Select reviews from Manga: The Complete Guide

A while back I asked Jason Thompson (the driving force behind Manga: The Complete Guide) if I could reprint some of the reviews I wrote for it here. I wanted to share them with everyone and also promote the book a little.

Not only was he kind enough to give permission, but he also took some time out to pick his favorites. Here are his selections.

Adventure Kid (Adventure Kid) (アドベンチャーＫＩＤ) • Toshio Maeda • Manga 18 (2002) • Brahman (2001) • 4 volumes • Straight Adult Manga • X (explicit sexual content)
A kid is next to a computer when it explodes and before long he and his girlfriend are sucked into the digital world and dumped into the past – in the middle of a World War II battlefield. A bunch of delinquents follow them in and fight off the evil, lecherous American soldiers. It turns out the computer was haunted by a mad scientist and the only way to escape is to go back in time and stop him from entering the machine. But then all the dead solders start moving again – they’re zombies! Meanwhile, the kid’s fat father has sex with a bunch of women. Back to the action! The kids are transported to a fantasy realm based on a video game where they fight/seduce demons to escape! As you can probably tell, this manga is more interest in not making sense than anything else. There are plenty of sexy women and frequent (but brief) sexual interludes, but really it’s just a weird mix of video game references, zombies, yakuza-wannabees, and demon sex.
3 stars

Battle Binder Plus • Rulia 046 • Antarctic Press (1994-1995) • 1 volume • Straight Adult Manga • X (explicit sexual content)
It might start as a sci-fi story of cyborg combat and rampant lesbian sex in the future but Battle Binder Plus quickly leaves all the sex behind. The first few chapters feature our heroine getting naked and engaging in sexual show-downs with a variety of beautiful female criminals before transforming into a giant armored robot and killing everyone, but eventually the whole sex pretense is abandoned entirely in favor of getting right into the cyber-suit powered armor combat. Lots of bystanders and big buildings are destroyed in the process, of course. Not that there aren’t plenty of nude reaction shots, but it’s more about blowing things up than blowjobs by that point. The mechanical and environmental designs are rather good but the humans just don’t measure up (and the artists skips more than one frame, jokingly apologizing for being lazy). In the end, the entire thing was probably just written as an excuse to draw a destroyed skyscraper on the moon and have a hot chick in power armor fight and kill herself.
2 stars

Fantasy Fighters • Koh Kawarajima • Manga 18 (2002) • (1998) • 1 volume • Straight Adult Manga • X (explicit sexual content)
Everyone knows that the rich rape the poor, but rarely has it been so graphically (and absurdly) demonstrated than here. A poor girl’s father is nearly killed after a fight with some mutant delinquents and is now only kept alive by a coin-operated life support machine. How does his daughter pay for it? By being the sex-slave for the evil rich boy that led the gang of mutants. That’s when things get interesting. The girl’s father is used in an experimental program to create supersoldiers for the rich (androids for the bourgeois – thus he’s a “bourgeroid”) so he escapes to rescue her. But it turns out that the father of the rich boy tried to stop his son from defiling her and committed suicide in atonement – only to be brought back as a bourgeroid himself! Now the two old men/cyborgs must fight (after traveling through a secret tunnel hidden in the bathtub) – and it is revealed that they were friends as children. Thankfully, the cyborg dad has angelic wings, so he can fly to safety. “The hidden power of the wretchedly poor has defeated me!” The art may be a cheap copy of Satoshi Urushihara and the sex boring, but the bizarre story and sheer absurdity of the dialogue gets high marks,
4 stars

Love Touch • Akira Gatjou • Studio Ironcat (1999-2000) • Vision Publishing (1993) • 1 volume • Straight Adult Manga • X (explicit sexual content)
Another entrant into the category of terrible fan-art that somehow got published, Love Touch begins with a sense of humor but quickly loses amid jumbled, incompetent storytelling and art that degenerates to the point where it is almost impossible to distinguish characters form each other. Even more puzzling is that the series also becomes more focused on relationships as it progresses instead of just straight-up sex (though it never really did that particularly well either). The art is basically pretty simple, but still manages to end up a cluttered mess without any real sense of eroticism, aside from the fact that people are naked and (might) be having sex.
1 star

Oh My! (Iya!) • Protonsaurus • Sexy Fruit (2002-2003) • Izumi Comics (1996) • 1 volume • Straight Adult Manga • X (explicit sexual content)
The best that can be said about Oh My! is that it is cute, once or twice. Everything else is terrible. Stories of incest and inappropriate student-teacher relationships might be worth the time if the art wasn’t entirely abysmal, amateur sketches – and if it didn’t go to such great pains to try to convince the reader that the clearly underage girls are eighteen and just about to graduate college. The sex is fine, but no one should care when it looks like this.
1 star

Manga: The Complete Guide is available on Amazon. Jason Thompson is a cool dude and available on LiveJournal.

