So, where does one start reading X-Men comics...?

A few months ago my nephew, who was then 13 going on 14, sent me a text asking if I could get him some Batman comics from the library where I worked, and he provided a list: Year One, Arkham Asylum, The Long Halloween, Hush, Dark Nights: Metal and Dark Nights: Death Metal. 

Older and/or more cynical readers might criticize Jeph Loeb's writing and elements of the Dark Nights books, but it's a solid list, and I wondered if he found it as a list of best or most popular Batman books somewhere online (I thought The Dark Knight Returns was notable absent from it, and I was a little surprised to see Scott Snyder's multiverse "crisis" series on there instead of Court of Owls). 

But as the guy being charged with finding those books? Easy peasy. They are all popular, fairly evergreen, in print and readily available through many different libraries in our system. Additionally, I had read all of them and was thus quite conversant in them; if my nephew liked any of them and wanted to know what to read next, or wanted more Batman (or other comics) from any of the creators, I could recommend other books until he was sick of hearing me talk.

A few weeks ago, I got a much scarier text from my sister/his mother: "The boy is interested in x men comics...Can you borrow some x men?"

Now, if you've been reading the site for a long time, you probably know that I have read some X-Men comics in the past...the huge cloud of "labels" on the right of the blog shows that I've used that label on 43 posts before (UPDATE: And, as I just noticed, 16 for "the x-men"...my labeling system is far from useful, I imagine). Still, I am far from what you might call a fan of the franchise...or even much of a knower-about-er. Like, I'm certain I know more than my sister—I know there's a hyphen between "X" and "Men" for example—but that is probably the comics franchise I know the least about, and most dread being asked to recommend books from (I used to think the Legion of Super-Heroes was even scarier, what with all the continuity reboots, but this recent-ish post from Mike Sterling convinced me that it was actually much simpler than I thought). 

In addition to reading so relatively few X-Men comics though, the franchise is just so...big. Launching in 1963, it is decades younger than Batman, but, there are just so many characters and, by the '90s, so many different titles and what seems, from afar, a rather convoluted number of alternate futures, from which characters occasionally come to join the cast. Additionally, the franchise seems to be one that (perhaps apropos) has many permutations. 

That is, as much as Batman comics may change over the years, from era to era and creator to creator, it's still essentially the same basic story of a superhero and or his sidekick/s defending a single city from criminals, the tone being more mutable over the decades than anything else.

Not so with the X-Men...and their many related X-teams and solo series spin-offs. 

Maybe a year or so ago, a co-worker had asked me to suggest some X-Men comics to him. Asking him some preliminary questions about his interest, he said it started with some Marvel video game (Rivals, I think...?) which led to him watching the first season of X-Men '97 (He was 25 or so, and thus never saw the original cartoon series that '97 was a continuation of).

I spent a chunk of the rest of our shift thinking about it and occasionally searching the library catalog, and I ended up telling him that my personal favorite was Grant Morrison and company's New X-Men run (which, in addition to its quality and new reader friendly take, has the advantage of being relatively limited in size, and thus a more manageable run than some of the more famous runs), but that Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men is probably the best place for him to start (Again, new reader friendly and short and distinct enough to be manageable).

 I further suggested he just put "X-Men" and "Epic Collection" into the catalog and look for covers with characters he liked or titles that sounded familiar...between the physical books and Hoopla, I think the library has all of the X-Men Epic Collections, and these seem to feature the characters from the cartoons prominently.

(Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always thought the original X-Men series was a sort of amalgam—a word I learned from comics!—of storylines from Chis Claremont's long run with the then-current Jim Lee costumes and designs and the cast of the '90s comics, and thus there weren't comics that perfectly reflected the cartoon...)

I spent more time considering what to recommend my nephew, though. 

Now, I am old enough that I did watch the original 1992-1997 X-Men: The Animated Series...or, at least, the first few years' worth of it (I was 15 in 1992, and by the time I got to college I didn't spend much time at all in front of televisions). In addition to my appreciation of the theme song, I mostly found it hilarious, particularly the over-the-top, melodramatic voice work and the handful of extreme accents. (I laughed pretty much any time Rogue or Gambit said anything, and I was a big fan of what a friend of mine referred to as the "exertion" noises that Professor X would make when pushing his psychic abilities or in some kind of psychic distress). 

This wasn't my first exposure to Marvel's merry mutants, though, as I still distinctly remember their appearance on the 1981-1983 Saturday morning cartoon Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (For whatever reason, the part I remember best was that Iceman and Firestar were imprisoned in rooms right next to one another, and their efforts to use their powers to try to escape meant they were inadvertently hurting one another). 

While I'm pretty sure I borrowed a copy of God Loves, Man Kills from the Ashtabula library as a teenager, back when there were, like, maybe 20 books of comics in the library, most of which were comic strip collections, I didn't really read any X-Men comics until around 2000, which is 1) When I finally started reading Marvel comics regularly, as they started hiring some of my favorite DC writers and publishing their Ultimate line, 2) When the first X-Men film was released and, related, 3) When Marvel seemed to make a concerted effort to sell X-Men comics to people who weren't already X-Men fans.

And that, I suppose, is why I am poorly suited to recommend X-Men comics; all the comics I read tended to be ones tailored for people who did not like the X-Men of The Animated Series or the Capcom fighting game or whatever (And I always thought Jim Lee's costumes kind of sucked; sorry, millions of X-Men fans who disagree with me...!)

Anyway, these are the X-Men comics that I've read regularly, why I read them and why I thought they might not be quite right to recommend: 

•New X-Men (2001-2004) By the point this book launched, Grant Morrison was my favorite comics writer, and responsible for JLA, which was and still is one of my favorite superhero comics. So, the idea of he and his JLA: Earth-2 collaborator (and Batman: The Scottish Connection artist) Frank Quitely reinventing the X-Men for people who don't read X-Men comics...? That was more than enough to get me to try an X-Men comic...but I also liked that, at the time, Morrison was giving interviews slagging off aspects of the comics, like Wolverine wearing a hat shaped like his hair and the fact that he and Beast have the same hairstyle. 

I think it holds up well, especially given to how tied to the turning of the millennium it was and Morrison and company's efforts to synthesize the original film's more realistic aesthetics into a superhero comic, but given that it's kind of the intentional opposite of '90s X-Men, I'm reluctant to recommend it to fans of X-Men '97 and the like.

•Ultimate X-Men (2001-2003) Like New X-Men, Mark Millar and Andy Kubert's book was presented as an X-Men book for new readers...but perhaps even more so, as it was set in a brand-new fictional "universe" being built from the ground up, completely divorced from the previous decades of Marvel Universe continuity, which Marvel (rightly, I think) thought provided a stumbling block for potential readers. I was a fan of Millar's previous DC writing—I haven't read anything of his since Secret Service, but it seems to me that he started out great and got worse as he his career went on—and only knew Kubert from the first Batman versus Predator miniseries.

I quite liked the Ultimate imprint and read everything for a while. I continued reading for a while after Millar left, reading the Brian Michael Bendis run and ultimately bailing on this book sometime during Brian K. Vaughan's run, I think. Twenty-five years later, I assume there's no real difference in reading a Marvel Universe book and an Ultimate Universe book, though, in terms of accrued continuity. Like, the book was very much of it's time...and that time has passed. 

