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I've been reading an absolute truckload of Bleach lately. I've never read it in it's entirety before, and now I'm deep in the Thousand Year Blood War Arc.

In my eyes the high points of Bleach have always been the character designs and unique abilities they bring to the table - sometimes at the expense of the plot, sure, but the characters look stylish.

It's amazing that Kubo came up with so many unique character designs in the series up through the Soul Society Arc - making characters stand out even in the same uniform is always tricky, but I don't think it's a controversial statement to say that his arrancar designs, in particular the designs of the Espada, are the design peak of the series. I'm keen to pick apart each one, discuss what I love (and what I hate) about each one.

I'll be counting down the list from the next post, and I'll be starting with the Novena Espada, Aaroniero Arrurruerie - my favourite example of Kubo's nonsense names.

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Bite-sized Takahashi - Came the Mirror & Other Tales

I absolutely love Rumiko Takahashi’s work. She’s one of the most famous mangaka out there and is so incredibly versatile. I’ve heaped praise onto the idea of short story collections earlier in this blog, and yeah it’s great to see the same thing for Rumiko Takahashi. Came the Mirror is one of the Rumic World collections, printed in 2015 in Japan and 2022 in English. I’d love to see some of the earlier Rumic World or Rumic Theatre collections get reprinted in English in future.

In my eyes, Takahashi is a master of working across genres and Came the Mirror has bits of everything. The titular chapter is more a horror story, there’s absurdist comedy and then there’s two idiots with feelings for each other being pushed together by supernatural forces - a Takahashi classic.

The third chapter The Star with a Thousand Faces is my favourite of the bunch. It’s a wild nonsensical comedy where everything that happens is caused by a misunderstanding, another Takahashi classic.

That’s not to say it’s all perfect. Some these one shots are pretty thin ideas, and you can see why they weren’t revisited and fleshed out into full stories. In particular, Lovely Flower has an exceptionally weak ending in my eyes.

The last chapter’s a cute little story of Rumiko Takahashi and Mitsuru Adachi recounting their journeys of becoming artists and talking about their shared history. Mitsuru Adachi is another artist I’m quite fond of, so he might be one getting a write up here sooner or later.

All in all it’s always nice reading some no-stakes one-shots from an artist I admire.

Long live the queen of manga.

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Please return my pancreas and my time - trying to digest I Want to Eat Your Pancreas

There’s an elegance to a well executed coming-of-age story. Watching a character grow and evolve and take their place in the world around them can be inspiring or at least provoke some thought. I was recently looking for something short and well received to read and noticed I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. Two volumes, ten chapters, seemed perfect. This is something I can read through in one sitting. Award winning, tugs the heartstrings, fantastic title - it all seemed perfect.

I really disliked this series.

It’s poised around a big meaningful message that it delivers in the last third, but it feels completely hollow to me. The main character is aggressively bland. I know he’s meant to be this way, it’s entirely the point of the series, but he’s such a generic blank slate downer. Our female lead - who suffers from a mysterious pancreatic illness and whose name I cannot remember - exists only to teach this mopey loser a lesson, which she’s decided to do for a fairly flimsy reason. If the story had centered more around her and her struggles I think I’d have liked the series more, but really she may as well have been a figment of the main character’s imagination.

The ‘twist’ in the last couple chapters - lord almighty. I understand that it’s there to add to the message of living your life because you don’t know what will happen but it just rang hollow to me. It also robs us of the chance to watch the characters properly confront her illness along with the rest of her family and her actual friends. The whole thing feels like missed potential all round, generic moments to tug at the heartstrings.

The art is fine, nothing to complain about here.

Maybe I’ve consumed this in the wrong medium. I Want to Eat Your Pancreas is a juggernaut. It was originally a novel, and in addition to the manga adaptation it’s had a live action film and a full animated film. Maybe the prose of the novel would have been beautiful enough to move me, or the combination of movement and a beautiful soundtrack would have added to the atmosphere. I don’t know, but I’m not going to give this series a second chance.

