Linda Thai, who blogs at Something Deeper: Anime, Manga, and Comics, begins her exploration of Osamu Tezuka’s manga with Buddha, praising it for its artwork, grand sweep, and philosophical complexity.

Also writing about Buddha is Angela Eastman, who analyzes the function of the story’s unconventional first volume. “But just as important as character – possibly even more important – is the milieu, the location and culture in which the story takes place,” she argues. “What the first volume of Buddha does is set up this world so that we understand the culture and the people.” You’ll find Angela’s essay at Diary of a Bookworm.

Over at Okazu, Erica Friedman posts a two-part review of of Princess Knight. Click here for part one; click here for part two.

Evan Minto, Editor-in-Chief of Ani-Gamers, deconstructs a scene from Swallowing the Earth.

Lori Henderson tackles volumes 14-15 of Black Jack at Manga Village, then posts an in-depth review of The Book of Human Insects at her own site, Manga Xanadu. Though Lori feared Human Insects would be a retread of MW, she was surprised at its depth and audacity. As she explains,

On the surface, Yuki from MW and Toshiko do seem to have a lot in common. They are both sociopaths that use anything or anyone to get their way. They have their own agenda and will kill anyone that stands in their way, showing no remorse. But just below the surface lies the one thing that makes a big difference between these two; their motivations… The contrast of Yuki and Toshiko could be framed in the nature vs nurture argument. Yuki is a product of his environment while Toshiko is an example of survival of the fittest.

In case you missed it: Anime News Network is reporting that Brazilian cartoonist Mauricio de Sousa, who was a friend of Osamu Tezuka, will publish a comic next month that will feature Astro Boy, Princess Sapphire, and characters from de Sousa’s popular series Monica’s Gang (Turma da Mônica).

How to Participate in the Osamu Tezuka Manga Movable Feast

To submit a review, essay, podcast, etc. for inclusion in the archive, please do one of the following:

• Send me an email with a link to your contribution.
• Post a link to your contribution on Twitter. Please make sure that you address it to @manga_critic and use the #mmf hashtag.

Older reviews and essays may be submitted for inclusion in the MMF archive, though they will not be featured in the daily link posts.

If you do not have a blog, but wish to contribute, please email me. I would be happy to post your essay here at The Manga Critic, as I did during the To Terra feast (hosted in May 2010).

Linda, a.k.a. AnimeMiz, makes the case for licensing Tezuka’s Umi no Toriton (a.k.a. Triton of the Sea), which she first encountered in its anime form. “This is a classic anime that had me awing as a young child at how cool Toriton rode his dolphin friend, and just how spoiled Pippy the mermaid was,” she recalls. “With the mention of the animals in this series, reminds me of just how much life Tezuka was in giving a role for non-humans.”

Over at Experiments in Manga, Ash Brown dedicates his weekly Week in Manga column to Osamu Tezuka with brief reviews of four titles: Black Jack, The Book of Human Insects, Princess Knight, and Swallowing the Earth.

Also posting mini-musings on Tezuka: Lori Henderson. As part of her weekly Manga Wrap-Up series, the Manga Xanadu host revisits Apollo’s Song and reads Princess Knight for the first time.

Sarah Hayes kicks off the week with a Black Jack-themed AMV at nagareboshi reviews.

This final link comes to us via Subete Animes, a Brazilian website. In Astro Boy, The Study of a Fossil, Panino Manino compares Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto with the Astro Boy story that inspired it. “Astro Boy has an immeasurable value and importance to the Japanese anime and manga, but given [its] age, [does it] still makes sense to read it today beyond mere historical curiosity?” he asks.

How to Participate in the Osamu Tezuka Manga Movable Feast

To submit a review, essay, podcast, etc. for inclusion in the archive, please do one of the following:

• Send me an email with a link to your contribution.
• Post a link to your contribution on Twitter. Please make sure that you address it to @manga_critic and use the #mmf hashtag.

Older reviews and essays may be submitted for inclusion in the MMF archive, though they will not be featured in the daily link posts.

If you do not have a blog, but wish to contribute, please email me. I would be happy to post your essay here at The Manga Critic, as I did during the To Terra feast (hosted in May 2010).