(Also, that logo sure didn't age well did it...? Like the cover art on that first issue, it looks extremely unappealing to my eye now...)

•X-Force (2001-2002) Even more emblematic of Marvel's then-leadership's willingness to risk breaking things and pissing off fans was this radical book from Peter-Milligan and Mike Allred, the former of whom I knew from DC's Vertigo Comics, and the latter of whom was an artist who I was at that time willing to buy anything he drew. I mean, they didn't just give these two their own X-title, but they had them take over X-Force with its 116th issue. I can't imagine the whiplash. 

The creators would eventually get their own title (X-Statix) and do lots of bold, fun things with it...although I wish they wouldn't have chickened out about using Princess Diana as a character. I followed them on to X-Statix and some of the various miniseries and revisits that followed.

I haven't revisited their work since; I wonder if the superhero reality show premise at the start is dated or not...I thought it felt a bit tired 25 years ago, honestly. Given the fact that, like New X-Men, this was a premeditated curveball thrown at the heads of '90s X-fans, this also doesn't seem like the place to start for the X-curious.

(By the way, I never did figure out how to read Doop speak, but I understand it is figure-out-able, isn't it...?)

•X-Men: Evolution (2002) I wasn't overly enamored with the 2002-2003 animated series that this book was a companion to (It was better than The Animated Series, though! The theme song wasn't as good, of course, but it wasn't a bad theme song, either). The comic was written by Devin Grayson for eight issues though, so that was enough for me to read it. I don't recall particularly liking it, and I assume it's not too terribly appealing to anyone who wasn't a fan of the cartoon.

•Astonishing X-Men (2004-2009) This was another X-Men book sold as one that wasn't necessarily for fans of the X-Men, thought it was more traditional in tone and a more straightforward superhero comic, and thus the realtively rare book that both newcomers and the traditional fanbase could enjoy (At least, I think so; members of the traditional fanbase can correct me if I'm wrong).

TV and movie guy Joss Whedon coming on as writer was the bigger selling point, though, and he was teamed with critically acclaimed artist John Cassaday. After their relatively short run ended, Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi took over. I remember switching from singles to trades part of the way through Whedon's run (Which, if I recally correctly, was rather write-for-the-trade-y). I don't remember anything about Ellis' stories, but I recall Bianchi's art. I think I dropped it while Ellis was still writing it. 

And yes, the book seems like a cursed one looking back from 2006, what with Whedon passing the baton to Ellis. 

•X-Men: First Class (2006-2009) Jeff Parker, the writer of Agents of Atlas, and artist Roger Cruz and others collaborated on a series of mini-series and specials featuring new, fun, often funny adventures set during the first year of the original X-Men line-up of Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Angel and Iceman. Lots of guest-stars and very loose continuity (In fact, I'm not sure if these were meant to be canonical or not; perhaps a real X-Men fan would be able to answer that). I also liked the 2008-2010 Wolverine: First Class series from Fred Van Lente and others.

•Wolverine & The X-Men (2012-2014) Unlike the rest of the books on this list, I didn't buy these individual issues but instead read them in trades from the library. By the point that the title launched, I hadn't read all that much of writer Jason Aaron's Marvel work, but he had a reputation for "awesome" comics featuring their darker, more adult heroes, and I liked all of the artists involved on the book, inside and out. The premise—Wolverine succeeds Charles Xavier as the headmaster of a school for "gifted youngsters"—was irresistible, and I liked Aaron's highly comedic execution. Like Morrsion's New X-Men, it added a lot of new characters via the student body.

I'm sure there were other X books I've read over the years. I know I gave a Peter David X-Factor revival a try based on critical acclaim for the original, for example. I read a Rick Rememder-written X-Force featuring Wolverine, Deadpool, Fantomex and some others in matching costumes. I know I read the Bendis X-Men run for a while, wherein the original teenage X-Men came from the past into the present. I read a book featuring an Avengers/X-Men hybrid team following Avengers Vs. X-Men. But the above are the ones I made a point of following...and still remember fairly well. 

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By the way, I should probably take a moment to acknowledge the best answer to the question of where to start with a particular superhero comic: Anywhere.

Like, just pick one up and start reading. If it's well made enough that it interests you and makes you want to know what happens next (and/or what came before), it will inspire you to keep reading.

I mean, I started reading comics in general with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons #2 (Not #1, but #2). I started reading Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with some short stories published in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness role-playing game source book. I got into regularly reading Batman and the mainstream DC Universe with a trio of annuals from a crossover event series presenting alternate futures of the characters (Detective Comics Annual #4, Batman Annual #15 and Superman Annual #3...still love those gloves...!)

The great thing about comics is that one inevitably leads to another, as you follow a character or "universe" or publisher or writer or artist from one book to the next.

My sister did take my nephew to the closest comic shop—with some trepidation, as she has helped me move more than once, and has thus seen and carried boxes and boxes of graphic novels and longboxes full of bagged and boarded comics books, and knows what starting reading comics as a teenager can lead to—and he showed me the half dozen or so comic book-comics he bought, including from the dollar bin. 

The X-Men comic he's starting with? Fabian Nicieza and Andy Kubert's The Amazing X-Men #4 from 1994, which seems to be part of "The Age of Apocalypse" event storyline. (I wonder if it was Kubert's drawing of Storm's naked shoulder on the cover that drew him to that particular comic...?)

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Anyway, below is what I ended up ordering from the library for my nephew. You'll notice a few points of overlap with what I've read before. In the near future, I plan to read (or re-read) all of the books below, and I'll write about that experience in the future).

•X-Men: First Class—Mutants 101 (2022) Collecting 2006's X-Men: First Class #1-8 and 2007's X-Men: First Class Special, all written by Jeff Parker and mostly penciled by Roger Cruz (Paul Smith penciled #6, and the special featured pencils from Smith, Kevin Nowlan, Colleen Coover and Nick Dragotta). 

I assume most X-Men fans wouldn't consider this X-Men: First Class an essential book in terms of the overall X-Men mega-story and lore, but I have to assume that if a teenager in the '20s wants to read about the founding X-Men line-up, they will have an easier time with this than trying to slog through the original 1960s comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Plus, I know from experience that these are fun and funny, and rather continuity light...that is, one doesn't really need to know or have read anything in particular to follow them, nor do they weave a bigger, more complex story from issue-to-issue. 

In these comics, the founding five face such villains as Juggernaut, The Sentinels, Spidey's foe The Lizard and The Skrulls and they team-up with the likes of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, Doctor Strange, Thor and Gorilla-Man (from Paker's own Agents of Atlas).

The book ends with pretty expansive profiles of Professor X and his X-Men, giving their stats and histories and ranking their powers and abilities. I assume this is useful to someone just getting into the X-Men, right? This is certainly the sort of thing I loved when I first started comics.

•Astonishing X-Men Vol. 1: Gifted (2014) Collecting the first six issues of TV and movie guy (and apparent terrible person) Joss Whedon and the late John Cassaday's 2004 series. Despite my reluctance to promote the work of Whedon, this is one of those relatively rare X-Men books that seemed created from the ground up to be new reader friendly, and, if I recall correctly, was at the time something of a compromise between the New X-Men era's more realistic (and high-quality) direction and the action-packed, superhero stuff of the '90s; a book for fans of the '90s X-Men cartoon and the first movies, then.