The Skull Man

The Skull Man is, in many ways, a very typical BONES production. Gorgeous, stylish, evocative, and compelling with amazing bursts of action. It's also riddled with loose ends and unanswered questions and full of a supporting cast that are far more interesting than the "main" characters, many of them clearly gifted with incredibly deep back stories we never get a glimpse of. It manages to simultaneously be surprising and tritely predictable.

The first few episodes suggested some kind of anime mixture of Batman and The Count of Monte Christo from the point of view of an outsider, a reporter trying to track down a brutal vigilante with hints of supernatural power. Add in some anime tropes of a spunky female sidekick and a mysterious old man who seems to know everything that's going on but refuses to say anything straight out and you have a pretty standard concept with the usual high production standard from BONES. I was expecting a formulaic and probably episodic show that would peter out mid-way through.

The show had an oddly compelling character to it, however. Maybe it was the somewhat retro feel to it with character designs that were clearly an homage to old classics or the strange, anachronistic pseudo-alternate history setting but the first several episodes manage to maintain a surprising momentum despise a startlingly slow pace (in hindsight). Very little is revealed about the histories of the main characters or the Skull Man himself. The supernatural elements of the show even come racing into the forefront when people start transforming into man-beast hybrids and having big knock-down, drag-out fights but the show still manages to maintain silent on what's really going on.

When it does start spilling the beans, though, it doesn't stop. The cast is fleshed out and the pacing picks up quickly, but more importantly The Skull Man keeps the audience guessing with a constant stream of red herrings and twists and turns that throw the original premise on it's ear, only to throw out the new premise as well. Conspiracies appear and collapse only to be replaced by another organization. Secrets are revealed - and then exposed as fakes themselves. This never feels cheap; instead, it keeps the otherwise simple, standard anime hero fighting monsters fresh and interesting.

Not everything gets resolved in the end. In fact, the ending is a huge, gaping hole begging for a sequel. The core storyline does get wrapped up, but many subplots receive little attention and some of those conspiracies introduced are clearly a platform for a further chapter in the series. Looking back, The Skull Man doesn't quite add up to more than the sum of its parts and it isn't really anything new, but it is all put together in a rather fresh way and is a great deal of fun.

Definitely recommended in general, especially for anyone who likes a bit of atmospheric action, likes guessing at what's "really going on," and can handle a very open-ended "conclusion."

based on full series, 13 episodes : ANN : Wikipedia : YouTube : Crunchyroll

Gunslinger Girl -Il Teatrino-

Under the guise of a "Social Welfare Agency," the Italian government gives young, terminally ill girls a new lease on life by turning them into combat cyborgs and using them to quietly dispose of dissidents and terrorists. They're kept under heaving conditioning, losing their memory and identity before the operation. Each has a handler that they are given an overwhelming attachment to, one which manifests differently from girl to girl. The pair could seem like father and daughter, brother and sister, or even lovers. Queue lots of girls brutally killing dudes and waxing about the transience of life.

I'm a big fan of the original series. It managed to combine slick animation with a completely fan-service, pandering concept and somehow turn it into a rather compelling tragedy. Both the manga and the original anime had a wonderful atmosphere. The juxtaposition of delicate young girls toting around assault weapons and remorseless murdering anyone they were ordered to was honed even further with the razor-thin line they all walked between following orders and losing all control in their mad obsession with their handler. The characters were all given surprising depth, despite clearly being from a checklist of "character traits to include in successful anime production."

All that the sequel manages to retain of that comes from direct references to its predecessor. It clearly had no budget for animation, substituting shaky still images and speed lines for quality production. Nor does it have any solid writing, either, feeling the need to state the obvious that was left simply understood before. There are no tactics, no questionable morality, no smiling children murdering each other, no real attention to detail or subtle charm. Just schoolgirls with guns and mental problems shooting totally eeeeeevil Italian terrorists.

Gunslinger Girl -Il Teatrino- is, bluntly, just about everything the original was criticized for being without any of the redeeming elements I found in it. Not recommended for anyone, unless poorly-animated middle schoolers with machine guns is really enough to get you going.

