Merry Month of Manga Review: THE WORLD EXISTS FOR ME

Kunihiko Ikuhara is indisputably one of the greatest anime directors working today.  He helped shape the original Sailor Moon into the classic it is today, and on his own he helmed Revolutionary Girl Utena, Mawaru Penguindrum, and most recently Yuri Kuma Arashi, all of which are masterpieces in their own right.  It's hard to believe that anything he touched could be less than perfect, but today's review shows that even he has some off-days.

THE WORLD EXISTS FOR ME ( S to M no Sekai), written by Be-Papas & art by Chiho Saito.  First published in 2002, and first published in North America in 2005.

PLOT:

Sekai is on a school trip to France, and she takes this opportunity to finally confess her love to her handsome classmate Midou.  At the moment he rejects her, the train crashes, but this is only the beginning of Sekai's problems.  A lovely blond boy carrying an equally lovely doll saves her, and together they are whisked through time and space to Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV.  Sekai is accused of being a witch, but is saved by Machiavello, a mysterious and seductive man with a strong resemblance to Midou.  Sekai is transported yet again to the time of Joan of Arc, where she learns that she part of a much larger fight.  Sekai seems to be the prize in a battle that involves the boy, the man, the devil, and a magical book known only as the Book of S & M, and it will take all her wits to survive.

STORY:

Oh, Ikuhara.  You can try to hide all you like behind the Be-Papas label you used for the Utena production staff, but your signature ideas and motifs are all over this manga.  As you would expect from him, all of those ideas and motifs are interesting, but they haven't been woven into a cohesive narrative here.  It feels like he's just making things up as he goes, and that's a bad plan when it comes to manga.

Let me see if I can make sense of what goes on in this volume, which would be more than Ikuhara does.  Sekai is the middle of a holy war between a literal angel and devil.  Sekai herself possesses some unspecified power that is connected to the magic book, which both sides want to reunite for their own desires.  It sounds simple enough in theory, but in execution it's a mess.  Part of the problem is that Sekai herself is terribly uninteresting, serving little more as the rope in the tug of war between Souveil (the angelic boy) and Machiavello (the devilish seducer).  She's also the prize in the contest, as both declare their love for her, even as Machiavello tries to bed her so he can touch her soul gem.  That's not a double entendre, although I don't blame you for reading it that way.  Anyway, Sekai is a character that is completely without agency and the only relatable thing about her is the confusion she feels over what is happening to her.

I don't blame her for being confused, as the time travelling doesn't seem to add much to the story.  It feels a little bit like we're being taken through French history's greatest hits, as we breeze through Versailles and the Affair of the Poisons, only to spirit itself away to the Hundred Years' War and Gilles de Rais.  Why does this happen?  Who knows!  The story never specifies what all these different points in history have to do with the whole Book of S & M nonsense.  It all starts to congeal into a pile of nonsense.  The World Exists For Me might be beautiful and occasionally intriguing, but it's nonsense all the same and it would need a strong hand and a strong direction to turn into something coherent.

ART:

Like the story, the artwork has a lot of ideas but it's not able to tie them together into something whole.  I suspect that in this case, the problem is that there are simply too many cooks in the kitchen.  In addition to Saito providing the art, there's also a separate costume designer, and I'd be shocked if Ikuhara didn't supplement some artistic ideas of his own.  At least Saito's character designs are lovely, if a bit simplistic, and she certainly has a way with drawing bedroom eyes.  I suspect that the character designer got a bit of a workout during the Baroque era sections, as the costumes are suitably beautiful, distinct, and surprisingly historically accurate.  I just wish she had toned things down with Sekai's school uniform, as it's a horrendous explosion of frills.  The chaos of the story seems to bleed into the art as well, as the pages are full of layered panels and the characters seem to leap in and out of their panels.  It's all terribly pretty and precious, but again it needed a strong direction and maybe a few less people to find its way.

RATING:

The World Exists For Me feels half-finished, like Ikuhara and company had a bunch of ideas for a manga and they just threw them all on the page before they had hashed out who was who and what was what.  It's a beautiful, intriguing, but ultimately incoherent mess of a manga.

