Independent Opinions, News, and Reviews of Graphic Novels, Manga, and Comic Books
As we learned in the first volume, Ranma Saotome, while undergoing martial arts training with his father, fell into a magical hot spring. Now, whenever he gets wet, he turns into a girl (because the spring was cursed when a young girl drowned in it). To change back, he has to be dowsed with hot water. Conveniently, there were hundreds of these cursed springs. Ranma’s father, for example, turns into a panda when he gets wet. It’s a flexible gimmick […]
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In the future shown in Chobits, persocoms are girl-shaped computer companions. A geek’s fantasy, they look just like real girls, except for their metallic ear casings, and they’ll follow their owner’s every command. Hideki is a typical sad-sack student struggling to pay his bills, so a persocom is far beyond his means. When he finds one in the trash, it seems like his wish has come true. As the premise suggests, there’s a lot of teasing to this series. Hideki […]
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One morning, Sey is woken by moving men. Her mother has decided to go to Italy to work on her novel, and she’s rented out their house. Sey will be living with her mom’s friend Meja, a happy homemaker who’s always wanted a daughter. And here comes the element that sets I.N.V.U. apart from other teen manga romances: Meja does have a daughter, Hali, but Hali has to pretend to be her dead brother Terry to keep Meja from having […]
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Rich, spoiled Keiko wants to be recognized as the prettiest girl in school, but she can’t compare with Meg’s magically granted beauty. While the boys are praising Meg as an angel and a goddess, Keiko fades into the background, a fate she refuses to accept. Her resulting plots are comical in their fussiness. For example, to get revenge on boys who ignore her, she has a crew that pours mud and then drives by in a car to splash them […]
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When he was nine years old, Megumi rescued someone he thought was a wizard, and in return, he was granted one wish. Unfortunately, Meg’s wish to be the world’s manliest man was misunderstood (perhaps on purpose), and he instead became the world’s womanliest woman. Now 16 years old, he’s gorgeous, only he’s also as aggressive as ever. This series is perhaps the world’s worst example of “be careful what you wish for”. His best friend Miki keeps telling him to […]
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Momoi is a lovely girl with a violent temper, poor impulse control, and a grandfather who thinks he’s a mad scientist. Uehara has a crush on her anyway, but since he’s sensitive and shy, nothing is likely to result from his attraction to her. Until they both wind up under one of grandfather’s crazy machines… and they swap bodies in Your and My Secret by Ai Morinaga. Momoi as a boy becomes someone to look up to, someone who excels […]
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I’m a little lost. At the end of volume two, the kids Conan was forced to go to school with were threatening to investigate his deserted home. (I say “forced” because even though he has the mind of an almost-adult, he looks like a six-year-old.) I took this to be a hint toward the next storyline; apparently, it was just a joke, since volume three opens with Conan, Rachel, and her dad on a cruise ship, returning from an island […]
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Jimmy Kudo, high school junior, idolizes Sherlock Holmes and solves mysteries for the police department in Case Closed, a long-running manga action comedy by Gosho Aoyama. After trailing bad guys to a mysterious meeting, he’s knocked out and poisoned. Although the villains meant to kill him, they instead turn him physically into a six-year-old boy. He winds up working with an incompetent private investigator, the father of the girl he has a crush on, while a mad scientist tries to […]
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