At Slightly Biased Manga, Connie compiles an indispensable Guide to English Language Editions of Tezuka’s Work. Not only does she provide summaries for every manga on the list, she also provides ISBNs for every edition — which means you could track down copies of VIZ *and* Vertical’s versions of Black Jack, if you were so inclined.

Rob McMonigal, host of Panel Patter, posts a “small appreciation” of Tezuka’s work. “Anyone who hasn’t read any of his comics should do so, because to fully love manga today you need to know where it came from,” he notes. “Use this Feast to find comics that interest you, and see how just about everyone else is borrowing from his playbook, especially on the shonen side of things. But be aware that his comics can be primitive at times, feature a cartoony style that will remind you of old 1940s American animated shorts, and have a tendency for a tin ear about sensitivity. We must appreciate Tezuka, but in context, one that could limit his appeal depending on the reader.”

Over at Organization Anti-Social Geniuses, Justin tackles one of Tezuka’s later works, Ayako. “With sickening characters combined with a well developed story that crashes slightly towards the end, Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako is a manga that once you start reading, page count won’t matter,” Justin writes.

Help wanted! In December 2010, I created a bibliography of books and articles about Osamu Tezuka. The list was never intended to be comprehensive; rather, I envisioned it as a resource for students, reviewers, and journalists looking for information about Tezuka’s life and work. I haven’t updated it in a while, and would welcome your recommendations: what other material should be on this list?

How to Participate in the Osamu Tezuka Manga Movable Feast

To submit a review, essay, podcast, etc. for inclusion in the archive, please do one of the following:

• Send me an email with a link to your contribution.
• Post a link to your contribution on Twitter. Please make sure that you address it to @manga_critic and use the #mmf hashtag.

Older reviews and essays may be submitted for inclusion in the MMF archive, though they will not be featured in the daily link posts.

If you do not have a blog, but wish to contribute, please email me. I would be happy to post your essay here at The Manga Critic, as I did during the To Terra feast (hosted in May 2010).

In Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (1996), Frederik L. Schodt argues that Tezuka’s most important legacy was the story comic, “an intricate novelistic format” that anticipated the long-running stories in Weekly Shonen Jump, Morning, and Nakayoshi (234). Tezuka’s first story comics — New Treasure Island (1947), Jungle Emperor (1950-54), Astro Boy (1952-68), Princess Knight (1953-56) — were aimed at children, but his later work demonstrated that the format was well-suited to exploring adult themes, too.

Tezuka also pioneered a new way of drawing stories. As Schodt explains, Tezuka borrowed techniques from Walt Disney films “to create a sense of motion with his page layouts” — in essence, to bring the movie-going experience to the printed page (235). Tezuka’s example proved exceptionally powerful; the dynamic, visually-driven storytelling of Astro Boy and New Treasure Island continue to influence contemporary artists, especially in the world of shonen manga.

Tezuka would have been pleased, I think, to see how widely his stories are being read today, both in Japan and throughout Asia, the Americas, and Europe. In the United States alone, eighteen of Tezuka’s manga have been adapted for English-speaking audiences, Astro Boy, Black Jack (1973-83), and Phoenix (1956-89) among them.

Through these translations, I’ve developed a complicated relationship with Tezuka’s work. I love his art: his fluid layouts, his brilliant caricatures, his tripped-out dream sequences, and Freudian sex scenes. I also love his ambition: many of his stories — especially from the later stages of his career — have the sweep and social conscience of a Tolstoy novel, but the lurid, trashy soul of a Brian DePalma thriller.

Whenever I read one of Tezuka’s books, however, I’m reminded of the social, cultural, and temporal distance between his world and mine, even when I’m engrossed in the story and invested in the characters. Reading Swallowing the Earth (1968), for example, I was confronted by images that upset me. As a feminist, I winced at Tezuka’s depiction of Polynesian women as Hottentot Venuses, libidinous monsters with enormous lips and grotesquely rounded bodies. As an American, I struggled through Earth‘s racial warfare subplot with a mixture of dismay and horror: how could someone as fundamentally humane as Tezuka unwittingly tap into white supremacist fantasy when dramatizing the injustice of segregation?

