Idol Dreams is coming back! The last installment came out (in English) just about a year ago, and volume 4 is due out November 7. (It can be ordered now through your local comic shop with Diamond code SEP17 2079.) It’s the story of a lonely, reserved office worker who magically becomes a 15-year-old celebrity to get a second chance at romance. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for the series doesn’t seem to have returned. As I said in my review of […]

Viz jumps into the yuri genre with this atmospheric but lightweight (so far) story of two women bonding over DJing. (Yuri is girl-girl romance, usually, in the titles we’ve seen over here, without the explicit sex scenes common to yaoi.) After Hours by Yuhta Nishio begins with Emi trying to meet a friend at a club who’s more interested in finding a guy. She’s not enjoying the noise or the people, and when she gets creeped on, she’s rescued by […]

These final two volumes of the adorable romantic comedy conclude in dramatic fashion, but without losing the innocent charm that makes My Love Story!! such a good read. But first, in volume 12, oversized, good-hearted teen Takeo must try to rescue his best friend, Sunakawa, from a transfer student suspected of nefarious motives, in a story continued from the previous volume. This is funny because Takeo is so unsubtle at everything he does. He’s straight-forward, as he pretty much has […]

It’s about that point in any manga series, where the episodic stories start giving way to more character-based insight. Bisco Hatori’s Behind the Scenes volume 4 is no exception. We’re still seeing the group of art students providing movie-making support, but here, we also get to meet the family of Ranmaru, the fish-out-of-water nominal lead character, as well as Goda’s father. The first story sends the team to buck up a director who’s collapsed under pressure and won’t show up […]

Don’t Be Cruel: Plus+ is a one-off collection of side and bonus stories featuring characters from the main yaoi series by Yonezou Nekota (also published by SuBLime Manga). I must have read Don’t Be Cruel at some point, because I vaguely remembered that it was about two schoolboys. The fun-loving, playboy one blackmails the studious one into having regular sex with him, but (typical of yaoi) they really have feelings for each other, although they aren’t willing to admit it […]

I imagine those who have trouble with the lack of consent on view in previous volumes of Ten Count have given up by now, but those who’ve stuck it out are rewarded in volume 4 by finally finding out what made Shirotani a germophobe. The title comes from Shirotani’s list of tasks he can’t stand to do, things like shaking hands without his gloves on. It was established as a starting point for a kind of aversion therapy, but therapist […]

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the Master Keaton series — the last I covered was volume 8 last year — because it’s not your typical manga series. Each volume is best approached as a short story anthology, held together by most (but not all) of the chapters having an appearance by Taichi Keaton, insurance investigator (and former special forces soldier, which helps when someone tries to kill him, which happens more often than you’d expect). By this […]

My favorite type of manga is shojo romance, but the extent to which I enjoyed Golden Kamuy volume 1 shows how valuable it can be to break out of one’s usual reading patterns. This historical action-adventure by Satoru Noda was a thrilling introduction to a pair of intriguing characters. Sugimoto, a hard-bitten veteran of the Russo-Japanese War (1905), is trying to pan for gold in order to help his comrade’s widow. He was a hero, with a reputation that he […]