Kinda makes me want to go back and re-watch the original to actually lay out a good defense for it...

based on 5 episodes : ANN : Wikipedia : YouTube

Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, episode 5

The world fills with Itoshiki-sensei with despair, his class is filled with mutants, and each episode takes everything to its ridiculous, illogical extreme, constantly driving the teacher into the comforting oblivion of suicide. While not as hyper as traditional crack-comedy like Excel Saga it's just as - if not more - random, constantly taking impossible-to-predict-but-hilarious turns. The unique visual style of the show is similarly varied, with art style and color palette changing as rapidly as the tone and ridiculous storyline.

It's no surprise that the director had previously worked on Pani Poni Dash!, as both shows share the same uncontrollable randomness. His work on SoulTaker also shows through in the wild shifts in perspective, lighting and color. While it's not as cute or quite as anime-typical as either, it does manage to avoid being weighed down by a massive cast with more distinctive character designs - and frequently not really expecting or needing you to remember who's who. Sayonora Zetsubou Sensei seems to draw from smarter source material with sharper (and more risqué) jokes. It's not just loli-con snipes or running gags; it keeps building as more and more screwed up students are introduced.

This is one of those titles I'd watched one episode of and knew I was going to like it, so I put it aside for quite some time. Now I've gotten back into it and I'm at a loss to really explain why I didn't keep up with it. Really brilliant stuff, one of the best comedy anime in quite some time. Highly recommend to anyone who doesn't need their anime to constantly make sense.

based on 5 episode : ANN : Wikipedia

Minami-ke

There's the way-too-kind-and-pretty older sister, the smart-mouthed younger sister and the overly-exuberant-and-dumb middle sister. Wackiness ensues. The slice-of-life comedy Minami-ke isn't really breaking any new ground at all but has an undeniable endearing charm to it and is just funny enough to keep from being simply an exercise in laid-back adorability. Very much in the vein of both Azumanga Daioh (but less straight-out wacky and with a tighter cast) and Strawberry Marshmallow (but with older characters and more focused on humor than "aren't little girls just the most adorable things?"), the expressive, dynamic character designs and animation are strongly reminiscent of Kamichu! (without the supernatural schoolgirl-become-a-god complication) as well.

As a slice-of-life show, there's little-to-no ongoing plot. Exaggerated characters are just thrown at each other in a variety of ridiculous situations and you laugh at the fallout. Animation is top-notch and used to great effect to bring everything to life. It's hard not to laugh along with the over-the-top antics when the younger two sisters start going at it.

It's virtually impossible not to draw comparisons with Azumanga Daioh, as it largely established the genre for American otaku. Minami-ke has a smaller cast (which may mean you might not find that one kind of girl you just love) and isn't quite as overtly cute (like Kamichu!, it's somewhat subtle its cuteness attack, letting it sneak around and jump you from behind when you aren't paying attention) but does feel somewhat less disjointed. It's less obviously a sequence of humorous skits sewn together by merit of sharing the same characters, even if only by virtue of each skit/sequence being longer.

Definitely highly recommended for anyone who is a fan of either cute girls just doin' stuff or heroin-comedy (Azumanga Daioh, as opposed to the crack-comedy of Excel Saga).

based on 6 episodes : ANN : Wikipedia

H2O ~Footprints in the Sand~

The initial promise of a blind protagonist tossed into an inbred, warped village in rural Japan and forced to confront the casual brutality that is everyday life there... has evaporated. In its place are big-eye, fat-headed kids whining about anything is possible as long as you believe and some plot about a kid forced by her grandfather to impersonate her sister after she died as a child. All of the surprising and disturbing innuendo that intrigued me so much in the beginning turned out to be me just reading into everything.


Let me spoil it. Here's what was really going on: Hinata Kagura dies as a child and her little sister, Hotaru, is forced to take her place by an abusive (and prestigious) family. They tell the village that Hotaru died. Meanwhile, the powerful Kohinata family abuses the village, taking advantage of its wealth and doing horrible things like refusing to give medicine to the poor. Hinata Kagura and Hayami Kohinata become friends - only to be torn apart when the Kaguras lead the village to overthrow the Kohinata's, burning down their houses and scattering the family. Hayami is forced to live in squalor in the woods and the townsfolk regularly abuse her, both verbally and physically. But then the Promised One shows up: the blind Hirose. The "Spirit of the Sound of Time" (who turns out to be the ghost of the real Hinata) shows up, cheerfully (and prophetically) cures his blindess and he obstinately - but passively - sets out to just make everyone get along.

