Review: THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS

Ever since the runaway success of Attack on Titan, every manga publisher has been looking for their own version of The Next Big Thing in shonen.  Even Kodansha Comics isn't immune from this, despite the fact that they are the ones making money hand-over-fist from that franchise.  So does this series stand a chance at such a title, or is it just another pretender?

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS (Nanatsu no Taizai), by Nakaba Suzuki.  First published in 2012, and first published in North America in 2014.

PLOT:
The land of Brittania is under attack.  It had been under the protection of seven powerful knights known as the Seven Deadly Sins, but they all found themselves framed for the murder of the king.  Now the Order of the Holy Knights has taken over and forced the populace to serve them or die.  Princess Elizabeth managed to escape their clutches, only to fall down in exhaustion at a faraway tavern.  Luckily for her, the tavern is staffed by the pint-sized Melodias, who turns out to be one of the fugitive Seven Deadly Sins.  Now the two wander across Brittania in their quest to find the other Deadly Sins, clear their names, and save the kingdom.

STORY:
So, is this the Next Big Thing in shonen?  Well, from what I've seen here it's certainly a solid beginning.  I'm just not completely convinced that it's all that different from its competitors.

I definitely get the sense that more thought was put into the plot versus the characters.  We don't even learn all that much about Melodias over the course of the book, and he's the freaking main character!  All we know about him is a bit of his backstory and that despite his child-like looks, he's an adult with a taste for fanservice.  As you can imagine, if they can't bother to do that much with the lead, the supporting cast gets even less development.  I was really disappointed that Elizabeth was relegated to the Token Girl role so early on.  Once she sets the quest into motion, all she does is provide fanservice (since she's weirdly blasé about Melodias grabbing her boobs or looking at her panties) and appeal to the emotions of others while Melodias does the actual fighting.  It really shouldn't be that way, considering that she has just as much of a stake in this fight as Melodias does.

The plot itself takes a lot of cues from the usual fantasy tropes.  We have a team of supernatural warriors to assemble, a number of increasingly powerful bosses and minibosses to fight, and plenty of wacky adventure to fill the time in between the plot-relevant fights, and all of this is played perfectly straight.  The good folk are (mostly) wholesome and righteous, and those villains who are not pure, mustache-twirling examples of evil are played as goofy louts. Honestly, what this reminds me of most strongly is Dragon Ball.  Aside from the fact that the story centers on a short but powerful guy and a taller girl with an agenda of her own, both Dragon Ball and Seven Deadly Sins have the same sort of light and wacky tone, which helps to make this a fairly pleasant series to read.  Unfortunately, that's where the similarities in story ends.  Suzuka doesn't have the flair for strong personalities that Akira Toriyama did even in the early days of Dragon Ball, and that lack of personality is really what holds this series back from becoming the sensation it wants to be.

ART:
My Toriyama flashbacks didn't stop with the art.  Suzuki clearly takes artistic influence from him as well, and it's honestly a welcome change from the ugly, angular art that so typically defines modern shonen.  The character designs strike a very nice balance between handsome, grounded photorealism and the sort of rounded cartoony forms Toriyama used for the Dragon Quest series.  Shading is done mostly with hatching, which adds to the slightly unpolished quality of the art.  If the artwork has a fault, it's that it's sometimes too busy for its own good.  Suzuka will fill the panels full of tiny details, be it the messy shingles of an old roof or raucous tavern rooms full of celebrating people.  It's great for establishing a scene, but sometimes the characters seem to get lost in the crowd.  Worse still, Suzuka isn't all that great at drawing action.  He's good at perspective and visually communicating the crackle and spark of magic powers, but he's not so good at choreography.  As such, his fights don't flow well on the page and he tends to overcompensate with speed lines.  It's a shame, because good shonen often depends on good-looking fights to excite the readers.  I do believe that Suzuka has the potential to become a great manga artist.  If he can work on his fight scenes, then the series can truly begin to capture its artistic potential.

RATING:
While the story sticks to the standards, the artwork has a lot of potential.  The Seven Deadly Sins isn't quite yet the big hit it wants to be, but with time and care it could grow into that role.

This series is published by Kodansha Comics.  This series is ongoing in Japan, with 11 volumes currently available.  5 volumes have been published so far, and all are currently in print.  The series is also currently available digitally through Crunchyroll.

