I never loved another CLAMP title the way I loved X; with each new series, I found myself less and less enamored with CLAMP’s stories and characters. I was relieved to learn that I’m not the only one who felt this way about CLAMP. Robin Brenner recently steered me towards Party Like It’s 1999, a Tumblr account written by another recovering CLAMP fan:

When I was about 20, I read the manga X (X/1999 in U.S. release) for several years. But I got older. I got less interested. I got fed up with CLAMP’s bullshit. I walked away. I’m 30 now. I’ve learned to like things that are good. I’ve learned to drink to forget. But now it’s time to remember.

The panel-by-panel analysis of X is pure genius, so add Party Like It’s 1999 to your RSS/Tumblr feed, stat.

Elsewhere in the mangasphere…

Good news for fans of Animal Academy, The Good Witch of the West, Monochrome Factor, Tactics, and Your & My Secret: JManga will be releasing the second volumes of all the TOKYOPOP titles it rescued from licensing purgatory. Look for new volumes on Thursday, May 17th. (N.B. JManga announces new arrivals via email before posting them at the site, so the new volumes won’t be listed until Thursday.) [JManga]

Prepare to be schooled! Manga scholar Ryan Holmberg examines the Japanese love affair with Walt Disney, focusing on the proliferation of akahon (rental manga) stories starring Mickey and friends. [The Comics Journal]

Evan Krell takes a trip in the WABAC machine to review Katsuhiro Otomo’s other masterpiece, Domu: A Child’s Dream. [ani-gamers]

The spring rain has yielded a bumper crop of flowers — Flowers of Evil, to be exact. Serdar Yegulalp’s review of is one of the best to date, acknowledging the strengths and weaknesses of this oddly compelling book. “Shuzo Oshimi keeps this story focused on the mechanics of psychological manipulation and bullying, not the panopoly of perversities explored by any characters in it,” he notes. [Genji Press]

• Dororo: Noel Kirkpatrick
• Negima! Master Negi Magi, Vol. 3: Charles (TWWK)
• Tokyo Mew Mew, Vols. 1-2: Nyuel
• X, Vol. 2: Mildred

Congratulations to all! I’ll be emailing winners shortly to find out where I should send your prizes, so check your in-boxes this evening.

Given the enthusiastic response to last week’s contest — over 50 entries! — I decided to give away more manga this week. This time, however, I’m giving away four sets, each consisting of two volumes. The sets are as follows:

• Set one: Bakuman, Vols. 9-10
• Set two: Durarara!!, Vols. 1-2
• Set three: Skip Beat!, Vols. 26-27
• Set Four: The Flowers of Evil, Vol. 1 and Gate 7, Vol. 1

Here are the contest rules:

1. Leave a comment indicating which set you’d like to win. You may enter all four drawings, if you wish.
2. Winners in last week’s Great Omnibus Giveaway are not eligible for the Double-or-Nothing Giveaway.
3. You must be at least 18 to enter, and a resident of the United States. I will not ship manga outside the United States.
4. The deadline to enter is 11:59 PM EST on Monday, May 21st. Winners will be announced at The Manga Critic on Tuesday, May 22nd.
5. Winners will be chosen by random lottery.

Exhibit A: The Cover. One of the characters is wearing cat ears and holding a cat. Gotta cover all the bases, I guess.

Exhibit B: Logic-Free Plotting. Chihiro rescues a kitten and names her Shiro. When Shiro develops a cold, Chihiro runs into the street, tearfully asking strangers where the nearest veterinary clinic is. (Presumably Chihiro has never heard of the Yellow Pages, directory assistance, or the internet.) He bumps into Kumazawa, who just happens to be a vet.

After Kumazawa examines Shiro, he berates Chihiro for being a lousy cat owner. Two minutes later, Kumazawa offers Chihiro a job at the clinic, even though Chihiro’s only qualification is that he feels bad about neglecting Shiro.

Exhibit C: Chihiro’s Job Title. Kumazawa cheerfully refers to Chihiro as his “wife.” Why? Because no job could be more emasculating than being someone’s chief cook, laundress, and maid… amirite?

Exhibit D: Situational Homosexuality (a.k.a. “You’re So Hot, I Made an Exception!”). Both Chihiro and Kumazawa are quick to establish their heterosexual bonafides at the beginning of the story. Which, of course, means that they will end up together at the end.

In a moment of juror nullification, however, I’m setting aside the evidence because I still loved Honey Darling, in spite of its dumber-than-rocks plotting, frequent recourse to cat ears, and retrograde depiction of married life.

