Review: FATE/ZERO

The only thing harder than adapting a TV to manga form is adapting a TV show based on a light novel which is a prequel to another TV series, which itself is an adaptation of a visual novel to a manga.

FATE/ZERO (Feito/Zero), based on the novel by Gen Urobuchi and Type-Moon, adapted by Shinjiro.  First published in 2010 and first published in North America in 2016.

PLOT:

Once every generation or so, a group of magically gifted organizations gather to wage war.  They summon magical warriors torn from the pages of legend and history to fight against one another.  The last one standing will win the Holy Grail and with it, the chance to have any single wish granted.  As the fourth Grail War begins, a few new contenters appear.  This includes a teenaged magic-user looking to prove himself, a murderous priest, and an assassin who hedges his bets with technology and guns.

Review: PRINCESS TUTU

Like last week's review, this is another adaptation of a beloved anime series from the 2000s (although it took a lot longer for this one to earn its acclaim).  Unlike that review, this one isn't a simple rehash of the source material...it's just a major downgrade.

PRINCESS TUTU (Purinsesu Chuchu), based on the story by Ikuko Itoh & Jun-ichi Satoh & art by Mizuo Shinonome.  First published in 2003 and first published in North America in 2004.

PLOT:

Ahiru is a clumsy girl who wants nothing more than to impress Mytho, a boy who is as handsome and gifted at ballet as he is sad and distant.  Edel, a local shop owner, gives Ahiru a pendant that allows her to transform into the magical Princess Tutu.  As Tutu, Ahiru can not only dance beautifully, but also salvage shards of Mytho's heart from monstrous creatures.  As Mytho's feelings return, Ahiru/Tutu finds herself in conflict with both Mytho's stern protector Fakir as well as the mysterious Princess Kraehe.

Review: GHOST IN THE SHELL - STAND ALONE COMPLEX

As network TV dives deep into reruns and reality shows, it's time for us to look at some TV-to-manga adaptations.  That's right, everything you'll see here is:

So let's start with one that started as a manga, became a TV show, and then became a manga again.

GHOST IN THE SHELL: STAND ALONE COMPLEX (Kokaku Kidotai Sutando Aron Conpurekkusu), adapted from the series by Yu Kinutani.  First published in 2009 and first published in North America in 2011.

PLOT:

In the futuristic world of New Port City, both bodies and minds can be digitized and mechanized at will.  This is something that not only civilians take advantage of, but criminals as well.  When such offenses are beyond the scope of the police, the shadowy government group known as Section 9 takes over.  Under the leadership of Major Matoko Kusanagi, the Section 9 team must work together to save the prime minister and his staff from a hostage situation while finding the mastermind behind it.

Review: STAR WARS: EPISODE ONE - THE PHANTOM MENACE

I started with a Star Wars manga, so naturally I had to end with one.  You see, it rhymes.  It's like poetry.

STAR WARS EPISODE ONE: THE PHANTOM MENACE, adapted from the film by Kia Asamiya.  First published in 1999 and first published in North America in 1999.

PLOT:

The planet of Naboo is on the verge of disaster thanks to a trade negotiation gone sour.  Their Queen, Amidala, decided to bring in a couple of Jedi Knights to help with the negotiations.  This fails epically for them, and after a few detours and one annoying Gungan they all find themselves sidetracked to the planet of Tatooine.  This in turn leads them to a slave boy named Anakin with a knack for podracing and the potential to become the most powerful Jedi of them all.

STORY:

First of all, I hope you all appreciate the fact I tried to distill the boring yet needlessly convoluted plot of The Phantom Menace to less than one paragraph.  Honestly, that's way more difficult than it really should be.  Secondly, despite the fact that this is a completely different film adapted by a completely different mangaka, this manga has the same problem as the one for A New Hope: it's a overly literal translation of the movie.  Unlike that one, though, this is an overly literal translation of a terrible movie.

I'm not shocking anyone by stating the obvious here: The Phantom Menace sucked.  It sucked in 1999, especially once the joys of the opening weekend passed and all we were left with were the dismal dregs and that one scene with Darth Maul.  It still sucks now, despite what the kids who grew up with these films might try to tell themselves.  It's badly written, it's boring, and very little of it has any impact on the later prequels, much less the larger universe of Star Wars.  You could fill several servers full of the thinkpieces, reviews, and alternate cuts that spawned from this film.  Sadly, all of that suckiness was successfully translated from the screen to the page. 

