Review: Draw This, Then Die! Vol. 1

One aspect of Japanese comics I've always appreciated is that so many of them are hyper-focused on particular niche subjects, their creators approaching those subjects with the same sense of import and drama that is afforded to what we Americans would probably consider more "standard" subjects, like epic fantasies, sci-fi sagas, horror and so on. 

Now, my own personal niche interest, like yours, is comics, and, of course, Japan will occasionally produce a comic about comics, or a manga about manga. I've been enjoying the ongoing Now That We Draw, a romantic comedy about two aspiring manga creators, for example, and now here's another manga that is about manga: Minoru Toyoda's Draw This, Then Die!

While Now That We Draw has a romance at its core, Draw This is what Toyoda calls "a high school club story" in the short afterword comic near the back of the first volume. That club is a manga club, and the focus on the book is, once it gets going, more directly on manga and its production. If you read comics, and perhaps especially if you make or have ever tried to make comic, there's a lot to like here. I mean, when I first flipped through it, having picked up because of the intriguing title, I landed on a full-page splash of a character with a clenched fist, sweaty brow and wild hair before a background of speed lines, screaming "YOU REALLY THINK MAKING MANGA IS THAT SIMPLE?! YOU FOOLS!! YOU HAVE NO IDEA!!"

Our main protagonist, and the girl on the cover, is Yasumi Ai, a high school girl who is constantly reading and re-reading her favorite manga that she has borrowed from a lending library in her small community on Izu Oshima. The manga is Robota & Pokota, and, as the woman who runs Teramura Rent-A-Book helpfully exposits, it is "a one-volume high school comedy about the logic-based android Robota and his emotion-based counterpart Pokota working together to learn what it means to be human." 

How important is the manga to Yasumi? Well, the character Pokota, a robot tanuki with a beret and a monitor on his stomach that will sometimes generate a digitized heart symbol, has become a sort of imaginary friend to her, always floating over her shoulder and giving her advice. 

Like, for example, when Yasumi sees a fellow schoolgirl drop a painting that begins rolling down the stairs right past her, Pokota turns to her and says, "Okay, Yasumi...what would a manga protagonist do at a time like this?"

Before school one morning, Yasumi runs into her teacher Teshima-sensei, a stern-looking woman in black business clothes and glasses, her hair tied back tightly. Teshima scolds her that she is going to be late for school and, later, gives her a full-page lecture on how bad manga is, beginning with "It's a waste of time, plain and simple." 

"It's just a meaningless slew of pulpy nonsense, full of cheap, momentary thrills," Teshima continues, "Manga will never get you anywhere in life."

While she listens patiently and respectfully, Yasumi does show her Robota & Pokota, and explains how it has helped her in her life:

When I was a kid, I had a lot of trouble making friends, so I spent all my time reading manga.

But after reading this one, it was like I could suddenly hear Pokota's voice in my own head, cheering me on.

And once I started following his advice, I was able to make real friends for the very first time.

So, you can't say manga's not good for anything. 

Things really get interesting when Yasumi learns that Hoshino Rei, the manga-ka responsible for Robota & Pokota, will be releasing a new volume at Comita, a big (and real life) convention of sorts for independent manga artists.

Without even telling her parents, who would forbid it anyway, Yasumi essentially runs away to Comita in Tokyo, where she experiences a big epiphany, which the artist renders in a a two-page spread of Yasumi and Pokota floating above the conventon floor, bathed in sunbeams and emitting sparkles:

Oh my gosh...

You can just...

Draw your own manga!

I get it now!

She is then confused that, when she gets to the front of the line for Hoshino Rei's table and is finally able to buy her own copy of the new manga, she sees her teacher Teshima sitting across the table.

"One moment, please," her teacher calmy says, then dons a mask over the lower half of her face, takes off her glasses, replaces them with opaque sunglasses, and now disguised, tells her student, "Sorry, you've got the wrong person."

But no, it turns out that Yasumi's favorite manga-ka Hoshino Rei and her manga-hating teacher Teshima are actually—and secretly—one and the same!

In short order, Yasumi and two friends at school, including the talented artist whose painting Yasumi had rescued in the earliest pages, form a manga club and, after proving their dedication, Teshima agrees to be their faculty advisor...seemingly in part because one of Yasumi's friends implies that they will blackmail her if they don't, now that they know her secret dual identity.

Teshima has a few odd conditions she makes the girls promise to, though:

One. Your academics must always be your first priority.

Two. You will not aspire to be professional creators.

Three. You will only ever make manga as a hobby...

And never, ever let it consume you to the point that you draw yourselves to death.

And so, the club begins meeting in the backroom of the rent-a-book shop (it turns out the owner and Teshima are actually close friends), and the girls soon fall into a division of labor: Yasumi writes the manga (she's working on a fantasy story about a pair of anthropomorphic cats on an adventures), the girl from the art club handles drawing it, and the third friend mostly just lays around reading the shop's manga, but offers her unvarnished opinion of the others' efforts, acting as something of a disengaged editor and surrogate audience member. 

Teshima-sensei regularly checks in with criticism and suggestions. (It is she, of course, who was in the "You fools!!" page, fantasizing about what she would like to have screamed at the girls, when they stumbled upon Osama Tezuka's "inductive" approach to storytelling —that is, starting with the ending first and working towards it—and Yasumi celebrates, "Dang, I guess we're all set now, then! We've found the secret to making good manga!")

By this point, of course, the manga has moved from talking about manga in a vague sense to more specifics, and it's fun to see the girls' youthful enthusiasm and their running into creative walls, and Teshima's bifurcated approach to them, acting at once as a mentor while warning them against the perils of making comics. In this, she keeps her stern face, and is limited in her praise and encouragement, while her inner thoughts, which we get to see, often differ greatly from what she says out loud.

So, um, what's with that title...? Is it a reference to Teshima's warning that the girls never draw themselves to death...?

Not...quite.

After the main story and the four-page afterword, Toyoda presents a 32-page story entitled "Lost World." This stars the young Teshima, and is essentially her "secret origin," explaining how she broke into manga. It...was not easy. 