My fondness for Honey Darling stems from author Norikazu Akira’s ability to be sincere, silly, and creative all at once. Consider her use of perspective: most of the story is told from the nervous, fluttery Chihiro’s point of view, but occasionally shifts to show us how Kumazawa and Shiro see things. These interludes are a subtle but effective reminder of how differently two people can interpret the same events; Kumazawa’s internal monologue reveals his attraction to Chihiro, though it’s easy to understand how Kumazawa’s terse pronouncements feel more like daggers than come-ons. These chapters also underscore the pleasures of domestic life. All three characters — and yes, I’m including the cat, since she’s been given a voice — clearly yearn for a sense of connection that transcends mere cohabitation; they’re a family, even if it takes them the entire book to use that label for their relationship.

The other thing that prevents Honey Darling from being too sappy is Akira’s omake. In the afterword, she jokes about Shiro’s prominent role — “For the record, this manga is a boys’ love story,” she declares — and cheerfully pokes fun at yaoi tropes. As her comments and comic strips attest, Akira is fully aware that she’s pandering to her audience — an awareness that puts a pleasant, fizzy spin on the material, even when it’s at its credulity-straining worst. At the same time, however, Akira never breaks the fourth wall or mocks her characters; the story is told with utmost respect for the characters’ feelings, no matter how contrived the situation. Now that’s hot.

Review copy provided by SuBLime Manga. Honey Darling will be released on June 12, 2012.

HONEY DARLING • BY NORIKAZU AKIRA • SUBLIME MANGA • 194 pp. • RATING: MATURE (18+)

Hagio has worked steadily since the 1970s, producing a variety of science fiction works — A, A’ (1981), Marginal (1985-87), Barbara Ikai (2002-05) — and dramas — Mesh (1980-84), A Cruel God Reigns (1993-2001). Over the last thirty years, she has received numerous honors, including the Seiun Prize for Best Science Fiction Manga (1980, 1983, 1985), the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize (1997), and San Diego Comic-Con’s Inkpot Award (2010). Earlier this year, Hagio became the first female manga-ka to receive Japan’s prestigious Medal of Honor in recognition of her substantial artistic achievements.

Curious about Hagio’s work? Several prominent English-language critics have interviewed Hagio, including Shaenon Garrity, Carlo Santos, and, of course, scholar Matt Thorn. Additionally, Deb Aoki has published a complete transcript of Moto Hagio’s 2010 talk at San Diego Comic-Con, which includes Hagio’s Q&A session with audience members.

But wait… there’s more!

Animation | If you’ve been curious about Princess Jellyfish, Serdar Yegulalp has a thoughtful review. “What could have been a dim-witted, gimmicky premise is turned instead into one of the best shows of 2012—loaded with heart, soul, humor and insight, and which even gets a little deeper each time you come back to it,” he argues. [About Anime]

Animation | Ben Ettinger’s meticulous analysis of Kids on the Slope has persuaded me that I need to start watching this show stat. Now if only someone would license the manga… [Anipages]

Animation | Caleb Goellner interviews voice actress Janet Varney about her role on The Legend of Korra, the sequel to Nickelodeon’s enormously popular Avatar: The Last Airbender. [Comics Alliance]

Comics | Dash Shaw uses Jeffrey Brown’s Cat Getting Out of a Bag and Other Observations as a jumping-off point for exploring what he dubs CAA, or cat appreciation art. [The Comics Journal]

Comics | Words like “crazy,” “awesome,” and “whoa nelly” are almost beside the point when describing Vom Marlowe’s one-of-a-kind fan comic, Wonder Woman and the Space Crocs of Nikszkelion. Go, read! [The Hooded Utilitarian]

Manga | Speaking of the Magnificent 49ers, Jocelyn Allen offers a delightful (if spoiler-rific) review of Keiko Takemiya’s Kaze to Ki no Uta, better known in English as The Song of the Wind in the Trees. “I simply can’t get over how unrelenting this series is,” Allen declares. “This could be terrible in the wrong hands, but with Takemiya at the helm, it is an incredibly powerful way to reach the hearts of her target audience: pre-teen and teenage girls. Because this is really what it feels like to be that age, on the threshold of puberty, opening the door to adulthood and everything! is! so! dramatic! Everything is a crisis of epic proportions.” [Book vs. Brain]

Manga | File this under Better Late Than Never: I just discovered the manga habit, a delightful blog covering josei, shoujo, and BL manga. If you need an incentive to learn Japanese, the author’s previews of untranslated titles will do the trick. [the manga habit]

