Independent Opinions, News, and Reviews of Graphic Novels, Manga, and Comic Books
It shouldn’t surprise me that I enjoyed the first volume more than this one. If you’re trying to build excitement, it’s a lot easier to keep introducing new twists and turns than to wrap them up in coherent fashion. Plus, there are a lot of years of war still to cover, although we do get quite the time jump on several occasions. I’m sure the experience would have been much different, and perhaps preferable, if I wasn’t reading all these […]
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BTOOOM! by Junya Inoue reads like a combination of Survivor and Lost filtered through a video-game overlay and the now-expected forced murder plot. Ryouta is unemployed, which gives him plenty of time to become one of the world’s best players of BTOOOM!, a new online video game in which you kill opponents with bombs, not guns. The next time he awakens, he’s on a tropical island, forced to play the game for real along with a mixed group of others. […]
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My fear that Kaoru Mori was going to follow anthropologist Mr. Smith away from the original bride Amir is thankfully not justified. As the series continues, the story sprawls, with chapters introducing new characters as Smith meets them as well as other chapters continuing to follow life with Amir. As volume 4 opens, we see more of what has happened with Amir’s family after they were unable to capture her back. Their reputation is damaged, which might ultimately result in […]
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This third volume was a tad disappointing. After the excitement in the first two books of the series, establishing the situation of schoolgirls struggling for survival after a morbid bus crash, I expected to see more twists and revelations with a similar high level of emotional effect. However, Limit volume 3 feels as though the author, Keiko Suenobu, realized that there was potential in this concept to run a long while, so she started padding the storytelling and introducing more […]
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This installment of the series wasn’t as interesting for me as the first book, but I’m not giving up on it yet. Missions of Love is settling into its groove. Without the author, Ema Toyama, having to introduce the characters and premise, the events become more typical, without the emphasis on odd elements that made the previous volume grab me. Yukina blackmails Shigure into acting as her boyfriend. He goes along with it, but since he’s learned her weakness, he […]
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My thanks to Alexander Hoffman for running a contest where I won this book and volume 2. It’s the kind of story I never would have tried otherwise, and I’m glad I got a chance to discover it without risk. It’s written and drawn by Keiko Suenobu. Limit, to describe it briefly and in reductionist fashion, is Lord of the Flies with Japanese schoolgirls. Konno is surviving her teen years by hanging out with the popular queen bee Sakura and […]
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What could have been an amusing comedy commentary on fandom becomes just another shonen manga by Yuuki Kodama. The Blood Lad of the title is a teenage-looking vampire who runs a domain in the demon world, but he’s really fascinated with Japanese popular culture, especially video games. When a human girl appears in his kingdom, he quickly runs through lust, bloodlust, and love before settling on trying to get her back home as a way of visiting the human world. […]
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One of the most famous of Osamu Tezuka’s adult works is now back in print in an oversized hardcover with a new translation by Kumar Sivasubramanian. The story of three men named Adolf is introduced to us by a reporter, Sohei Toge, who covered the Berlin Olympics in 1936. (Message to Adolf was originally published in the 80s, which made his age more reasonable.) His brother is murdered there, and the body, taken away by officials, disappears. While investigating, Toge […]
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