Turns out there was no The Lottery or any creepy, weird small-town with some kind of brutal, human-sacrifice superstitions. Instead, we just get a grand collection of idiots who are more than willing to take the abuse and blame for things they didn't do, and a town full of people more than happy to abuse - and then just as happy to be all nice-nice once an I'm-blind-but-now-I-see hapless loser shows up and asks "Why can't we all just get along?"

Recommended only for moe-taku and anyone with an unhealthy love for insipid harem anime that have pretensions of a deeply tragic plot.

based on 7 episodes : ANN : Wikipedia

Armored Trooper Votoms: Red Shoulder Document - Roots of Ambition

This prequel to the military sci-fi classic Armored Trooper Votoms tries to give some explanation of Chirico's past, shedding some light on both his time with the infamous Red Shoulder brigade but also the tragic childhood he had forgotten. Unfortunately, half-assed answers and recycled dramatic footage aren't as interesting as the faint air of mystery he had in the original series.


Red Shoulder Document - Roots of Ambition (also translated as Roots of Treachery) suffers much the same muddled and nonsensical plot as the modern prequel The Pailsen Files (which is supposed to immediately follow). The Red Shoulder brigade (the best of the best) essentially live in a prison and are routinely tossed into live combat just to see who survives, all as part of some quest to cull an immortal soldier who has luck/destiny on his side. This, of course, is Chirico. After proving he is immortal, they send him to the front lines to try to kill him once and for all. He's apparently too dangerous to be left alive.

There are a few glimmers of the tactics that made Chirico such a bad-ass in the TV series, but plot holes are large enough to run a mech through and what plot is there seems completely impenetrable without an encyclopedic knowledge of Votoms trivia. Recommended only for fans hardcore enough to watch a full hour for a few shots of a baby covered in goop floating in a vacuum with a terribly disturbing stare (at least judging from the other character's reactions).

based on full 60-minute OVA episode : ANN : Wikipedia

Armored Trooper Votoms: Pailsen Files

Despite fond memories of the original Votoms as military hard sci-fi that spanned from gritty realism on a futuristic battlefield to galactic conspiracies about super-soldiers, this shiny new prequel falls flat. The bad-ass hero Chirico is less stoic than effectively brain-dead and completely passive and the plot meanders around long-overused territory: the military brass keep sending Chirico and his misfit squad into ill-conceived suicide missions to test just how much of a super-soldier he really is.

While the retro-styled characters are inconsistently animated, the all-CG mecha are very well-done - making it all the more of a shame that very little is done with them. Most fight scenes come across as amateurish staging of WWII movies with giant robots.

A well-worn and aimless plot combined with suspense-less combat adds up to a terrible spin-off that arrived too late to ride on the success of a classic franchise. Recommended only to the most die-hard Votoms fans who will be happy just seeing the mecha animated with modern CG.

based on episodes 1-4 : ANN : Wikipedia

Manga: The Complete Guide

So the post with the Bondage Fairies reviews reminds me that I should probably do a quick, obligatory post about my involvement in Manga: The Complete Guide.

My friend Jason Thompson (who I ran into way back when because we were both big into the Kult RPG - still such a shame that died again) asked me to work on it a while back now. He was putting together this massive book to give brief reviews of every manga published in English and he wanted me to help.

Specifically, he wanted me to review the hentai manga.

Apparently he'd been reading my reviews/rants on my livejournal account and wanted someone who could write something funny (and often snarky) but still be able to actually consider the books for what they were: porn.

A waist-high stack of hentai manga later, I became an "expert on Japanese porn comics." A very illustrious title, I know. All it really did, though, was give me a frightening peak at the repressed Japanese id and enamor me of the short, 500-words-or-less review. Helped inspire me to get around to doing this blogination as well.

Bondage Fairies reviews

I wrote these two reviews for the Bondage Fairies series (Anime News Network, Wikipedia) as part of my work on Manga: The Complete Guide, but ended up not being used. They were rather negative for such a historic property, so they got a second opinion. I got permission to repost them here, so enjoy my snark.

The Original Bondage Fairies (Title) (Kanji Title) • Kondom • Mangerotica (1999) • Japanese Publisher (1993) • ## volumes • Straight Adult Mnaga • X (explicit sexual content)

Going way beyond just an X-rated Tinkerbell, Bondage Fairies is an unsettling mixture of lesbian sex, BDSM and a heaping helping of bestiality featuring scantily clad women who fit in the palm of your hand. There’s plenty of simple girl-girl coupling in the series, but much of it also involves domination and rape/torture, spiced up with just every kind of animal or (more frequently and disturbingly) insect the author could work in: worms, beetles, bats, slugs, etc. Industrious readers can read whatever they would like into the fact that beautiful elfin faerie girls repeatedly receive the attentions of hideous male beasts. Perhaps the most disturbing thing, however, is that Kondom renders the female form in a simple and alluring manner. It’s undeniably attractive, making the sinful acts that later occur with vermin and insects all the more grotesque.