Manga | The winners of the 36th annual Kodansha Manga Awards were announced this week. Among the honorees were Setona Mizushiro’s Shitsuren Chocolatier (Best Shojo Manga) and Makoto Yukimura’s Vinland Saga (Best General Manga). [Anime News Network]

Manga | The eyes have it: author Matt Alt explores eye motifs in manga. [Alt Japan]

Manga | Khursten Santos files a detailed report on volumes one and two of The Flowers of Evil. [Otaku Champloo]

Manga | In his latest House of 1000 Manga column, Jason Thompson looks at the fascinating but flawed Dragon Head, an apocalyptic horror story published by Tokyopop in the mid-2000s. “Dragon Head is a very, very well-done manga for the first two volumes, but then it sort of drifts off,” he observes. “Reading Dragon Head is an interesting glimpse of how manga stories are structured so that they could end at certain points or get expanded if they’re popular enough.” [Anime News Network]

The artists’ strategies for bridging the divide between fine and sequential art have varied. In Glacial Period, for example, a team of anthropologists unearth the Louvre’s collections, which have been buried under ice for a millennium. The scientists try to make sense of the objects they discover, not unlike a group of aliens speculating about the purpose of a Coke bottle or an Etch-A-Sketch. Other novels are more fanciful: Eric Liberge’s On the Odd Hours reads like a classy version of Night at the Museum, in which the museum’s iconic pieces come to life, roaming the empty galleries until the night watchman can subdue them. Still others are explicitly historical: Bernar Yslaire and Jean-Claude Carriere’s Sky Over the Louvre, for example, stars two of the French Revolution’s best-known bad boys: Maximilien Robiespierre and David.

Hirohiko Araki’s Rohan at the Louvre, by contrast, takes its cues from the world of J-horror, using the Louvre as the setting for a nifty ghost story. In the book’s opening pages, we’re introduced to Rohan, an aspiring manga artist who lives with his grandmother in a nearly deserted rooming house. (N.B. Fans of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure may recognize Rohan as a minor character from one of the later volumes of the series, though prior knowledge of JoJo is not necessary for appreciating Louvre.) The unexpected arrival of a beautiful divorcee turns the normally placid household upside down with tearful drama. Within a week of her arrival, however, Nanase disappears into the night, never to be seen again.

We then jump forward ten years: Rohan, now 27, is a successful manga artist who decides to visit the Louvre to view what Nanase once described to him as “the darkest painting in the world.” The painting, he learns, has never been publicly displayed; it sits in a long-forgotten basement vault. What transpires in the bowels of the Louvre is a mixture of old-fashioned Japanese ghost story and contemporary slasher flick; if one were to update Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan for today’s audiences, the denouement of “The Black-Haired Woman” or “Hoichi the Earless” might look like the climatic scene of Rohan.

For all the gory zest with which that scene is staged, Rohan‘s artwork is uneven. Araki’s command of color is impeccable: the prelude is bathed in a golden light, while the scenes at the Louvre are rendered in a cooler palette of grey, blue, and pure black, a contrast that nicely underscores Rohan’s journey from youthful inexperience to maturity. Araki’s sexy character designs are another plus; even the most muscle-bound figures have a sensual quality to them, with full lips and eyes that that moistly beckon to the reader.

When those figures are in motion, however, Araki’s artwork is less persuasive. Rohan and Nanase’s bodies, for example, rotate along several heretofore undiscovered axes; only Power Girl and Wonder Woman twist their bodies into more anatomy-defying poses. Araki’s fondness for extreme camera angles similarly distorts his characters’ bodies, as he draws them from below, behind, or a forty-five degree angle, eschewing simple frontal views whenever possible. Such bodily distortions are meant to give depth to the picture plane, I think, but the result is curiously flat; the characters often look like paper dolls that have been bent into unnatural shapes, rather than convincing representations of walking, talking people.

What Araki’s artwork does best is convey a sense of place. The opening pages are lovely, offering us a peek into a world that is largely — though not completely — untouched by modernity. Araki takes great pains to render the boarding house’s environs — its rock garden and gnarled pine trees — as well as its interior of spartan rooms and sliding doors. We feel the stillness and seclusion of the inn, and bristle when Nanase’s cell phone pierces that tranquility.