Like Yasumi, Teshima was highly imaginative, and seemed to live her life partly in fantasy, although her fantasies ran toward the violent. For example, after her editor kindly declines her first manga, Teshima imagines detonating the building she has just walked out of in a cool, cinematic scene in which she walks toward the reader, heedless of the explosion behind her (At other points, she will imagine shooting the editor and putting a grenade in her mouth!). She will also frequently compare herself to characters in manga she has read, not entirely unlike Yasumi does.

Throughout this story, Teshima likens the creative process to something she read in Stephen King's autobiography On Writing: A Memoir of Craft, how "stories are 'found things,' like fossils buried deep within the ground." Toyoda illustrates Teshima's search for fossils with little cartoon Teshimas in miner's helmets using pick axes to dig white tunnels underground, not unlike those dug in Dig Dug, dinosaur bones often just outside of the tunnels.

As she struggles to make the right manga, one that an editor will accept and can then see publication, she tries genre after genre. She seems to hit rock bottom when she overhears her parents, who have always been encouraging of her ambitions, talking about how they don't think she will ever make it.

And then, during her first Comita, for which she printed 1,000 copies of her latest manga but only sold one, she meets her own personal manga-ka heroine. She agrees to look at her manga, and responds quite unexpectedly:

Oh, I see what the problem is...♥

You're just not psycho enough.♥

Is making manga—and comics in general—the provenance of psychos...?

Toyoda doesn't seem to suggest that it's not.

Deciding that she would rather just die than make manga, Teshima tells herself, "Well, if I'm gonna die anyway, I might as well try one more time... draw one last manga with all the spite and malice I can muster..."

While that sounds like it might lead to a rather dark or cynical work, that's not how she sees it, and she comes up with this statement of purpose, which, you'll notice, ends with the words, "Draw This, Then Die!!!"

Then she snaps into a sort of crazed, fugue state, screaming in her head at the page and her characters, as Toyoda draws her furiously drawing, rendering her with thick, black, shaky lines. "I'll kill you all!!!" she screams insider her head. "I don't care if it kills me too!! I'll draw myself to death if I have to!!...Laugh, damn you!! Fall head over heels!!...I'll make you, and  you, and everyone else...live happily ever after!! Ah ha ha ha ha ha!"

And, um, that's where her charming high school comedy Robota & Pokota came from. 

So how did Teshima go from her success with that manga to becoming a teacher who seems to be actively crusading against manga? That's one of the mysterious of Draw This, Then Die!, what exactly happens between the events of "Lost World" and the start of the manga. 

After the back-up, I became far more fascinated with her character than Yasumi, although I suppose as things progress, Teshima will eventually have to share more with her pupils, and perhaps tell them the secret of making good manga (That is, going psycho) or continue to try to shield them from achieving a dream with such an apparently high personal cost...? 

I don't know, but I had a blast reading the book, and found myself laughing out loud repeatedly during "Lost World."

I can't wait for the second volume, which is due November 3. 

Review: Blue Box Vol. 1

I recently saw an ad for this series in the back of another Viz book, which referred to the protagonists as "sports-crossed lovers", and that was enough of a hook to grab me. He's a high school badminton player, and she's on the basketball team: Can they make it work? Sure, I'll check that out to see for myself!

The male lead is junior high student Taiki Inomata. That's him on the right, with the badminton racket over his shoulder. He's quite devoted to the sport, and works super-hard at it, going to the school gym early every morning to practice.

Someone else is also always there early, practicing hard at her sport: Chinatsu Kano, a first year in high school who is already a basketball star...and extremely popular with the boys at their sport-centric school (That's her on the left, obviously).

Taiki is smitten with her, and after a kinda sorta first page meet-cute, wherein she accidentally throws a basketball into his face and then, to make it up to him, gives him a candy bar, Taiki tells his friend and teammate "I'd sure love to marry her". He then spends a panel imagining what it might be like to be an adult living under the same roof as Chinatsu.

He'll get his wish before the first volume is over...well, sort of.

We learn early on that both Taiki and Chinatsu's mothers played on the same basketball team when they were younger. Taiki is briefly distraught when he learns that Chinatsu's family is moving overseas, and he thinks he will never see his crush again. And then he is relieved when he finds that while her family is moving, she will be staying to attend school and play on the basketball team...she'll just be staying with a family friend. And then he is shocked when he wakes up one morning to find Chinatsu in his kitchen; apparently his own mother is the family friend Chinatsu will be staying with, and now Taiki and Chinatsu actually are living under the same roof...! (As to why Taiki's parents didn't mention this fact to him beforehand, I guess because it was more dramatic if they didn't...?)

The guy-living-at-close-quarters-with-his-crush seemed a bit of a cliche to me, and I found that a lot less interesting than the pair's budding friendship (and maybe, eventually, more...?), and the fact that what seems to attract each to the other isn't their looks or anything else so much as their dedication to their respective sports, the lens through which Taiki seems to see the world (When first talking to his friend about his crush, for example, they use sports metaphors to discuss the possibility of a relationship with her; "Set your sights on advancing to the quarter-finals," his friend Kyo advises him, "Like, get her to know your name. Or ask for her number.").

Eventually, he sets his sites on getting to nationals in badminton, and extreme longsho. This, of course, means training super-hard, even harder than before...which seems to endear him to Chinatsu further.

The pair isn't on a glide path to being happy couple, though. There are, of course, complications. 

One is Hina Chono, Taiki's teasing classmate and a rhythmic gymnastics prodigy who might have a crush on him...at least, it sure seems like it to some of their classmates. 

And then there is Haryu, who is Chinatsu's classmate and friend (and who calls her by the nickname "Chii," while Taiki calls her "Chinatsu Senpai") and who is also on the badminton team. In fact, if Taiki really wants to make it to nationals, he's going to have to beat Haryu, making the upperclassman a potential rival in more ways than one.

So even at this early point, we have potential romantic rivals in the cast, and the makings of various love triangles. What Haryu and Hina have in common with the leads are that they too are completely devoted to their sports too, making them admirable and attractive, and giving them things in common with the leads as well. 

Now, as little as I knew about high school boys' volleyball before reading Haikyu!! (which I loved) or soccer before trying Blue Lock (which I decided wasn't for me), I know still less about badminton, and found it a weird sport to feature in a high school sports romantic comedy comic (Is badminton big in Japan, perhaps?). Odd, and a little funny, if I'm being honest.