Ikoku Nikki (Different Country Diary) is another coming of age story that also deals with loss and has been absolutely beautiful, although the loss occurs before the series starts. Solanin is an all-timer and will squarely hit anyone unsure in their journey from early adulthood to adult adulthood.

Two outta five stars.

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Comfort foods and a comfort read - Bambino!

As I write this, I’m currently 75 chapters into Bambino!, a cooking/slice of life manga written and illustrated by Sekiya Tetsuji. I started reading today and have absolutely stormed through it. Bambino! (the exclamation point is always a part of the title) follows the journey of Shogo Ban as he goes from apprentice chef and university student to, well...apprentice chef and university dropout. Known as Bambi or Bambino by literally everyone he encounters, Ban manages to explore every section of Trattoria Baccanale, a traditional Italian restaurant situated in Roppongi Hills.

This is my third read through of Bambino in the last five years and it’s an incredibly approachable manga. The characters are bold and recognisable, the art is realistic and you feel for Bambi as he’s journey and hits a variety of roadbumps. I’ve never worked in hospitalities, but the series paints a vivid picture of working in a restaurant.

That’s not to say that this is a perfect work of art. I’ll start with a minor nitpick, for a food based series, the imagery of the meals themselves sometimes look a little muddled. It’s not pure food porn imagery like some other similar series. More importantly though, the common criticism is the story, the ending in particular. There’s a twist in the final stages that’s poorly executed and something that ends the series on a sour note. Sure, it sets itself up for the sequel, but man, it really could have done it in a better way.

Overall I think it’s a good read. It’s a really well realised universe, the characters and setting are really vivid and it’s incredibly easy to read. There is a sequel series - Bambino! Secondo. It’s unfortunately sitting half-finished in scanlation purgatory. As someone that wants to see Ban’s story completed, count this as another vote to continue the translation.

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Shonen Monday-Funday #4

Well it’s Wednesday again.

At least this is coming out on the same week. It’s a real pity it’s taken me a couple of weeks to come out with this one because this was a solid Shonen Jump week. Solid without being overwhelmingly good, but that’s fine - if every chapter in the magazine was a banger, we’d lose some of the overall nature of the banger itself.

Full disclosure - I’m up to date on every title coming out in the Shonen Jump app aside from Jujutsu Kaisen (I know, I know), Mission: Yozakura Family(I’ve started on it and...it’s fine) and Me & Roboco (I don;t feel like I’m missing much after reading a few chapters), so I can’t count those three titles.

Luckily I don’t need to think much about what I’m missing out on, because this weeks best chapter in Jump belongs to the multi-time King of Manga, One Piece. Despite running since the universe came in to being, One Piece still has it. Never lost it, really.

We pick up on Chapter 1015: Chains (jesus that’s so many) and we’re surely nearing the end of the Wano arc, and everything has completely degenerated into chaos. Fights are breaking out everywhere, there are more named characters that are actually paying an important role in the story running around than you can shake a stick at, and serious shit is happening. After the shock of Luffy losing last week, it’s up to the rest of the invading force to rally from that shock. Kaido once again proves to be one of the biggest villains in the series, and we get great character moments from Momonosuke & Law. This chapter also sets up some great fights we’ll see coming up soon as well.

Sanji also kicks a dinosaur, so that pretty much makes this chapter worth the cost of entry by itself.

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Shonen Monday-Funday #3

Nothing like starting a new series and then abandoning it after two attempts. Oops. This marks the first Shonen Monday-Funday to actually be attempted on a Monday, so hopefully this is the start of a new trend, but really who knows.

Shonen Jump continues to barrel into 2021 with some solid titles and some engaging stories overall. The Wano arc in One Piece begins to have more and more consequences, I have no idea what’s going on with Undead Unluck anymore, but it’s still readable and Black Clover has a quiet down chapter after last weeks incredible hype moments.