Likewise, Araki captures the Louvre in vivid detail. He guides the reader through its galleries, marching us past the Nike of Samothrace and several rooms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings. We follow Rohan’s gaze upwards towards vaulted ceilings encrusted in sculptural detail and elaborate frescoes, pausing to meet the gaze of the Dutch burghers and Roman gods whose images are mounted on the gallery walls. We then descend into the museum’s extensive network of tunnels and storage vaults, a veritable catacombs of neglected and obscure objects spread out over hundreds of acres. Although these dark, claustrophobic spaces make an ideal setting for a horror story, they’re also a powerful reminder of the Louvre’s history; the tunnels are remnants of a twelfth-century fortress that once occupied the site of the present-day museum.

If the artwork is, at times, overly stylized, Rohan at the Louvre is still an imaginative celebration of the Louvre Museum, conveying its scale, age, and majesty. Araki’s book is not as sophisticated or ambitious as some of the other titles in this series, but is one of the most dramatically satisfying, achieving a near-perfect balance between telling a ghost story and telling the Louvre’s own story. Recommended.

ROHAN AT THE LOUVRE • BY HIROHIKO ARAKI • NBM/COMICS-LIT • 128 pp. • NO RATING

Khursten’s enthusiasm for the topic has already inspired me to start working on my contributions. Here’s what she has to say about the role of food — and food manga — in Japanese culture:

In a moment of impulse, Kasuga steals the gym outfit of beautiful classmate Nanako Saeki — an act witnessed by Sawa Nakamura, the class outcast. Nakamura confronts Kasuga after school, threatening to expose him as the thief unless he complies with her requests. Her motives for blackmailing Kasuga are complex, a mixture of prurient interest in Kasuga’s sexual fantasies and sadistic delight in wielding power over a boy. At times Nakamura  physically dominates him — she punches and tackles him — and at times she manipulates him with humiliating tasks and questions.

I’d be the first to admit that the similarities between Flowers of Evil and Sundome — however superficial — predisposed me to dislike the book. I didn’t think I had the stomach for another story in which a ball-busting girl sexually and psychologically tortured a sad-sack boy. Yet Flowers of Evil proved a far more compelling and honest look at adolescent sexuality than Sundome, thanks, in large part, to Shuzo Oshimi’s sympathetic portrayal of Kasuga.

Throughout the book, author Shuzo Oshimi hints that Kasuga’s character was inspired by his own experiences as a book-toting misfit. “I read Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil for the first time in middle school,” he explains at the end of chapter one. “I didn’t understand much of it, but the book’s feel — suspicious, indecent, yet nastily noble — made me think, I’m so cool for reading it.” Kasuga, too, clearly feels a sense of superiority for having discovered Baudelaire at a young age; in a fit of self-pity, he muses, “How many people in this town understand Baudelaire?” At the same time, however, he’s keenly aware that his peers think he’s weird. Kasuga may be mature enough to appreciate Baudelaire — or perhaps, more accurately, to think he understands Baudelaire — but he isn’t quite old enough to shake off his classmates’ teasing.

Oshimi also does an exceptional job of dramatizing Kasuga’s inner sexual turmoil. Early in the book, for example, Kasuga catches sight of Saeki. In a flash, he pictures her clad in gym clothes, blushing and telling him, “I love you.” His acute embarrassment at being discovered mid-reverie is all the more palpable for the way in which he’s drawn: Kasuga sinks into his chair, his shoulders slumped, brows furrowed, and body foreshortened, making him look like a moist ragdoll. In later chapters, Oshimi uses surreal imagery — a wall of eyes, a fun-house mirror, a giant sink hole — to suggest that Kasuga’s normal teenage discomfort with sexual feelings has become something more powerful and destructive: shame.

If Kasuga is a sympathetic character, Nakamura poses greater difficulties for the reader. She claims her true agenda is to expose him as a pervert, but nothing about Kasuga’s behavior indicates that he is; if anything, Kasuga is naive, torn between romantic and sexual ideas about love. (That he calls Saeki “my muse, my femme fatale, my Venus” suggests the extent of his confusion.) Nakamura, too, appears to wrestling with complicated sexual feelings; in several scenes, she hints at her own predilections, only to accuse Kasuga of harboring even nastier ones. In short, Nakamura seems intent on finding someone more self-loathing and sexually confused than she is, yet her behavior is so violent and manipulative it sometimes feels as if Oshimi is trying too hard to suggest her disaffection; Nakamura’s character veers dangerously close to being a symbol of castration anxiety, rather than an emotionally damaged teenage girl.

That said, The Flowers of Evil is a shockingly readable story that vividly — one might even say queasily — evokes the fear and confusion of discovering one’s own sexuality. Recommended.