Actually, let me correct that: it successfully translates the suckiness of the first half of the film to the page.  Do we have all the tedious trade negotiation stuff?  Check!  Is there all of the nonsense with Jar-Jar and the Gungans?  You bet!  Do we still have to deal with overly chipper, precocious and virgin-birthed Anakin?  Yep!  At least there were moments and characters in A New Hope that people would have wanted to relieve in manga form.  There is none of that here, as it cuts off just shy of the podrace and all of the good action sequences happen during or after that point.  That means that like the previous Star Wars manga I covered, this one also ends up focusing on all of the most boring bits of its respective movie.

On top of all of that, you can add the complete and utter lack of character for the cast.  There are plenty of characters and they talk plenty, but there's no sense of emotion or character voice...at least, where the humanoid characters were concerned.  Asamiya seems to struggle far less with the various alien and robot characters.  If anything, he strives to accurately capture their lines (or in R2D2's case, transcribe his beeps).  This means that he and the translators go out of their way to accurately transcribe Jar-Jar's every single word.  Let me tell you, it doesn't get any less racist or annoying on the page!  Even I had forgotten just how omnipresent Jar-Jar is during this portion of the film.  Every panel he's in is sheer agony and he remains completely out of place in this super serious and stone-faced plot.

This is absolutely a product of its time, that time being that brief period in the summer of 1999 when Phantom Menace merchandise was inescapable and the ineptitude of the film hadn't quite sunk in for most.  It's the last time anyone would have wanted to relive it in manga form, especially when the manga in question is so literal and inept to begin with.

ART:

Hisao Takada's big flaw was being rather generic.  After reading this, though, I longed for his brand of artistic decency because Kia Asamiya is an ABYSSMAL artist.  This book might feature some of the stiffest artwork I've seen in a manga.  At best, he can draw maybe two sorts of faces: wide-eyed innocent and squinty-eyed older person.  Worst of all, they are all stuck on a perpetual expression of 'dull surprise.'  Regardless of whichever face he might be drawing, they are drawn in the crudest, most angular possible, and many of them have these weird hatchmarks that I suspect are meant to convey cheekbones but look more like wrinkles. 

He doesn't handle bodies any better, and that makes me dread of how precisely he would have handled the actual action scenes.  His paneling is simply too small and too stiff to even convey the fluidity of a swinging lightsaber.  There's no way he could ever capture the grandeur of all these exotic locations or Amidala's ridiculous wardrobe.  About the only thing he can draw competently are the aliens.  All of them are shockingly on-model, and if he wasn't working from reference materials or screenshots I would be shocked.   It's a shame that he couldn't bring any of that effort to anything else.

RATING:

This is a terrible manga adaptation of a terrible movie.  There is no charm, no originality, no beauty, and no sensible plot to be found here.  Even the most hardened Star Wars fans would dismiss this manga as completely unnecessary.  Not even the publisher bothered with the rest of this, so why should you?

This series was published by Dark Horse.  This series is complete in Japan with 2 volumes available.  One volume was published and is currently out of print.

Review: TIGER AND BUNNY

Maybe I've been picking too much on older adaptations.  Maybe in the intervening decade and a half (give or take) the manga world has figured out how to properly adapt a TV show to a manga.  At the very least, it might be picking better subjects for just such a treatment.

TIGER AND BUNNY (Taiga Ando Buni), based on the series by Sunrise, written by Masafumi Nishida, character designs by Masakazu Katsura, and adapted by Mizuki Sakakibara.  First published in 2012 and first published in North America in 2013.

PLOT:

In Sternbelt City, superheroes fight not in the name of justice, but in the name of the corporate sponsors that support them.  Their efforts are aired live on TV before an ever-eager audience and the heroes themselves are ranked like contestants on a reality show.  Some heroes have become incredibly popular under this system, but then there are others like Wild Tiger, a.k.a. Kotestu Koburagi.  His superpower is a short-term burst of super strength, but he's one of the few who cares more for saving people than looking good for the camera.  To improve his image, his producers decide to pair him with Wild Bunny, a.k.a. Barnaby Brooks Jr.  Barnaby is a newcomer with powers similar to Kotestu, but he chafes at the idea of a partner, much less one that teases him at every turn like Wild Tiger.  Nonetheless, the two must learn to work together to save the city from a fate far worse than any publicity stunt.

