Graphic Novels

It’s the end of the year, and now that the reminiscing and navel-gazing is over it’s time for the most important year-end festivity, looking at how many books I read. In 2018 I read thirty-six, compared to 2017’s forty-two. This year, I have twenty-nine books recorded in LibraryThing, but this excludes eight volumes of Toriyama Akira’s DragonballZ because they’re part of a box set and so, from LibraryThing’s perspective, are only one book. There’s also The Bowl of Tears and Solace, which isn’t in their catalogue at all last I checked. That brings us up to a more typical thirty-eight, two more than last year.

When I pick up a story by prolific horror artist Ito Junji, there are two things I expect: It’s gonna be good, and it’s gonna be gross. There are a few exceptions at least to the latter point, but his adaptation of Frankenstein delivers on both fronts. If you’re looking for a manga to read for Halloween but want something more classic than Uzumaki or Gyo, this will be a solid choice.

Since comics are a visual medium let’s start with the art. Every panel is filled with detail, and the heavy linework and monochrome colour make the whole story feel appropriately dark and uneasy. Panel layouts are effective throughout the work, and the design of the monster is excellent. Perhaps this sentiment comes from reading it so recently, but thinking through other designs for Frankenstein’s monster, like the 1931 film or Hammer’s movie series among many others, this may be my favourite. He looks appropriately terrifying and obviously stitched-together, but also strong and agile as he is in the novel. I was less excited by the human characters, who all look good but not particularly special. I suppose that’s fine, though, since Frankenstein is best kept relatively realistic to aid suspension of disbelief, so wild character designs aside from the monster may call too much attention to themselves.

Go Nagai has long been an artist I’ve been aware of and was interested in perhaps checking out someday, but I only got around to doing so recently. My interest was piqued last year when I watched Yuasa Masaaki’s anime adaptation of Nagai’s comic Devilman, titled Devilman Crybaby. Yuasa is always excellent and this anime was no exception, and as soon as I saw that Seven Seas had published the first half of the original in an omnibus edition I picked it up right away. They released the second and final omnibus late last year and I recently finished it and, though it’s been a while since I last reviewed a comic, I figured I’d share a few thoughts about it.

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. I had to pick them up a few at a time, since I didn’t have that much spare cash in college, and also had to figure out what order Dark Horse’s initially unnumbered volumes ought to be read in. Still, the best way to read OMG is probably to marathon several volumes at once, take a break, read several more, and so on.

Kio Shimoku’s Genshiken: Second Season is a tough comic for me to review, because I can’t help comparing it to the original run of Genshiken. Part of what I liked so much about the original, though, was that I could relate to it back in college. Since then, though, not only has the comic changed significantly, but I’ve changed as well.

I first read Genshiken early in college, and loved it right away. The setting, a college anime club, doesn’t sound all that exciting, but it has a few things going for it. At the time, anime was just starting to take over as my primary hobby, and I was also getting very involved in one of the student organisations at my university. Furthermore, I could see a lot of myself in two of the main characters, Sasahara and Madarame, and the whole cast seemed like a group I could see myself hanging out with.

Now we move on to an older, shorter work from the mid-1990’s by Yasuhiko Yoshikazu, Joan. It’s a work of historical fiction, about a young woman named Emil who’d been raised as a man near the end of the Hundred Years War, who sees visions of Joan of Arc urging her to follow in her footsteps and serve the French king. I can’t say how historically accurate the work is overall, aside from the fictional Emil, but the last volume includes a short essay by Chojun Otani, a scholar of French literature, who says that Yasuhiko came to him for help in his research, so he’d apparently made at least some effort in keeping the work as accurate as the story allows.

So, I’ve already talked about Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin twice before, so I think I just have a few things to add. The eighth volume does pick up where the fourth left off, having finished Char and Sayla’s backstory. Yasuhiko Yoshikazu’s art is still excellent, and I especially like the colour pages with the watercolours. He also continues to be very good at characterising Gundam’s large cast, even those who are only around for a chapter or two.

I was a fan of Kishiro Yukito’s original Battle Angel Alita, which I finished at about the time the omnibus edition of the sequel, Battle Angel Alita: Last Order began, but I fell behind on the Last Order release for a long time. However, I figured there’s no better time to knock out a few graphic novels in a row than when you’re supposed to read seventy-five books in a year and it’s September and you’ve only got forty-three.

I wrote about the first two volumes of Zekkyo’s comic adaptation of ToraDora way back in July 2011, and volume three a few months later. Since then, each volume has continued to follow the anime fairly closely (I haven’t read the original novels, so I can’t make a comparison there), and my opinion of it has remained consistent from volume to volume. The character art is good, the jokes generally work, the drama is, perhaps, a bit melodramatic at times, but that’s just part of the style. It does have a high school setting, which I almost always dislike, but I’ll give it a pass since I’ve been following the story for so long.

There are three notable things about Seraphim 266613336 Wings. One is that it has the most unwieldy three-word title I’ve ever encountered. The second is that it’s another Kon Satoshi comic, but one he did with Oshii Mamoru (of Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor fame). The third is that, like the other Kon comic I’ve read this year, it’s unfinished.

Now, the story is an interesting one - the premise is that the world is plagued by a disease called “seraphim,” which causes its victims to hallucinate and to gradually grow wings out of their back. Much of the world is already dead (and Japan was apparently wiped out entirely), so the WHO sends out two men and a dog called the Magi to escort a girl, Sera, who seems to be immune to the disease and possibly the key to finding a cure, back to her homeland in central Asia. It’s fairly wordy, which is something that Oshii is known for, but everything does move at a quick pace with some action thrown in.