I believe that my love of all things Tezuka is well-documented on this site, but I’ve always found his mature late-era works to be generally more entertaining than his early kiddie-skewing ones.  Here, we have a late-era work that skews towards the kiddie side of the spectrum and is less interesting as a result.  “Unico” […]

The nuttiness continues in this volume as the gang races to complete not only Ogiue’s debut manga, but also her doujinshi for Comi-Fest.  Then Ohno’s other American friend Angela (of the ginormous boobs) also makes a return appearance once the con begins in earnest and the direction of this “second season” becomes a bit more […]

This is a review of vol. 24 of “Blade of the Immortal.”  The reason the title isn’t listed above is because I wanted to write, “The latest volume of ‘Blade of the Immortal’ is so goddamn good that you need to stop reading this now and go out and buy it!”  (Which I’ll admit could […]

The last volume of this came out… wow, over two years ago.  Normally such a long delay would be frustrating in the extreme, but not this time.  While the actual delay in creating new chapters has been down to mangaka Takehiko Inoue’s health problems, we’ve still been getting a steady stream of work from him […]

I picked this up with the hope that Carl Horn would have a very wide latitude to work with in localizing these stories given that this would be a collection of parody shorts from a variety of mangaka.  The good news is that not only was that apparently true, you can also tell that he […]

Anime News Network reported last night, by way of James Hudnall’s blog, that founder of Studio Proteus, co-founder of AnimeCon (later known as Anime Expo), and manga translation legend Toren Smith passed away recently.  The man had effectively been retired in the industry since selling Studio Proteus to Dark Horse in 2004, but this was […]

More stories from the creator of “Blade of the Immortal?”  Yes please!  Years ago, Dark Horse released another story collection from the mangaka called “Ohikkoshi” which told an extended story of the romantic tribulations of a group of college students.  It was wild, goofy, full of in-jokes and more than a little slapdash in parts […]

Tsutomu Niehi is certainly an acquired taste.  The mangaka behind “Blame!” and “Biomega” definitely prefers style over substance and his storytelling can be frustratingly opaque more often than not.  However, his art is certainly distinctive with its Geiger-esque influences and the narrative in “Biomega” showed that he was growing as a writer.  So when Vertical […]

The third volume of mangaka Keiko Suenobu’s “Limit” puts its best foot forward yet in trying to convince me that it was clearly a mistake on my part to start reading this title.  Early on we find out that the mysterious figure seen at the end of the previous volume was Hinata, one of Mizuki’s […]