Even when it infuriates me — as passages in Apollo’s Song (1970), Ayako (1972-73), and The Book of Human Insects (1970) have done — I’m still irresistibly drawn to his work. I admire Tezuka’s willingness to wrestle with the dark side of human nature, to create heroes and villains of genuine moral complexity. I also admire Tezuka’s playful side: his tendency to break the fourth wall, write himself into stories, bestow Dickensian names on his characters, and draw elaborate crowd scenes that would have made Busby Berkeley green with envy.

In the last ten years, there’s been an explosion of English-language articles and books aimed at readers like me, fans who recognize Tezuka’s important role in shaping the modern anime and manga industries, but want to learn more about his life, career, and artistic process. Helen McCarthy’s The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga (2009) is an excellent example of this trend; though she meticulously explains Tezuka’s star system and elucidates recurring themes in his work, she argues that Tezuka was “first and foremost a maker of popular entertainment,” and should be understood as such.

The complexity and size of Tezuka’s oeuvre has inspired American scholars to write about him as well. Flip through a volume of Mechademia, or browse the Asian Studies aisle at your local bookstore, and you’ll find scholars writing about Tezuka’s artistic legacy from a variety of perspectives. Some of these works — such as Natsu Onoda Power’s God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-WWII Manga (2009) — make a conscious effort to bridge the gap between Ivory Tower and fandom, while others are clearly intended for academic audiences.

The goal of this month’s Manga Movable Feast is to create a space where all of Tezuka’s admirers — fans, critics, and scholars — can interact, sharing their reactions to his work, assessing his artistic legacy, reviewing titles new and old, and engaging with the messier, more problematic aspects of his work. Anyone can contribute: all you need to do is send me a link to a Tezuka-themed essay, podcast, or review, and I’ll feature it in one of my daily round-ups. (Email or Twitter are the best way to submit links; Twitter submissions should be directed to @manga_critic.) Note that the feast runs from today (Sunday, February 19th) through Saturday, February 25th. For more information, please visit the Osamu Tezuka MMF archive.

This is an expanded version of an essay that appeared at The Manga Critic on 12/14/10.

Soulless

As fans of Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate novels know, Alexia is a sharp-tongued woman living in Victorian London — or rather, a steampunk version of Victorian London in which vampires and werewolves co-exist with the “daylight” (read: “human”) world. As she would in the real nineteenth-century England, Alexia faces pressure to marry, a prospect complicated by her age — she’s twenty-six — her ethnicity — her father was Italian — and her prodigious intellect. Alexia has one additional strike against her, albeit one that doesn’t affect her marriageability: she’s soulless, a “preternatural” being who can neutralize the vampires and werewolves’ power, temporarily reducing them to mortal form.

Plot-wise, Soulless is an agreeable mishmash of Young Sherlock Holmes, Underworld, and Mansfield Park, with a dash of Jules Verne for good measure. The basic storyline is a whodunnit: Alexia becomes the prime suspect in a string of supernatural disappearances around London, and must collaborate with Lord Collan Maccon, a belligerent werewolf detective, to clear her name. What they discover in the course of their investigation is a grand conspiracy worthy of an Indiana Jones movie, complete with evil scientists, vampire “hives,” sinister-looking laboratories, and a golem; all that’s missing is the Ark of the Covenant and a few Nazi generals.

At the same time, Soulless is a romance. Alexia would make a swell Austen heroine, as she faces the kind of obstacles to marriage that would elicit sympathy from the Dashwood girls and Fanny Price. The greatest of these hurdles isn’t her name or her age, however; it’s Alexia’s firm conviction that marriage should not be a socially or financially expedient union, but a true partnership. Paging Elizabeth Bennett!

Given how many genres are present in the text — it’s a crime procedural, a thriller, an urban fantasy, a comedy of manners, and a bodice ripper — it’s astonishing how well all the tropes mesh. Some of that success can be attributed to the dialogue. The characters’ peppery exchanges are an affectionate parody of British costume dramas; substitute “soulless” for “penniless,” and Alexia could easily be a character in Sense and Sensibility. A few passages strain too hard for effect — would anyone have really chosen “comestibles” over “food” when complaining about a party? — but for the most part, Carriger finds a convincing tone that’s neither faux-archaic nor casually contemporary.

