slice-of-life comedy set in a small Japanese town and written by Kiyohiko Azuma. It's the story of Yotsuba Koiwai, a quirky five-year-old, and her life after she and her adoptive father move to a new town. The story focuses on Yotsuba, her father and his friends, and the neighboring family, and deals with many of the events that occur during in daily life in Japan, like shopping, school festivals, summer homework, and typhoons. The humor of the series comes primarily from Yotsuba's lack of knowledge about things a typical five-year-old would know, and the resulting way that she misunderstands a lot of what goes on around her. (If I'm making this sound too dry, trust me, it's not; this series is hilarious. My favorite parts are when Yotsuba and Yanda--a friend of her father's who became Yotsuba's enemy when he ate her ice cream--get into childish arguments with each other.)

Yotsuba&! is a change from Azuma's previously translated series, Azumanga Daioh: Yotsuba&! is drawn in a standard manga page format, while Azumanga Daioh was a series of four-panel comics (kind of like the comic strips in newspaper, except in Japan comics are printed and read up-to-down rather than left-to-right).

Yotsuba&! is published by two different translation companies: ADV Manga published the first five volumes, and then sold the title to Yen Press, which reprinted those five and has continued with the following volumes. This means that if you go from reading ADV Manga's translations to reading Yen Press's, you'll find some differences: one of the character's names is spelled differently (Fuka in ADV's, Fuuka in Yen Press's), and a few of the jokes are different. This reflects the two companies' different appraches to translation: ADV aims to make the translation as accessable as possible for the widest range of readers, while Yen Press tends to focus a little more on readers who already have a familiarity with manga and Japanese customs and spelling (the difference between Fuka and Fuuka is that romaji--the Japanese alphabet--has many double vowels, while in English that's pretty rare). But Yen Press includes notes to avoid being too obscure.

(I mention all this because at Mooresville Public Library, the first five copies of Yotsuba&! are by ADV, so don't be surprised when you spot the changes in volume 6!)

Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, by CLAMP

It's a month full of CLAMP titles! But when the mangaka (the Japanese term for a manga artist/writer) group has been creating series for over fifteen years, maybe it's surprising that it's only a month.

I mentioned Tsubasa, or TRC (not to be confused with Tsubasa: Those Who Have Wings, a series produced by Natsuki Takaya, the mangaka of Fruits Basket) before when talking about xxxHolic; as I said there, the two series occur within the same universe and often reference each other. TRC differs slightly from xxxHolic in terms of story-telling--it was published in the Japanese Shonen Jump, and is a part of the shounen (boy's stories) subgroup of manga, meaning it is similar to other shounen titles like Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece.

Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles is a fantasy series set in no particular world; in fact, its plot involves four people traveling together to different worlds for their own reasons. Sakura is a princess whose memories were changed into feathers ('tsubasa' is Japanese for wing or feather) and scattered among many worlds as the result of an evil spell; she and Syaoran, a young man from her world, are traveling in order to find and return these memories to her. Kurogane is a ninja who was sent away from his world by the princess he served for being too bloodthirsty; he's traveling in order to return home. And the fourth person, Fai, is a wizard who refuses to use magic and who is traveling because he is running away from something--or someone.

Many of the worlds and supporting characters of TRC are similar to those of previous CLAMP titles. In fact, Sakura and Syaoran are both characters from the series Cardcaptor Sakura, and many of the events in that series have an impact later on in the story of TRC. No world is ever quite like its original story's; but because so much of Tsubasa Reservior Chronicles either relies upon or is improved by a knowledge of CLAMP's previous works, it can make the story a little harder to dive into for those unfamiliar with them. And like xxxHolic, the translation of TRC maintains honorifics (those name-endings in Japanese that are similar to English "Mr." and "Mrs.") and some Japanese words. But also like xxxHolic, each volume has notes on terms and references to Japanese customs.

Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles is heavily dependent on a prior knowledge of CLAMP's works to understand a lot of its background; but the foreground--the plot and the growth of the characters as they travel, work together, change and sometimes even betray each other--does not require it, so you can read and enjoy the story for what it is: the tale of a group of people from vastly different worlds thrown together for a common goal and learning how to work together and to accept the personal changes that come as a consequence of growing close to other human beings.