Manga and Comic Reviews
If you’re familiar with the web machinima series “Red vs. Blue,” I want to to remember all the way back to the first season. Back to the moment when Sarge, taken out of action by a grenade to the face, is revived through the heroic efforts of Grif’s administration of CPR. Sarge is grateful until […]
Two volumes in and it still feels like I know exactly where this series is going to go. This is mainly because it’s striking to see how movie-like “Prophecy’s” pacing is here. Volumes one and two really do read like the first two acts of a feature film. In the first volume we had the […]
There’s been some advance word on a couple of titles that bear looking out for from this company later this year: After being announced at last year’s Anime Expo, the first omnibus edition of “The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service” arrives in August. (So, two solicitations from now.) Easily one of the best manga still being […]
Does mangaka Gamon Sakura really know what he’s doing with this series? That’s the question his characterization of Kei, the title’s protagonist, posed in the previous volume and things only get worse in that regard here. Granted, all of the stuff regarding the plans that Sato (A.K.A. “Hat”) has in store for the demi-humans of […]
The subtitle for this volume is “Time For Grown-Ups,” and that turns out to be a bad and good thing for this series. In that order. Things start off with the introduction of someone who is at this point an unworkable assemblage of cliches and character types before we get to meet this series’ Lex […]
Yokoi would be your average high school girl if it weren’t for one thing: her neighbor Seki. You see, the boy who sits next to her in class doesn’t just goof off. He elevates it into an art form. Creating an ersatz domino rally with erasers, turning his desk into a shogi board, creating a […]
Make of this what you will: Last week, Kodansha Comics announced several new manga licenses. Of particular interest to me was “Die Wergelder,” a new manga from “Blade of the Immortal” creator Hiroaki Samura. This is notable because it’s his first series to not be published by Dark Horse. In addition to the mangaka’s signature […]
At first I thought this would be the first volume of the series to offer nothing worth writing about. It kicks off with the launch of the brand new Tazugane-class vessel and most of the core cast is onboard to put it through its paces. Narratively, this involves the vessel coming into contact with a […]
There are those rare moments in fiction where a character manages to say exactly what you’re thinking about the work in question. You get the feeling that whoever was responsible for those words just reached into you head and either put them down on the page or had them come out of someone’s mouth. It’s […]
After “20th Century Boys” ended last year, I and everyone else who followed it were left without our bi-monthly Naoki Urasawa fix. For years Viz had been serializing his most famous works — the aforementioned title, along with “Monster” and “Pluto” — and now we were left with nothing. What was going to take its […]