Review: MERMAN IN MY TUB

It's April, so in honor of the fourth month of the year let's take a look at some 4-koma manga!  Now I could start out with the obvious choice here, but instead I was going to look at a more modern example of successful 4-koma manga.

Then I remembered that I had already reviewed Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun.

No matter, though!  I remembered that there was another amusing 4-koma that came out last year, albeit one that flew far further under the radar.

MERMAN IN MY TUB (Orenchi no Furo Jijo), by Itokichi. First published in 2011 and first published in North America in 2015.

PLOT:

Tatsumi thought he was just saving some random blond guy washed up on the riverside.  He didn't expect that man to be a literal merman.  He certainly didn't expect said merman (named Wakasa) to take up residence in Tatsumi's bathtub so he can eat Tatsumi's food, read magazines, and generally get overly giddy about the luxuries of everyday human life.  Things only get more complicated as Wakasa's other half-sea creature friends start showing up, along with Tatsumi's extremely possessive little sister.

STORY:

I actually reviewed this series a while back for seasonal reviews over at Infinite Rainy Day.  It had its ups and downs, but I did generally like it.  That being said, I would have never expected its source material to come out in English until Seven Seas picked it up.  Upon review, my opinion of this first volume is pretty much the same one I had of its animated counterpart.  It can be kind of irregular in quality, but it does land a good gag here and there and is weirdly endearing and cozy in its own right.

Tatsumi isn't so much a protagonist as he is a straightman.  After a while, his underreaction to...well, pretty much everything becomes a gag onto itself.  I can live with that, as it's a welcome relief from the standard manzai set-up that so many comedy manga like to use.  The real star of the manga is Wakasa, and Itokichi gets a lot of mileage out of this single character.  You get a lot of the expected fish-out-of-water jokes (pun not intended) and some of them are quite amusing, but he does get to be more than just mere comic relief.  Yes, Wakasa is childish and naïve, but he's a genuinely good-hearted soul who simply cannot contain his enthusiasm for the world around him and tries his best to share that enthusiasm with Tatsumi.  Amazingly, the relationship between Tatsumi and Wakasa is NOT played up for fujo fanservice.  This premise would seem to lend itself to a lot of slashiness, but aside from a few gags here and there (including one that evokes tentacle rape of all things), but it's one of the few places where the writing practices some real restraint.  That helps to keep the focus on the funny and not the shipping.

Still, this premise would have swiftly become boring and claustrophobic if it focused solely on Tatsumi and Wakasa.  That's why it was a good idea on Itokichi's part to regularly keep adding new half-fish people one at a time, and each of them brings their own flavor of humor.  There's half-octopus Takasu, who is handy with his tentacles; jellyfish-man Mizuni, who is calm, gentle, and forgetful; and tiny half-hermit crab Maki, who is reclusive and prickly but good at keeping the tub clean.  Again, the jokes aren't necessarily complex, but the jokes focus more on the personalities of the fishmen and not just loud wackiness.  There's only one addition to the cast that doesn't work: Tatsumi's little sister Kasumi.  Her only gag is that she's an insanely jealous little imouto, complete with all the awkward fanservice that tends to come with that role anymore.  These gags are not only incredibly awkward, but they don't fit the light tone of the story at all. I don't know why Itokichi felt the need to add this unneeded bit of otaku humor when the story (such as it is) works so much better without it.

Merman In My Tub is not necessarily the kind of manga that will leave you regularly laughing out loud, but it every so often make you smile and even feel a little warm and fuzzy.  It's got a great balance of humor and heart, little sister gags not withstanding, and the 4-koma format keeps the gags coming without getting stale.  Good 4-komas are not common, but this one manages to edge its way into that select group.

 ART:

4-koma manga is a format that doesn't demand great art, and Itokichi keeps things fairly modest because of that.  If the art has any particular problem, it's that the character designs (Tatsumi and Wakasa in particular) are rather overdesigned for such small, modest panels.  Wakasa in particular has this bizarre blond hair cone on the back of his head that never fails to baffle me.  At least she is very good at capturing Wakasa's liveliness on the page.  She loves to draw his big goofy expressions, moments of superdeformed reactions, and his tail thrashing around in involuntary glee.The characters tend to be rather tightly packed into the panels, Itokichi does liven things up through the use of crazy angles and the odd bit of dramatic lighting.  After all, there is only so much any artist can do when 90% of their story takes place inside a single, ordinary Japanese bathroom, but Itokichi manages to make the most of her limitations.

RATING:

Merman In My Tub manages to become more than pure fangirl bait by putting some care into the characters, some variety in the humor, and adding a little bit of heart to the whole thing.

This series is published by Seven Seas.  This series is ongoing in Japan with five volumes available.  Three volumes have been published and all are currently in print.

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.