"Time to make nice with the public, eh, Summers?" Wolverine asks during a suiting-up sequence.

"We have to do more than that, Logan," Scott says, concluding his sentence on a two-page splash page revealing the team in their costumes for the first time in the book, "We have to astonish them."

Flipping through this again now—I haven't read it since I did so in singles over 20 years ago now—I'm struck by how many of the images I remember clearly. Cassaday's work on this title is quite incredible, and there's an awful lot of specific panels, poses and spreads that are just plain burned into my memory.

Anyway, Cyclops, Wolverine, The Beast, Emma Frost and Kitty Pryde star in a story involving the promise of a "mutant cure" and a new alien menace. Plus, Colossus comes back to life after what seems to me like a rather long time for an X-Man to be dead (but maybe not?), and there's a dramatic, silent two-page spread where we throws Wolverine at something. I always like when they do that. 

•Wolverine and The X-Men By Jason Aaron Vol. 1 (2012) Collecting 2011's Wolverine & The X-Men #1-4  by Jason Aaron, Chris Bachalo, Nick Bradshaw and others. With the X-Men bickering and split into factions—I think this was one of those times Professor X was dead, and during the time that Cyclops was a terrorist or whatever?—Logan is the new headmaster of the newly re-named mutant school, The Jean Grey School for Higher Learning. Plenty of familiar faces make up the teaching staff, including Kitty Pryde, Beast, Iceman and even Doop. 

From what I recall, this was basically a comedic, occasionally even sticom-like take on the New X-Men concept, with the X-Men splitting their duties between superheroing and teaching a student body full of young mutants. Also, lots of new characters among those younger students, not all of whom were necessarily mutants. 

As such, it seems to be a pretty good jumping-on point—and it ran long enough that there's a big, satisfying chunk of it—although I wonder if it spinning out of a particular point in X-Men history might mean that it doesn't age particularly well? At least in terms of it being so different from the current status quo...? 

•Uncanny X-Men by Gail Simone Vol. 1: Red Wave (2025) Collecting 2004's Uncanny X-Men #1-6 by Gail Simone and pencil artist David Marquez (Javier Garron draws the sixth issue). I haven't read much of Gail Simone's Marvel work, but I was a fan of her team books for DC Comics over the years (Her first runs on Birds of Prey and Secret Six, anyway), and I think she's a really great, craftsperson style writer. Her work is often fun and funny, and she's good at relationships and team dynamics and if every story isn't always a great one, it's never a bad one, either; like, I've never regretted buying or reading a Simone book for the writing.

Also, she just seems like a really nice lady.

So Simone on the X-Men seemed like a good move on Marvel's part...even though I didn't pick it up,  my disinterest in the X-Men cancelling out my interest in Simone.

This seemed like a good choice for my nephew though, as not only do I trust Simone to create good comics, but it's one of the current ongoing titles and it has a small cast of some of the better-known characters, even if you only know the team from the cartoons and movies: Wolverine, Rogue, Nightcrawler, Gambit and Jubilee (Heck, they're all well-known enough that you can just look at the trade's cover and recognize each of them by their hands...or tail, in Kurt's case). 

•X-Men by Jed MacKay Vol. 1: Homecoming (2025) Collecting 2024's X-Men #1-7, by writer Jed MacKay and pencil artists Ryan Stegman and Netho Diaz.

This wasn't on my radar at all, and I'm not super-familiar with MacKay (I have liked all the Stegman art I've seen, though), but Kiel Phegley suggested it on Bluesky when I was crowd-sourcing suggestions, and it has the advantage of being one of the current iterations of the team (Unless it's changed since this book shipped, I guess). Also, Cyclops is in it, and my nephew did say he likes Cyclops. 

I haven't read it yet, but the team seems to be more...idiosyncratic than that of the Simone book. Aside from Cyclops, I recognize The Beast, Juggernaut and Magik from the cover; the back cover says the lady with the pink sword is Psylocke and the kid with pink hair is Kid Omega (Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's Quentin Quire). Some investigation reveals that the person on the ice bridge is Temper. As for the bald guy with black eyes...no clue. Maybe just a random mutant they are protecting...? Also, while he's not on the cvoer, Magneto is also in the book.

Flipping through, it looks rather nineties-ish...which I imagine is probably appealing to many modern X-Men readers, picking up the comics because they like X-Men '97 and Rivals or whatever...

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Before I started thinking too hard about what to recommend, I asked my nephew for some more information that could potentially guide me.

"Are there any particular characters you are interested in?" I texted him. "Or line-ups? Or eras or artists or storylines...?"

When he responded, he answered with characters beyond just the X-Men:

i like cyclops, wolverine a lot. also magneto. i'm also interested in any spider man ones.

...

also am big fan of night wing.

In quoting his text here, I obviously didn't add a hyphen to "spider man" nor smooth "night wing"  together into one word, in order to better express where my nephew is as a superhero fan (Or maybe a texter?). 

As he had a birthday coming up a few weeks after that exchange, I went to the Barnes and Noble down the street from my library to look for some Spider-Man and Nightwing books, which seemed easier for me to pick out than X-Men ones.

I had posted about this on Bluesky at the time, but I was kind of shocked at how poor the American superhero comic book selection in general was, as it had shrunk by at least half since the last time I looked at it. Meanwhile, the manga section seemed to have doubled in size (Honestly, just eyeballing it I think the store had more shelf space devoted to volumes of Jujutsu Kaisen than to all Marvel comics).

There were only a handful of Spider-Man books, and the only ones there—Spider-Man: The Other and Spider-Man: Blue (although the spine just said "Spider-Man") and the Marvel Premier version of Spider-Men: Worlds Collide (although the spine just said "Spider-Man")—didn't seem like good starting points. 

I ended up only buying one book there and then ordering two others from online. If you're curious, here's what I got him for his birthday: 

•Nightwing: Leaping Into the Light: DC Compact Comics Edition (2026) I love these things, as they are extremely cheap (Just $9.99! The cost of two and half brand-new comic books!) and they are mostly focused on evergreen "classic" DC comics, the very sorts of comics you would gift someone curious about a particular character. (The only thing I don't like about the line? All of the books they've published so far have been ones I've already read in singles or trades). I had previously bought my nephew the Compact Comics Editions of Batman: Hush and Batman: The Long Halloween when he had requested various Batman books a few months back (At that price point, they make for a good impulse buy, too).  

This collects the first 11 issues of Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo and company's acclaimed recent Nightwing run (Or the first two trade collections). I think it's unusual among the Compact Comics line in that its contents are of more recent vintage than most of the other comics collected. 

Anyway, I read at least the first half of this in a trade previously and liked it just fine. I do wonder if it's the best place to start with Nightwing but, well, I feel like he's a character whose history is, at least in the broad strokes, relatively simple—the original Robin and long-time Teen Titan as a grown-up, now serving as the vigilante protector of his own city—and my nephew knows him from various Batman cartoons (In fact, when he was still young enough to have themed birthday parties, he asked for a Nightwing party one year. Not Batman, to my sister's frustration, as there are plenty of decorations and party favors related to Batman, but Nightwing. My niece/his sister diligently created a string of flags with Nightwing symbols on them). 