This series was published by Tokyopop.  This series is complete in Japan, with 2 volumes available.  Both volumes were published and are currently out of print.

Merry Month of Manga Review: ALICHINO

Some manga were never meant to be great stories.  Some were meant to be artistic showcases, with just enough story to string the images together.  Today's review is a prime example of this.

ALICHINO (Arikino), by Kouyu Shurei.  First published in 1998, and first published in North America in 2005.

PLOT:

Alichino are stunningly beautiful and ethereal beings that can grant a human's greatest wish or desire, but they are also predatory creatures that exploit human suffering so that they might consume human souls.  Thus, when a young girl stumbles upon handsome yet sad visage of Tsugiri, she believes him to be an alichino.  The truth is far more complicated, though.  Tsugiri is not an alichino, but he holds within him a terrible power that draws alichino to him, and he is forced to confront a dark past which he had presumed long forgotten.

STORY:

Alichino isn't necessarily a bad fantasy story, but neither does it feel like the beginning of a complete one.  It's got one or two interesting ideas to work with, but it takes its sweet time putting those ideas into action.

The biggest problem is that there's a lot of backstory to get out of the way in this first volume and Shurei's solution for getting that across is through seemingly endless conversations.  This wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that she also plays coy with actual, solid information about Tsugiri and his friends until the last third of the volume.  That means the first two-thirds is frustratingly vague while the last third is all but vomiting backstory and motivation upon the reader.  I could have lived with that had the main characters been compelling figures in their own right, but even after we learn their backstory they remain dull, lifeless creatures.  Tsugiri and his housemate Enju are so stoic and mopey that they can barely leave their house most of the time, while Myobi is kind of a sociopath, regardless of whether she takes the form of a girl or an owl.  Still, at least they got the benefit of names; the girl that kicks the story off doesn't even get that much going for her.

The concept of the alichino is an interesting one in theory - creatures with the look of an angel but the minds and diets of a demon.  They're not to be meant to be explicitly evil, but instead merely predators looking to survive.  It's a shame then that Shurei keeps contradicting this idea by having every alichino save for Myobi be conniving, wicked figures actively seeking to exploit humans, especially Tsugiri.  Tsugiri, on the other hand, is the Chosen One, albeit the worst sort of Chosen One possible.  He is a kusabi, a human who basically serves as living alichino bait.  To the alichino, he's a tasty treat that will grant them incredible powers.  To humans, he's an avatar of disaster, bringing death in his wake, and it was only through the intervention of his mother and a mysterious man that he survived to adulthood.  What this means for him now is that Tsugiri is a mopey bastard who mostly stays in his house and argues with Myobi.  Our hero everyone - a miserable recluse!  Honestly, the only character with any spark of life to them was Myobi.  She is an alichino but has chosen to overlook her basic instincts and become Tsugiri's friend and protector.  Why does she do this?  I wish we found out, because doing so would have been more interesting than the monster-of-the-week format that most of the volume follows. 

Alichino has some good ideas and a good character or two lurking within it, but it lacks life and momentum and needs to parcel out its backstory in a more evenhanded manner instead of dumping exposition and long flashbacks onto the reader.  If Shurei could find that sort of balance, then she might just have something interesting here.

ART:

Of course, Shurei isn't known for her storytelling, but for her art, and it's easy to see why she would be so acclaimed.  Her character designs are exquisite, with loads of finely textured hair and clothes, androgynous faces, and dark, doll-like eyes that seem to burn straight through the page.  Her characters reminds me strongly of the works of Yoshitaka Amano or Ayami Kojima.  The only problem with that is that to maintain that highly detailed sort of Gothic beauty, Shurei had to sacrifice the cast's ability to emote.  When combined with the fairly static story, it makes the whole cast come off like a collection of beautiful corpses drifting through the pages.  It's a suitably Gothic notion in theory, but it only adds to the inernt plot.

