News and reviews for the discerning manga fan
Soulless is saucy in the best possible sense of the word: it’s bold and smart, with a heroine so irrepressible you can see why author Gail Carriger couldn’t tell Alexia Tarabotti’s story in just one book. As fans of Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate novels know, Alexia is a sharp-tongued woman living in Victorian London — or [...]
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a trans-Pacific flight encounters turbulence, and before any of the passengers can shout “J.J. Abrams!” — or “William Golding!” for that matter — the plane crash-lands an uninhabited tropical island, far from civilization’s reach. In some variations of the story, the island itself poses the greatest danger [...]
The received wisdom among otaku is that anime based on manga may, in fact, be as good if not better than the original source material, while manga based on anime are often hastily conceived, poorly executed products designed to capitalize on a franchise’s popularity. I’m happy to report that Blood+ is a notable exception to [...]
Though hard-core manga fans may wrinkle their noses at Daniel X and Gossip Girl, these YA novels-turned-graphic novels are big business for Yen Press. The first volume of Yen’s Twilight manga was one of 2010′s best-selling graphic novels, moving over 125,000 units, while Maximum Ride: The Manga continues to outperform many licensed titles. I’m of [...]
For years, Tokyopop specialized in a particular genre — call it “forbidden bromance,” for want of a better term — in which two handsome, impeccably groomed young men teetered on the brink of a relationship. That relationship usually faced a serious obstacle: one might be a demon and the other a human, for example, or [...]
In his review of TRON: Legacy, critic Andrew O’Hehir made a distinction between movies that are boring because they make the viewer keenly aware of time’s passage — what he calls “intentional and challenging boredom” — and movies that are boring because they overstimulate the viewer — what he calls the boredom of “endless distraction [...]
If Rumiko Takahashi and Kaoru Tada collaborated on a manga, the results might look a lot like Nao Yazawa’s Moon and Blood, a cheerful mish-mash of slapstick humor, romance, and light horror. Sayaka, the protagonist, walks into her kitchen one morning to discover that a handsome, imperious teenager named Kai has taken up residence with [...]
In his essay Moe: The Cult of the Child, Jason Thompson argues that one of the most pernicious aspects of moe is the way in which the father-daughter relationship is sentimentalized. “Moe is a fantasy of girlhood seen through chauvinistic male eyes,” he explains, “in which adorable girls do adorable things while living in questionable [...]
Have you ever seen the pilot episode of Law & Order? Most of the regular characters are present, and the script follows the three-act structure familiar to anyone who’s watched an episode of any Law & Order series, but the pacing is slack; the dialogue fizzles where it should crackle; and the actors struggle to [...]
When the Manga Bookshelf team introduced Bookshelf Briefs, I debated whether to retire my own capsule review column for good. After some consideration, I decided not to discontinue Short Takes, but to re-tool it as a monthly feature. To kick off the new edition of Short Takes, I’m re-visiting three series that I previously reviewed: [...]
When I lived in New York City, I went on my share of awesome first … [Read More...]
GTO: 14 Days in Shonan is loud and silly, the kind of manga in which … [Read More...]
Among the many books I read and loved as a child, few left as … [Read More...]
Below is a list of helpful English-language web resources about manga and manhwa. I update this page … [Read More...]
Since joining the Good Comics for Kids team in 2008, I've reviewed a variety of comics, graphic … [Read More...]
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