Oh, this is the one I found at Barnes and Noble, by the way.

•Nightwing Vol. 1: Bludhaven (2025) I was reluctant to buy a Chuck Dixon comic, but then I convinced myself that the only problem with Dixon is that he has terrible politics, and compared to the likes of other comics creators, well, he didn't commit any crimes or abuse anyone, so...it could be worse? (In fact, I've already mentioned several other terrible human beings in this very post!) Also, it seems hard to avoid Dixon if one wants to read about Nightwing. 

Looking online, it seems like most of—maybe all?—of his long run on the title has been collected into huge compendium editions, but a 1000-page book seems like a bad thing to hand someone who is still comics-curious. 

This particular collects the first eight issues of the Dixon and Scott McDaniel run, which launched the ongoing Nightwing series way back in 1996. It also, to my surprise, contains a 1995 four-issue Nightwing miniseries by Denny O'Neil and Greg Land (from back when Land's art still looked like it was drawn by hand). 

I've never read this mini, but, flipping through it, I noticed it opens with Nightwing in one of his older costumes, and he has comically long hair, which he wears down when he's Dick Grayson  and in a three-foot long ponytail when he's Nightwing. Hopefully the hair—and Dick's fashion!—won't scare my nephew away...

•Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026) This is a brand-new $9.99 collection of 11 issues of Amazing-Spider-Man from the rebooted "Brand New Day" era. If you haven't run across this in the wild, it's the same size as the DC Compact Comics and Marvel Premier Editions, just lacking the trade dress of the latter. 

I was not a fan of the reboot, which I think "broke" Spider-Man in the same way that the New 52 broke several characters and franchises...or, at the very least, caused my interest in them to evaporate. While there were a lot of talented folks involved during that period of Spider-Man and I picked up issues here and there based on the artists, flipping through this now, I don't think I actually read any of this.

Still, it is a starting point, and it is being marketed as such, and, well, there aren't a lot of such entry points to the character. Unlike, say, Batman, Spider-Man doesn't seem to have a Dark Knight Returns or a Batman: Year One (Or an Arkham Asylum or a Gothic or a Long Halloween or a Hush or a Court of Owls or...), so I went with this. 

I see that it features Wolverine (on page 3!) and The Punisher, so I'm sure it should prove exciting enough to a newer, teenage reader (Also The Shocker and J. Jonah Jameson, but I can't imagine the boy likes those two as much as his uncle does).

Oh, and there's art from Chris Bachalo and Marcos Martin, which are two artists I am more than happy to stick in the face of a new reader...

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🤔 In retrospect, I wonder if I should have just given him some Doom Patrol comics and feigned ignorance of the difference. "What do you mean? You wanted the comics about an old guy in a wheelchair leading a group of super-powered freaks that launched in the 1960s, right...?"

A Month of Wednesdays: August 2026

BORROWED:

Crescent Moon Marching Vol. 1 (Scholastic/Graphix) I was intrigued by this manga when I first heard about it, mainly because my friend who also reads manga used to be in her high school marching band, and thus a manga about high school marching band seemed relevant to her interest. 

When it was finally released, then, I snapped it up, intending to write a review of it for Good Comics for Kids but, alas...but then I remembered that my editor had already written an early review of it a few months back...and it was also highlighted as one of the books of interest in a column on the site the week of its release.  There's no rule that says we can't offer multiple reviews of the same book, of course, but it seemed like overkill for me to review it too. I mean, it's a fine book, and there are some interesting things about it that differentiates it from the pack—it's printed in full color rather than black and white, it's from Scholastic rather than a publisher better known for their manga offerings—but I don't think it's so extraordinary that readers need a third post about it on the site.

So, I'm writing about it here.

Hamachi Yamada's series stars Mizuki, who runs away from home—and the pressures to succeed academically in school, and her demanding mother who is doing the pressuring—to the small, seaside town of Akita, where her aunt lives and runs a small cafe.

While there, she meets an intriguing boy Akira, and shortly afterwards she sees him enter a school gym from which loud and strange noises are emanating. She looks inside, she finds the school's marching band rehearsing, and the poor girl, who is afraid she's wasting her whole youth on studying but has never found anything to really interest her when she's not studying, is awestruck.

Her aunt offers some advice: "Once you find something that sets your heart racing...DON'T LET GO OF IT. You'll regret it when you're older."

And thus before too many more pages pass, somewhere in the second chapter, Mizuki, who has never even held an instrument before, is transferring to Senshu High and joining the marching band. Specifically, she'll be playing the trumpet, the same instrument that Akira does.

The rest of the volume follows her as she learns more about the trumpet and marching band, discovers just how challenging it actually is, meets some of the other members of the band and prepares for their first public show.

Readers, of course, will learn all about marching band along with her, and, personally, as someone with no real experience with the subject, I found it a bit of a revelation. There's some metaphorical stuff about keeping your head up (not unlike Haikyuu's repeated references to volleyball being a sport where you're always looking up) and being part of and in synch with a group, but there's also just all sorts of literal stuff about how complicated it is. I mean, not only do you have to play your instrument, not only do you have to play it with a bunch of other people playing there's, but you have to do so while marching, which means there's a degree of physical challenge (the holding of the instrument, the marching) and a high degree of choreography, so that everyone stays in step, and you don't, say run into the person in front of them and cause them to cut their lip on their instrument (As Mizuki does to Akira at one point). 

I was surprised to see all of this—and maybe I shouldn't have been, but, again, I don't know anything about marching band—and was thus intrigued to see the band members running laps and doing sit-ups (Which maybe isn't universal; that friend I mentioned said they only had to run for punishment sometimes) and the pages and pages of choreography Mizuki finds herself being asked to memorize. 

Like other, similar manga and American comics for young readers I've read, then, this book is about its subject in multiple ways...while also telling dramatic story related to the subject. Will Mizuki find herself through marching band? Will she fit in with this new community? Is she going to end up falling for Akira? (They've already done the manga/anime trope of falling together, so that he lands on top of her)

I mean, I imagine. 

As I said, the book is in color, which is in and of itself rather unusual, and it gives the proceedings not only a vibrancy, but also a particular mood and tone, and helps communicate just why it is that Mizuki is so taken with the band when she first encounters it, as well as the various charms of her new town. 

Okay, so maybe the book isn't an important one to the overall comics medium (Although, I won't be surprised if it finds many fans, and that, to some of them, it will prove to be an important book in their own personal lives), but it is certainly a charming one, and, with the deep, rich, emotional coloring added to a style of art we rarely see in color, it's a beautiful book, too. 

...

Also, I'm kind of curious about the "DANGER BEARS" signs near the school. I guess this is because the school is out in the country, meaning it's possible there are bears around...?

The above panels lead to a joke of sorts, where the rustling and the signage discuss a bear is sneaking through the foliage, but it ends up being one of the characters. But I can't stop thinking about that sign....

Justice League Unlimited: DC KO (DC Comics) I'm just not that interested in DC's latest big event series, DC KO, for all of the obvious reasons. 

It's yet another "crisis" story in the DCU, it involves messing with continuity to some degree yet again, and then there's the big, dumb premise, which seems to be that Circumstances have forced the heroes into a video game-style fight-to-the-death tournament (in which no one will actually die) in order to save the universe (Say, where was Scott Snyder when the brain geniuses who came up with Injustice were brainstorming ways to do just that? DC KO's version seems better than the grim half-the-heroes-are-fascists-in-a-parallel-universe one they settled on).

