Confuse-o-Vision Week, #5: Highschool of the Dead, Vol. 5

This particular quixotic reading project ends as it began -- see my explanation on Monday -- with a book solidly in the middle of a series.

But, for my final number, I'm attempting a higher level of difficulty: for the earlier books this week, I'd read some of the earlier volumes (if not for a while). Today, I'm hitting the fifth volume of Highschool of the Dead, written by Daisuke Sato and drawn by Shouji Sato, which I've never seen before. Let's see how much sense it makes to me...

The premise is pretty straightforward: the dead have risen, hungry for the flesh of humans, and everything has gone to hell. A small group of friends from a private highschool -- led by ordinary guy Takashi Komuro -- grabbed some weapons and is looking for a safe place, and has attracted a few others (the school nurse, a cute little girl). As this volume opens, they've reached a mall, after fleeing the compound of the rich girl's parents, and has found more tensions there. (I could have figured all of this out, but Highschool of the Dead also has an excellent recap page up front -- I recommend that feature highly for all manga series.) The featured character this time is an exceptionally high-strung female police officer -- Asami Nakaoka -- who is the requisite borderline-incompetent, in-over-her-head female authority figure who will either be proven completely inadequate by further events or will step up to be actually competent -- which it's to be isn't clear by the end of this one.

This is only almost a harem manga, since Takashi has a chubby sidekick (they're the Japanese equivalent of Pegg and Frost in Shaun of the Dead), but all of the other main characters in their group are female, nearly all of them are exceptionally buxom, and they mostly dress in tight, short outfits which are often school uniforms. This particular volume doesn't seem to live all the way up to the M rating -- there's only panty shots, at worst, and the violence is primarily human-on-zombie, and no more than ordinarily gory for a shonen comic. (So I'm tentatively assuming that there's been worse, probably on both fronts, and/or that there will be worse to come.)

The tone is mostly serious -- except for the sidestories at the end, which include "Cosplay of the Dead," a transparent attempt to get all of those buxom females into even skimpier, odder costumes and poses -- but doesn't reach the level of bloodthirsty nihilism that zombie stories often do these days. Our heroes aren't perfect -- they're all carefully flawed in audience-identification and standard-characterization ways -- but they're, at least in this volume, primarily good people trying to do their best in a horrible and unexpected situation. And the body count isn't nearly as high as I'd expect -- of all of the characters listed in that intro synopsis seem to have survived all five volumes so far, implying that each new book introduces a couple of zombie-fodder redshirts (but not more than a handful), while our main cast continues on, physically untouched.

I'm not a fan of zombie stories -- they encourage lifeboat morality in all of its worst forms, and privilege the raw, rampaging id, besides the usual boring nature of zombies themselves -- but this is an attractive-looking, reasonably well-written (if generic) story, so I didn't mind reading it at all. (And that's pretty high praise, from me, for a zombie story.)

Confuse-o-Vision Week, #4: Zombie-Loan, Vol. 13

This week, I'm reviewing late volumes in manga series without having read most of the earlier volumes, to see what  (if anything) a new reader could figure out. I had something like an explanation of this strange behavior on Monday in the first post.

Today's choice is the thirteenth and final volume of Zombie-Loan by the manga team Peach-Pit. Coincidentally -- I didn't plan this at all -- both the members of Peach-Pit are female, which makes this very appropriate that it's appearing on International Women's Day. I read and reviewed Volumes 2 and 3 of this series back in 2008, but haven't seen it since then. 

Not all experiments are successful; not everything we try works. So far this week, the manga stories were clear enough to get into, even if I wasn't sure who all of the people were and what they had to do with anything. But Zombie-Loan has stymied me. When I read it, it was the story of three teenagers -- a cute boy with dark hair, a cute boy with white hair, and a mousy clumsy girl -- who had died, been brought back to life through vaguely magical means, and were working off the value of that resurrection treatment working in the collection office of the company that does the back-to-life deal. (Hence, they all were paying off their zombie loans -- get it?) As this book begins, the three of them -- I think it's the three of them, but the light-haired guy might be someone else, and the white-haired dude on the cover might be somewhere else -- are on a boat, confronting a guy (or maybe a woman -- there's several of them, dressed identically like the Gorton's fisherman, and I can't tell them apart) who can turn them into digital static with the giant oar he (she?) carries. (They may be in some kind of simulated environment, or maybe the whole thing is just a more high-powered fantasy than I expected.)