STORY:

Tiger and Bunny might be the first time I've seen a TV series adapted so smoothly into a manga.  I suspect the biggest reason for that is its unique premise.  After all, it's a series about superheroes fighting crime.  It's already like a comic book, albeit a Western one, so there's not a great deal you have to do to make that work on the page.

Kotetsu endears himself to the reader right off the bat.  He's snarky and a little fumbling in his ways, but he's also incredibly noble and selfless.  He's a rebel in a world where public image means everything, but he's also a good-hearted goofball when the costume comes off.  This makes him both incredibly easy to root for, a lot of fun to read about, and weirdly attractive to boot.  Of course, like any good comedy pairing or any good buddy cop drama (which this story basically is), Kotetsu needs a good foil.  He needs a straightman, the good cop to Kotetsu's bad cop, and Barnaby is a perfect fit for such a role.  He's more than a little vain and rather prissy, but he's also smart enough to think up strategies on the fly and do good detective work.  Putting these two together turns them into a fairly well-balanced pair that have plenty of potential for future drama as well as comedy.

Outside of these two, we don't see much of the other superheroes of this universe.  At most, we get to see some of their battles in passing.  While we do pick up a few bits and pieces of how superpowers work in this universe (in short, it's basically what you would get if you blended X-Men and The Incredibles), we don't really get to see what the other heroes are like when off-screen.  We've seen more of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that surround the heroes than we do of their own lives.  They have to deal with contracts, negotiations, promotional fluff like music singles, and even producers trying to affect ratings through their choices of when and where to focus the camera.  That leaves the obvious satire of these parts feeling a little empty, but maybe later volumes will do better on this front.  Still, it's off to a damn good start, as it gives the reader a good sense of who Kotetsu is, the world he inhabits, and the problems he will have to overcome, and it makes me want to watch the original to see how well the two match up.  It's doing precisely what a TV-to-manga adaptation should be doing and doing it quite well.

ART:

Sakakibara's artwork also does a good job of translating the show's look to the page.  Sakakibara is unusual in that while her background is primarily in animation (including working as a key animator on this series), she also has some experience with comics.  She not only did a manga adaptation of the Bayonetta movie, but also worked with Marvel for a while.   That means she's able to find a happy medium, incorporating the fluidity of animation with the ability to visually tell a story in comic form.  Of course, she did have the advantage of having some really good character designs to work with.  Masakazu Katsura is a name that's well-known to old-school manga fans, having created works like Video Girl Ai, I"s, and Zetman.  He's always been known for his fine (if rather fanservice-filled) artwork, and it's clear that his skills have not waned with the years.  All of the character designs here are handsome, well-rooted in reality, and positively stylish, right down to Kotetsu's snappy signature wardrobe or Barnaby's delicately winged hair.  The superhero costumes/mech suits are also fantastical and unique, ranging from Gatchaman-style suits to futuristic mech suits.  All of this looks great in action, as the fight scenes are nicely drawn and easy to follow.  When you put all of these elements together, you get a great looking manga that's fun and thrilling.  It's hard to tell how much of this is due solely to Sakakibara and how much of it is due to the rest of the production crew, but it's hard to argue with the results.

RATING:

It's hard to believe that Tiger and Bunny never took off here in the States.  It's good looking, it's got a premise that would be familiar to a lot of comic-reading Americans, and it's got a humorous, charming hero.  At least it can boast one of the best TV-to-manga adaptations you'll find on the market.

This series is published by Viz.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 9 volumes currently available.  7 volumes have been published and all are currently in print.

Review: EL HAZARD

This one is kind of personal for me.  El Hazard: The Magnificent World was an OVA I watched fairly early in my days of being an anime fan.  I enjoyed it then and still consider it a favorite now.  Hell, I wrote an entire article on the franchise!  I just wish this wasn't just yet another middling entry into the El Hazard franchise.