There's no life to be found anywhere within the world of her manga.  The backgrounds are just as well-rendered as the characters, but they're drowning in darkness and lack any sense of personality.  She does at least know how to frame her art for best effect.  She keeps her page composition quite simple to keep the focus on all those beautiful faces, and she makes very effective use of dark space and vertical frames.  Still, the manga itself can't compare to the color artwork they included.  It's full of cool blues, blacks, and purples contrasting against warm pastels alongside Art Nouveau flourishes.  It's just a shame that she can't breath that same sort of life into her black and white art.  Alichino can be a marvel to look at, but when it comes to visual storytelling it tended to leave me cold.

RATING:

Alichino truly is one of those manga that you should read more for the art than the story.  The art is intricate (if a bit lifeless), and it might be enough for some to gloss over the story's inert pacing and infodumping.

This series was published by Tokyopop.  This series is complete in Japan with 3 volumes available.  All 3 were published and are currently out of print.

Merry Month of Manga Review: WARNING! WHISPERS OF LOVE

I've encountered a lot of yaoi short story anthologies during my time here, but they never really impressed me.  So often they truly are just random grab-bags of story scraps, too short to make any impact or do anything interesting.  Today's selection is one of the very rare exceptions to that trend, and a very welcome one at that.

WARNING! WHISPERS OF LOVE (Koi no Mimi Yori Chuiho), by Puku Okayama.  First published in 2010, and first published in North America in 2011. 

PLOT:

This whimsical collection of boys' love stories cover revolves around three couples: two boys caught in a cat-and-mouse game centered on ear cleaning, a short-term sublease that turns two roommates into a warm and cozy couple, and the love between a teenage boy, his boyfriend, and his boyfriend's rambunctious little corgi.

STORY:

"Whimsical" is not a word I would commonly use for a BL collection, no more often than I would sincerely use the word "funny."  Yet those are the two most apt words to describe Warning! Whispers of Love.  It comes off less like a traditional collection of BL stories and more like a collection of slightly slashy shonen slice-of-life stories, and each one is full of charm.

The tone is set straight away with the titular story, where incoming freshman Hajime has to avoid the overly attentive attentions of his sempai Nagisa, whose seemingly perfect appearance belies his obsession with ear cleaning.  This is something that will come off as rather strange to most American readers, where at most ear cleaning is something done on a whim with a Q-tip.  In Japan it can be a more formalized act, complete with special tools, and it's an action that's meant to be both caring and intimate, someone one can only do with their loved ones and family.  Not surprisingly, this leads to a lot of suggestive jokes, but that's about as raunchy as this story ever gets.  More time is spent watching these two chase each other around school like cartoon characters than there is spent on their budding and awkward romance.  It helps that the comedy is well-executed, as Okayama has a great sense of comic timing.  She knows when to let things get silly, when to hold on a reaction for maximum laughs, how to keep the jokes fresh, and when to reign things in to allow for a bit of emotion.  She also keeps the story structure loose and fast, which is why it plays out more like a slice-of-life story than anything else.

The two stories in the middle aren't quite as strong or as funny as the ones that bookend the collection, but both are enjoyable in their own right.  The first, "My Room," features Shino the musician and his accidental roommate Sato, whose gratitude to Shino for getting a place to stay turns to devotion as he learns more about the man.  Shino in turn has to come to terms with his own feelings and relationship with Sato.  The second, "Beyond the Lens," concerns childhood friends Hiro and Ryu.  They were separated during junior high, and when they meet up again in high school they discover that their feelings for one another go beyond mere friendship.  Here Okuyama isn't going for laughs but instead for warm and fuzzy feelings.  Both of these stories aren't as lively or as focused as some of the others, but are still satisfying and sweet in their own right.