Despite curiosity about the Plastic Man/Lobo fight* (and a couple of questions), I had planned on skipping it. But, if I did, would I be able to make sense of the latest volume of Mark Waid and Dan Mora's Justice League Unlimited, which, as the subtitle suggests, is apparently a tie-in to DC KO...? 

It was with some trepidation that I cracked the cover, but I assumed I would be alright. I mean, I've been reading reviews of some of the DC KO issues as they came out (and just read a review of the collection a few days before I sat down to write this) and, again, the premise doesn't seem that complicated. Besides, Mark Waid has been writing big event series and tie-ins to such series for about as long as I've been reading comics; if anyone knows how to script a comic so that it ties into an event yet still stands on its own, it's gotta be him, right...?

To my surprise, the big DC event that this arc seemed to tie-in to wasn't DC KO, but rather an entirely different one from long ago: Waid's own 1995 Underworld Unleashed. 

See, while the book acknowledges what is going on in DC KO—Earth is falling to Darkseid again and thus the heroes are trying to evacuate the entire population of the world somewhere safer, most of the big guns are busy elsewhere—the plot here is that many relatively minor and/or silly villains have been given power-ups by the devil Neron in exchange for their services (here, though, without the accompanying redesigns), and, in order to stop them, a team of heroes must journey to hell itself and attempt to trick Neron by preying on his inability to resist making deals. (It also, to a lesser degree, reminded me a bit of 1994's Zero Hour; I'll get to that in a moment).

How does this tie into DC KO? Well, it seems pretty clear that it doesn't actually have to, and that Waid is basically just marking time with this arc, filling a certain number of issues of his ongoing series with something that won't interfere with DC KO, and at least gestures towards relation to it. He does manage some connective tissue, though, so much so that a less cynical reader—like, say, the Teenage Caleb who read Zero Hour and Underworld Unleashed—might not see the strings.

Essentially, with so many heroes starring in DC KO proper, the remaining Justice Leaguers are meant to be helping with the evacuation of the world, but all the villains villain-ing is keeping them from being able to do so, and thus the distraction needs to be dealt with. And as to why so many villains are willing to work with Neron at all—even those like Captain Cold and Heatwave, who got screwed over pretty badly by him once before—well, they are sure that Earth has really had it this time, and Neron has promised them sanctuary in Hell if they just do his bidding here at the end of the world. 

Waid divides the arc into two real plotlines. One, set on Earth and the Watchtower above, where we see series regulars like Red Tornado, Blue Beetle Ted Kord and The Challengers of the Unknown do satellite stuff while Mary Marvel, Kid Flash, Doctor Occult, Martian Manhunter**, Cadejos, Boruka and Golden Frog and Airwave fight with the villains on the ground (And there, as per usual, plenty of cameos, although here there more from villains than from heroes). 

The other involves Mister Terrific taking a team of heroes to Hell to confront Neron. But with the heroes spread so thin, who is left to go on a suicide mission with Mister Terrific? Well, luckily there are all those time-lost heroes from the past and the future who have apparently been hanging around the Watchtower since the end of "We Are Yesterday", some of whom I know and some of whom I don't. (Conveniently, assembling a League of random heroes from different timelines for the space of an arc also means Waid can tell a JLU story without actually using any heroes who are busy elsewhere in the event and its tie-ins.)

These guys are actually a pretty perfect team for Terrific to use too, as he tells them that they aren't actually their real selves, but "remnants" of those selves plucked from the timestream, distinct entities that will cease to exist when everything is straightened out. (And here's the bit that reminded me of Zero Hour, as these heroes know that saving the day ultimately means they're own deaths; in Zero Hour, it was slightly different, but some time-lost heroes knew that fixing the timestream meant they will return to their own timelines, and, in at least some cases, that's a death sentence of sorts.) 

Of course, telling them this is probably not all that smart on Terrific's part, even if he does now claim to be the "smartest man on the planet"—not the third smartest, as per usual, but the smartest—as it means they spend their lives a little too freely, and, in at least one case, the looming threat of non-existence leads one to actively hamper Terrific's mission. But I suppose Waid wants us to know just how expendable these guys are, so we don't feel quite so badly when they start sacrificing themselves during their journey through Hell. 

So which time-lost heroes are we talking about here...?

Hook-handed, 1990s Aquaman (Seeing Dan Mora draw him certainly hasn't made me rethink the fact that this is still my favorite Aquaman design); Power Girl Kara Zor-L (That's the pre-Crisis, Earth-2 version, right?); Guy Gardner, Warrior (from 1994's Guy Gardner: Warrior #17, from the look of it, although his hair is wrong); electric Superman; the Interlac-speaking Gold Hawk, who I think might be the first Hawkman incarnation (He's one of the two characters completely unfamiliar to me here); a Batman Beyond who is actually Tim Drake (So, the Batman from Futures End, I think...?); Kingdom Come's Green Lantern Alan Scott; a Doctor Fate (Real name Sofie; this is the other one I can't place) and Justice Legion-A's Owlwoman from the 853rd Century (Whom I first remember seeing in the Grant Morrison/Dusty Abell contribution to 1999's DC One Million 80-Page Giant). 

Waid makes a decent enough attempt at giving each of them a moment or so, either in the hours before they embark on their mission, or during that mission itself, at least gesturing towards some form of characterization (like Guy going to see the modern-day Ice and finding out they are no longer together, or Power Girl recording a video message for her current self, the repeating panels of the sequence giving me a flashback to Heroes in Crisis). It's a nice attempt, but it mostly boils down to a character trait apiece: Alan Scott has been doing this a long time, Tim Drake is scared, etc. 

As they journey through Hell, they take turns sacrificing their lives in one big action scene after another, until, by the time they arrive at Neron's throne at the climax, Mister Terrific is there with just one other hero. 

DC's Hell is different here than any I've seen, but then, DC has a lot of versions of Hell, and it's rarely consistent; this one doesn't much resemble that of Underworld Unleashed or Day of Judgment, both of which were Hells ruled by Neron. It's built of some DC stuff (The Demons Three are there to greet the heroes when they first arrive), some stuff from classic mythology (Charon and his ferry) and some stuff unique to this comic; there's a lot of weird monsters with bug-like forms.          

The journey seems to go on perhaps too long—Waid and Mora spend several issues having the heroes fight their way to Neron, whereas Waid and pencil artist Howard Porter did so in less than an issue in Underworld Unleashed #3—and I suspect that had as much to do with marking time as any other aspect of the arc.

Still, Mora is a great artist, and it is, as always, worth one's time picking up comics like this just to see him draw stuff. I certainly enjoyed seeing him revisit some costumes from the '90s—he really makes that temporary Superman costume sing, for example—and getting to draw weirder, scarier stuff than usual. 

As with the first volume of Matt Fraction's Batman, as I read this, I wondered if I maybe I have just been reading DC comics for too damn long now, given how much of this felt overly familiar, with Waid covering ground I have seen covered and re-covered before. I mean, I've lost track of how many times I've seen DC's superheroes journey to Hell since I read Alan Moore's story of Swamp Thing doing so. Of these ten heroes, I've seen Superman, Alan Scott, Aquaman and Guy Gardner all do so before.

