[...] Afterschool Charisma [...]

[...] don’t care for the work of Natsume Ono. I found her samurai series, House of Five Leaves, confusing and Ristorante Paradiso badly inconsistent, with too much telling, not showing. I also [...]

[...] the next batch, only Tokyo Flow Chart doesn’t have an announced release date, and that doesn’t [...]

H5L — I like David Welsh’s idea to turn it into yaoi.

Totally agree with you on KUB. It’s growing on me in my memory.

House of the Five Leaves I’m willing to give a couple more chapters too, before I make a final decision. Nothing really grabbed me, but I think I see potential, maybe.

Kingyou Used Books was a delight. I love how the class reunion came alive when people discussed their favorite manga. In America, you could only get that response with TV shows. A series that celebrates the charm and power of books already has me as a fan.

Toyko Flow Chart flew right by me. I didn’t like the humor or the art.

[...] been pretty impressed with the online manga available at SIGIKKI.com, courtesy of Viz Signature. Now I’d like to [...]

[...] Johanna Draper Carlson takes a look at four of Viz’s Sigikki comics at Comics Worth Reading. Danielle Leigh reads some recent shonen manga at Comics Should Be Good. At [...]

The sad thing is you can’t say a whole lot about what shaped her as a person, since pretty much everything before the beauty pageant that got her in the palace is undocumented speculation with multiple variants. Documenting the female half of the family tree wasn’t a high priority to the ruling families.

I kind of wish their opening example hadn’t been Marie Curie swearing off science, though. And you would think they would support minors that mirrored her original life.

And Cixi kind of got the shaft. Her access to power was based on beauty and producing a male heir, but her fame came from being a cross between Nancy Reagan and Machiavelli. She didn’t go from the daughter of a minor bureaucrat to absolute rule for fifty years because she was pretty. I would think the whole purpose of a clone would be to give her the political training that would complement her original’s talents.