Soulless’ other great strength is its appealing cast of characters. Alexia and Maccon are clearly the stars of this imaginary universe; anyone who’s read Middlemarch or Emma will immediately recognize that Alexia and Maccon are The Main Couple, as they spend most of volume one denying their mutual attraction and trading zingers. (“I may be a werewolf and Scottish, but despite what you may have read about both, we are not cads!” Maccon declares in a fit of Darcy-esque pique.) In the spirit of the best nineteenth-century novels, however, Carriger situates her lovebirds inside a vibrant community, albeit one inhabited by grumpy werewolves and flamboyant vampires in lieu of parsons, baronets, and virtuous maidens. Though these supporting characters don’t always get the screen time they deserve, Lord Akeldama, Professor Lyall, and Ivy Hisselpenny enliven the narrative with sharp observations and sound advice for Alexia and Maccon.

Manga artist Rem, best-known for her work on Vampire Kisses, does a fine job of translating Carriger’s prose into pictures. Though Rem’s attention to period detail is evident in the characters’ sumptuous costumes and lavishly furnished parlors, her meticulousness extends to the action sequences as well. An early fight between Alexia and a vampire is expertly staged, making effective use of dramatic camera angles and overturned furniture to capture the intensity of their struggle. Rem also manages to fold many of Carriger’s steampunk flourishes — zeppelins, steam-powered carriages, “glassicals” — into the story without overwhelming the eye; if anything, I found the subtlety of the steampunk elements an improvement on the novel, where the object descriptions sometimes felt like tangents.

The only drawback to the artwork is Alexia herself. In the novels, Carriger describes her as plain and full-figured; in the manga, however, Rem depicts Alexia as a buxom, wasp-waisted babe with a pouty mouth and a pretty face. That transformation is certainly in keeping with manga aesthetics — even the plainest young characters are usually pleasing to the eye — but not with the source material; as a reader, one of the real pleasures of Soulless is watching the heroine triumph on the strength of her character and brains, not the size of her bust.

On the whole, however, Rem has succeeded in taking a justifiably popular novel and making it work in a different medium on its own terms; readers new to Carriger’s work will be as enchanted with this cheeky, fun adaptation as her hardcore fans. Recommended.

Review copy provided by Yen Press. Volume one of Soulless: The Manga will be released in March 2012.

SOULLESS: THE MANGA, VOL. 1 • STORY BY GAIL CARRIGER, ART AND ADAPTATION BY REM • YEN PRESS •  208 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (VIOLENCE, SEXUAL SITUATIONS, NUDITY)

One quick programming note: since I will be hosting the Osamu Tezuka Manga Movable Feast next week, Show Us Your Stuff will be on hiatus until Thursday, March 1st. –Katherine Dacey

Hi, I’m Safetygirl! Welcome to my office, or, as a friend dubbed it, “the otaku room.” When I bought this house, I wanted a room for my computer and small manga collection, and it’s really expanded since then! Besides manga, this room is for my anime, cels, character goods, and doujinshi collections. I also LOVE the Shinsengumi, and collect anything with any version of the guys in baby blue.

Behold the Great Wall of Manga!

How long have you been collecting manga?
I was briefly into manga in the mid-’90s, mostly the stuff available in the old floppies, like Ranma ½, Maison Ikokku and Oh! My Goddess, but at that time I was all Marvel/DC/American superheros. Then I went to college and gave up on comics entirely, due to finances and being annoyed by the frequent rebootings and retconning of American comics.

That changed in 2003. That was when a friend let me borrow the first volumes of Kare Kano and Kindaichi Case Files, and I avoided reading them for a while. Then I finally read them… and I was hooked. I had just gotten a promotion at work and had extra disposable income, so a new hobby came just at the right time.

What was the first manga you bought?
I can’t remember what it was back in the ’90s—that was a long time ago! In more recent times, it was Kare Kano volume two. I was annoyed that the manga cows had been handling it and the spine was dinged, but I bought it anyway—I had to know what happened! It’s still in my collection now, even though my feelings towards the series has cooled appreciably since that time.

Close-ups of Safetygirl’s enormous (and drool-worthy) manga collection.

