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 [...]
Yakuza Cafe is a pleasant surprise, a cheerful, smutty send-up of gangster manga that playfully mocks maid cafes, foodie manga, and yakuza culture. The titular gangsters are the Fujimaki Clan, a once-feared crime syndicate who’ve launched a legitimate business: a yakuza-themed cafe, staffed by the clan’s former foot soldiers. Though the food is tasty, and [...]
“Today, I belong to the enemy” — so begins Dawn of the Arcana, a medieval fantasy in which a feisty princess marries into a neighboring country’s royal family. Nakaba characterizes herself as “a lamb,” sacrificed by her people to help two warring kingdoms maintain a fragile peace. Her husband, the handsome but insolent Prince Caesar, [...]
Screwball comedy? Gender-confused bodice-ripper? Homage to Moto Hagio? In a word, yes — the very silly but totally entertaining Nephilim is all those things. All it needs to put it over the top is a mangafied likeness of Fabio on the cover. The story focuses on Gai, a studly soldier, and Abel, a waifish creature [...]
Once upon a time, when there were only three major television networks, programming executives assumed that most folks were too busy enjoying the final days of summer to be clamoring for new installments of Marcus Welby, M.D. or The Streets of San Francisco. Nowadays, of course, no major network would dare to take an entire [...]
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 [...]
“Spunky” is one of the most overused words in shojo manga reviewing, but Shurei, the heroine of The Story of Saiunkoku, is spunky in the best sense of the word: she’s smart, resourceful, and boundlessly optimistic, despite the fact that she’s unlikely to ever achieve dream of becoming a civil servant. (I should note that [...]
Androgyny is as much a part of rock-n-roll as sex, drugs, and three-minute guitar solos, so it seems only natural that a music-obsessed manga-ka would write about a female guitarist who struts like Mick Jagger, or a male singer who can wail like Whitney Houston. Putting two such androgynous rock-n-rollers together in the same manga [...]
Has Japan experienced a recent surge in pachinko-related child abandonment? I ask because Kamisama Kiss is, by my count, the fourth manga I’ve read in which a parent (a) racks up gambling debt (b) angers his creditors and (c) skips town, leaving his son or daughter to deal with the consequences. Nanami, Kamisama‘s plucky heroine, [...]
Lou Grant may have famously told Mary Richards, “I hate spunk!,” but I have a special fondness for plucky heroines, those ladies whose confidence, determination, and unrelenting optimism compel them to save the school drama club or bag a cute boy. I’m not an indiscriminate fan of spunk, however: I strongly prefer stories in which [...]
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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