With this volume, mangaka Gamon Sakurai continues his efforts to yank the narrative in the direction he wants it to go.  Frankly, I was hoping we were going to get a series about a charismatic psychopath (Sato) who is out to murder those in the government, military, and big business who wanted to exploit his […]

It’s the penultimate volume of this series, and mangaka Hiroya Oku decides to oblige the readers who have been following it for so long with some answers.  To his credit, they’re actually fairly interesting ones that explain some of the nonsense that has come before and play against your expectations.  Vol. 37 starts off on […]

Principal Asano wins one and loses one in my book for this volume.  I was very much looking forward to seeing how his intervention would change the shape of the baseball game between Class E and the varsity squad at the end of the previous volume.  Though he offers some choice motivation that helps the […]

After the not-bad manga exclusive to the collector’s edition release of the game, we’re now getting the official manga spinoff to “Final Fantasy Type-0.”  While people who have played the game will know that the title of “Ice Reaper” refers to Kurasame, the instructor to Class Zero, those who don’t probably won’t find enough connection […]

I know I’ve said this before, but when you’ve got a series whose storytelling is more episodic than serialized the wait between volumes doesn’t sting as much.  Granted, I’d love for this series to be more popular so we could get caught up to the Japanese release (and get the spinoffs as well).  This isn’t […]

This series came to my attention at that manga publisher roundtable I attended at Comic-Con.  A series about a practitioner of Japanese calligraphy who moves out to a rural island is selling better than the publisher expected?  I have to see how such odd subject matter is connecting with fans!  As these things go, the […]

One could say that Chise Hatori has led an unlucky and unloved life.  This would be before she was auctioned off for the tidy sum of five million pounds to a mage with an animal skull for a head named Elias Ainsworth.  While this would seem like just the latest tragedy in a life that […]

Masamune Shirow is the Frank Miller of manga.  That’s because it’s hard to overstate the contributions of both men to the medium of comics in their heydays, and the works they created are still being drawn upon for adaptations in other media.  They also experienced a sharp decline in their standing within the industry after […]

After five volumes I’m starting to get a little fuzzy on the details of the main plot for the series.  It’s supposed to be about how wandering ronin and surrogate father to Daigoro, Togo Shigekata, is delivering a message as the dying wish of a last man.  Upon delivering it, all sorts of behind-the-scenes machinations […]