It all ends on a strong note with "Tomorrow, Dog Day, Sunny & Clear."  It's the story of Yochi and his boyfriend Keiichi, and more specifically with Keiichi trying to compete with Yochi's pet corgi Dog for Yochi's attention.  Yes, the corgi is named Dog and that's both bizarre and lazy, but I'm a sucker for corgis and watching poor Keiichi grapple with this dense yet adorable dog never gets old.  If anything, Dog tends to steal the show with his Frisbee chasing and his trick of 'kissing' (read: headbutting) Keiichi.  Of course, that may be because the boys' relationship is so low-key.  Their relationship doesn't change in any way shape or form, and they're only vaguely established as a couple in the first place.  Still, this story was great fun to read and I was even a little disappointed that it was so short.

Warning! Whispers of Love is a funny little marvel of an anthology.  Okuyama is great with both comedy and romance, and gets a lot of both out of some otherwise ordinary premises.  The beginnings and endings tend to be a bit vague, but the stories onto themselves are so engaging that they could go on forever and never get dull.  In a genre that's so full of drama and self-serious smut, this book serves as a sweet and endearing palate cleanser.

ART:

Okuyama's art style is highly unusual for BL.  Her art isn't as heavily stylized and shoujo-fied as most yaoi artists tend to be.  If anything, her artistic sensibilities are closer to that of Hideyuki Azuma (Azumanga Daioh, Yotsuba) or Masakazu Ishiguro (Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru) than your standard BL artist.  Her characters are delicately rendered, but they're rounded, clean and simple in design.  They're also terribly cute in a casual, boyish way, and I kind of adore how she draws Dog with this realistic corgi body and a face that verges on an emoji.  This is a fairly chatty collection of stories, so instead of backgrounds she tends to make do with a bit of screentone or some super-deformed reaction going on in the background.  I feel like her art style would be more engaging to a general audience then a lot of BL art tends to be and it fits the tone of her stories beautifully.

RATING:

I had picked this up during the last RightStuf  holiday sale mostly because it was cheap, but in doing so I discovered a true diamond in the rough.  This collection features some of the most entertaining BL I've read in a long time thanks to its unconventional art style and great sense of humor.  Don't wait for the next holiday sale to pick this one up.

This book was published by Digital Manga Publishing.  It is currently in print.

Merry Month of Manga Review: REVENGE OF MOUFLON

Raijin Comics was one of the many failed manga distributors of the 2000s manga boom, and they were only known for three things:

    1.  Their full-color editions of Fist of the North Star
    2.  Being the first publisher to put out Slam Dunk
    3.  For publishing weird old manga and manga that simply felt old, like today's selection.

REVENGE OF MOUFLON (Hofuku no Mouflon), written by Ueno Jiro & art by Ono Yochiro.  First published in 2002, and first published in North America in 2004.

PLOT:

Sano Yohei is a popular TV comedian who got into a bit of trouble when he punched a politician in public.  Right now, though, that scandal is the least of his problems.  His flight ends up being hijacked by terrorists who intend to crash the plane into the middle of Tokyo to create financial ruin and chaos.  After the terrorists flee, Sano is the only one who can fly the plane to safety, but only if the Diet and the US Air Force don't try to take the plane down first!

STORY:

It's kind of sad to think that this manga was about the most current and topical thing that Raijin could lay claim to during their short run; most of their manga dated from the 80s and 90s.  It's certainly topical for its time, as it was all about politics and terrorism, but it's also kind of histrionic, melodramatic, and meant more to glorify the martial spirit of Glorious Nippon than tell a good story.

When I think back on this volume, there are a few things that stand out in my mind.  The first and most notable thing is that EVERYONE IS CONSTANTLY SCREAMING IN THIS BOOK!  Sano, the other passengers, the politicians, the military brass, just everyone is shouting in fear, anger, confusion, or shock.  All this shouting makes everything feel hysterical after a while, whether any given scene is meant to be or not.  The second is that the sheep metaphor is hammered in the reader so often and so thoroughly that it loses all meaning.  The title refers to the mouflon, a species of wild sheep that lives in the mountainous regions of central Asia.  More than once, Sano or one of the other supporting characters liken themselves and Japan as a whole to the mouflon, being proud and independent instead of placid and docile like domestic sheep.  It's a perfectly fine metaphor if not an entirely original idea.  It's just that after the third or fourth time that someone declared that they're not just some dumb sheep I wanted to scream.  It gets to the point where a flight attendant promises to name her unborn child with the characters for mouflon, that's how unsubtle that metaphor gets.