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Review: HATSUNE MIKU - UNOFFICIAL HATSUNE MIX

Dark Horse Comics have been in something of slump over the last couple of years.  While they are still acquiring new titles, few have made any sort of impression.  Even their CLAMP rereleases have slowed down to a trickle.  You can only imagine my surprise, then, to discover this book amongst the manga at my local library (second only to my surprise that it wasn't an artbook).  Having never been one for the Vocaloid fandom, I wondered if this collection might help me understand its appeal.  Oh, how little I knew then...

HATSUNE MIKU - UNOFFICIAL HATSUNE MIX (Meka Hikoshiki Hatsune Mikkusu), by Kei.  First published in 2008, and first published in North America in 2014.

PLOT:
Hatsune Miku and the rest of the Vocaloids are now the stars of their very own manga series, where they encounter everything from festivals to magic to poverty to celebrity, getting through the good times and the bad through the power of friendship and music.

STORY:
I've never understood the appeal of Hatsune Miku.  She's a corporate mascot, for god's sake.  She only exists to sell software (along with countless other goods these days), and she has no personality nor voice beyond what the fans and marketing teams produce.  Getting excited over her feels like getting excited over the Trix Rabbit or Charlie the Tuna.  In spite of that, Japan can't seem to get enough Miku.  They'll use her to sell just about anything under the sun, and they'll stick her in every form of media possible, including manga.  This one even went so far as to bring in Kei, the artist who created Miku's original design, to draw and write it.  It's too bad then that while he may be a perfectly fine character designer, he's a really terrible mangaka.

This is essentially one big short story collection, and all of them are self-contained.  This is a good thing because trying to make all of these stories fit a singular continuity would be nothing short of madness.  A story about the Vocaloids trying to earn money through wacky part-time jobs can easily be followed by a sob story where someone is sad or dying, which in turn might be followed by a story where summer cicadas have been replaced with tiny, chirping Mikus.  The shortness and disconnectedness of all these stories means that there's no space to spare for developing any sort of emotional depth or character building.  Instead the stories tend to rely on one of a few things.  They may be based around seasonal gimmicks like Doll Day or school festivals, feature humor that either requires in-depth knowledge about Vocaloid fandom or is pure randomness, or built on shallow melodrama.  Shockingly, the answer to just about every dilemma presented is "Miku sings a song and everyone is happy." 

The Vocaloids here don't have personalities so much as they have a small collection of quirks which are hammered into the reader's brain like so many nails.  Weirdly enough, our title character is probably the blandest of the lot.  Aside from her obsession with music, her personality shifts wildly depending on what the story needs her to do.  The rest are simply character types instead of characters: Len and Ren are child-like and mischievous, Luka is the gentle, motherly one, and Meiko is the drunk.  These quirks are used for humor, drama, and sometimes outright promotion, as more than a few of the later comics are meant to promote the Hatsune Miku video games.  No matter who is featured of what happens to them, everything is over in 12 pages or less, leaving only a feeling of annoyance and boredom.  After reading this, I'm now MORE confused about the appeal of the Vocaloids than ever before.

ART:
You'd think that considering the mangaka's background that he could figure out how to craft a good-looking comic.  Sadly, the actual manga art looks AWFUL.  It's in stark contrast to the many examples of color splash art, most of which look quite pretty.  Some are more painterly and other more digital, but they're full of fanciful costumes and warm colors and are generally nice to look at.  The manga itself, though, is flat and has been moe-blobbed to the extreme, verging upon super-deformed.  Expressions and actions are broad and stiff, and the backgrounds are mostly screentone.  Kei may be a perfectly fine artist on his own, but he can't tell a story visually to save his own life, and it's not like he can fall back on deep storytelling to carry the rest for him.

RATING:
I really shouldn't have been surprised to learn that a manga based on a mascot is shallow, annoying, and badly drawn.  This mix is best left on the shelf.

This series is published by Dark Horse.  The series is complete in Japan with 3 volumes.  These volumes have been released in a single omnibus, and is currently in print.

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Review: KINOKOINU MUSHROOM PUP

Well, let's kick off this month with a surprisingly sweet story from an equally surprising source - Digital Manga Press.  Most people know them either as a yaoi publisher or the folks who do all those Tezuka Kickstarters, but in recent years they've started building up a quiet little stash of heartwarming titles, ones deserving of more attention.

KINOKOINU - MUSHROOM PUP (Kinoko inu), by Kimama Aoboshi.  First published in 2010, and first published in North America in 2014.