EL HAZARD: THE MAGNIFICENT WORLD (Shinpi no Sekai El Hazard), adapted from the OVA by Kidetomo Tsuburu.  First published in 1996 and first published in North America in 2002.

PLOT:

Makoto Mizuhara is your average high schooler.  He's nice, he's popular, he's not bad at chemistry, and when he first meet him he is being chased around his high school by former student council president Katsuhiro Jinnai.  Jinnai is ruthless, ambitious, and egotistical, and he blames Makoto for pretty much all his failings in life.  The only witnesses to this ridiculousness are Jinnai's sister Nanami and Mr. Fujisawa, a teacher and professional drunkard.  The chase is interrupted when a massive earthquake swallows them up and transports them to the magical world of El Hazard.  Most of the gang end up teaming up with the lovely princess Rune Venus and a trio of elemental priestesses, all of whom are trying to defend the land against the large, insect-like Bugrom who fight under Jinnai's command.  Now both sides are fighting to be the first ones to reach an ancient weapon known only as the Demon God Ifurita.

STORY:

Even more so than my review of Escaflowne, it's going to be really hard for me to be impartial here. The original OVA works in part because it takes a lot of common elements, shakes them up with a vaguely Arabian theme, and makes it all work in a harmonious manner.  It's a sort of alchemy that's hard to recapture (as the many sequels demonstrate), and that goes double for a comic version.  This doesn't even have the excuse of being a previous concept like Escaflowne's manga; this one came out between the release of the final episode of the original El Hazard OVA and the premiere of The Wanderers TV series.  That means that it's in a bit of a no-man's-land as far as continuity goes and is free to pick and chose whatever bits from both it likes, and that pick-and-choose quality leaves the adaptation as a whole feeling muddled.

I don't mind that they tried to condense the story; lots of TV-to-manga adaptations do that, and I'd sooner have it condensed than stretched out with filler.  He doesn't mess too much with the events of the story as a whole and he even managed to capture some of the humor of the show, which is always a plus.  I definitely don't mind that they went with a version of Makoto that's closer to the TV show than the OVA, as the show did try a bit harder to give Makoto something resembling a personality by making him a bit of a science geek and a bit more aware of the harem-like hijinks going on around him.  It's just a shame that Makoto's tiny bit of development comes at the cost of the rest of the cast. 

Some simply get shorted on screentime like Mr. Fujisawa does.  Others get overly simplified, as Jinnai is turned from a well-balanced comic villain to a Snidley Whiplash-esque buffoon.  Sadly, it's the supporting female cast that gets the worst of it.  It seems Tsuburu decided to stick with the show's interpretation of Princess Rune Venus.  That means she's little more than a wibbly little damsel there only to become Makoto's love interest.  Even Diva, Queen of the Bugrom, gets a similar treatment, as she becomes little more than Jinnai's ditzy sidekick.  Tsuburu might have had his choice of what bits and pieces of characterization he wanted for the cast, but most of the time he chose very poorly and it really damages what is otherwise a fun adventure story.

ART:

Again, Tsuburu doesn't mess too much with the look of El Hazard, save for the fact that this is one of the last works Viz released flipped.  Most of the character designs are in line with the ones used on the TV show, and he gives them a rubbery sort of broadness that works really well with the more comic characters.  The panels are surprisingly large and spacious, but Tsuburu tends to settle for halos of speedlines instead of actual backgrounds.  El Hazard is supposed to be a vast and exotic world, but you can't really tell that from this adaptation.  The action is crisply rendered and the only thing that gets in its way are the huge, translated sound effects.  Overall, the art is consistent if not terribly remarkable. 

PRESENTATION:

It seems even the folks at Viz were aware of the confusing quality of the El Hazard continuity, as there's a character guide in the back that details some of the differences between the OVA, TV, and manga versions of the main cast. 

RATING:

The El Hazard manga isn't necessarily a bad adaptation, just an uneven and uninspired one.  The few changes that are made are to the story's detriment and the artwork is merely ho-hum.  Even for a franchise that's mostly made up of forgettable entries, this one may be the most forgettable and unnecessary of them all.

