Alphabetical Index of Other Manga Reviews

The Quest for the Missing Girl

I checked out this mystery because I adore the detailed thin line art of Jiro Taniguchi (The Walking Man). That’s on display, but the story is nothing to write home about. In a plot that could have been part of Murder, She Wrote, mountain climber Shiga heads to Tokyo to find the missing daughter of his dead best friend. There’s more to it than that, thematically — Shiga had an additional connection with the widowed mother, and the girl turned […]

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Luv Luv: Pretty Poison, Make Love & Peace

The first Luv Luv Press title, Voices of Love, was intriguing to me, just because it was very unusual in the U.S. to see manga romance stories for women with explicit sex included. (Although there had previously been the occasional explicit shojo story.) The next two, Real Love and Love for Dessert, were pretty bad, since they seemed to emphasize the sex at the expense of believable (or in some cases, any) characterization and storytelling craft. So how do the […]

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Yotsuba&!

Yotsuba&! has an odd title that’s easily explained: each chapter features strange little girl Yotsuba getting excited about something that’s new to her. So we see Yotsuba & shopping! Yotsuba & rain! And so on. Her appearance and behavior are so unusual, at times, that I’m tempted to speculate that she’s an alien, especially when I remember her green hair. (Translation notes explain that, in Japanese, “yotsuba” means “four-leaf”, and her hair color and style, four pigtails, make her resemble […]

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Apothecarius Argentum Volume 1

A princess needs a healer, who turns out to be a childhood friend become an apothecary, in Apothecarius Argentum by Tomomi Yamashita. She’s a headstrong tomboy, but Argent is the man who knew her when. He’s also a living toxin, immune to poison but with a killing touch. That kind of irony — the master healer brings life although he’s walking death — underlies the book’s plots, providing multiple layers. The princess loves food, to the point of overeating, but […]

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Flock of Angels Volume 3

The series by Shoko Hamada concludes in this volume. I haven’t read book two, so I’m not sure how Shea wound up living in the mountains with a mysterious black-winged girl. Her people can fully retract their wings, unlike him. So even where he might fit in, he doesn’t, although most are nice enough to him. Still, there are a bunch of weird things about their society, things Shea finds wrong and disturbing. However, they risk dying out, unless something […]

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Love for Dessert

Aurora’s Luv Luv line of explicit manga for women continues, and the quality is still disappointing. Like the other books, Love for Dessert contains a set of short stories by the same author, Hana Aoi. You can see the pasted-together nature of the stories — pick a quirk, bolt it onto a character, shove in requisite sex scene whether it fits or not — from the cover, where the tongue and the spoon seem like afterthoughts, edited into a generic […]

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Walkin’ Butterfly Volume 3

As Walkin’ Butterfly volume 3 opens, Michiko’s mentor has been hospitalized. She fainted, and tests reveal liver damage from too much alcohol. She’s also about to give up on her agency, just as Michiko had given up on being a model. Seeing someone else quit gives Michiko new determination to pursue her dream, although she’s equally driven by escaping a nightmare, by getting a chance to redo a scene from her past in a better way. I’m getting bored of […]

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Nephilim Volume 1

It feels, upon opening Nephilim volume 1, like Anna Hanamaki set out to craft not a story but a catalog of as many fetishes as possible. A Nephilim is male during the daytime but becomes female at night. Plus, they’re bloodthirsty; they try to kill anyone who sees them. However, the one in this book is so incompetent that that’s less a threat than unintentional comedy. A chest-baring soldier captures a Nephilim after flirting with him. Once night falls, he […]

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