THE FLOWERS OF EVIL, VOL. 1 • BY SHUZO OSHIMI • VERTICAL, INC. • 202 pp. • NO RATING (BEST FOR OLDER TEENS)

1. Leave a comment indicating which manga you’d like to win. You may enter all four drawings, if you wish.
2. You must be at least 18 to enter, and a resident of the United States. I will not ship manga outside the United States.
3. The deadline to enter is 11:59 PM EST on Monday, May 14th. Winners will be announced at The Manga Critic on Tuesday, May 15th.
4. Winners will be chosen by random lottery.

Questions? Leave a comment below!

Fan response to the Hetalia news, however, made me wonder whether my spending habits aligned with other manga lovers’. So I put the question to you, readers: what’s the most you’ve ever spent on a single volume of manga? If your favorite publisher offered a print-on-demand service that enabled you to buy older, OOP print titles from its catalog, how much would you be willing to pay? Inquiring minds want to know!

* Tokyopop, Right Stuf!, and Gentosha will also be publishing volume three, which has not been released in English. Brigid Alverson has more details on the partnership at MTV Geek: http://geek-news.mtv.com/2012/05/03/hetalia-manga-rightstuf/.

DURARARA!!, VOLS. 1-2

CREATED BY RYOHGO NARITA, CHARACTER DESIGN BY SUZUHITO YASUDA, ART BY AKIYO SATORIGI • YEN PRESS • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

One man’s wacky is another man’s wearisome — that’s what I concluded from reading volumes one and two of Durarara!!, an antic comedy about the Ikebukuro district. The story has a sprawling cast of characters, each of whom is but one or two degrees of separation away from the others. Mika, for example, is a cheerful stalker who loves Seiji, a boy who sat next to her during an exam. Namie, Seiji’s older sister, is the leader of Yagiri Pharmaceuticals, which performed experiments on Celty, a dullahan, or headless horsewoman, who rides the streets of Tokyo astride a motorcycle.

Are you still following me?

As one might imagine from my brief description of this small but representative sampling of cast members, Durarara!! suffers from an overabundance of plot. There’s gang warfare, a cadre of evil scientists, and a mad scramble to find Celty’s head before she does. Add to that several mundane subplots involving bullying and classroom dynamics, and it’s easy to lose track of what’s happening on a scene-by-scene basis. Akiyo Satorigi’s artwork is a plus, as he painstakingly creates a distinctive appearance for each cast member, no matter how inconsequential to the overall story. Alas, almost none of the characters make a lasting impression; only Celty, with her mordant wit and Avengers catsuit, registers as an interesting “person.” I’d definitely read a manga in which she was the central character, but I’m less inclined to read one in which her predicament is just one more wacky element in a jumble of plot points.

Review copy of volume two provided by Yen Press.

KAMEN, VOL. 1

BY MIHARA GUNYA • GEN MANGA • NO RATING

Kamen has an irresistible hook: a man awakens in a field, only to discover that a noh-like mask has fused with face. He cannot remove it; if he does, he will die, as he and the mask are now bound together in a symbiotic relationship. As our nameless hero begins the quest to recover his identity, he crosses paths with a group of soldiers transporting prisoners of war. “Kamen” is taken prisoner as well, soon finding himself inside a fortified city ruled by the brutal Lord Dazam.

Alas, Kamen doesn’t live up to the promise of those first pages. Mihara Gunya’s script is earnest and plodding, sagging under the weight of obvious dialogue. None of the characters have much personality, either; Lord Dazam is a garden-variety villain, all snarls and bluster, while Kamen is silent and expressionless, a hulking giant in a fancy hockey mask. Even Simba, Dazam’s niece, is a one-note warrior: she’s tough but principled, though it’s never really clear what values or experience inform her righteous tone.

Careful scrutiny of Gunya’s artwork reveals similar deficiencies. Though the figures are modeled with consummate care, Gunya has difficulty breathing life into the action sequences. The characters seem rooted to the spot, even when speedlines indicate leaps, punches, and flying arrows. The backgrounds are stiffly drawn as well, relying heavily on computer-assisted linework that is too tidy and symmetrical to be genuinely convincing. Only the characters’ faces are genuinely animated; one wishes Gunya had rendered the hand-to-hand combat with the same visceral energy as the smiles, sneers, and gasps.

The bottom line: Kamen has all the right ingredients to be an engaging fantasy-adventure, but is too stodgy and slow for its own good.