Still, manga-ka Kouji Miura tries to make it look cool and action-packed. This isn't a sports manga in the way that Haikyu!! is—sports occur within, but the playing and outcomes of the matches aren't the focus—and so when Taiki and Haryu play badminton against one another, we don't see how each point is scored, but just a few moments of the match as it's played. 

But what we do see looks pretty cool, the lines that compose the characters' arms and rackets blur to show their movement, the backgrounds occasionally become speedlines, and Miura draws the "path" the shuttlecock takes from racket to floor with the same kind of focused, laser beam-like line that Haruichi Furudate would draw the volleyball during spikes.

Near the end of the volume, Miura draws this double-page splash during the Taiki vs. Haryu match, the volume's most obvious attempt to make the playing of badminton seem cool and maybe even a little badass:

I admit that I found it a bit funnier than I did dramatic.

There are a few scenes of the girls and their sports too, but only very short sequences in this volume.

Perhaps I will come to understand and appreciate badminton in future volumes, as I came to understand and appreciate volleyball before. So far, we see one key different between it and basketball; badminton is basically a solo sport when it comes to competition, whereas basketball is a team sport, and Taiki mentions that what he likes about badminton is it's all on him to succeed or fail (My high school sports were cross country and track, which are both technically team sports, but which your performance is down to you as an individual, rather than a team, for the most part).

It's all pretty well-executed and does what a first volume should: It makes me want to read the next one (I've actually already ordered volumes 2 and 3 from the library!). The romance/sports hybrid nature of it turned out to be just as appealing as it seemed.

Now, why do you think it's called Blue Box...? Is that some badminton or sports reference I don't get...?

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. 

On Punch! Vol. 1

Viz Media released the first book in this three-volume series way back in 2006. Why am I just now picking it up? Well, last weekend, when flipping through some of the old manga on my bookshelf, I saw an ad for Rie Takada Punch! in the back of one, and it looked intriguing enough to give it a try. 

A shojo series from the creator of Happy Hustle High, Punch! stars 15-year-old Elle Nagahara, whose love life is impossible.

It's not just that she hails from a family of martial artists. Dad was a boxing champion, Mom was a wrestling champion, and her grandfather, who she affectionately refers to as Gigi, was the first Japanese world champion of Muay Thai kickboxing, and he now runs a gym where he trains young fighters.

No, it's that her grandfather and his one-time rival and best friend long ago promised each other that their grandchildren would marry, which means Elle is kinda sorta promised to 17-year-old professional fighter Ruo. He's quite dreamy, as evidenced by the fact that Elle's best friend and much of the female student body seem to have crushes on him, but, since they grew up together, Elle can't help but think of him as anything other than an older brother.

That's not how he feels, though, and so whenever Elle finds a boy she likes, Ruo's friends from the gym threaten the guy in question, tell them Elle is spoken for and scare him away. As the first volume opens, Elle is reading a letter from her latest totally-normal, not-at-all-involved-in-fighting crush, the handsome but book-ish Yuichi, who has apparently just had a visit from the boys from the gym: "Please leave me alone," it reads. "I'm begging you!"

Still, she's determined not to marry Ruo, and find romance with a normal guy. Or, as she puts it, "I will escape this martial arts hell!!"

That's not quite what happens though. 

A chance meeting at a store with a boy leads to an unlikely fight scene. She sees him hustled into the restroom by a trio of thugs, and when she goes to get the manager to help him, she finds that the boy has beaten up all his attackers, despite the three-on-one odds. One of the guys on the ground then recognizes the boy: "You're... Shindo! Kazuki Shindo from Seisho High..."

Later, when Elle ties to tell Ruo that she doesn't want to marry him, he assumes that she has another crush again, and, under pressure, she blurts out Kazuki's name. At least in this case, when Ruo's friends go to threaten him to back off, Kazuki isn't scared away...in fact, even though he doesn't even know who Elle is at that point, he fights back.

Kazuki then gradually gets pulled closer and closer into Elle's orbit. When he shows up at the gym to fight Ruo, Gigi intervenes, offering to train Kazuki and making the boys promise not to fight one another outside of the ring (Why is Gigi interested? Well, in part, he thinks Ruo needs a true rival to improve his skills and sees the potential in Kazuki to become that rival). 

In fact, by the end of the book, not only are Kazuki and Elle pretending to be a couple (largely in attempt to help break off her engagement, although they obviously and predictably do find themselves falling for one another, too), but Kazuki has transferred to Elle and Ruo's school...and is now living with Elle...!

The art, storytelling and character designs are all typical of shojo, with all of the boys being drawn very tall (sometimes even unnaturally so, as they look overly elongated) and with pretty features, particularly the long, light-haired Ruo and dark-haired Kazuki, who is apparently so pretty that he wears a hoodie all the time to disguise his face...! (That's Kazuki on the cover above, by the way.)

Elle is, by contrast, quite short and round-faced...but not nearly as short and round as Gigi, who Takada gives the stature of a Sanrio character, seemingly half the size of Elle and seems to always be drawn in chibi style (He reminded me quite a bit of Happosai from Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma 1/2). Somewhat oddly, near the end of the book, when there's a fairly dramatic scene, he reverts to a normal size and style and is only recognizable as the same guy by his bald head and eyepatch.

The book seems to pile cliches on top of one another pretty quickly, but, as they say, cliches are cliches for a reason, and the characters and book itself seems self-aware regarding aspects of the melodrama. It also seems a little more heavily American-ized than I think we might expect from a more recent manga. For example, Elle is said to be a freshman rather than a first-year, and there's at least one exchange where it seems the translator was trying to convert something pertaining to Japanese names into something that makes sense in English.

The first volume of Punch! was, nevertheless, mostly rather light and breezy (Save for a scene in a hotel where Ruo seems intent on forcing himself on Elle, despite her protestations, until she accidentally hurts herself fighting him off and he belatedly comes to his senses). Given how short the series is, I plan to read the rest of it.