Nine Dragons Ball Parade continues to drag for me. Yeah OK, there was a time-skip at the end that will allow the plot to actually start, but it did very little with the 18 or so pages it had before. As I said previously, I’m a big fan of shonen sports manga, so I’m hoping that it manages to succeed. There’s potential in every series that gets axed early, but it’s so obvious in sports manga - I don’t really want to see another Beast Children or Robot x Laserbeam (both of which I think I was enjoying more than Nine Dragons right now)

Mashle pushed itself to the top of Shonen Jump this week in my opinion with a fantastic chapter. Mashle probably needs little introduction at this rate, it’s an excellent series with incredibly strong comedy and surprisingly good action. The concept of “what if Harry Potter was jacked” has proven versatile, and the plot is basic, but it’s hitting the beats well. Chapter 64: Dot, Lance, and how babies are made, picks up in the middle of a bad guy invasion during a tournament, a classic shonen trope. We’re in the middle of combat and thanks to the powers of an enemy wizard, Dot and Lance end up being turned into babies. Incredible. The comedy value of the normally loud delinquent archetype Dot and the stoic rich kid archetype Lance racing around as babies is unmatched, and watching them fight off their baby-driven instincts to scoop up toys is genius. The fact that neither baby can understand the other (because of course they can’t) is a nice comedic touch as well. Lance ends up saving the day by being massively overpowered, but this is acceptable in the Mash universe. We also didn’t see the two transform back into teenagers unless I’m mistaken, so there’s some good comedy potential still available. The chapter also nicely sets up the next one, with Mash and our main villain staring down each other, preparing for a showdown, but unfortunately Mash has forgotten everything about the bad guy.

Classic Mash.

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Shonen Monday-Funday #2

Well it’s still technically happening on a Wednesday.

This was a pretty solid week for Shonen Jump. One Piece continues with the utter chaos that is the Wano arc, Mashle is effortlessly both hilarious and hype and My Hero Academia drops some pretty major plot revelations in a chapter that was probably a strong #2 this week. A dishonorable mention unfortunately goes to Nine Dragons’ Ball Parade in this issue. Sports manga are probably my secret weakness, I’m a gigantic sucker for a well told sports story, and Ball Parade has been pretty slow out of the gates in my opinion. Gathering a team from scratch is a great sports manga set-up, but everything in the last two chapters could have been accomplished far more quickly.

Enough of the bad, and on to the good. This week, my favourite chapter I read in Shonen Jump came from Phantom Seer. Launched in August 2020, Phantom Seer was always going to have a rough time of it. Appearing a week after the short-lived (and pretty bad) Bone Collection was cancelled, it initially looked like competition to the superior Jujutsu Kaisen. Both series do run in the same kind of supernatural/exorcism battle series playground, but Phantom Seer has a dedication to horror art that sets it apart a bit.

So what made this week the best chapter in Jump? Chapter 26: The Way the Tengu Master Fights, is a really solid, well put together action chapter. It features a couple of supporting characters taking on a new villain, continuing their fight from last chapter. It shows more character depth for Kenma Oigawa, the titular Tengu Master - although there’s still plenty to be explored, and I’d love to learn why he has such as deep connection to his Tengu familiars. After some very solid action scenes, showing our two heroes getting the upper hand through clever use of the Tengu, we get a stellar villain reveal, with the Puppet Master villain showing us the true puppeteer behind the fight.

Phantom Seer is at its best when it’s showing the true horror of the supernatural monsters that its heroes wield in combat. It’s able to inject creepy drawings (not that creepy though, this is still a Jump title) into solid action to great effect and this chapter did a great job of setting up a villain to be vanquished in subsequent chapters

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Shonen Monday-Funday #1

Earlier this week to my absolute horror I discovered that I was up to date on nearly every single title that’s currently running in the Shonen Jump app.

I’m going to update this every Monday morning, when new chapters are released for me on the app, and talk about the best or most interesting chapter of the weekly releases. I thought about also using this format to write about the worst chapter, but I have a feeling it’ll just be endless weeks of ranting about “i tell c” until that manga gets cancelled - it’s just absolute garbage, with a terrible premise, generic art and weak mysteries - the death knell for a detective series.

Anyway, enough about that.

Kicking off this segment is Magu-chan: God of Destruction, chapter 33: Encounter in a Winter Wonderland.