1 out of 4 stars

The New Bondage Fairies & Bondage Fairies Extreme (Title) (Kanji Title) • Kondom • Mangerotica (1996-2003) • Japanese Publisher (1996-2000) • ## volumes • Straight Adult Mnaga • X (explicit sexual content)

The sex-crazed fairies continue their adventures, though the stories stray further away from fairie-on-fairie action to include a wider variety of insects and other talking critters getting it on with the tiny bewinged beauties. Fairies serve as the police force in the forest, but “protecting the weak” and “upholding justice” invariably involves having sex or harvesting “fairie nectar” or getting raped by some giant beetle or spider. The art is just as good – if not better than – the original series, but the increased emphasis on girl and insect coupling makes it even more uncomfortable. The short breaks for humorous stories about the author’s encounters with the diminutive nymphos are a welcome escape.

1 out of 4 stars

Eastern Standard, issue 4

Eastern Standard, issue 3

Eastern Standard, issue 2

Eastern Standard, issue 1

This is the first issue of the magazine I created with Eric and got our friends Doc and Joe to help write articles for.

I'm testing out a web site that allows you to create a flash interface for an PDF you have. Seems to work pretty well - just click on the magazine and a full page viewer will open up. Then you can browse through that and click on any page to zoom in.

Shigurui (full series)

The first thing that struck me about Shigurui was the incredible lighting and sound design. The show is incredibly stark both visually and aurally with blinding washes of white over a landscape of stillness and silence punctuated by brief and incredibly brutal bursts of shocking violence. Muscles tense. Warriors size each other up. A foot shifts here. A hand clenches there. Someone's head goes flying and everything is drenched in blood.

In many ways very appropriate for a samurai story; it certainly hearkens back to the great scenes in older samurai movies where more time is spent on the stare-down than the swinging. Since this is from from the director of Texhnolyze, this should come as no surprise and tell you all you need to know about the show's "deliberate" pacing.

Ostensibly, Shigurui starts out as a standard samurai anime, albeit much more realistic than most. There are no ninja powers or fireballs here, it's all about the tiny details in the fighter's stance or their grip on their sword. With it's indulgence of combat minutiae and relative lack of actual action-packed sword-slinging, it seemed to be just a samurai anime for samurai otaku with far more style that it deserved.

We even have all the stereotypical pieces: a prestigious dojo, a chivalrous top student in line to inherit it and marry the master's gentle daughter, and a conniving rival who not only fights dirty but has the fall to try to run away and hide when the tide turns against him. Everything begins to take a much darker, more sinister bent as the truth is slowly spooled out. The master is a raving madman with only brief moments of lucidity, during which he's a heartless, evil bastard. The chivalrous student is doggedly obedient, following his master's every command, no matter how inhuman. The manipulative rat seems to be the only one with any human dignity - or is it all an act?

Combined with the non-linear and obtuse storytelling that isn't afraid of leaving loose ends and unanswered questions, Shigurui quickly becomes a baroque tragedy of warped, in-bred privilege and how the fires of revenge, greed and ambition will burn everything around them to ash. It's a clear condemnation not only of the samurai (and their fetishization) but the paths of vengeance and power-and-any-cost in general.

There are no heroes in the show, only monsters and shattered victims (sometimes one and the same).

Sadly, that's not to say it's for everyone. Even beyond the bursts of starting gore and nudity, the glacial pacing will make it nearly impossible for some viewers to really get into it. Shigurui does manage to reach (and maintain) an almost palpable boiling tension, but it takes some time to get there. The "ending" is also profoundly unsatisfying. Having taken a leisurely pace through the first 10 episodes, the last two are surprisingly rushed and somewhat hard to follow. They contain some of the most gruesome and moving scenes of the entire run but leave huge gaps, most significantly how the Gennosuke Fujiki (the chivalrous student) loses his arm. When the anime opened, he faces off against Seigen Irako (now a blind cripple) for a final showdown - but it closes without showing how he lost his arm.

Definitely recommended for those who want something a bit more cerebral and can endure the pacing and don't mind having only hints to go on to get to it.