Bookshelf #42

The end is in sight. This week, we start with the top shelf of my very last set of bookshelves in this tour of my personal comics library. This particular set of bookshelves is the very oldest, one so old that I can't remember where it came from, but I have been putting books on it since at least junior high (Although the books have mostly changed, as, back in junior high, I didn't actually have any graphic novels or trade paperback collections of comics yet...and they weren't exactly common at the time).

This top shelf is mostly devoted to manga, as its small size is only able to accommodate the small digest/tankobon style collections manga usually comes in. Most of these are old enough that I don't remember them terribly clearly and have had to pull them off the shelf to jog my memory. As there aren't actually too many, I'll just name them all, left to right. 

•Spy Vs. Spy First, we have the only non-manga books on this shelf, which I stuck there because they were published in that format and thus fit pretty perfectly. These are a trio of 2009 collections of Antonio Prohias' Spy Vs. Spy cartoons, published by a Watson-Guptill Publications. I'm a fan. These strips were always my favorite part of Mad magazines when I was a little kid (and thus in the prime Mad demographic). In addition to being weird, clever and violent, they also didn't require the amount of reading or pop culture fluency that other Mad features did. It was a great pleasure to be able to read scores of the strips back-to-back-to-back-to-back (etc.) like this. 

•Kill Me, Kiss Me Lee Young Yuu's manhwa series is a romantic comedy in which a pair of opposite sex identical cousins (is that a thing?) decide to swap identities and schools, so that the female cousin poses as a boy in order to get close to her crush, and the male cousin poses as a girl in order to be around a bunch of girls. Amusing complications abound. It looks like this actually ran five volumes; I'm not sure why I didn't get the fifth, as I remember really enjoying this series. Do note how faded the Tokyopop logo at the top of the spines are. There's significant sun damage to a few random volumes on this shelf, presumably because the sunlight filters through the blinds in the otherwise always dark room to hit certain books just so.

•Gun Blaze West Even all these years later, this still seems like something of a rarity to me: A manga western. This was from Shonen Jump and was the work of Rurouni Kenshin creator Nobuhiro Watsuki. Not sure why I only have one volume. Flipping through it now, the character designs look appealing. I guess this volume just didn't hook me.

•Iron Wok Jan The title chaacter is a chef who thinks of cooking as a battle, and manga-ka Shinji Saijyo fills the book with over-the-top imagery of Jan's intense cooking, in which he often looks like a maniac. As with Kill Me, Kiss Me, I apparently have all the volumes save for the very last one.

•Sgt. Frog Mine Yoshizaki's manga takes up the most space on this shelf...and is probably the best known (well, given what is right next to it, maybe second best known) of any of the manga on the shelf. It follows a hapless little alien invader who looks just like a humanoid frog; he was meant to conquer Earth but he ends up being defeated and semi-captured by the kids in a human family, who then force him to do chores instead. Though he occasionally bridles at his fate, he seems genuinely happy, as he would prefer to build Gundam models and laze around the house than engage in the hard work of world-conquering. Gradually, others from his home world arrive to help him...each of these is a different color and has a very different personality, but, even altogether, they are generally useless when it comes to conquering Earth. There was an anime. It looks like it ran 21 volumes; I seem to have read the first 13 and, at some later point, bought volumes 16 and 19 somewhere, assuming I would eventually catch up. I never did.

•Kingdom Hearts I have four volumes of Kingdom Hearts and one volume of a Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memory, all by Shiro Amano. I am not a video game player, but the concept of this game series—Mickey, Donald, Goofy and some anime-looking human kid journey into the settings of various Disney movies—intrigued me. I knew I wasn't going to ever play the games, but I could read the comics. I don't recall liking them very much, as the original elements of the story were kind of dull and melodramatic. Semi-related is the very slim, sun-damaged volume to the right of Chain of Memories. This is Disney's Kilala Princess, and it's about a schoolgirl who goes on an adventure in which she meets various Disney Princesses (The copyright is 2000, and the "newest" princess featured seems to be Jasmine from Aladdin).

•Sokora Refugees The work of a writer named "Segamu" and artist Melissa DeJesus, this was an "amerimanga" about a schoolgirl from the real world being transported to a fantasy setting for an adventure. There's lots of "fan service" in the art. I remember liking it at the time, but I can't recall much about the plot beyond that at this point. There are only two volumes of it, and I think it was left unfinished, rather than completed in that time. Apparently, there was some controversies involving it, The writer seems to be pseudonymous (according to Wikipedia, anyway) and, like former Marvel Editor-in-Chief C. B. Cebuslkis writing under the penname Akira Yoshida, was a white guy, or, at the least, a guy with a Western-sounding name who seemingly posing as a person of Asian descent. There also seems like there might have been something hinky with the sales data regarding the book as well. 

•Legends From Darkwood Another "amerimanga" in the fantasy genre. I remember liking it at the time too, but don't remember anything about it now. 

•Marmalade Boy Wataru Yoshizumi's manga features really great shojo-style art. The story is about a girl dealing with a new and unusual family arrangement...including a cute jerk of a new stepbrother. I obviously didn't stick with this one, which I guess ran eight volumes.

•xxxHOLiC/Tsubasa Next, we have a pair of CLAMP books from what I believe was the then-new publisher Kodansha. xxxHOLiC, as it's stylized on the back cover, is about a young man who takes a job working for a witch in a magic shop, while Tsubasa is sweeping fantasy series featuring magic and a spirit wolf made of fire. I recall being quite impressed with Kodansha's presentation and design, and both series were fine, but I didn't make it too far with either. A result, I suspect, of there just being too damn many comics to read. 

•Red River I was quite fond of Chie Shinohara's shojo series about a modern Japanese young woman who is magically transported back to the ancient Middle East. I fell behind before Viz had even published the first half-dozen (Why don't I have volume 5...? I do not know). I had always planned on catching back up, something I thought about doing again when I saw 3-in-1volumes being published much more recently. Not that I ever did, of course; it ended up running for 28 volumes. This is a good example of the sun damage random books suffered; note how faded the first two volumes are versus the later one.

•Duck Prince Ai Morinaga's manga from CPM has a fun premise, inspired by the story of the ugly duckling, from which it takes its name. Reiichi is, according to the back cover copy, "short, fat and ugly." When he is struck by a car, he wishes to come back beautiful in his next life...and gets his wish. His face was so badly damaged in the accident, that got massive facial reconstruction surgery that, at his family's demands, made him beautiful, rather than restoring his old looks. He also hit a growth spurt while in a coma and is now tall and slim. Even the texture of his hair has somehow changed...! I obviously didn't follow this, but it certainly seems to have potential. 