I love Magu-chan. It’s an incredibly fun gag-manga about a quirky middle-schooler Ruru, and her pet eldritch abomination, the adorably squishy Magu Menueku, the God of Destruction and First Pillar of Chaos. It’s a pretty light and breezy series that follows various elder gods as they misunderstand modern society and undertake wacky comedy hijinx in different settings. Think Sgt Frog  but with godlike squid instead of alien frogs. At only 33 chapters it’s easy to speed through the entire series as it’s pretty light on plot (in a good way).

Chapter 33 looks to be a customary winter episode. Ruru wins tickets to a ski resort and heads there with her friend Ren and his mother, as well as Ren’s companion god, the complete loser Naputaaku. This is exactly the kind of set-up we’ve seen previous Magu-chan chapters, characters travel to a new environment, comedic misunderstandings and wacky hijinx ensue and Magu-chan ends up blowing up a mountain and we all head home safely and nothing has changed the end.

The twist here is that the chapter doesn’t resolve itself neatly by the end. After some light escapades including Ren embarrassing himself once again, Magu-chan ends up rolling down the mountain as a snow-boulder (hilarious), and he and Ruru encounter another elder god - The Third Pillar, Muscar of Fate. Unlike the others, Muscar looks like a human, a child in cloak with hair ominously draped over one eye. Muscar creates a snowstorm which blows away Ruru’s other friends, leaving Magu-chan and Ruru standing there as Muscar declares, in a pretty obviously sinister way, that he simply wants to be Magu-chan’s friend. You can practically hear the spooky music playing as the camera closes in on Muscar.

This chapter topped the list for me this week as I think it could lead the series in a very new direction. It hews pretty closely to the formula so far, but hints at future plot developments. I’m keen to see where Kei Kamiki goes with this. Do we end up with an all-new serious Magu-chan? Are we a battle series now, Zatch Bell but with squid? It would also be pretty easy to back off, and push Muscar into the comedy basket along with the rest of the cast, and I’d be OK with that too.

Well, that’s Shonen Monday-Funday #1 wrapped up. Next week, let’s see if we can get this done with less preamble and actually on a Monday!

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Seeing through a Vision Quest in The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott

So here’s another quite outburst of Things What I Done Just Read. I’ve just put down a copy of The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott by Zoe Thorogood, and wanted to capture some thoughts on it quickly.

The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott is a 200ish page graphic novel that was published in 2020. It’s the debut work of Zoe Thorogood, who according to the book is 21, and according to her twitter is vision impaired, having had gradually deteriorating vision since the age of 4. It captures two incredibly rough weeks in the life of Billie Scott, an artist in her early twenties who suffers a detached retina after an assault, and is told that she’ll go completely blind in a short period of time. Following a drunken pep-talk with housemates she barely knows, she decides to go on a journey to paint ten portraits to use in the gallery exhibition she has just been accepted for. She’s woefully unprepared, but this act is sort of a preventative measure taken to avoid sitting alone and imploding, as self-destructive and dangerous as it is.

The story kind of darts around between Billie’s encounters with different people, but if you were new to living on the street your life would be pretty chaotic too, so it’s fitting. A series of new people (and one dog) gradually round out the ten portraits on her journey, and new relationships are built and shattered.

The art is good – I liked it. Look, I’m aware that I’ve just put out a phenomenally bland statement there but it was good – I wasn’t blown away but I don’t think I needed to be. I’m trying to think of who the art reminds me of, Paul Pope maybe? It’s certainly detailed, and the coloring is great. The book uses a muted color palette, and sticks with black & white, adding in an accent color for certain pages. I don’t know if there’s a theme to it, red pages mean this and blue pages mean that, but it helps create the tone that Zoe Thorogood is going for.

One thing that I liked about the story is that it’s not a touching ode to someone grappling with their impending disability. There’s a space for stories like that, and there are some really excellent examples (as an aside I’ve heard phenomenal things about The Sound of Metal and I really need to carve out some time to see it), but not every story about disability needs to cover this territory. The message that the author wants us to take away is that art is meaningful, and that we should attempt to create whenever we can. Art will change the world. This isn’t subtext, by the way, this is literally text and it’s spelled out for us in the last few pages by Billie.