How big is your collection?
Over 2,100 volumes. Even though I cull and sell pretty aggressively, I’m running out of room! When I bought my house in 2004, I designed the custom-built shelves in my office to fit 1,300-1,400 books, which seemed like a lot—I had maybe 500 at the time, plus some character goods I wanted to display. As you can see, I’ve had to be pretty creative; I’ve found that manga can serve as great cord-hiders on the entertainment center. I bought a shelf at a Borders fixture sale, and it holds my Shinsengumi manga on one side while the other has my Yuu Watase titles (and a great place to display my Watase pin collection!). Recently I had to add another shelving unit; this one has my CLAMP collection (with a little room for expansion!) and Yumi Tamura. In the past couple of years, I’ve started stacking things vertically—I don’t like doing that, but the shelves aren’t deep enough for double rows.

What is the rarest item in your collection?
I wish I could say those super-expensive middle volumes of Basara, but I don’t have those yet. The French copies were an affordable placeholder, and it’ll be a good test of my French when I get there.

Beyond my manga, I also collect cels, and being one-of-a-kind, those are rare. The focus of that collection is Millennium Actress.

Safetygirl’s anime shrine. Bow before it and be humbled!

What is the weirdest item in your collection?
The original run of Golgo 13, as published by LEED here in the US in the mid ’80s. It’s flipped! Featuring strange coloring on the first chapters, where flesh tones are rendered in an Oompa-Loompa-ish orange! I’m not sure if it’s really weird, but it’s certainly early in the history of manga in the US.

How has your taste in manga evolved since you started your collection?
I think I was like a lot of people: I went on what my friends were reading, and things related to the anime I was watching on TV. I didn’t find the manga blogging/tweeting community until much later, and they’ve been an influence. But these days, I don’t do Jump titles like I used to—I’ve not liked one enough in a while to justify the investment of dozens and dozens of volumes. I’d like to say that I’m pickier now, and I use the manga community to help guide me towards things I might have either overlooked or dismissed. But what attracted me to manga was shojo, and that’s still what I love the most. I’ve also discovered that the rest of the world has manga, too, so I’ve been able to improve my rusty high school French AND finish Walkin’ Butterfly at the same time!

Kaze Hikaru artwork.

Who are your favorite comic artists?
Taeko Watanabe (Kaze Hikaru), Shigeru Takao (Teru Teru x Shonen), Yuu Watase, Miyuki Yamaguchi, Kaoru Mori, and my newest favorite is Yumi Tamura. I really wish I knew how to bribe the folks at Viz—brownies, maybe?—so they’d license 7SEEDS. For American comics, the only titles I still have left from my once-extensive collection are the trade paperbacks of Sandman and Astro City.

What series are you actively collecting right now?
I try to keep up to date—I fell behind a bit 2007-2008, which sent me scrambling during the CMX/GoComi shutdown era. Currently: Kaze Hikaru, Twin Spica, Black Bird, Dengeki Daisy, Kimi no Todoke, Oresama Teacher, xxxHolic, Arata, House of Five Leaves, Sayonara Zetsubo-Sensei, Bakuman, Kamisama Kiss, Natsume’s Book of Friends, Vampire Knight, Chi’s Sweet Home, Afterschool Charisma, Kingyo Used Books, Story of Saiunkoku, Ouran, Goong, Bunny Drop, Bride’s Story, Yotsuba, Black Butler, Arisa, Otomen, The Betrayal Knows my Name, Drops of God, Sailor Moon, Dawn of Arcana, A Devil and Her Love Song. There’s a lot of other series I would be buying, if they still were being printed. Looking forward to: The Earl and the Fairy, Sakuran.

I buy stuff from France and Germany, but since I tend to order in bunches on a quarterly basis, I wouldn’t say that I’m following anything. From Japan I buy Kaze Hikaru, and whatever Yamaguchi Miyuki and Shigeru Takao are putting out, and other things as needed. I have a weakness for anything from Hakusensha with a pretty cover. If I lived near a Book-Off, I would need another room. I subscribe to Flowers and Melody.

Manga, anime, and Hello Kitty! swag.

Do you have any tips for fellow collectors (e.g. how to organize a collection, where to find rare books, where to score the best deals on new manga)?
Catalog it, somewhere. I used to use Collectorz, but it no longer met my needs. Now I’m fairly happy on LibraryThing, though I still use Collectorz as my back-up. I once was a big fan of ListerX, but it suddenly closed and ALL of my work was lost. So no matter how much I trust LibraryThing, I *have* to have an offline record of my collection. However, one advantage to an online catalogue—it’s easy to access if you’re out book shopping! I also keep spreadsheets on my pre-orders and things I will pre-order, once RightStuf has a sale!