•Beauty Pop So, I have volume two of Kiyoko Arai's Beauty Pop, but not volume one. Why? Who can say. The copyright is 2006, which is pretty far back, in terms of my memory for comics I may or may not have even read once. I assume I did not read this one, though. It's about high school makeover artists. I suppose I should probably sell it the next time I visit a used bookstore...

•Faeries' Landing Young Hyun's series is a kinda sorta fantasy harem comedy, in which the young, male protagonist becomes the guardian of a magical faerie...and learns he is destined for 108 doomed romances. I liked it enough to read the fist three volumes.

•By The Sword This looks like a story set in feudal Japan? Despite the cover, which makes a scantily clad young woman with a sword the selling point, I didn't notice any such fan service within it's pages just now. Honestly, at this point, your guess is as good as mine regarding this book. 

•Tokyo Mew Mew This is about an 11-year-old girl whose DNA is merged with that of an endangered wildcat...and four other girls whose DNA is merged with four other endangered animals. Why was their DNA manipulated? Well, it's part of an experiment to engineer superheroes of sorts to defend the world from alien invaders. It's vaguely Sailor Moon-ish, but wasn't my cup of tea. 

•Instant Teen Like Duck Prince, this has an interesting but probably problematic premise. Here the star is "a homely fifth grader" who eats a mysterious package of pink nuts and is transformed into a beautiful woman! There's an element of 13 Going On 30 to it—and some of the attendant ickiness that comes with a story imagining a little girl's mind in the body of a grown woman—at least in terms of the basic concept, if not the execution. 

•Dramacon This was, if I recall correctly, the print debut of web-comic creator Svetlana Chmakova, and I had bought it explicitly because I had heard such rave reviews about it online. It's about an amateur writer attending her first anime convention with her artist boyfriend...and then meeting "a mysterious cosplayer." Drama, as promised, ensues. This is copyright 2005; 21 years later, Chmakova has established a solid body of work to her name, including a series of books set at a fictional middle school with one-word titles, like Awkward, Crush, Brave and so on.

On My Deer Friend Nokotan

Seven Seas Entertainment debuted the first collected volume of manga-ka Oshioshio's My Deer Friend Nokotan in 2020. Despite the series running for eight volumes and leading to an anime adaptation, I had not heard of it until comics critic Tegan O'Neil mentioned it in passing, somewhere around the time O'Neil had written about Maid to Skate. 

The book's appeal is fairly evident from its cover and pun title: It's a comic about a high school girl who might also be a deer. 

That premise is, of course, an insane one, but, given that this is a highly silly, slightly surreal comedy, that insanity is more of a virtue than it is a detriment.

Our point of view character is Koshi Torako, a seemingly perfect, model student. Her image as such has been carefully curated and diligently maintained, as she seeks to distance herself from her unsavory past. She used to be a delinquent, you see.

Her facade of perfection is challenged one day on her walk to school, where she happens to pass the title character, who has somehow found herself hanging by her antlers from utility wires, snot dripping from her nose, birds pestering her and dogs and cats barking and hissing at her.

After the two girls make eye contact, Koshi tries to walk away—"Should I get involved?...I don't have time for this! As a model student, being late is unacceptable!!"—but the girl with the antlers guilts her into helping her down. 

Once Koshi does so, Nokotan says, "Thanks a lot for getting me down, gangster girl!"

Does this weird deer girl know Koshi's closely guarded secret? How could she?

Well, apparently deer can sense juvenile delinquency...? As Nokotan says that Koshi smells like a gangster and says that even her antlers are tinging; indeed, they light up in Koshi's presence, as if they are some kind of former juvenile delinquent detector. 

In the next scene, her antlers light up again, this time detecting Koshi's virginity...and this in school, in front of others in their class. For, you see, Nokotan has just transferred into Koshi's school, and, in order to keep Nokotan from inadvertently revealing her past to the rest of the school, Koshi finds herself reluctantly befriending her.

And thus begins a lot of weirdness. 

The next morning, Koshi's desk is buried under a pile of deer crackers, like those sold at the park in Nara to feed the deer, Nokotan's way of thanking her for helping her down from the wires the other day (That's a deer cracker in Nokotan's hand on the cover, by the way). 

When Koshi refuses the crackers, Nokotan next plucks off one of her (detachable?) antlers and hands it to her. Pages later, she uses her antlers as if they were handles to take the top half of her head off. They can also be used as grenades or open up like a little suitcase in which Nokotan might carry a banana.

As Koshi seeks to unravel the mystery of Nokotan, she surveils her, following her to her after school job, where she works in the deer enclosure at the zoo...

...approaches passersby to buy deer crackers to feed the deer (including she herself) and then leads a deer parade.  

Inextricably drawn into Nokatan's madness, poor Koshi eventually finds herself as one of only two members of the school's new Deer Club, which is a club devoted to taking care of deer. Nokotan will play the part of the deer, and Koshi, as the president, will take care of her.

And then we get to a cliffhanger ending, in which a mysterious dark-haired girl seems to be...hunting Nokatan...?

It's all very weird, made more so by the fact that not only does Oshioshio present Nokotan as something of a deer/girl hybrid, but is often extremely random in her depiction of the character, as seen in the suspicious deer facts that are often bandied about and the ever-changing, cartoon character nature of her antlers.

On top of this, no one seems to be quite as shocked by Nokotan's deer-ishness, certainly not to the degree that Koshi is, leading to lots of gags revolving around her reactions of extreme incredulity and exasperation (You can see her reaction to seeing Nokotan at "work" above, for example).

Based on what I've seen on YouTube, it seems Deer Club grows, and I would be lying if I said I wasn't curious to see what sorts of girls would want to join a club like this and why....

In which I babble for a while about The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All

How many posts do you think it takes to qualify as a series? If it's just two, then I guess we could consider this post the second in a series in which I check out extremely popular manga only to find out that it's not really for me, following last month's post on Blue Lock. 