This series was published by Viz.  This series is complete in Japan with three volumes available.  All three were published and are currently out of print.

Review: STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE

This month we're shaking up things a little and doing a little bit of spring cleaning when it comes to the themes.  That's why I'm dusting off an old theme for this month:

Now, for the sake of easiness variety we're going to open this up a little to include movie-to-manga and OVA-to-manga adaptations as well.  We're going to kick thing off with one of the rarer instances of movie-to-manga, one where the movie isn't anime but instead a Western movie.  In fact, it's one of the most popular movies of all time.

STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE (Star Wars Episode 4: Aratanaru Kibo), adapted by Hisao Tamaki.  First published in 1997 and first published in North America in 1998.

PLOT:

In a galaxy far, far away, a young farm boy named Luke discovers that his two new droids are carrying a secret....

I'm sorry,but do I really need to summarize this one?  Honestly, the only way at this point you aren't familiar with the basic plot points of A New Hope is to be either a very young child or if you have purposefully removed yourself from the world, preferably by literally living under a rock.  Even if by some small miracle you haven't actually watched the film, you almost certainly have seen it referenced or parodied in various other forms of media.  This was just as true at the time of this manga's release as it is now.  The only difference is that the hype around Star Wars wasn't coming from a new film, but instead the Japanese release of the special editions of the original trilogy.  Honestly, though, the real reason that I don't need to summarize this manga is that this manga IS the film.

This might be one of the most literally movie-to-manga adaptations I've come across in my time.  Line for line, shot for shot, this manga is a match for the original film.  The amount of panels that feature something that wasn't originally in the movie (special edition or otherwise) could be counted on your hand with some fingers to spare.   If you have seen this movie, you know precisely what and when everything is going to happen in this manga.  It also takes its sweet time adapting that movie, as this volume only covers roughly the first quarter of the movie.  That means we get a few glimpses of Darth Vader, but most of our time is spent watching Luke, Obi Wan and the droids wander around the dusty wastes of Tatooine.  So if you want all the exciting stuff - Han, Chewie, Mos Eisley, the Death Star, the Battle of Yavin - you have to read the later volumes.  I just have to wonder why anyone would bother with a manga that's basically the same as the movie but stretched out over multiple volumes.  At that point, you might as well cut to the chase and just watch the movie.

ART:

I will grant Hisao Tamaki this much: he's a decent artist.  He does try to capture the actors' likeness as much as possible, although the closer he gets to the main cast the more the characters start to look cute in an anime-friendly sort of way.  What few action pieces can be found here are nicely captured, although his tendency to use speedlines does tend to obscure the action and dramatic angles a little.  Once again, though, Tamaki isn't really doing anything you couldn't get from the movie.  Many panels are a shot-for-shot recreation of a scene.  The only difference between them and the movie is that they were flipped because this is a Dark Horse manga from the 90s and that was simply what was done back then.  He also has the most generic artstyle ever.  He might be the first manga artist I've seen whose art actually looks like something straight out of those bargain-bin "How To Draw Manga" books.  It's all fairly appealing and competent, but it lacks any sort of personality or visual flair.  It's telling that the cover art (provided by Western comic artist Adam Warren, of Empowered fame) is more distinct and energetic than the artwork within the book.  Once again, you'd be better off just watching the movie.  Well, that or looking up manga-styled fanart on DeviantArt. 

RATING:
I can't give this book a red light if simply because it's adapting a great movie and does a decent, if rather literal, job at it.  That being said, it's such a literal translation that it renders itself kind of pointless by merely existing.  Even hardcore Star Wars fans will likely regard this as nothing more than a curiosity.

This series was published by Dark Horse.  This series is complete in Japan with four volumes available.  All four volumes were published and all are currently out of print.

Review: GANKUTSUOU: THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO

Let's bring the subject matter back to something closer to the present, and something unique even for this month.  What we have here is an adaptation of an adapation of a literary classic:

GANKUTSUOU (The King of the Cavern): THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, adapted from the series by Studio GONZO, written and drawn by Mahiro Maeda.  First published in 2005, and first published in North America in 2008.

