In case you weren’t convinced that Hiro was the bad guy in this story after the past couple of volumes, mangaka Hiroya Oku goes to make the case again here.  After a Japanese S.W.A.T. team busts into Shion’s home in the middle of the night, wounding the girl and her grandmother in the process of […]

If you’ll recall, I wasn’t all that impressed with the first volume of this new “Gundam” series.  It delivered all the familiar “War is Hell” moral musings you’d expect as seen through the Federation and Zeon’s struggle to take control of the strategically important Thunderbolt sector without doing much to distinguish itself.  Some steps are […]

The latest Moto Hagio manga to come from Fantagraphics features a first chapter that is confusing, weird, and likely going to turn off readers unaccustomed to the kind of strangeness this old-school shojo mangaka likes to traffic in.  It takes place on the island of Barbara and focuses on young Aoba and her two friends, […]

The school restaurant fair showdown between Classes E & A turns out not to be the main story for this volume.  It’s dealt with pretty early on as the resourcefulness of Class E shows that they can at least go the distance against Class A even when the odds are so thoroughly stacked against them. […]

Longtime readers have probably picked up on the fact that I’ve got a kind of weakness for manga that tackle foreign places and time periods.  So it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that I picked up the first volume of mangaka Kazuhiro Fujita’s “The Black Museum.”  This is actually the second arc in the series, but […]

Do you like lesbians?  Do you like mass murderers?  Do you like lesbian mass murderers?  If you answered yes to all three of these questions then boy do I have a series for you!  Yoshimurakana’s “Murcielago” is about Kuroko Koumori, plucked from death row for murdering a ton of people to put her talents to […]

There’s a scene early on in this volume where Thorfinn recounts to the family he left behind what he’s been up to for the past sixteen years.  Mangaka Makoto Yukimura doesn’t have his protagonist go into specifics, only showing Thorfinn calmly narrating, the shocked looks of those around him, montages of panels from chapters past, […]

Why haven’t I talked about this series in a while?  That’s because it really hasn’t risen above the harmless the first volume offered.  I went into this series, based on a concept from Masamune Shirow but with the manga actually by “Excel Saga’s” Rikudou Koshi, fully expecting a trainwreck and didn’t get that.  Instead, “Pandora” […]