This time it's Sumiko Arai's The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All, AKA "the Green Yuri", based on its distinctive green covers and Arai's use of that same particular shade of green as an accent color throughout the comic.

Yen Press released the first volume of the series, which is now up to volume three, in 2004. I passed on it at the time for what probably seems like a weird, even random reason: I tend to avoid manga with really long titles. 

Since then, a manga-reading friend mentioned that she was following it, Renee Scott posted about it having blown up in a post on Good Comics for Kids and, most intriguingly, I saw an interview in which Dave Grohl talked about it in conjunction with the announcement that the upcoming anime adaptation would use Nirvana's "Bloom" in the opening sequence...an unusual state of affairs, to say the least.

As to why a Nirvana song might be used for an anime opening, well, the manga's two protagonists Aya Osawa and Mitsuki Koga bond over their love of (mostly) '90s American rock music, and Nirvana is, of course, a favorite of the pair, and the first of the three chapters in the first volume is actually entitled "Teen Spirit". ("Kurt definitely would've loved this," Grohl says in the interview.)

The format is a bit unusual compared to most of the manga I read, although the premise is solid (and, for someone who came of age listening to "alternative" music in the nineties, the focus on the music of the era is appealing).

As for that format, beyond the use of an accent color over the mostly black and white art, the story unfolds in super-short, four-page stories or chapters, and thus reading it in a collection like this felt a little like reading a collection of an old-fashioned "continuity" comic strip, with the constant stops and starts and a hint of narrative feedback, as elements get restated (I don't know the exact origins of the manga, but in the thank you section at the end of the book, Arai writes "When I first posted the story of these two on Twitter, I didn't have the slightest idea that it would turn into something like this..." From what I read on Wikipedia later, it seems as if the comic was originally published online, which likely explains it's super-short chapters and comic strip-like feel).

As for the premise, well, popular, girly-girl Aya is a fan of Western rock music from 30-ish years previous, unlike her friends, who have more modern (and, presumably, Japanese taste). And thus the first lines of the book, which appear over a scene of her listening to "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with ear buds in school, are "Music is best... ...when you listen to it alone."

One day, she discovers a CD shop—Do these still exist? In America, or is this a purely Japanese phenomenon?—and, attracted to the rhythm she hears, walks in, only to lock eyes with the young person behind the counter.

This person wears a black hoodie with the hood up, disguising all of their hair save for the black bangs, a black mask that disguises the lower half of their face and, although we can't see it in the four-page, full-color prologue that opens the books, pants. Despite the eye make-up and black nail polish, Aya assumes this person is a guy.

She's wrong. This person is a girl, Mitsuki, and not only is Aya mistaken about the CD shop employee's gender, shes also doesn't realize that she already knows her. Mitsuki, it turns out, is in her class, where she sits right next to her.

At school, of course, the shy, quiet Mitsuki wears the school uniform, complete with a skirt, and she also wears glasses and eschews make-up, even diligently removing her nail polish before school, not wanting to stand out in anyway at school.

In the shop, it's crush at first sight for Aya:

He' so stylish...

...and mysterious.

He's got impeccable taste in music too!

I LOVE NIRVANA!

I CAN TOTALLY FANGIRL OVER HIM...!

Just watching him from afar gives me joy...

And then, when she gets her hair tangled in the headphones there so customers can listen to the music before they buy it, the "guy" comes over to help her, smilingly apologizing for touching her hair.

The next morning, she recounts this whole encounter to her two friends...mere feet away from Mitsuki, who is overhearing how her "flashy" classmate has a fangirl crush on a boy...who is actually her.

Now, the way Arai draws the two Mitsukis is, of course, quite different, and I know from experience that we don't always recognize people when we see them out of the context we expect to see them in (The image above is a photo of Arai's design pages from the back of the first volume, featuring the two Mitsukis). Still, wouldn't Aya recognize her classmate if she took off her glasses and put on a mask, hoodie and pair of pants...?

Well, as someone who has spent a lifetime enjoying Superman stories in various mediums, I'm obviously accepting of the idea that a pair of glasses can completely change someone's identity (Additionally, one of my all-time favorite movies is She's All That, a movie which would have us believe that the super-cute Rachel Leigh Cook of 1999 is barely worth noticing when wearing glasses, but a radiant beauty the moment she takes them off). 

I could even buy Mitsuki being so freaked out at first as to want to keep it a secret of sorts, not introducing herself to Aya at the shop, or butting into the next morning conversation to admit that she was the guy at the shop that Aya was fan-girling over.

But this double identity plot gets pretty weird pretty fast, as Aya becomes a regular at the shop and soon, friends with The Guy At The CD Shop. Mitsuki's continued maintenance of a secret identity with a friend and classmate strikes me as...odd. 

Arai's teasing about whether or not Aya is about to discover Mitsuki over the course of the stories is fun and cute (And, again, makes me think a bit of Superman...particularly from the stories where Lois doesn't yet know that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person). 

But why is Mitsuki keeping a secret identity?

I mean, it's not like The Guy At The CD Shop is a superhero like Superman or Spider-Man, like she has arch-enemies in the criminal underworld who might target her loved ones. The mistaken identity turning into a secret identity is, at the very least, extremely awkward, and makes Mitsuki's actions seem questionable in the earliest strips in the book 

(Also, I am not entirely clear if Aya just mistakes Mitsuki for a boy because perhaps she is a bit androgynous and elements of her wardrobe are more male than female coded, or if Mitsuki is intentionally dressing up as a boy for work, and that's why she hides her long hair under a hood and much of her face with a mask. Whatever the case is, after she hears Aya talking about her, she knows that Aya thinks she's a guy, and never does anything to disabuse her of this which, again, seems weird.)

What at first seems a little odd or weird gets downright ridiculous at the point in which they actually become friends, and Aya gets The Guy At The CD Shop's number. At that point, she puts "his" contact info in her phone, as "My Guy." That's right; she doesn't even know "his" name...! How does one get to the exchange-phone-numbers stage without first exchanging one another's names...? (When Mitsuki calls Aya for the first time, she introduces herself thusly: "Um... I'm the person from the CD shop in front of the station...")