STORY:
Albert, the scion of a noble family, has come with his best friend Franz to celebrate Carnival on the lunar city Luna.  It is there that Albert meets the mysterious and compelling Count of Monte Cristo, who saves the young man in turn.  Months later, Albert learns that the Count is coming to meet his family and their circle of peers in Paris, but none of them are aware of the Count's true purpose for coming.  The Count's past is tied to a man named Edmond Dantes and the three men who betrayed him: a powerful judge, a wealthy baron, and the influential general who married Edmond's fiancée.  Albert wants friendship with the Count, but the Count is only after one thing: revenge.

PLOT:
Gankutsuou is a rare sort of adaptation.  It's very ostensibly removed from the Alexandre Dumas novel that inspired it, what with all the spaceships and lunar colonies and whatnot.  At the same time, it retained the complexities of the novel, and many have declared the series a better adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo than most television and film adaptation could ever be.

Admittedly, the combination of sci-fi and Ye Olde France isn't an entirely smooth one.  People may party on Luna instead of Paris or ride in spaceships instead of carriages, but somehow the systems of power and class remain the same as they were in the past.  Still, the setting isn't what draws the reader to the story.  No, it's the characters that do that, and the Count in particular.  In an interesting twist, the story is not told through the Count, but through naïve, gullible Albert.  You almost can't help but feel a little sorry for him, because it's quite apparent from early on that Albert is the sort who is easily led by the stronger personalities of his friends, family, and the Count.  At the same time, you want to smack him for being so dumb at times, and when he starts fighting with Franz or his tomboyish fiancée Eugenie you wish the story would go back to the Count.

Nonetheless, it's a clever move to switch the protagonist from the Count to Albert, because it allows the Count to retain his mystery and allure.  The reader is left in much the same place as Albert, fascinated by the glimpses and tidbits we can gleam about the Count.  Of course, the reader has an advantage that Albert and the others do not.  The last third of the volume is an extended flashback to the Count's days as Edmond Dantes.  We see the plot against him, we see his downfall, and we witness his descent into madness and despair.  With that knowledge before us, all of the Count's interactions before and afterwards becomes something darker and more twisted.  We get to see the Count as a sort of game master, and behold his manipulations of others.  Poor Albert may not have a chance against such a force of personality, but that doesn't mean that it isn't thrilling to watch.

This all sounds grand, but the biggest problem is that Maeda can't really take credit for most of it.  Since so much has been preserved from the book, much of the credit in turn goes to Dumas.  Maeda and company might have changed the setting and the focus, but what they've done is little more than placing a beautiful gem in a new setting.  Sure, the new setting may highlight different qualities and reflect light in different ways, but they weren't the ones who cut and faceted the gem in the first place.  At the very least, these changes don't do anything to diminish the beauty and perfection of the original.  Instead, they highlight its own natural charms and complexities.

ART:
It's hard enough to avoid turning any review of a show-turned-manga into 'well, the show did this, but the manga does that!'  It's harder still to do so when talking about the art, and hardest of all when the show is as visually distinct as Gankutsuou.   It's often held up as one of the best shows ever produced by Studio GONZO, a lush combination of traditional and 3D animation, one where the characters seemingly drift through seas of color and patterns.  Such visual lushness is a challenge to transcribe from the screen to the panel, and on all fronts Maeda fails.

To be honest, it looks unfinished.  While the character designs from the show are retained, they are drawn in rough, sketchy lines.  Facial features disappear and reappear on a whim, and the only shading comes from rough hatching.  Everything just looks so flat and drab.  The only point where any sort of visual imagination is when Edmond starts going mad, and the world around him melts and swirls about him.  It starts with mere visions of his nightmares, but by the end it devolves into abstract expressions of his very emotions, flickering in and out of the oppressive darkness.  It's an incredibly powerful and evocative set of images, and the contrast is all the more stark when it's compared to all the other tall, plain panels full of talking heads.