PLOT:
Hotaru Yuyami is a broken man.  He's a popular storybook illustrator, but he's all but retreated from the world since the death of his beloved family dog Hanako.  He can't focus on his work, he doesn't want to talk to other people, and he can barely be bothered to sleep or eat on a regular basis.  His mourning is interrupted when a strange pink mushroom in the yard transforms into an equally strange pink dog that Hotaru dubs Mushroom Pup.  Together with Mushroom Pup, Hotaru's editor, and a mohawked mushroom enthusiast, Hotaru begins to emerge from his depression and move on with his life.

STORY:
If the description above didn't make it clear, this is kind of a strange story.  That being said, it's also a very simple and touching story, one not all that far removed from the storybooks that Hotaru creates. 

While it's clearly riffing on the 'boy and his dog' sort of stories, Kinokoinu is really more about coping with the death of a loved one.  At first, Hotaru's reaction seems bizarre.  While I wager that many of the people reading this know the pain of losing a well-loved pet, few of us would mourn them for months as they sunk into a deep depression.  Over time, though, we learn Hanako was all but family to him.  She's the last living connection he has to his parents and she was the only thing that could cheer him up after their deaths.  With her death, Hotaru is now truly alone in the world, and suddenly his sadness and disconnect from the world start to make more sense to the reader.

It's not all touchy-feely, though.  Clearly Mushroom Pup gives not the slightest of fucks as she employs some extreme methods for snapping Hotaru out of his funk.  She burns Hanako's things, she scribbles over Hotaru's manuscripts to force him to make a real effort, and even kicks him when he starts to lose himself in his memories.  Still, you can't argue with the results.  Bit by bit, Hotaru is forced to deal with the here and now and to reengage with the world.  Mushroom Pup might be destructive at times, but she ultimately does these things out of genuine love and concern for Hotaru.

At times it feels like Mushroom Pup got more development than the rest of the supporting cast, despite the fact that she never speaks a word.  We do get to know Hotaru's editor and Yara the mushroom expert a little and we also see them loosen up and bond with Hotaru under the influence of Mushroom Pup, but they don't really serve much purpose to the story beyond a bit of exposition and to serve as gentle cheerleaders for Hotaru.  Still, it all adds up to a story that's at once bittersweet yet wistful.  I wouldn't have expected such a moral from something that seemed so simple and cutesy, but this story is in its own way like a mushroom.  Under its strange exterior are some surprisingly deep and far-reaching roots.

ART:
Aoboshi's art is much like the title character itself, being both cute yet odd.  The character designs are flat and simple - once again, a style not all that dissimilar from Hotaru's own.  Still, there's a lot of charm in Hotaru's sleepy-eyed gaze or Yana's bottle-brush hair.  The human characters tend to be rather understated in their expressions and movements, but Mushroom Pup manages to get across a lot of her moods and meanings just through her body language or a well-timed close-up (despite the fact that Mushroom Pup's face rarely shifts expression).  The backgrounds are also quite plain, even a little claustrophobic since so much time is spent inside Hotaru's house.  Still, it does make for a good contrast for the few times he does go outside, and these moments usually coincide with major emotional moments in the story as well.  While I tend to prefer elaborate artwork in manga, it's stories like this that remind me that sometimes simplistic art can also be as emotional or beautiful as any masterpiece..

RATING:
Digital Manga Press really stumbled onto a gem with this weird yet touching tale of death, remembrance, and cute little mushroom dogs.

This series is published by Digital Manga Press.  This series is complete in Japan in 5 volumes.  2 volumes have been released so far and both are currently in print.

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

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Holiday Reviews & Giveaway!

Well, this year I'm shaking up the format a little.  Instead of 12 reviews, this year I'm doing one per day, 25 reviews in total.  Think of this like a manga review advent calendar - each day, instead of revealing a little toy or chocolate, I will reveal a new review of a new series from 2014.  Befitting this change in format, I'm also changing the giveaway prize.  Instead of a selection of books, I'm giving away a $25 gift certificate to RightStuf!!

What hasn't changed is how to enter the giveaway.  To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment below talking about the best manga series you read in 2014 before the end of Christmas Day.  New or old, short or long, it's doesn't matter - as long as it was new to you, it counts here.  The winner will be then chosen at random from the comments.  As such, don't be shy!  Let your voice be heard and maybe you'll be the one with $25 to spend on some manga of your own.

