One of the difficulties with this blog is trying to please everyone. When I released the poll I secretly hoped that there would be one item that stood out in terms of amount of votes, but right now there seem to be a lot of people who want me to blog two extra series, cover manga and write recommendation posts. I can’t do all of those at the same time.
Okay, so I think I know what I’m going to do now: cover manga and whenever I feel like it and have enough time write some sort of Studio spotlight. The focus will remain on the manga though. this season is relatively small, so good enough for such an experiment. I am really new to manga though, so I still have no idea what my taste is in terms of mangas. I’m also not going to burn myself out by trying to tackle complete series that take forever to finish. I want first want to experiment a bit, as accessible as possible.
So for now, I’m going to pick a bunch of first chapters of manga that seem interesting and are fairly recent so that they don’t have many chapters yet, and I’ll continue covering them if they catch my attention enough. I guess that for the format, I’ll use the same short blurbs I use for last season’s Kaleidoscope.
Hito Hitori Futari – ch.01: This was the first manga that caught my attention and so far I like this first chapter a lot. It’s got this interesting take on reincarnation, and the lead character is this spirit who is waiting to be reincarnated. It has created this world in which these spirits are actually educated while they wait for sometimes even years in order to be born again. And even then this manga goes into a different direction by punishing the lead character for her behavior by making her a guardian spirit who does nothing but sit around a person from start to finish. There are a lot of neat ideas into just this one chapter here.
Phantom Syndrome (Oneshot): This is a manhua one-shot I randomly checked out. It seemed to have won an award, and the scanlator really seemed to like it so I gave it a try. Focusing around a girl who misses a finger, it’s the kind of story that feels really vague and confusing when you start it, but at the end things come together. It’s a cute little romance, and the twist at the end was well done, but there were a few things that didn’t fit well. The actions of the guy in the story in particular could have been better explained. Also I feel that this was a victim of a bad translation. No offense to the scanlator, but the story is already hard enough to follow without those stiff and half-broken sentences.
Mix – ch.01: Mix is Mitsuru Adachi’s next work, meant as a spiritual successor to Touch, taking place 26 years after that series. I can see that he shuffled around the different character roles in order to make this similar, yet still different from his other works, with this time there being a lot of twins, and no hints of romance yet. I’m not going to keep up with this, for a few simple reasons though: first of all, this is bound to get an anime anyway; second of all, Touch took bloody ages to get going, and for this experiment I want to follow series that immediately catch my attention, and this episode just didn’t catch my attention enough, plus the baseball throwing scenes just miss something when they’re not animated. I only want to know why the two main characters are brothers and yet not twins. Very subtle there, Adachi.
Inherit the Stars – ch.01: This is hard sci-fi, but what caught my attention about it is how it intends to combine the first ventures of humans into space, together with the human race of 50 thousand years ago, and I’m interested in how they’re going to do it. This first chapter was mostly set-up and introduction to a number characters, some of which are very easily ticked off. If anything the characterization seems to be the weakest part of this manga so far, as very little time was spent on it and the characters are rather one-sided.
A Million Pound Love- ch.01: When I started this experiment, I figured that people would start to recommend me things. I never expected that there would be so many though. With this I’m going to especially take care to not get overwhelmed by them, so I’m not going to touch upon them just yet, and at least for this first week trust my own judgment in finding stuff. The above manga I all found thanks to Mangahelpers, with the exception of Mix of which I knew it just recently started. However, I also got thinking started thinking:out of all the anime series adapted from manga that I have watched the past years, which manga author and concept impressed me the most? And with that, two names stood out: Mohiro Kitoh (Bokura no, Narutaru) and Shimizu Reiko (Himitsu). My attempt to check out Bokura no completely failed a few years ago, as I got stuck at chapter 33 or something, but I did want to try this out once more, in a bit more accessible way. Luckily, Shimizu Reiko wrote a collection of one-shots with A Million Pound Love that are very easy to get into. So what if it’s from 1984?
After checking out the first chapter (which also seems to be the most noteworthy of the anthology it’s compiled in), I must say: this really was the first time in this experiment that I really was drawn in. The four manga above were nice and interesting, but I always felt like I was looking at a bunch of pictures with a bit of text here and there. Here I was really swayed along with the story, which is a really strange romance with a lot of heart put into it, containing some great twists. The panels were drawn beautifully, and the way the text boxes were lined out was much more dynamic than the four other manga listed above. Like Himitsu, this was just chock full of creativity and it subverted a ton of cliches. It did adhere to a few jarring cliches as well though, so it’s not entirely perfect, but if this is what manga can do, then I’m definitely going to continue this experiment.
NB. Dear god, how many romance manga are there anyway? While I was browsing through the different manga, I was really surprised how many shows there were that seemed like carbon copies of each other. Not to mention the bizarre fanservice titles. The worst I found beyond the incest ones is a show about keeping a young vampire girl as a pet…