So, when they first arrive, and Electric Superman starts stuttering in disbelief, while Alan Scott narrates that, because Superman doesn't believe there is any such thing as an irredeemable soul, "of course his mind is reeling," I thought of the image of a weeping Superman in Neil Gaiman and company's 2000 Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame, which may or may not be canonical, and 1999's Day of Judgment, another time Superman went to hell (That latter trip to hell would have been from a point in his life after which this time-lost version existed, though).

Somewhat disappointingly, while Waid tries to give a bit of characterization and a big action moment to each of the time-lost heroes, he doesn't quite do the same with Terrific...except, of course, for one scene where he uses a logic paradox to trick a gatekeeper and then when he tries to make a deal with Neron. At no point, however, does Waid address how Terrific might feel about the concept of Hell, given that he was, at least earlier in his history, an avowed atheist and skeptic of the supernatural, something he would argue with his fellow members of the JSA about (This despite, of course, that his origin involved The Spectre). 

Maybe later writers addressed the matter of Michael Holt's faith in the years past—Heck, maybe Geoff Johns did so in past pages of JSA or Justice Society of America, and I've read and forgotten about it—but given that Mister Terrific is the one character on this journey who is "real" and stars in Justice League Unlimited, and that he at least had a very strong opinion about the prospects of the afterlife before, I think that might have made more interesting ground to explore than, like, I don't know, seeing an alternate future Tim Drake freak out about being in Hell and trying to live up to the legacy of his Batman, you know?. '

Ah well. It's become clear for a while now that this book is going to be a sort of narrative string around which the beads of various DC event series and crossover events can be strung, an ongoing title in which the mega-story of the whole DC line can play out 20 pages a month. While that isn't very appealing to me, it does have a couple of strong selling points.

This is, after all, a "toy box" comic in which we can see Mark Waid and, often, Dan Mora play with DC's heroes and villains, and one in which we can hope to see unexpected cameos from random, little-seen characters (Check it out! There's a panel featuring Jack O' Lantern in this!). 

Though nothing much new or exciting or imaginative happens in this volume, it still has those elements going for it.

And hey, I was able to follow it, even without having read and/or caring about DC KO...!

REVIEWED:

The Girl Who Loved Monsters (Viking) While it's a little awkward in its construction due to the fact that writer Insha Fitzpatrick is simultaneously trying to set up a series and provide the first in what is apparently meant to be several episodic adventures, once it gets going, the book is actually a lot of fun. I kind of loved the idea of the two dueling books about monsters—one "evil" book and one "good" book—and artist Ashley Robin Franklin (who oddly gets an "Illustrated by" credit on the cover instead of something more accurate) designs and draws a hell of a werewolf. Every time I see or hear the title I can't help but think of Emil Ferris' My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, though. Anyway, my full review of Fitzpatrick and Franklin's book is here. 

Hulk Teach: A Tale of 2 Teachers (Scholastic/Graphix) This is the sequel to Jeffrey Brown's Hulk Teach. In the original comic, a deal worked out by Bruce Banner's lawyer/cousin She-Hulk finds him performing community service to make up for all of the damage caused by The Hulk (instead of being sent to a SHIELD prison), and the form that community service takes is teaching middle school. Here, Banner is joined by a part-time co-teacher with a similar deal: The Fantastic Four's Benjamin Grimm, AKA The Thing. Hilarity ensues. I reviewed the first volume here and the just-released sequel here.

But I want to take this opportunity to talk about an aspect of the books that I didn't mention in the reviews. And it involves a sizable spoiler to them, so, if you haven't read them—and if you like The Hulk, the Marvel Universe and funny comic books, you should definitely read them—please stop reading this post and go away. You can come back and finish this post after you've read both Hulk Teach books. 

Okay, so in the first book Banner meets Mr. Museler, a very peculiar fellow teacher who is something of a foil and rival to Banner...so much so that he acts like a foil and rival, despite the fact that the two are, you know, both middle-school teachers. 

Mr. Museler is a curious character. Not only is he a sort of negative example of a teacher, strictly teaching his class to the test so that they can score the highest in the school (and win a pizza party), rather than prioritizing their learning, but he's also pretty weird. He says he's independently wealthy, and only teaches middle-school as a hobby, rather than it being a job he needs to do in order to make a living (Or it being a vocation). 

And the source of his wealth? A hat factory. Indeed, he is always wearing a comically large hat. 

Here, for reference, is Mr. Museler...or "Hat Man" as The Hulk calls him:

Okay, so why did Brown draw such a tall hat...? Well, given that Museler has an adversarial relationship with Banner/The Hulk in the books and that he has a mustache and the specific shape of his hat, I immediately assumed he was actually The Leader in disguise the first time I laid eyes on him.

And yet Hulk Teach ended without ever revealing that Museler was hiding a very tall head under his very tall hat, and so I decided I was wrong after all. Brown did not create Museler—French for "to muzzle"—as a middle-school teacher alter ego for Hullk villain The Leader afterall, it seemed. I guessed that the mustache was just a coincidence, and that Brown just drew that particular hat like that just because he thought the taller hat was funnier than one that was more standard hat size and shape..

Anyway, in A Tale of 2 Teachers, Museler is once again there to bust Banner and The Hulk's chops—as well as the chops of the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Thing—competing with them while teaching his class in ways that are suspect, like having them watch movie adaptations of classic works of literature rather than having them reading or using AI to help them writer their speeches.

I was shocked—shocked, I say!—by the events of the climax. Both Banner's class and Museler's class have built robots, and these are fighting in a robot battle royale. Museler's class's robot destroys all the other robots and kind of goes crazy, leaping out of the "Robactagon" at one point, and damaging Museler's signature hat:

As you can see, Museler does indeed have a very big head under his very big hat. Then, in my second-favorite page of the book, The Hulk and The Thing destroy the robot while shouting their catchphrases. A fire breaks out, and the kids build a makeshift aqueduct (something the Hulk had previously taught them about) to put out the fire but, in the process, some splashes on Museler...revealing his green skin!

At this point, Museler/The Leader's dialogue bubbles turn green, the same color as the dialogue bubbles of the gamma-irradiated Hulk and She-Hulk, Banner explains to the kids who The Leader was and how he came to be, and The Thing states the obvious: 

So even though I had immediately suspected that Mr. Museler was really The Leader, because Brown didn't reveal it in the first book, I assumed my suspicion was incorrect...and therefore when Brown did reveal this fact in the second book, I was actually completely shocked!

Bravo, Jeffrey Brown. 

*Actually, from what I've heard on Bluesky, that fight doesn't actually occur in the main series...or, um, anywhere else, aside from the marketing. That sucks...but it also feels sort of appropriate that the most compelling element of a Big Two event comic isn't actually in the comic or its tie-ins, but the marketing for them. 

**Wait, is Martian Manhunter really not in the tournament...? That seems...weird, as he is not only one of the most powerful heroes, one who could swat down the majority of the participants without breaking a sweat, but he's also one of the few who could go all the way. I mean, if anyone in the DCU could take down Superman in a fight, it's J'onn, right...? At this point, one thing I am curious about the tournament aspect of the main series is how Snyder might convincingly sell us on Superman winning rather, I don't know, the last match being The Spectre eliminating Martian Manhunter...

