Takao Kasuga is a middle-school student in a small town who likes reading, and has a particular fondness for the poems of Charles Baudelaire.  He also has a crush on Nanako, the most popular girl in class, so when the combination of a moment of weakness and the perfect opportunity strikes, the kid winds up […]

This second volume shows that, much like the first, when you have this much style you don’t need to have that much substance (or coherence, for that matter).  The main characters are still the members of the secret organization “Libra,” and they’re still trying to maintain the peace between the many different creatures and factions […]

Longtime readers know that I love to bitch about the long delays between certain manga from Dark Horse.  It’s a pet hate of mine that I doubt I’ll ever get over.  However, when it comes to the length of the wait between volumes, this second volume of “The Monkey King” has them all beat.  Had […]

If it seems that I write about this particular manga more than others, that’s because it usually winds up bringing something new to the table with each volume.  Case in point:  Creators Moritaka and Akito finally deliver their manga masterwork here.  This a watershed moment for the series as the title was pretty much founded […]

With this third volume, the series has settled into a comfortable and familiar groove.  Shizuku will encounter someone in crisis or distress that will somehow be related to wine, much investigating by himself and his associate Miyabi will be done, and we will all have learned something new about this classiest of beverages before the […]

The Shohoku vs. Ryonan match is over.  FINALLY.  This particular game ran over five volumes for thirty-six chapters.  Think about it:  When this was originally serialized back in Shonen Jump, it took 2/3rds of a year to tell this story.  That’s almost as long as it took to serialize this story in English.  I could […]

The first four volumes of this series gave me the impression that it was an amusing bit of fluff showing how a bachelor copes with adopting his grandfather’s six-year-old love child.  It did have a very “how to” vibe with its look at what a single father’s lot is like in modern Japan, but that’s […]

As I mentioned in the podcast, “Twin Spica” sold so poorly that in order to complete it Vertical started publishing the series as two-in-one editions from volume seven onwards.  Now that it’s finally over, we’re getting an idea of just how bad sales were courtesy of a thread on their Facebook page.  The short version […]