Adding in Billie’s portraits at the end is a nice touch. The epilogue wraps things up perhaps a little too cutely for my taste, but it closes the book on the story well enough.

All in all, it’s an interesting read with an excellent title – I haven’t mentioned that I love the title earlier but my god do I ever. Definitely worth a read, and maybe I’ll go out and look for her second creation myself, rather than check it out from the local library like I did for this one.

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Art and Immortality in Utamaro

Go Nagai is rightfully regarded as a pioneer in the field of manga and graphic arts. He has an incredibly extensive bibliography, stretching back all the way to 1967 and is responsible for creating important works such as Mazinger Z, Cutie Honey and Devilman. It’s hard to think of other artists that have excelled in such varied genres as super robots, magical girls and horror.

In Utamaro, Go Nagai steps down another narrative pathway, adapting Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, transposing it into late 1700′s Japan and weaving it into the life of historical figure Kitagawa Utamaro. I don’t know much about Utamaro’s life, beyond the facts that he was a well-known creator of woodblock prints and pictures, his influence extending into the French impressionist movement. His style, full of elongated features on beautiful women is almost the default of what you see in prints from the era. The manga was created in 2008, collected in a single volume in 2009. Sadly, there is no official English translation, but some people have happily done the work allowing us to read this.

The single volume manga follows Utamaro after he creates a painting of the Crimson Tayuu, a famous geisha (the story is full of historical figures but I am fairly certain that she’s fictional). The Crimson Tayuu becomes obsessed with the painting, and convinced that it’s the key to her beauty, believing that it transforms to reflect the desires in her heart. She quickly falls into evil ways, compromising her values to protect the painting and her beauty, before the story concludes with a fiery confrontation between the Tayuu and Utamaro. Both Utamaro and the Crimson Tayuu are followed equally through the story, as other historical art figures of the time drop in.

The art style is recognisable from miles away, sharp angles, heavy shading and sinister looking people. The man draws some of the heaviest eyebrows I’ve ever seen, and every character is capable of handing out some intense side-eye. It’s classic stuff.

This story is very much not a straight retelling of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde’s book follows Dorian over decades, watching as he abandons his morals and slides into debauchery as the painting grows more and more grotesque. Utamaro takes place over a few months maybe? The passing of time here is unclear. A single volume, 200 pages or so isn’t really that much, and the pacing of the story suffers from it. The Crimson Tayuu jumps incredibly quickly into full blown evil, demanding the death of Utamaro

All in all, this is worth a quick read. A single volume manga won’t take anyone much time, and maybe people more familiar with ukiyo-e art and late 1700′s Japan will appreciate this more than I did - of all the historical figures present, Hokusai is the only one I recognised by name. The art is great, although Nagai goes hard on the sinister overtones. It’s relatively easy to find on most manga infested corners of the internet and it’s another item in the long bibliography of Go Nagai.

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Following the trail – an understanding of The Migratory Forest

I’ve decided to resurrect my completely dead tumblr account to share some assorted thoughts from about things I’ve read recently. As a semi-anonymous blogging platform this’ll do.

One of the underrated aspects of manga, in my opinion, is the existence of the short story collection. The halls of manga literature are defined by their epics, but there’s nothing like a good collection of short stories that allow you to understand an artists’ qualities and style quickly and effectively. The best writers can create wholly realised characters and worlds in less than 20 pages.

The Migratory Forest – a collection of walks – is a single volume manga, a collection of interconnected short stories written and illustrated Yaku Haibara that was published in 2008. No official English translation exists, and this is the only thing of Yaku Haibara’s that I think I’ve read. Looking at their page of credits on mangaupdates.com shows a few josei titles, one long runner called Outen no Mon and a truly stunning amount of Fullmetal Alchemist yaoi doujins. One of their credits is even an NCIS LA doujin, which OK, sure why not – rule 34 is an absolute I guess.

The Migratory Forest, Kaiyuu no Mori, kind of bears those influences. It’s not explicit, but more on the line of introspective moments that you see in some romance manga. Every one of its chapters meditates on love, whether forbidden, unrequited or forgotten. Forests and nature as metaphor for love and secrets are a constant motif through the stories.