Manga about the Shinsengumi.

Organize it in a way that makes sense to you. I do alphabetical, but I do keep series together (sometimes there’s a name change, like how GoComi’s Ultimate Venus is Big Bang Venus in French), or file by common name. (Both Codename: Sailor V and Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon are under “Sailor.”)

Deals and rarities—I scour comic book stores. Some bought into manga heavily during the boom, and have a lot of stock from that era. Good if you’re looking for Emma, not so much for something more recent. For new things, I wait for RightStuf studio sales, and I’m a member of their GotAnime? discount club. I buy a lot of manga; getting it 40% off helps a lot!

To see more of Safetygirl’s awesome otaku room, click here.

Show Us Your Stuff is a regular column in which readers share pictures of their manga collections and discuss their favorite series. If you’d like to see your manga library featured here, please follow the directions on this page.

Created by Kusumi Masayuki, this extraordinary character comes to life under the pen of Jiro Taniguchi, in a mode similar to The Walking Man: each tale leads him to taste a typically Japanese dish, reawakening memories, drawing out new thoughts, or causing furtive encounters.

Moody foodie manga by Jiro Taniguchi? Yup, I’d read that, even if no one wrestles a wolf or scales a two-hundred foot rock face in a blinding snowstorm. Best of all, I won’t have to wait much longer to do so: Koduko no Gourmet will be available through JManga on Tuesday, February 21st. My only question: when will Fanfare/Ponet Mon publish a deluxe print edition?

The introduction is a little disingenuous, however, as the book assumes a level of artistic fluency on the part of the reader that isn’t reflected in that warmly inviting statement. No novice could use the passages on anatomy or perspective to learn either of these essential drafting skills; the authors don’t break down the process of sketching a body or a three-dimensional space into enough discrete steps for a newcomer to recreate the examples in the book. The same is true for their advice on tools; though the authors provide a detailed catalog of pens, nibs, erasers, templates, blades, and brushes favored by professional artists, the information about how to use these tools presumes that the reader has worked with similar implements.

What How to Draw Shojo Manga does well, however, is introduce novices to the concepts associated with creating sequential art. The authors review the basics, explaining the various types of camera angles and shots, and when they’re most effective; discussing the underlying philosophy behind character designs; and showing how an artist takes a script from words to storyboards to finished product. The book also includes an appendix with practical information about submitting work to contests — obviously less applicable to American readers — as well as strategies for handling criticism; in a thoughtful touch, the authors critique a short story (included in full in the book) so that readers can better appreciate the substance of the editorial comments. Whenever possible, the authors use examples from actual manga to underscore points about character design and layouts; sharp-eyed fans will recognize works from such Hakusensha magazines as Lala, Melody, and Hana to Yume.

The bottom line: How to Draw Shojo Manga won’t turn a greenhorn into Arina Tanemura, but it will help her identify areas of weakness (e.g. poor drafting skills) and provide her with the vocabulary to discuss — and learn more about — the creative process.

Editor’s note: This review was originally included in a Short Takes column from November 2010. When I reorganized my site in January 2012, I created a category for instruction manuals (How to Draw Manga) and decided that this review would be better suited as a stand-alone piece. Look for more how-to reviews in the coming months!

HOW TO DRAW SHOJO MANGA • WRITTEN BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF HANA TO YUME, BESSATSU HANE TO YUME, LALA, AND MELODY MAGAZINES • TOKYOPOP • 176 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

The Dolph Lundgren character — if I might be allowed to call him that — is Shimazu Toyohisa, a Satsuma warrior facing long odds at the Battle of Sekigahara (1600). Just as Shimazu’s death seems imminent, he finds himself transported to an alternate dimension, one in which mankind’s greatest warriors — Hannibal, Nobunaga Oda, Joan of Arc — have been assembled for an elaborate game. The purpose and rules of the game remain elusive, but the primary objective seems to be mass destruction: the game’s organizer unleashes hordes of ghouls and dragons on Shimazu and his allies, in the process laying waste to cities, forts, and crops.

