On my ongoing quest for entertaining trash!

“Wounded Man” managed it for nine volumes.  “High School of the Dead” gave us seven volumes that trended downward in quality before it just stopped.  “Terra Formars” gave us one hilariously awful volume before improving just enough to be boring.  “Tenjo Tenge” was… Well, that was mostly good and never less than “readable” for the majority of its run.  So it’s a few notches above “trash” in my estimation.  Yet it’s far harder than it looks to find a series that has the right balance of ridiculousness, ineptitude, sex, and violence to make for an enjoyable read that manages to also be absent of just about any socially redeeming qualities.  I picked up two series in the past month to see if they’d fit the bill.  However, while “Prison School” shows promise, “Freezing” is utter crap.

I picked up “Freezing” first, so let’s start with talking about just why this is just plain terrible.  In the future, humanity is at war with the generic alien menace known as the Nova and the most effective way humanity has found to fight them off is by mashing “Claymore” and “Tenjo Tenge” together.  You see, the female warriors (called Pandora) are injected with Nova DNA to augment their fighting capabilities — that’s the “Claymore” bit — and the series is set in a school where they hone their abilities against each other and in organized battles — just like “Tenjo Tenge.”  It’s into this scenario that Kazuya, the little brother of a legendary Pandora who was killed in battle, is thrust and he makes the worst kind of impression on his first day at the West Genetics Academy.  As a guy, he’s a candidate to be a Limiter for a Pandora, enhancing their fighting abilities in battle.  However, his first move is to mistake the school’s killer ice queen, Satellizer El Bridget, for his dead sister after seeing her from behind.  After doing so, he runs to embrace Bridget and causes the girl to lose the battle she’s engaged in against her rival.

If that doesn’t grab you, be advised that things don’t get any better from there.  Subsequent stories involve Bridget getting a rematch against her rival, fighting against another Pandora who has her own harem of Limiters, and taking on an upper-classman Pandora who is out to discipline Bridget for her recklessness and work through her own combat trauma in the process.  Writer Dall-Young Lim doesn’t offer up any surprises with his execution of these stories, and the thread linking them together — the thawing of relations between Kazuya and Bridget — is as formulaic as you’d expect.  The characters also fail to make much of an impression as all of the supporting cast are plucked from the high school character trope list, with Kazuya filling the “hapless yet determined” shounen hero role.  Bridget’s characterization is also notable for the mixed signals we get in the context of the story.  Everyone in West Genetics talks about her ruthlessness and how no boy has survived being her Limiter for long, but she comes off as just standoffish and soft-spoken in the story itself.  Killer ice queen?  More like combat-trained snow bunny.

So if the story and characters fail to impress, what else does “Freezing” have to offer?  Lots of panties, lots of butts, and lots of boobs.  The busty shot of Bridget on the cover tells you pretty much all you need to know about where this title’s priorities are.  Artist Kwang-Hyun Kim serves up many instances of panty flashing, or women fighting in their underwear or suggestively ripped clothing.  Despite the “older teen” rating on the book, it’s all pretty tame.  The art itself is also smooth and clean, but lacking in invention or real excitement.  There’s lots of fighting in this volume, yet none of it really has any impact.

This is also pretty joyless affair when you get down to it.  I’m not talking just about the title’s painful attempts at comedy.  No, it’s that on the surface “Freezing” purports to showcase women in an empowered role.  After all, they’re the only ones who can become Pandoras and fight off the Nova, with the boys in support roles as their Limiters.  Except that’s not how it plays out in the series.  For all the talk about her formidable skills, Bridget is at a loss to win a battle herself here without Kazuya’s help.  Same goes for the other Pandoras.  This leads to several scenes where Bridget gets severely beaten before Kazuya has to step in and save the day.  Quite frankly it’s disgusting and it only gets worse by the end of the volume, which ends on a cliffhanger as some generic thugs hold off a couple Pandora with their gun and force them to strip as well.  If everything up to this point didn’t convince me that I could go the rest of my life without reading the next volume, then the finale here would’ve done the job just fine.

“Freezing” is a failure on every level and even if you’re a teenage boy looking to see sexy manga girls fight, you can do a whole lot better than this.  Like “Prison School,” for example.  It’s the story of five boys who wind up being the first male students admitted to the formerly all-girl Hachimitsu Academy.  They are Kiyoshi (relatively normal protagonist and reader stand-in), Shingo (relatively normal not-protagonist), Takehito a.k.a. “Gackt” (uber-serious socially awkward otaku), Jouji (pseudo-badass who spends most of his scenes coughing up blood from his mouth ulcers), and Andre (the fat guy with a goofy-ass character design).  All they want to do is talk to the girls, get to know them, and hopefully lose their virginities by the time they graduate.  Standing in their way are their varying levels of social awkwardness and the “Shadow Student Council.”

Made up of three elite members of the academy, they see it as their job to maintain order, discipline, and zero perviness between the men and women of the academy.  So after all the boys get busted for trying to peep on the girls in the shower (BECAUSE OF COURSE THEY DO!) they’re rounded up and put into a separate building in the middle of the academy.  A virtual “Prison School” if you will.

The key difference between this and “Freezing” is that “Prison School” doesn’t take itself seriously.  At all.  It knows exactly how dumb its setup and characters are and treats them with all due respect.  In one example, the rest of the boys turn on Kiyoshi after he stands up for them in the face of the sadistic discipline dished out by big-bosomed, short-skirted vice president Meiko.  As it turns out, they LIKED being tormented by this dominatrix and are even envious of Gackt when she sits on his face for further disciplinary action later on.  They’re less receptive of secretary Hana’s efforts as her kind exterior masks an ugly brutal side that likes to unleash her karate skills on these victims.  To add insult to injury, she wears shorts under her skirt instead of panties!

Things get even weirder and more perverse as the series goes on and we see president Mari’s ass-loving father, the weird bond Kiyoshi and Hana wind up sharing after he witnesses her “moment of weakness,” and the planning Kiyoshi and Gackt engage in to allow the former to escape during a weekend to go on a date.  Nobody in this series comes out looking like a paragon of virtue or intelligence and I’m actually looking forward to seeing just how much dumber the scenario can get.  To a certain extent.  The “date” storyline looks like it’s headed towards disaster, but in a fairly predictable way.  If it can surprise me, I’ll be impressed.  Also, Hiramoto mines a lot of “they’re not gay, but everyone thinks they are” humor that has long passed its sell-by date.  The sooner he works that stuff out of his system, the better for all of us.

“Prison School” also has an anime currently airing in Japan and simulcast out here.  After watching the first episode, I’d give the nod to the manga as its not-quite-as-naughty-as-you-think-they-are bits aren’t censored to sell blu-rays later on.  It’s dumb as a sack of hammers and some of it is just plain trash, but there’s enough self-awareness in it to make the humor work and the first volume to be entertaining more often than not.  For context, I can see the boys of “Prison School” really getting into a series like “Freezing,” learning all the wrong things from it, and then getting disciplined in hilariously sexual ways for their troubles.  That’s the only entertaining thing I can think of for that series, which is going straight to the “to sell” shelf.  I may break it out as an example from time to time, but this is the last review of a volume of “Freezing” you’ll read on this site.  Not so for “Prison School.”