What? I said I’d read seventy-five books this year; I didn’t say how I’d get to seventy-five.
Anyway, considering how down I was on this series at the end, I enjoyed these early volumes more than I thought I would. Oh, My Goddess! isn’t really a must-read, but it’s charming, and it’s entertaining enough if you like the style of late-eighties or early-nineties anime or manga.
Fujishima Kosuke’s Oh, My Goddess!, a series approximately as old as I am, has finished; Dark Horse published the last volume earlier this year. I was a relative latecomer to the comic, picking it up only in 2007, I believe, when it was already approaching twenty years old. I was able to blow through most of it that had been published up to that point fairly quickly, since someone must have dumped the first twenty volumes or so at a local Half Price Books.
This series is going to end with a whimper, isn’t it?
I’ve been down on Oh My Goddess for a long time now; the series basically lost me way back in volume 41, and I’ve basically just been stewing in a fairly mediocre arc for three years waiting for it to end already. Things have improved somewhat in the last couple volumes, I suppose; Fujishima Kosuke is better at drawing motorcycle racing than he is any other sort of action, and the character art is still nice enough.
So, say you’ve started taking Japanese classes. What do you want to do, especially if you’re a bibliophile like me? Start reading, right? Novels and poetry are pretty tough, though, so you go to the next best thing - comics, which you’ve just discovered are not mayn-guhs but manga. I mean, hey, they’ve got pictures and stuff to help you out, so they’ll be easy, right?
I won’t say “wrong,” but they’re not really “easy,” either.
Back in high school, ten dollars for a volume of manga (or mayn-guh, as I and many unfortunately pronounced it) was a pretty good deal for my precious allowance money. I could certainly afford more of it than I could American graphic novels, and it was also cheaper per volume than anime DVD’s. However, manga did have one drawback in that they could get very, very long.
I remember looking at the first volume of Ranma 1/2 in a Bookstop outlet, knowing it was popular and liking the first couple chapters I read in the store, and hey - I could buy two or three volumes at a time!
First, a programming note - over the next couple months, I’ll be finishing up my web design certification, and I’ve just begun a Biblical studies programme, so I’ll be busier than usual. I’ll continue to blog and update every Sunday, but expect more short posts like this for a little while.
With that out of the way, I’ve gone through a few graphic novels over the past couple weeks. I talked about Gunslinger Girl volumes 11-12 in the previous post, but here are the others:
Okay, “sucks” may be a bit strong, but Fujishima Kosuke’s Oh, My Goddess! volume 41… it’s still not very good. Neither were the last couple volumes.
I hate saying that, too, because I’ve really loved this franchise since I started reading in 2009. Nowhere near its 1994 American debut, but still longer than any other comic I follow (a couple webcomics excepted). The series' basic premise, a young man living with a beautiful goddess, is pretty blatant wish-fulfillment fiction, but the characters are likable enough that I can forgive it that.