Review: Betrothed to a Fox Demon Vol. 1

I've been reading so many realistic manga of late, particularly ones about highschoolers with crushes on one another, that it was a little weird and a little refreshing to pick up a manga full of some of the things I used to associate with Japanese comics. You know, stuff like swords, demons, battles and Japanese mythology. This particular manga is Anju Hino's Betrothed to a Fox Demon, the first volume of which was released by Square Enix Manga in April. 

In fact, it reminded me a bit of a particular manga—Rumiko Takahashi's Inuyasha—but only really in a few of the broad strokes, some of which I guess are even apparent from the cover alone. 

On that cover are Kuro Kyogane and Fuyu. Kuro, known as "The Black Wolf", is a social outcast, but he comes from a long lineage of exorcists; in fact, he comes from a clan of exorcists that have defended Japan from demons for a thousand years. 

As Kuo is the clan's last male heir, his grandfather is constantly bugging him to marry, but Kuro has no interest in doing so, as he is completely devoted to eradicating every last demon, something he has acquitted himself to after his parents were killed by demons.

When his grandfather presents the beautiful Fuyu to him as a potential bride, Kuro immediately rejects her...and the very idea that he even needs to marry in order to continue the clan for another generation.

"Exorcists won't be necessary once demons go extinct," he argues. "And since I'm wiping out the demons... ...I don't need a wife."

Fuyu proves even more persistent than Kuro's Gramps, however, and, after proving how much help she can be and (part of) the reason she wants to marry Kuro, he agrees...but things go differently than he expects, as both Kuro's grandfather and his betrothed were keeping a few important details from him.

After a rather unexpected twist, Kuro comes face-to-face with Kyubi, a powerful nine-tailed fox demon that his family had previously sealed away (and which, I should note, probably doesn't look like any nine-tailed fox demons you've seen before), and Fuyu finds herself possessed by it. 

This possession, however, seems to manifest only as a pair of fox ears atop her head and a tail...otherwise, as of the first volume in the new series, she seems perfectly normal (Although she is now a target of other exorcists, as such possessed "vessels" can attract other demons through their "miasma").

By the end of the first chapter, then, about 70 pages in, the premise seems set: Kuro and Fuyu must quest for a cure to her possession, finding themselves beset both by supernatural threats and the exorcists who hunt them. 

These exorcists appear to be organized into something between a guild and an army, as a faction of four agents from "The Exorcism Agency's Pursuit Squadron" follows our heroes into a supernatural black market. They are (mostly) young and good-looking, dressed in all black uniforms and all extremely interesting. 

The plainest of them is a man with an eye-patch and a rifle, the most modern technology in the book, which seems to be set in the later centuries of feudal Japan. There's also a little girl who controls a huge and terrifying puppet; a girl with a very short skirt who was previously set up as a potential wife of Kuro and who carries a scary doll whose face transforms to a scarier masked form; and, finally, Gyobu Monobe, whose face is completely wrapped in bandages, with a few random pins stabbed into them (He might look like the Snake Eyes of the team, but is apparently, like Fuyu, a person possessed by a demon; the marks of his possession are apparently not as cute as Fuyu's). 

Mostly set up then, this volume tells us the story of the two characters on the cover, how they come together, what they are devoting themselves to, and introduces us to some of their adversaries; the book ends with the couple rushing to an assembly of the Exorcism Agency to have their marriage officially recognized, which will allow them to stay together (in much the same way that Gyobu is allowed to work with the Agency, even though he is possessed by a demon). 

The character designs are all quite strong and striking, and full of some interesting surprises (Like the aforementioned puppet, for example). 

What is perhaps most interesting is the demons that populate the book. These don't look much of anything like those you might have seen in other manga or anime and are visually pretty far removed from the sorts of creatures in traditional Japanese folklore.

The Kyubi, for example, looks nothing like a fox, nor does it seem to have any tails. It wears a mask over its eyes...or maybe the "main" eyes on its...let's say "head." Below this horned head, which sits atop a long neck, are a mass of arms...and eyeballs and mouths and a big, weird secondary head. It looks more Lovecraftian than something one might find in traditional Japanese art. (Speaking of traditional Japanese art, there is a tengu in one panel, a corpse of one lying on a table at the black market; it looks like a humanoid chicken with well-developed pecs and abs.)

Other demons include a gigantic crying monster baby which forms an exterior stomach attached by umbilical cord in which it captures and tries to digest its victims, a centipede-esque "dragon" and a shapeless demon that is all mouth that later resolves itself into what resembles a huge two-headed Komodo dragon.

The fist demon we see—Kuro is actually introduced cutting his way free from inside his body with a sword—looks like some sort of toothy, bug-eyed kaiju. 

And then there are these weird little fellows, which look like something that might walk by in a Studio Ghibli film: 

Fuyu, who you can see drools a bit when she notices them passing by above, immediately proceeds to club one to death with her ladle and make them into a stew:

Looks pretty terrible to me! I mean, those guys are clearly fuzzy, right? And she doesn't seem to skin them at all, so I guess eating the "meat" of the stew would mean eating a mouthful of hair, right...? I think I might prefer some of the dishes I've seen in Delicious in Dungeon...

After each chapter, the manga names the various demons that have appeared, and ranks their danger, rarity and intellect with stars. These guys, officially labeled "Low-Level Demon", are one-star all across the board, and their write-up says, "They are found everywhere" and that they are "Nicknamed 'Ingredient-kun' by Fuyu."

That scene is probably the funniest bit, but there is a decent amount of humor throughout, helping level the action and adventure that dominates, and the elements of horror present in the story. 

Review: You and I Are Polar Opposites Vol. 1

They say opposites attract, and that would certainly seem to be the case with Suzuki and Tani who, despite being classmates, could not be more different from one another. 

The pink-haired Suzuki is loud, outgoing and popular, always at the center of a whirl of conversations and social activities. The bespectacled Tani is quiet, stoic and gracelessly direct on the occasions when he does speak to a classmate. (At one point, a classmate contemplating the pair imagines a sort of pyramid chart showing the various levels of popularity within the school hierarchy, and Tani is not even in the chart, but standing off to the side of it and labeled "Out of bounds".)

Nevertheless, Suzuki has a crush on Tani, partially because she thinks he's cute, and partially because she's attracted to the fact that he is always so true to himself and that he doesn't go out of his way to try to please others like she herself does. 

At school, her interest mostly manifests in her trying to include him in the conversation, even when it is something he clearly has no interest in (Like, for example, the best kind of eye makeup). 

Now, I am used to manga romances going on for hundreds and hundreds of pages before any form of consummation, with the characters dithering and fretting for multiple volumes before one or the other comes out and confesses their feelings. 

It was therefore a little surprising that by page 13, the pair are holding hands on a walk home and by page 33 Suzuki has chased Tani down and screamed "I like you!!!" at him. By the time that the first chapter ends, then, the pair are a couple already.

The premise of this particular high school romantic comedy isn't the usual will they/won't they then, but rather if and how two such incredibly different people can make a relationship work.

Throughout the rest of the first volume they walk home again together as a couple, they go on their first date (burgers, shopping and a movie), Suzuki's friends try to make sense of the relationship and the pair work on communicating their feelings for one another more effectively. 