Like all good Schwarzenegger or Stallone vehicles, Drifters makes a few token gestures towards subplot and world-building. Shimazu helps a group of elves resist their oppressors, for example, teaching them the manly art of standing up for themselves. Hirano provides so little explanation for the elves’ marginalized status, however, that the entire episode registers as a stalling tactic for the climatic battle at volume one’s end, a half-hearted effort to show us that however unhinged or deadly Shimazu may be, he knows injustice when he sees it.

Drifters’ other shortcoming is the artwork. Hirano’s clumsy character designs make the entire cast look like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, with huge, sunken eyes, large, triangular noses, and blocky torsos. Though one might reasonably argue that Picasso’s bodily distortions were a deliberate aesthetic choice, it’s harder to make the same case for Hirano’s work; his characters’ mitt-like hands and poorly executed profiles suggest a poor command of perspective, rather than an artistic challenge to it.

Hirano’s action scenes suffer from an entirely different problem: they’re riotously busy, bursting at the seams with too many figures, monsters, and weapons, overwhelming the eye with visual information. One could be forgiven for thinking that Hirano was trying to out-do Peter Jackson; not since Sauron flattened the forces of Middle Earth have so many warriors and monsters been assembled in one scene to less effect. Looking at the opening chapter, however, it’s clear than Hirano can stage a credible battle scene when he wants to: he depicts the Battle of Sekigahara as a churning mass of horses, samurai, and swords, effectively capturing the confusion and claustrophobia of medieval combat. Once dragons and orcs enter the picture, however, the action scenes begin to lose their urgency and coherence, substituting the terrible immediacy of hand-to-hand fighting for larger, noisier air battles where the stakes are less clearly defined.

It’s a pity that Drifters is so relentless, as the story certainly has the potential to be a guilty pleasure; what’s not to like about a manga in which Japan’s greatest feudal warriors fight alongside Hannibal, Joan of Arc, and elves? What Hirano needs is a little restraint: when the story is cranked up to eleven from the very beginning, the cumulative effective is deafening, making it difficult for the reader to hear the endearingly cheesy dialogue above the clank of swords and explosions. And if there’s anything I learned from watching old chestnuts like Commando, it’s that even the most testosterone-fueled script needs to pause long enough for the hero to say something pithy and ridiculous.

DRIFTERS, VOL. 1 • BY KOHTA HIRANO • DARK HORSE • 208 pp.  RATING: OLDER TEEN

In 2012, we’re beginning to see publishers address this issue in a meaningful way. VIZ, for example, just rolled out Shonen Jump Alpha, a weekly digital magazine that’s working hard to close the gap between the Japan and American editions of its most popular titles. Yen Press is taking that process one step further with the serialization of Soul Eater NOT, a spin-off of Atsushi Okhubo’s popular shonen series Soul Eater. Beginning with the February 2012 issue of Yen Plus, new chapters of Soul Eater NOT will be released on the same day in Japan and North America. Better still, Yen Press is starting with the very first chapter, making it easy for fans to follow all the action.

More details below, and in Brigid Alverson’s recent interview with Kurt Hassler at MTV Geek.

PR: Yen Press Launches World-Wide Serialization of Soul Eater NOT in February Issue of Yen Plus

The latest issue of Yen Plus, the monthly manga anthology from Yen Press, features its first simultaneous serialization with Japan – and the first ever simultaneous worldwide serialization, with the latest chapter of Soul Eater NOT! Future chapters of Soul Eater NOT! will be available to Yen Plus subscribers the same day they’re published in Square Enix’s Monthly Shōnen Gangan magazine.

Soul Eater NOT! is a spin-off of the New York Times bestselling series Soul Eater, following new student Tsugumi Harudori in the NOT class at Death Weapon Meister Academy. It features an all-new cast as well as a few familiar faces to fans of Soul Eater. Creator Atsushi Ohkubo says, “To my American fans, please enjoy Soul Eater NOT! alongside Soul Eater!” According to Ohkubo, “Soul Eater NOT! is a story that takes place just a little bit before the events of Soul Eater. I drew it with the motto, ‘It’s a savage but super-fun life!’ in my head.” Ohkubo drew a special congratulatory illustration to mark the occasion, which appears in the February issue.