Finally, there's this manga's idea of what constitutes political commentary.  Like a lot of Japanese media, it shows that while Japanese people are perfectly aware of terrorism, especially in the years immediately following 9/11, but that they didn't quite grasp WHY terrorism happened.  It's very strange that for all the fuss they create, the terrorists never reveal why they take over the plane.  It's true - the plot hinges on a plan that is entirely based on the educated guesses of outsiders.  The terrorists take over the plane, only to leave without a single explanation to anyone on the plane or anyone outside of it.  The only thing we ever learn about them is that they can't be fundamentalists because they speak Japanese.  Those aren't my words - those come straight from the manga.  That's a rather naïve statement, as it presumably refers to Islamic fundamentalists, but they could just as easily be political or social fundamentalists, if not just random madmen.  Hell, they could even be ex-employees trying to bring down their former company with a massive scandal!  Why not?  It's just as plausible as "create worldwide financial panic."

The story also doesn't think much of either Japanese politicians or the US military, considering that it treats both parties like monsters that are determined to kill innocent people for the sake of maintaining the status quo.  A smarter manga might have used such a dilemma as a way to explore morality and whether sacrificing the plane for the sake of the greater good would be a necessary evil or not.  Instead, Jiro uses this as the starting point for a massive international conspiracy against the nation of Japan, and one that can only be defeated by the common people coming together to stand up to their oppressors.  This plot veers dangerously close to propaganda at points, riding high on the nationalistic sentiment and hot topics of 2002.  It's just that 13 years later, we can recognize those sentiments as hysterical and paranoid and they simply do not hold up.

ART:

Yochiro isn't a bad artist, but his style seems to be an odd match for such serious subject matter.  The characters look and act like over-the-top shonen characters, with huge gaping mouths, bugging eyes, and gritted teeth.  In fact, everything seems to be over-the-top here.  The panels feature lots of low dramatic and frequently Dutch angles, and speedlines are all over the place.  Sure, the action itself is well-drawn, and the backgrounds are nicely traced from real world reference, but it doesn't do anything to help ground all these overacting characters, and it all just adds to the hysterical tone of the story.

RATING:

Revenge of Mouflon wants to be a daring political thriller, but it's too melodramatic and paranoid to resonate with foreign audiences, much less modern ones.  It feels less like an overlooked classic and more like an embarrassing artifact of its time.

This series was released by Raijin Comics.  This series is complete in Japan, with 7 volumes available.  2 volumes were published and both are currently out of print.

Merry Month of Manga Review: THE BETRAYAL KNOWS MY NAME

I rant a fair bit about typical shoujo being nothing but milquetoast schoolroom romances, but there's another sort of shoujo story that's just as common and just as boring.  They tend to involve some fantasy or supernatural elements, maybe a touch of fujoshi fanservice, and a lot of confusing mythology and terminology, and today's review is all too typical of these sorts of stories.

THE BETRAYAL KNOWS MY NAME (Uragiri wa Boku no Namae o Shitteiru), by Hotaru Odagiri.  First published in 2005, and first published in North America in 2011.

PLOT:

Yuki's life has always been one full of strife.  Orphaned and unpopular, he nonetheless soldiers his way through life through his unending kindness and good will.  Soon enough, though, he finds himself wanted by all sorts of people.  There's the demon-possessed classmate that wants to kill him, the long-lost half-brother that wants to bring Yuki into their magical clan, and the dark and mysterious Zess who wants only to protect Yuki from the world.  Yuki discovers that he possesses potent magical powers, and he must use them to find his purpose and place in the world.

STORY:

Few things are as tedious as bad shoujo stories, and The Betrayal Knows My Name is a perfect example of just that.  It's a stew of shoujo and supernatural clichés that have been mixed into the graphic novel equivalent of dull grey sludge, and honestly I think would rather have read some actual dull grey sludge.