I did mention earlier that each of these chapters are interconnected, but it’s really just a token level of connectivity. For example, the first chapter ends with the chapter protagonist returning to work, asking where a co-worker is – we’re told taken the day off as she’s livid after discovering her boyfriend of eight years cheating on her. The next chapter follows her and another passer-by as they free themselves of past attachments by burying belongings and a nameless goldfish respectively.  

It’s a cute way to hand things off, but I like it. Every chapter ends and leads off into a new beginning. You solve your problem, pass someone in a store and we then get to see what is in their head.

My favourite chapters are the first, “Mirage”, and the fifth, “Black Forest”. I don’t want to turn this into a frame by frame retelling, but “Mirage” shows the forest in its least metaphorical way. We follow Satoshi, a 35 year old office worker from Tokyo as he returns to his grandparents rural village for a memorial service. He’s haunted by a dark secret, something he revealed in the forest there more than a decade ago with his much younger cousin Miyo. The early parts of the chapter are spent on edge as he navigates social situations and his own anxieties.

When Miyo reveals that she remembers enough, we look into his eyes and it’s

a

fucking

dagger.

It’s pretty clear that this will (deservedly) haunt Satoshi. The forest that lurked in his nightmares now has a face with eyes that stare into his soul. That’s a cliched sentence, but read the chapter and you’ll get the same feeling.

Black Forest is less dark, but still delves into emotions that lurk beneath the surface. The teacher of a German cooking class for housewives (the Black Forest in this title refers to the cake here) discovers that one of her students is married to her ex-boyfriend that she had a long and troubled relationship with. There’s no elaborate plan, no scheme to humiliate the other woman, merely a knowing smile as her husband comes to pick her up from class is all the meager revenge she needs. There’s nothing better than showing quietly your own existence and successes to someone that never expected to see you again. An interesting part of the chapter is also that there’s no real indication that the abusive ex is continuing his ways. He’s not featured, but the broken relationship is positioned more as the failures of two different people rather than an escape. The chapter uses a few flashbacks, as well as using the chocolate flakes on the cake like feathers to obscure memories.

I really like this collection. It’s a quick read, but there’s enough to come back to over and over. It’s not too hard to find, punching the title into your search engine of choice will bring it up pretty quickly. If you’re here it’s probably through a similar search, so why are you asking me?

Maybe I’ll keep an eye out to see if Outen no Mon is ever translated, or dig through the rest of their works for something properly serialised. Who knows?

Within me lies a deep, dense forest.

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Might as well start somewhere

I'm formally welcoming myself to tumblr land.

Woo.

Even though I'm years late to the party, I'm gonna have to learn this from ground up.

I'm currently sitting outside on a trampoline in the winter sun, and feeling like I need to write something and share it semi-anonymously. I don't want to launch into my damn novel just yet (The Project), but I want to put metaphorical pen to digital paper as it were. As such, I think I'll describe what I'm seeing and feeling (dorky, I know, but jumping in anyway).

It's fantastic writing on a trampoline. There's always a slight bounce whenever I tap the keyboard. Every small movement leads to another smaller reaction. Shifting left might disturb the pile of leaves that have gathered up, even though they're a few feet away.

This little circle of canvas really is my domain. Everything happening away from here is outside of my control. The only thing that I have power over is the words that are scattering forth from my hands, as my fingers dance clumsily across the keyboard. I'm just not a great typist.

I just heard a bell ringing in the distance. It's really the only break away from the regular background sounds.

I'm really fighting the urge to light a cigarette. I don't smoke, but I ended up with a full deck after a night out, and it's been sitting all lonely by itself for the last few weeks. It just seems like the right moment to have a quiet smoke. The silence, the cold breeze, the winter sun beaming down just that tiny enough amount of heat to make it all bearable. Smoking on a trampoline is a terrible idea, though. This trampoline has had its canvas replaced a couple times due to errant ashes, and I'd rather not be responsible for that all over again.

Um. Cool. Maybe I'll think of something interesting to do here, but this tumblr is probably just going to be reshares of other people's art combined with boring walls of text, as above.

Ace.