As I first read this, I felt like I was reading more of a storyboard than a manga.  It was only after I finished and started doing some research that this feeling was explained.  Maeda isn't a mangaka by trade, but instead an animator.   He started out with Studio Gainax in the days of Royal Space Force and Gunbuster.  He's worked on OVAs of all sorts, ranging from Giant Robo to Gunsmith Cats to Doomed Megalopolis.  Most recently, he directed Evangelion 3.33.  It's a safe bet to call him a good animator.  The problem is that being a good animator isn't the same as being a good comic artist.  An animation storyboard isn't necessarily meant to be smoothly read.  It's meant to just be a visual outline of a scene, one that the rest of the animation staff will fill out as needed.  A manga creator may be doing the same thing with a page - tell a story through a series of images - but they don't have the luxury of 24 frames per second to fill out all those images.  They only have so many pages to get their point across, so every panel needs to be both visually appealing and easy to follow to achieve that.  Sadly, for all the skills that Maeda has, he can't quite translate them to comic form.

RATING:
The story remains brilliant, but the poor art drags it down mightily.  Stick with the show if you want to enjoy this particular version as it was meant to be consumed.

This series was published by Del-Ray.  All 3 volumes were published, and all are currently out of print.

You can purchase manga like this and much more through RightStuf.com!

Review: MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM 0079

Today we're making a hard shift in topic, going from moe economics to old-school mecha action.  Today's review isn't even the first manga series based on this series, coming 15 years after the original series, but did that time gap help save a manga series that was:

MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM 0079 (Kido Senshi Gandamu), based on the series created by Yoshiyuki Tomino and Hajime Yatate with art by Kazuhisa Kondo.  First published in 1994, and first published in North America in 2000.

PLOT:

It is Universal Century year 0079.  Earth is locked in a war with the Republic of Zeon, a moon colony that wishes not only for independence, but dominance.  The battle has been rough and bloody, but Zeon maintains its edge through the use of Zaku, giant piloted battle robots, along with the guidance of the legendary pilot Char Aznoble.  During one of those battles, a young boy called Amuro Ray stumbles upon the Earth force's secret weapon - a piloted robot of their own, the Gundam.  Now Amuro must join the war and fight if both he and his shipmates are to survive.

STORY:

Call me crazy, but I always thought that something adapted from another form of media - say, a TV show - should be able to stand on its own.  In a perfect world, it would even be able to explore interesting new angles or expand upon the universe of the original source material.  That's what makes this version of Mobile Suit Gundam so disappointing, because it reads more like a storyboard or an illustrated episode breakdown instead of a stand-alone story.

If the story here were told any more stiffly, it would be completely stagnant.  There's no sense of flow from panel to panel, much less from scene to scene.  People come and go, battles zoom by, and the whole thing is infused with an air of tedium.  You almost wonder at times if Kondo is simply rushing through the whole thing just for the sake of getting it done before a deadline.  The rush not only hurts the pacing, but the characters as well.  Amuro seems to be the only one with anything resembling a character arc, and that's mostly just him going from bland to pissy halfway through because how dare a ship full of soldiers expect him to behave like a soldier when he's the only one who can pilot a military weapon?  Even then, all it takes to get him out of his funk is a well-earned slap from Fraw Bow (easily my favorite part of the book).  Still, that's enough to distinguish him from the rest, who display no personality at all.  Honestly, if it weren't for the character guide at the front of the volume I wouldn't know who half of these people were. 

ART:

The action scenes fare no better than the rest.  You could pose a bunch of assembled model kits with backgrounds drawn in crayon and that would still be more dynamic and expansive than the battles seen on the pages here.  That same stiffness extends to the fights, and worse still everything is crammed into small, seemingly inflexible panels.  As such, you never get a sense of scale.  You could easily forget that these are GIANT FREAKING ROBOTS fighting in OUTER FREAKING SPACE.  Honestly, there's only one thing that Kando can seem to do right, and that is draw a proper Gundam.  He lavishes detail upon the Gundam, the Zakus, and even the spaceships.  If only he could have done the same for the characters.  Someone should have told him that he really didn't need to replicate the crappiness of the original series' animation.  Many of the characters look only half-drawn, and they frequently go off-model.  It's weird to think that this particular manga came out in the mid 1990s, because it's so cheap and sloppy that you would think it was done while the series was originally on air, back in 1979. 

Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 is just a failure on every front.  It doesn't engage the reader by drawing them into the drama of the One Year War.  It doesn't delight them with stunning visuals, allowing to savor all the different robots and the epic space battles.  It's just dull, beginning to end.