It's all quite fun and cute, if I can use that word (There's a chapter entitled "Cute", in which Tani struggles to figure out exactly what Suzuki means when she uses the word, as she uses it quite often and in a variety of contexts).

The opposite nature of the characters reflected in manga-ka Kocha Agasawa's portrayals of them as well, as any drama involving Tani mostly plays out in narration boxes in his own head, while Suzuki abstracts into cartoonier renderings when her emotions are high, the Usagi-like buns/"meatballs" of her hair sometimes pop off her head when she's surprised and, in one memorable scenes, she glows and sparkles with unstoppable-ity—like Mario after he picks up the star—after a successful first date. 

The manga seems to have run eight volumes, the last of which was released earlier this year, and there's an anime adaptation as well. 

Bookshelf #43

This week's bookshelf is another mostly manga one, thanks in large part to the size of the shelf, and how easily the standard tankobon-style manga volume slip into it. 

At a glance, you will notice that Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma 1/2 accounts for the majority of the shelf. Ranma was the very first manga I ever bought and read (this would have been somewhere in the mid-to-late '90s, before I graduated college), and you can see that I had started reading it before Viz had standardized the design for the series. 

I kind of like the older design, where each volume was a different color. I just checked, and not only are the older ones printed right to left, but so too are volumes 22 to 31. The series actually ran 38 volumes, which means I stopped buying new ones seven volumes before the series ended with, what I assume, is the marriage of Ranma and Akane. 

I'm not entirely sure why I never finished it, but I've done something similar with television shows I like...it means that it's still out there to be consumed and enjoyed at a later date. Of course, it has now been so long since I've read Ranma that I fear I would have to start over and re-read everything before I get to those last seven volumes, even tough, from what I recall, the story is pretty simple and repetitive, as Ranma and Akane fight various rivals who have a crush on one of them or the other, many of whom transform when they get wet. 

I am curious how Ranma holds up in 2026, given that it is about a boy that turns into a girl on occasion. I'd definitely be curious to read a trans writer's take on it. (Perhaps less interestingly, it also revolves around an arranged marriage, so I wonder if that element marks it as old-fashioned today or not). I know that there was rather recently a new anime released, so chances are there is a whole new generation of Ranma discourse out there and I just haven't gone looking for it yet...

Just to the left of all the Ranma volumes are a couple of other Takahashi books: The first chunk of Urusei Yatsura (which I've attempted a few times but never made it all the way through), a volume titled The Return of Lum Urusei Yatsura  which I haven't yet read either and the final volume of Maison Ikkoku (I read that series via volumes borrowed from the Columbus Metropolitan Library up until the last volume, which I bought from The Laughing Ogre. I remember liking that series an awful lot, but it has now been so long since I've read it that I would have to re-read it to have a decent conversation about it). 

After Takahashi's work, we get to the comics adaptation of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, of which I have eight volumes. This is based on the same novel that Ang Lee's beautiful 2000 film was...and probably owes its existence, or at least its translation and importation into the U.S., to the popularity of the film. It launched in 2002 and was published by ComicsOne Corp. 

The design and packaging are great, and the book is filled with gorgeous full color art. Another interesting book to revisit, I imagine. I wonder if I got the whole series or not, though; a note at the end of the eighth volume says they are working on volume 9, so I would guess not...

What else does this shelf hold...?

•Kuro Gane Vols. 1-2 In feudal Japan, a young samurai on a mission of vengeance is killed...but a "master inventor" rebuilds him with a new steel body and gives him a talking sword, allowing him to carrry on. 

•Minima Vol. 1 Schoolgirl Ame's favorite toy comes to life. This volume ends with an incredible cliffhanger, I see just by flipping through, so much so that I'm kind of surprised I didn't get the next volume just to see how it is resolved.

•Gacha Gacha Vols. 1-3 Protagonist Kouhei has a crush on his lifelong best friend...who has been acting weird lately. Why? Because she apparently has multiple personalities, and Kouhei is bewildered by the changes from one to the other. Probably not politically correct, huh? There's a lot of fan service in this one, which is rated "OT" for "Older Teen", 16 and up...

•Blank Vol. 1 This is one of Tokyopop's "amerimanga", I believe, which introduced me (and, I imagine, the comics industry) to a lot of talented creators, at least one of whom is among my favorite artists working today. This one is a secret agent action comedy by Pop Mhan, who is one of those artists who moved on from Tokyopop to draw all kinds of super-comics for various publishers and with various writers. My personal favorite of his comics was probably Spyboy with Peter David; he also drew some Batgirl, but from near the end of the original series, when it had gotten pretty badly written...

•Et Cetera Vols. 1-3 I liked this one quite a lot. Another manga Western (like Gun Blaze West, covered last week), it stars cute, pig-tailed Minchao who possesses a really cool and very weird gun, which has a big spherical chamber. It's called "the Eto Gun" and it is, according to the back cover, "a mysterious weapon that uses the spirits of the Zodiac animals to fire unstoppable bullets." So, in the first volume, for example, she shoots a guy in the face with a smiling cartoon rabbit.

•Fruits Basket Vols. 1-2 This one is obviously a very popular manga, but, having given Natsuki Takaya two volumes, I just couldn't really get into it. It's about an orphaned girl who meets a family possessed by the spirits of the (Chinese) zodiac. 

•East Coast Rising. Another Tokyopop book from a familiar name, this is a pirate comic by Becky Cloonan. You all know Becky Cloonan at this point, right?

•Fairy Tale Vol. 1 The art in this is great, and the character designs are strong, but it didn't hook me. It obviously went on to become quite popular though. (Flipping through it again as I write this post, I am reminded that I found that weird little snowman-like character somewhat off-putting. I kind of want to re-read this now if only to see what that guy's all about, and how he might compare and contrast with Frozen's Olaf...)

•DearS Vol. 1 This is the black spine you see. It was apparently an advance copy sent out for review. There's a girl with very long hair and big boobs and, um, that's all I remember about it. Even flipping through it isn't managing to jog my memory at all, and, because it's not the final version of the book, there's no back cover copy. It is the work of "Peach-Pit", which is the name shared by two female manga artists, although when I hear the word, all I can think of is Jason Priestly behind the counter on 90210.

•Magic Knight Rayearth Vol. 1 Another CLAMP book, this one is an epic fantasy featuring magical girl-like heroes with swords and amazing powers. I know I read more of this than I see on my shelves, so I assume I did so via the library. 

•No Need For Tenchi: Unreal Genius Cartoon Network's Adult Swim programming block introduced me to Tenchi around 2000 or 2001, and I have to assume I found this at Half Price Books, on sale at a convention or on the shelf of a particular Columbus comic shop near campus that I am blanking on the name of, given that it's from 1996. There's a "5" on the cover and spine, but I remember reading it and not having any problem doing so; maybe because, at the time, I was well-versed in the characters and universe from the cartoon...? 

•The Japanese Drawing Room: Victorian Travellers in Japan This slim non-fiction graphic "novel" is by Sakura Mizuki, Shaun Garner and Sean Michael Wilson was published by The Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum in 2006. The credits page says it is "based on the journal Westward from the Golden Gate by Annie Russell-Cotes. I am assuming it got to me because someone wanted me to write about it.