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 […]

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 […]

Leave it to Japan to find a way to combine the alien invasion and inspirational teacher genres.  After a multi-tentacled alien demonstrates his power by destroying a huge chunk of the moon and promises to destroy the Earth in one year, he makes a proposal to the leaders of the world.  He’ll become a teacher […]

We’re in the home stretch now.  “Claymore” ended its magazine serialization back in October and the final, twenty-seventh, volume came out earlier this month in Japan.  That’s actually quite reassuring as things have been steadily building towards a climax over the past few volumes, so it’s likely things will be going out on a high […]

Back when I reviewed Kon’s “Tropic of the Sea,” I made the mistake of going into the manga expecting it to be the last great work of a genius who was taken from us too soon.  (I was also mistaken about its length — this is his longest manga work.)  As it turns out, my […]