If Mitsuki did want to continue the deception that she was some random guy that Aya met and not her classmate, she could have given her a fake name or, this being Japan, maybe just her family name ("That's weird," Aya might have thought, "There's a girl in my class with that same name!"). If she wanted to come clean, that might have been the point to do so. Instead, when Aya writes her number on Mitsuki's hand at the shop, Mitsuki neither volunteers a name nor does Aya ask for one.

Eventually, Aya discovers the deception and is rightfully pissed at Mitsuki. In an attempt to make it up to her, Mitsuki goes into boy mode to play and sing a song at the school festival; she doesn't wear the mask, but otherwise dresses up like she does at work, with her hood up and, conveniently, no one at school seems to recognize her.  She's introduced as a "musician dressed in all black!!' and when kids in the crowd look up at her on stage, they say "I can't see their face against the backlight...Who is that?!"

Aya recognizes her, of course, saying to herself:

Even with so many people around... ...It sounds like she's playing just for me.

—Since...

...I'm sure no one here... ...knows stuff like Radiohead...

My guess is that Mitsuki was playing a cover of "Creep", as that's the name of the third and final chapter in this volume.

After that, the pair introduce themselves properly, and begin a proper friendship, one based on their love of old Western music, despite their different styles and apparent social statuses at school. 

I'm not sure where things will go from here—there's a lot of kinda sorta almost flirting between the pair, and it is called "Green Yuri"—but by the end of this volume, they are merely friends getting to know one another, and Aya hasn't yet completely transferred her apparently romantic feelings for Mitsuki's boy mode to her real, female self.

I think now that we are past the weird dual-identity bit—which I don't think Arai handled particularly well, as we only see the characters' emotional reactions to this plot business, and never get any explanations for why they act the way they do and what they might be thinking—the series likely improves....or at least will annoy me personally less.

That said, the four-page format wasn't particularly fun for me to read, so I'm not sure if I'll pick up the next volume or not. We'll see.

************************

Can we talk about the music a bit...? 

Despite Nirvana's prominent place at the beginning, essentially bringing the two together, I was kind of surprised at how...basic the two characters' taste was throughout. As I said earlier, their favorite Western music seems to be what we called "alternative" in the '90s, but from what I can see from kids' t-shirts these days and what I hear on the radio, this is essentially classic rock now. 

In addition to Nirvana ("Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Heart-Shaped Box") and Radiohead ("Creep"), what other artists appear in the manga...?

Boy-mode Mitsuki (who, amusingly, finds herself falling into her "role" as Aya's crush, surprising herself by flirting with her and trying to act cool in front of her), lends her the new Foo Fighters album. I'm not sure which one this might be (um, the only Foo Fighters album I've ever actually listened to was their 1995 self-titled debut), but apparently, it's "based on a fictional band they created", as Aya tries to explain to her completely uninterested friends.

Later, Aya sends Mitsuki/her "guy" a playlist, which includes Blur ("Song 2"), Black Sabbath ("Paranoid"), The Strokes ("Repitlila"), Bon Jovi ("You Give Love a Bad Name"), Beck ("Loser"), Pearl Jam ("Alive") and what I believe is Royal Blood ("Figure it Out").

When Mitsuki's uncle, who owns the CD shop she works at, scans the stongs on Aya's list, he's shocked. "What the heck?!" he thinks. "This selection really matches my tastes... ...but given how cool these songs are... ...did some middle-aged dude put this together...?!" (He is relieved—and in awe—when Aya walks into the shop, and his niece says it's her playlist, and not that of some creepy older guy.)

But I don't know...Bon Jovi...?

A few scenes later, the school principal plays an Aerosmith song over the loudspeakers, one from their early days, and only Aya and Mitsuki seem to appreciate it. 

Later, Guns 'n Roses and the Chili Peppers are mentioned, as well as a "Willow", which is the first time I've heard of her. I was a little disappointed to look Willow up, based on the song title on Aya's phone ("Coping Mechanism"), only to discover that "Willow" is Willow Smith, daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. Of course, it's probably not fair to her for me to judge her based solely on her celebrity parentage, without actually listening to any of her music. 

After some dithering, I finally read the deeply weird Blue Lock Vol. 1.

Ever since I finished reading the last volume of Haikyu!!, I've been casting about for a replacement series of sorts. In part, I've been curious about how typical Haruichi Furudate's volleyball manga might be of sports manga. Like, is it a truly exceptional example of the genre, one that transcends interest in volleyball or sports in general? Do any other series offer such strong and compelling characters, and manage to be dramatic and suspenseful enough to suck a reader into caring about something a relatively trivial as a high school volleyball game?

Writer Muneyuki Kaneshirto and artist Yusuke Nomura's soccer manga looked like a good candidate. While the high school sport being played differs, it too is a popular comic originally published in a weekly shonen book, and it is apparently pretty popular. I see tankobon volumes of it coming though the library on a fairly regular basis, and it seems to have lasted quite a while, as I've seen numbers in the twenties on the spines (It looks like there have been 39 volumes released in Japan to date, and Kodanasha Comics just released volume 32 in the states last week). When I've flipped through them, the soccer action seems incredibly intense.  

But it's really the anime that sold me on finally giving the series a try.

Not the anime proper, but just the opening, which you can see here. It looks ridiculously over-the-top, with boys and soccer balls raining from the sky at one point, the ground similarly littered with fallen soccer players at another and the hero Yoichi Isagi posing atop a veritable mountain of players in one of the many striking images in the relatively short sequence.

And then there's an image that seals the deal, as there seems to be a super-villain of some sort involved...? At the very least, a thin man with opaque glasses and a big, thin, toothy grin appears on the screen, gesturing grandiosely with his arms. Can a soccer comic have a supervillain in it...? 

So, I finally gave in and reserved a copy of the first volume from the library. 

Blue Lock is...not what I thought it was. Nor is it what it looks like. 

Now, at this point, millions of readers all around the world know this, but I am writing this post for comics readers like myself, who know the comic exists and think merely "soccer manga," not for current Blue Lock readers. 

The first volume opens with a portentous three-panel, three-page, full-color section about the uniqueness of a particular soccer position, that of the striker:

Within the world... ...of soccer...

You can train a player... ...to be a first-class goalie, defender, or mid-fielder. 

But strikers are entirety different...