Anyway, there's a lot of talking over the next three hundred pages -- about the mousy girl being a "singularity" who can destroy the world, about the "seven-member committee," about Elizabeth (who I think is a metaphor rather than an actual person) and her children, about someone called the Inspector (who was apparently an important minor character for a while) and his supernatural relationship with the mousy girl, about the worlds of Higan and Shigan, and about a bunch of other things I didn't get. There's also a car that flies for no reason I can see -- after being saved, mostly off-page, from riding down a river towards a waterfall -- a chase up a giant spiral staircase out in the middle of an ocean (and the invisible elevator right next to it), and a bunch of other characters doing something else somewhere else, one of whom might actually be the white-haired kid. (Or maybe not.)

It all ends with a bang, in a way I probably should spoil for people who might actually know what it all means. But I definitely didn't get it, and so this quick note is really nothing like a review at all. The best I can say is to go back to the first volume instead, and see if that grabs you -- but, under no circumstances should you pick up a series with the last volume.

Of course, anyone with two brain cells to rub together already knew that....

Confuse-o-Vision Week, #3: Black God, Vol. 15

This week's bizarre attempt to bump up posting frequency sees me reading later volumes -- much later, in this particular case -- of series that I read the beginning of, but then missed for a while. I doesn't make much sense, but I explained my rationale in the first post of the series on Monday.

Today's volume is the fifteenth of Black God, a very shonen series (full of demon-fighting and loud professions of eternal friendship, plus gigantic conspiracies and their coincident interlocking secret plots) by the Korean team of Dall-Young Lim and Sung-Woo Park, done originally for the Japanese market. I read three early volumes back in 2008, but missed the ten volumes in between. 

Series hero Keita started off as both a manga creator and a complete jerk, but this book is so totally focused on action and the machinations of its battling-superhuman-factions plot that he has no time to be either of these things this time out. (He may have stopped being either or both of those, but I can't tell.) He's still eternally bound to mototsumitama Kuro, the girl on the cover -- OK, she's not a "girl," but a member of a nonhuman race with vast supernatural powers that get even greater powers when they bond with a human contractee and "synchro"together. (It's still just the supernatural half of the duo that does the fighting, as far as I can tell, but I bet the humans will mix it up before the series is over.)

As usual with a series about people fighting in complicated ways, the cast has proliferated, through what seem to have been either chance encounters or battles, and this volume begins in the middle of a standoff, as half-mototsumitama Mana (another cute girl, blonde this time -- seasoned manga fans are nodding their heads in recognition of a standard trope) battles Kaien, who is tall, adult, male, and arrogant, which all mark him as a very nasty villain. (There's room to write at least one Ph.D. thesis on shortness as a marker for righteousness in manga.)

Once that battle is settled, we dive into the next story (which doesn't end in this volume, either; it's like manga-makers do this deliberately to keep their audiences buying more!), where the smaller, weaker "family" that our heroes belong to try to set up a trap for the head of a larger, nastier family and kill him. It looks like the big problem will be that said nasty is Kuro's brother Reishin, but, of course, there's plenty of other problems before that, and lots of fighting at high speed with extreme blur lines and cool pictographs (because you have to yell out the name of the fighting technique you're using for it to be effective, silly!) superimposed on them.

The art is still top-rank, state-of-the-art shonen-style; if you like fighting manga at all, Black God looks amazing. The story is good -- equally right down the center of its genre, without anything to surprise or disappoint -- so this is a great discovery for fans of this kind of story. (Though there is a very fan-servicey side story at the end -- in which the group goes to a public bath, which every manga cast has to do every twelve volumes or so -- which not only has a lot of carefully-drawn upper female anatomy, but centers on the girls' competition over the comeliness of their "boobies," until they burst on on Keita and insist that he judge among them. Let it not be said that Black God doesn't earn it's OT rating.)

Confuse-o-Vision Week, #2: Soul Eater, Vol. 8

See yesterday's entry for something like an explanation of why I'm dropping back into series that I read a few volumes of, several years ago. This time out, I've got the eighth volume of Soul Eater, a teenagers-battling-demons story that I began with the first volume a few years back -- and liked, honestly! -- but didn't manage to make it back for #s 2 through 7. As is usual this week, we begin the story already in progress....

