Independent Opinions, News, and Reviews of Graphic Novels, Manga, and Comic Books
In a departure from previous series Doubt and Judge by Yoshiki Tonogai, Secret doesn’t have students locked in a booby-trapped warehouse and told to kill each other one by one. Instead, they’re in their classrooms, which makes the whole thing creepier, by keeping them in the setting of daily life. A small group of students have been in counseling because they were the only survivors of a bus crash that killed many of their classmates. On the last day of […]
Read more
The series by Yoshiki Tonogai about kids forced to murder each other concludes in this volume, and that’s pretty much all you need to know, that here’s where the story ends. I wrote about the first couple volumes of Judge, but I quit talking about — and paying attention to — the intervening books, because it was just about spinning out the suspense, which wasn’t very effective. I’m trying to recall if the three twists in this volume were foreshadowed […]
Read more
The more time I spend with Shiro and Kenji, the couple behind What Did You Eat Yesterday?, the more I like them and their stories. Particularly now that they’re celebrating Christmas with another couple in volume 7. Mr. Kohinata makes sense for them to get along with, since he’s relatively well-behaved and shares some of the same interests, but Gilbert seems to exist just to make smarmy cracks about how they’re not “being gay” right. (He was the one criticizing […]
Read more
Just when I started feeling that reviews of Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma could become almost mechanical — what’s the special ingredient for the challenge? what’s the competition hook? what crazy dish does Soma come up with to win, or at least demonstrate his strength of character? — volume 6 comes along to shake things up. The next big competition for the cooking school kids is the Fall Classic. Before summer break, those who have been selected to participate are […]
Read more
My hopes for this series raised in volume 1 weren’t completely fulfilled. Instead of thoroughly exploring the nature of computer crimes and behavior online, Prophecy volume 3 follows up on the manhunt started in volume 2, focusing on more human motivations of loyalty. It’s certainly a more dramatic way for Tetsuya Tsutsui to wrap up the series in this book, and it makes for a tighter character arc, but I liked the themes of how growing computerization are affecting society […]
Read more
The food competition series continues with the results of the breakfast cook-off from volume 4. The students, after being up all night, have to successfully serve 200 plates of an egg dish to breakfast buffet customers. Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma volume 5 once again provides cooking education along with its challenges. To satisfy a customer, a chef has to take into account how a dish will be served in order to keep it attractive in appearance and consistent in […]
Read more
My Neighbor Seki volume 2 is just as cute and funny as the first volume by Takuma Morishige, and that consistency is a good thing. Yokoi is still distracted by the weirdly creative things Seki does with, on, and to his desk during class, but this installment expands their world a bit with the introduction of a new character and different settings. The first chapter features a “lucky laugher” game. I’m not familiar with this piece of Japanese culture, but […]
Read more
And so the series ends, with more of the same. For me, Manga Dogs volume 3 demonstrates that the gag — of a school-age manga author bedeviled by three pretty boys who want to make manga but are woefully misinformed about what it takes — has run its course. As expected, the cliffhanger threat from volume 2, that Kanna’s series will get canceled under the new magazine editor, is addressed, but briefly — it was all a misunderstanding. Many of […]
Read more