Review: JOAN

Before we all stuff ourselves silly with food, let's take a look at one last historical manga, an overlooked masterpiece from the creator of Gundam: The Origin.

JOAN, by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko.  First published in 1995, and first published in North America in 2001.

PLOT:
Emil (born Emily) is the orphaned illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Lorraine.  She was saved by one of the Duke's followers who disguised her as a boy to protect her identity.  Now Emil is a young woman who wants to fight for her country as well as to emulate her own personal hero, Joan of Arc.  Emil heads off to Tourelles to meet with the other nobles and officially pledge herself to the cause, guided by visions of Joan in various stages of her life.  When Emil gets there, she discovers that she has allied herself to the dauphin Louis, a noxious bully who wants only to claim the kingdom for himself.  Now Emil finds herself questioning everything that has driven her to this point, even her visions of Joan of Arc, wondering if she has tied herself to an ignoble cause.

STORY:
I was expecting this to be a simple retelling of the life of Joan of Arc.  While it does serve as a sort of biography, Joan is more focused on exploring how Joan's life affected the land and people left behind after her death.

Mind you, if anyone had to walk in Joan's footsteps, few are as qualified as Emil.  She is a steely and determined woman, one who is driven to protect her family, her identity, her homeland, and her king.  She is surprisingly unfazed by her visions of Joan, as Joan herself reflects on her life and urges Emil onward.  Is Emil having divine visions like Joan did herself, or is it all simply a figment of her imagination, a projection of her own beliefs and desires?  Yasuhiko seems determined to keep mum on the matter, letting the reader decide for themselves.  She certainly serves as contrast to those around her, the noble youth trying to convince her jaded elders of something greater than themselves.  In Emil many see the echoes of Joan, but any lofty ideals they might have held died with Joan, and now most are simply trying to survive.

Admittedly, this story will make a lot more sense to those who know something of the events of the Hundred Years' War.  The story does it best to keep the chain of events clear and the book is loaded with translation notes to explain who is who and what is what.  Nonetheless, it throws a lot of names and titles about without a lot of context, and without it some of the impact is lost as well.  In particular, a little research goes a long way towards giving context to our ostensible villain, that scheming little bastard Louis, first-born son of King Charles VII.  He quickly demonstrates himself to be a megalomaniacal bully, one that is hungry for power and fighting solely to prove that he is a better leader than his father the king.  Louis comes off as a cartoonish figure on the page, but history proves that Yasuhiko didn't take a great deal of liberty with him.  The real Louis was that much of a bastard, one who opposed his father to his dying day and at the time of the story really was plotting a rebellion against him.  Louis may want for a mustache to twirl in an evil manner, but you can't say that he was misrepresented.

Joan uses a tumultuous time in French history to show how people can be affected when a real hero dies.  To some the hero becomes inspiration; to other, that same hero becomes little more than a fond memory or just a name to exploit for their own cause.

ART:
The story is good, but the artwork is even better.  First and foremost, this series is published in full color, with large watercolored panels stretching cover to cover.  I especially liked his use of bold, monochrome washes of color to convey both mood and setting, be it the cold, dark purples and blues of the wilderness, the golden yellows of sunny days and happier times in the past, the sickly green of the big city, or the fiery oranges and red during times of turmoil and threat. 

The character designs are handsome and grounded, although Yasuhiko has always tended to make his villains more cartoony than his heroes.  As such, Louis and his allies tend to have larger, more slanted eyes and bigger, broader expressions.  He also has a hard time making his leads NOT look like Amuro Ray, as Emil looks essentially like a slightly softer version of him with a Prince Valiant haircut.  Still, he clearly put a lot of effort and research into making the backgrounds and costumes as historically accurate as possible, although he tends to let things get a bit more Impressionistic during Emil's visions.  Honestly, the only artwork here that doesn't work is the front cover, which is far too Spartan to appeal and doesn't begin to suggest the beauty that lies beneath it.

PRESENTATION:
Luckily, that plain cover is in fact a book jacket that can be removed.  Unluckily, the cover underneath is even more plain, featuring just the title over a light brown marble pattern.  As noted before, there are quite a few pages of notes and essays afterwards explaining various historical references in the story, the Hundred Years' War, and the life of Joan of Arc for some very necessary context.

RATING:
This is a great historical drama with equally magnificent art, and anyone interested in seeing what Yasuhiko can do outside of Gundam should check this series out.

This series was published by Comics One.  The series is complete in 3 volumes, and all are currently out of print

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