PRESENTATION:
At leas the folks at Viz tried to give this story some context.  As noted before, there's a character guide at the front to sort out who's who.  There's also a timeline that goes into the Universal Century as well as the One Year War, a necessity for a series that's loaded with backstory but not always willing to share it with the newcomers.  Also, as was true for many older Viz titles, the artwork here is flipped.

RATING:
If you're looking for a manga about Mobile Suit Gundam, stick with Gundam: The Origin and leave this half-assed tie-in on the shelf. 

This series was published by Viz.  The series is complete in Japan with 12 available volumes.  9 volumes were published, and are now out of print.

You can purchase manga like this and much more through RightStuf.com!

Review: SPICE AND WOLF

It's summertime, which means that the broadcast networks seasons have been over for a number of weeks.  As the days grow longer and hotter and you seek solace indoors, it seems all you can find is reruns.  This month I'm running with that idea, at least as closely as you can in manga.  While many an anime series is based on a manga, there are also quite a few manga which are adapted from a television series, and those are what I'll be looking at this month.  Just remember that everything you see this month is:

SPICE AND WOLF (Okami to Koshinryo), based on the light novel series by Isuna Hasekura, with character designs by Jyuu Ayakura and art by Keito Koume.  First published in 2007, and first published in North America in 2010.

PLOT:
Kraft Lawrence is a travelling merchant who wanders the world in hopes of making his fortune.  During a visit to a farming village, he discovers a naked girl in his cart bearing wolf ears and a tail.  She claims to be Holo the Wise Wolf, a harvest goddess looking to return to her far northern homeland.  She offers to provide her companionship and wisdom to Lawrence in return for a trip home.  Now Lawrence has both a new partner as well as a new opportunity to make some serious profit.

STORY:
So, does the Spice and Wolf manga add anything that either the light novels or animated series didn't already possess?  Nope!  Mind you, that's not the worst thing possible, because Spice and Wolf is thankfully anchored around a great couple, and this adaptation does nothing to harm that.

Holo is easily the more dynamic of the two.  She is playful and teasing, but she can also be wise, insightful, and even wistful, and as a character she's incredibly engaging.  Mind you, Lawrence is no slacker in the personality department himself.  He's flustered by Holo initially, but he soon learns to give and take with Holo's teasing, and he also learns that Holo's keen ears and innate ability to read body language makes her just as valuable as a partner as she is for casual conversation.  That's good, because they sure do engage in a lot of it - Lawrence can easily go on for pages at a time on some given economic or trade practice.  It's something of a signature for this series, but it's also something of a love/hate sort of thing.  You have to either accept it as is or skim over those parts.

The setting is rather vague on the details.  It seems to be some sort of medieval world, complete with what is TOTALLY not the Catholic Church suppressing the old pagan ways.  Still, we never get a date or a country name.  It's a world where hot peppers ( a New World plant) is an expensive luxury, and the most advanced science appears to be economics.  I guess the focus here is less on world building and more about building the relationship between Holo and Lawrence.  Clearly we're building this towards a romance, but the story wisely keeps the tension to a low, low simmer - just enough to tease, but never enough to derail the story momentum.

It's a shame that the artwork couldn't make as elegant of a transition as the story.  While Koume is clearly trying to stay close to Ayakura's original designs, he's clearly put these characters through the moeblob filter.  Faces are bigger, rounder, simpler, with lots of blushing, and more attention is lavished on Holo's nipples than anything else.  Yeah, that mature rating on the cover is there for a reason - Holo spends the first third of the volume naked.  They even print her big entrance in full color, which wouldn't be remarkable except for the fact that it comes many pages into the book and it's rare to see color pages in North American manga outside of the very beginning.  It's certainly indicative of where the artist's priorities are, and sadly they really aren't on the economics.

PRESENTATION:
In a savvy bit of cross-promotion, there's an excerpt from the light novel version of Spice and Wolf.

RATING:
This manga doesn't really add anything to the story and the art is something of a downgrade, but it's still a solid romance with a touch of fantasy and a lot of economics.

This series is published by Yen Press.  This series is ongoing in Japan, with 10 volumes available.  8 volumes have been published so far, and all are currently in print.

You can purchase this volume and many more like it through RightStuf.com!