Happy Mania Volume 1

I’m very glad I waited until now to read this. I’ve been curious about Moyoco Anno’s Happy Mania for years (since it came out five years ago), because it was one of the earliest josei manga translated in the US. (Josei is manga aimed at women instead of girls.) If I’d read it back, then, though, I don’t think I’d have gotten the humor or been able to approach it with the lightheartedness required. Now, with more manga under my […]

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Walkin’ Butterfly Volume 1

I’m so glad to see more josei manga titles becoming available. These are books aimed at women, skewing older than the better-known shojo books for girls. And you’ll know that Walkin’ Butterfly by Chihiro Tamaki is for an older reader (it’s rated 16+) from the first page, which is a full-body nude image of the protagonist glowering at the reader. It’s an appropriate choice, since it sums up the core conflict of the story. Michiko is very tall, and as […]

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High School Debut Volume 1

A typical shojo plot — young woman desperate to get a boyfriend as she starts high school — is made highly entertaining through dynamic characters and art in High School Debut by Kazune Kawahara. Haruna is used to working hard to get what she wants. She’s a softball player (and girls’ manga fan) who thinks that slavishly following teen magazines for fashion and behavior suggestions will gain her a guy. She doesn’t understand what works specifically for her body type […]

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Azumanga Daioh Omnibus

Not your typical manga, the Azumanga Daioh Omnibus by Kiyohiko Azuma (collecting four previously published books) follows a group of high school girls through school until graduation. With a few exceptions, the entire book consists of four-panel strips (called 4-koma)… so this is more like a Japanese version of a Dilbert collection than your usual high-school romance. At first, I took them lightly, as slight gag strips that told a joke and moved on. It surprised me later on to […]

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Death Note

The biggest disappointment I’ve read recently is easily Death Note. I’d wound up collecting all 12 books of the series, and over the Thanksgiving holiday, I started reading them. Volume one was as involving as they’d said it would be. Super-student Light Yagami finds a notebook dropped by a death god to cause trouble. Anyone whose name is written in the book will die if the person writing it also pictures their face. The art, by Takeshi Obata (Hikaru no […]

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Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs Volumes 5 and 6

I don’t make any claims for superior artistry or quality, but this manga series by Yukiya Sakuragi has quickly become one of the top five I look forward to. It’s consistently entertaining, and I know what I’m going to get from it: cute dogs and soap opera among the people who love them. It feels good to read it, and it rewards me exactly as I expect it to. I do wish, though, that some of the fan service chapter-opening […]

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The Wallflower Volume 13

I liked the premise behind this odd series by Tomoko Hayakawa — four gorgeous guys hired to bring a geeky horror fan out of her shell — but when I sampled The Wallflower before, I could never get into it. For me, there was too much emphasis on the horror references, not enough character development. I was surprised, then, to find myself drawn into this later volume. I still can’t tell the guys apart, and it’s a bit unnerving that […]

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Genshiken Volume 9

The otaku/manga/anime fan series by Kio Shimoku comes to an end with this volume and school graduation. The club president’s American friends have returned. Sue, the bad-tempered yaoi fan, now has a dream: to attend university in Japan as an exchange student. Since she only talks in anime quotes, there’s some confusion over just how much Japanese she understands or can speak. For that reason, her friends think it’s a bad idea, but Ogiue (who winds up hosting Sue as […]

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