I'd expected that this would be along the lines of Bleach or a Japanese B.P.R.D., focusing on the "Scythemeisters" (minions of the death god, Shingami, sent out to collect evil souls, who conveniently all call themselves witches) and their magical, sentient weapons (who shapeshift into different weapons, and also, of course, into teenagers themselves), but I'd forgotten the black hole at the center of the manga universe: high school. The main characters at this point are the students at DWMA -- Death Weapons Meister Academy, which full name is mentioned only once, near the very end of the book -- and their teachers and the graduates of the school are background characters like a sensei in the early going of Naruto.

So the two main Meisters of the first volume are nowhere to be seen in this volume (I think), and the #3 that I thought would be their Draco Malfoy -- the annoying son of Shingami -- looks a lot like a series hero this time out, even though he's not in half the book. (Manga can be difficult to peg like that -- when you're telling a multi-thousand page story with a cast of dozens, any random two hundred pages might not be about the central storyline at all.) And the larger plot -- besides the usual engines of manga: go kill/capture that demon, spar with your classmates, and the upheavals of adolescent friendships -- revolves around a really powerful witch/demon/evil woman called Arachne, who is of course manipulating events  for ends we can't quite see yet. (And there's her long-lost sister, as well, who was thought dead -- possibly in this series, possibly just in backstory -- and returns in a seemingly-harmless form that every true manga reader knows means that she's the most dangerous one of all.)

It's a big stew at this point, with a lot of characters I saw for the first time in this book -- the two folks on the cover are minor adult Meisters, for example, nowhere near main character status -- doing mostly violent things and wondering about mysteries. It's still as energetic as the first volume was, and Ohkubo's art is solid shonen work -- but the writing is a bit better than that, with nice sneaky hooks and dialogue that hits all of the usual notes without sounding exactly like every other manga. I can't say I completely understood this volume, but I did enjoy it, and that's a plus.

Confuse-o-Vision Week, #1: Sumomomo, Momomo, Vol. 11

It's hard to jump onto a moving story, particularly when it's been moving for a while -- that's why most of us begin stories at the beginning, and work our way through them. But what if we read the beginning, and wandered off for a while, and wanted to see if we could catch up? My reading project this week examines exactly that situation: what it's like to read a late volume of something I saw at the beginning and lost track of along the way. If all goes well, I'll read one manga volume each day and post a review that night -- making as much sense of that volume as I possibly can.

Starting off is the eleventh volume of Shinobu Ohtaka's Sumomomo, Momomo -- I read the first two volumes of this when they came out and really liked them, though I worried that even in the second book, it was sliding away from the original boy-who-will-never-be-a-martial-artist premise into something more generic and bland.

The main character of Sumomomo, Momomo -- Koushi Inuzuka, who started off the series wanting to be a great prosecuting attorney, even though he's the sole heir of one of the greatest families of martial arts -- is only really in two of the seven chapters -- the big ending, where he's dragged into a duel yet again, and a more interesting earlier bit, where he joins a family of gorillas [!] to fight a giant tiger [!!] to escape from a hidden valley [!!!] as part of a training mission.  So, as far as I can tell, Sumomomo, Momomo is yet another manga that's been taken over by its supporting cast -- even Momoko, the subtitular ("The Strongest Bride on Earth") character and the first of the harem that's apparently formed around Koushi, doesn't get much page-time here.

Instead, the focus is on another one of those secret-martial-arts-groups-trying-to-take-over-the-world plots, which has gotten to a level that requires a lot of this book to be made up of scenes in which characters I don't recognize -- several of this series's plethora of nice-and-spunky girls, the mean-girl nemesis of at least one of them, darkly smoldering young men with hair in their eyes, and the blocky fathers of several of the above -- emote loudly at each other about their plot, until I could just about figure out what was going on, and come even closer to caring. (Ohtaka has a light touch, so Sumomomo, Momomo is still not completely telling its story straight -- but it does seem to have drunk its own Kool-Aid.)

This volume was fun and zippy, but I have to admit that it disappointed me -- at no point does Koushi protest the role of punching each other as a method of settling disputes, or quote a single legal codicil. In fact, mid-way through this book, Ohtaka shockingly and completely abandons what I thought was the point of the series, and declares that Koushi is no longer "the man incapable of learning martial arts." I may have had unrealistic expectations, but the first volume of this series was a wonderfully funny parody of the kind of story that it now wants to be. And I'm afraid I can't see that as an improvement.