The only novel thing about Yuki is that it's unusual to see a male shoujo lead act like such a spineless jellyfish of a person.  I swear that a third of this first omnibus is spent inside Yuki's inner monologue, where he rambles on endlessly about how he doesn't have anyone in his life and how sad that makes him or how making friends and having others care for him make him so happy.  Yuki is the sort who is all too willing to martyr himself for others, which means he's also the sort who willingly walks into obvious danger without a plan because of friendship.  He's even willing to go so far as to forgive his aggressors almost instantly because he's that much of an idiot just that gentle and good!  The story treats him like a princess, sometimes more literally than usual.  It's implied that he was a girl in a previous life, he's kept inside a giant mansion that might as well be a castle, he's even called Yuki-sama like a princess.  Yuki couldn't be any more of a passive figure in his own story unless he was comatose, and I couldn't have cared  less about the fact that the story treats him like a chew toy for others to play with.

Yuki at least gets the benefit of some backstory and purpose, however nebulously it may be defined.  It's still a lot more than the rest of the cast can lay claim to.  Yuki's brother is there mostly to glance over his glasses and spew exposition, and the rest of their clan does nothing but fill up space.  Zess (who randomly gets renamed Luka) is your stereotypically dark and broody dude who is there to loom over Yuki in a vaguely suggestive manner.  Even the villains are vague, being little more than weird little demon creatures that turn nameless NPCs into raving loonies.  Most of the cast is so forgettable that I could barely keep track of who was who as I read it.  These aren't characters - hell, they're barely even archetypes.  They're just a bunch of automatons going through the motions of a horrendously confusing plot.

Well, maybe the word "plot" is too generous for what goes on here.  It's far too unfocused to be a proper and straightforward plot.  It starts off as some sort of supernatural action piece, only to shift hard into some slice-of-life nonsense when Yuki meets his clan, only to shift again into a school-based storyline where Yuki murmurs to himself about friendship and how it makes him so happy (even as it starts to make me feel so nauseous).  Of course, he and everyone else will happily stop to throw loads of made-up terminology at the reader.  There's so much of it that they had to include a glossary, and that glossary is the only way that anyone could bring any rhyme or reason to it all.  I can't recall the last time I read a manga like this, one that was so fundamentally broken on every level.  Nothing works, nothing is developed well in any manner, and there is no pleasure on these pages, not even the guilty sort.

ART:

I should have guessed that someone who would write such a sloppy story would have equally sloppy, stiff, and amateurish art.  Odagiri is mostly known for yaoi works like Only the Ring Finger Knows, and she brings that same level of quality to this work.  That means all the characters have the same cookie-cutter, pointy-chinned, cat-eyed face and the same lanky bodies, complete with orangutan arms and creepy, spidery hands.  Often the only way to distinguish characters is by their distinct yet universally awful haystacks of hair or by their barely buttoned Hot Topic wardrobes. 

The sloppiness doesn't end with the characters.  The action scenes are badly obscured by sound effects, screen tones, and masses of jagged beams of mystical power.  The pages and panels alike are assembled in a haphazard manner, and Odagiri loves nothing more than filing up her pages with narrow vertical panels full of vague inner monologues.  That's another problem with the art - no one ever shuts up, and the art suffers for it.  The panels are stuffed frame to frame with talking and thinking, and it often turns the panels into a series of talking heads.  Some manga can make that approach work, but not one that's meant to be about demons and gods and whatever else is meant to be going on here.  Much like the story, the art work going through the motions of the genre without any understanding or skill applied.

RATING:

I have a hard time believing that this sold as well as it has when it's such a ridiculous mess from cover to cover.  Not one thing is done well, as the story is incoherent and dull and the art is laughably bad.  It's a betrayal of good sense, good taste, and everything that makes a manga good in the first place.

This series is published by Yen Press.  This series is complete in Japan with 11 volumes available.  This series was released in 2-in-1 omnibuses, and all are currently in print.