A first-class striker can't be taught...

They naturally appear... ...wherever the game is the hottest!

Okay, I have no idea what that means, exactly, but it sounds cool, and that last line appears over a two-page spread featuring Isagi holding a soccer ball, surrounded by a bunch of determined, colorful-looking kids. 

From there, we visit a meeting of the Japan Football Union in the wake of the Japanese team's sixteenth round loss of the 2018 World Cup. New hire Anri Teieri, a strident young woman whose bust and butt seem to swell when she becomes angry (Is this the creators' way of saying that she is sexy when she's angry...?), lays into the men in the room, chastising their complacency, their "soccer is just business" attitude and their acceptance that the Japan will never win the World Cup. 

She has a plan. "I will produce... ...players who can lead this country to a World Cup victory!!" she shouts. She then dramatically slaps the monitor at the front of the room, upon which we see a headshot of the "supervillain" I glimpsed in the anime opening.

"Please observe!" she continues. "This is the indispensable coach who will help us destroy and remake Japanese soccer... ...Jinpachi Ego."

Next, we jump to the climax of a high school soccer game which will determine which of the two teams competing will go to nationals. Isagi has the ball and is driving towards the goal, with only the goalie left to stop him; if he makes this goal, it will tie up the 0-1 game and give his team a chance. If he misses, all is lost.

At the last moment, Isagi remembers that "Soccer is... ...a team sport played by eleven people...", and we hear one of his coaches call his motto from the sidelines: "'One for all, and all for one'!!" 

Isagi passes to a teammate, who takes the shot...and hits the post of the goal, thus failing to score. The other team gets the ball, and their star forward Ryosuke Kira drives all the way to the opposite goal and sinks a shot, winning the game and crushing Isagi's dreams of going to nationals. 

Okay, so far, so good, and pretty much what one might expect from a soccer manga.

But then things get weird. Arriving home after the game, Isagi finds a letter waiting for him. It's an invitation to join "a special player training program." He accepts and, arriving at the designated location with him, he finds Kira. They go in together, and find the room filled with other boys, all of whom seem to be forwards like them. In fact, there are 300 of them total.

And then things get weirder still. The lights go out, and a spotlight falls on thin, wiry Jinpachi Ego, dressed all in black with a soccer ball bolo tie, glasses and a pair of spectacles: 

I'll say this plainly. 

Only one thing is necessary for Japanese soccer to become the best in the world: 

The birth of a revolutionary striker. You 300 will be my subjects...

...in an experiment aimed at creating the world's best striker.

To this end, he has had the Football Union construct a pentagon-shaped facility he calls "Blue Lock." If the boys decide to join the program, they will abandon their homes and move into the facility together and begin his training regime. 

"Whoever survives this Blue Lock," he says, " And outlasts the other two hundred ninety-nine...the last remaining player... ...will become the world's best striker."

The assembled boys think he's mad, an assessment that come in part from the national philosophy of what soccer/football actually is. 

Ego explains: 

Just what is soccer? 

A team sport played together by eleven comrades...?

A band of brothers...?

Each relying on the others...?

Wrong. And that's why this country's game has always been weak. 

I'll tell you...soccer is...

...a sport in which you must score more points than your opponent.

Whoever scores the most points is the best. 

If you want to play at 'getting along,' then piss off. 

Ultimately, the passage concludes when the spidery Ego cajoles and convinces them that he can make one of them the greatest player in the world, the one who will score the final goal that will win Japan as World Cup, and the climax of his speech leaves Isagi shaking, with what looks like a cloud of gray energy or fire igniting in his eyes.

At the end, he and all 299 other candidates rush forward to join the program.

The rest of the volume is devoted to the boys in the compound, something of a prison, military installation and laboratory rolled into one, in which Isagi finds himself in "Room Z" with eleven other players. They wear weird, tight-fitting black uniforms that automatically rank them based on their abilities (Isagi is 299, which is why he is in room Z, with the others who are among the worst of the 300). 

Oh, and it is only at this point, after they are all already in Blue Lock, that Ego reveals that whoever is eliminated from the program "will forever lose the right to represent Japan." 

So, there is a real penalty to failure. The losers won't die, exactly, but they will lose their "soccer lives."

The first trial is a game of "tag," in which whoever is "it" has possession of a soccer ball, with which they have to hit one of their fellows...and eliminate them from Blue Lock (Which would then leave each room with 11 occupants, the same number of players on a soccer team). 

So Blue Lock is a sports manga...sort of. But the massive elimination, all vs. all set-up put me in mind of Battle Royale, too. There's an element of science fiction and of dystopian fantasy to the book as well.

By the end of the first trial (and the first volume), we see that Isagi is willing to become ruthless and cutthroat in the way Ego wants them all to be, as, after showing mercy to a rival at one point, another of his new roommates puts him in a position in which he must act without thinking about it, and the action he takes is apparently one born of pure survival instinct...or, perhaps, his true self...?

The premise, then, seems to be watching what happens to a regular, decent kid in this situation, and how he deals with the immense pressure to become a sort of supremely selfish psychopath in pursuit of becoming a soccer star. And with 299 other boys in the same position, there's plenty of room for Kaneshiro and Nomura to fill the cast with interesting characters, a few of whom we meet in this volume.

It's honestly a pretty crazy premise for a book, and it's easy to see how intensely dramatic and suspenseful it can be. It's a sports manga with an angle that makes it far more than a sports manga. 

I'm not sure it's for me. While I am curious about how it ultimately ends, and if Isagi will make what seems like a Faustian bargain in pursuit of being the best (and if the creators will settle the conflict between Ego's vision of the game and what is presented at the more standard vision of soccer in Japan), it doesn't seem like a particularly fun comic.

The setting made me feel a little uncomfortable and claustrophobic, and the set-up seems to be one that will accentuate the nastiness of the characters. Also, at this point, there wasn't much in the way of soccer. I know that will change—based on that anime opening, it looks like each room's team will play against one another, as you can see letters on the characters' jerseys—but the fact that they are playing in the context of the Blue Lock program rather than for their schools seems somehow less interesting to me.

Anyway, Blue Lock has great art, great action and a totally insane premise, so it's not really a surprise that the book is as popular as it is.