Happy February, everyone! Love is in the air, chocolates are on sale, snow is starting to melt where I live, and VIZ Media has news and new releases to share with you yet again! This month we’ll be talking about some long-running properties and authors you’ve certainly heard of before, including the Deadpool/Shonen Jump collaboration and Rumiko Takahashi’s short story collection Came the Mirror & Other Tales. But first, the news.
Thank God, Shonen Jump is Not Doing NFTs
Last month, Shonen Jump scared a lot of its fans by tweeting that “Soon you’ll be able to show your Shonen Jump love in a whole new way. Exciting announcement tomorrow!” Three hours later, they tweeted a follow-up clarifying that the new way to show your love for Shonen Jump is not NFTs, with a smiley face. Thank goodness!
Instead, the exciting announcement was about the opening of the official Shonen Jump Store for the United States, an online merchandise store selling T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, and Shonen Jump-branded slides brought to you by VIZ media. So far the only manga represented are Bleach and One Piece, with promises of more to come in the future. I’m hoping for Haikyu!! stuff myself, but now Shonen Jump fans in the U.S. can show off their fandom in style.
Hear Voice Actors Read Lines in Promotional Videos on Twitter
VIZ media’s official Twitter page has recently started posting short videos animating sequences from their bestselling manga, while a voice actor reads the dialogue as the character they portray. Here’s Caitlin Glass as Winry in this scene from Fullmetal Alchemist: Fullmetal Edition, and Lauren Landa as Juno to celebrate Juno’s birthday on February 12. Fun and innovative!
Limited Edition Yashahime Blu-Ray
Yashahime is the anime-only continuation of Rumiko Takahashi’s legendary InuYasha series, following the daughters of the original protagonists as they journey across the fantastical land. On February 15, the limited edition 2-disc Blu-Ray box set of the first half of season 1 goes on sale, containing episodes 1-12 of the original anime series. This limited edition set also boasts a 20-page full-color booklet, a premium art card, a poster, extended commentary from the cast, and other special features, to say nothing of the high quality video and audio. Fans of Yashahime should grab this set while they can!
Speaking of works by Rumiko Takahashi, let’s take a look at…
What I’m Reading
Came the Mirror & Other Tales
Rumiko Takahashi
February 15, 2022
This is a collection of six short, horror-tinged stories from various points in Takahashi’s long manga-making career. Most of them focus on romantic relationships, without necessarily being romantic. My favorite story in the collection was “Lovely Flower,” originally published in 2003, about a woman who kept finding a strange-smelling flower around herself in her daily life. It felt more like a josei than Takahashi’s usual shonen and seinen work, which was refreshing, and I love the limited color palette in the opening pages of the comic. I also enjoyed the final comic, a collaboration between Takahashi and Mitsuru Adachi discussing how they both got into manga in the first place, got published in Shonen Sunday, and met each other at dinners sponsored by the editorial department. We love manga about manga!
Fans of Rumiko Takahashi’s longform work could do worse than pick up this collection, and for newcomers to her oeuvre, Came the Mirror is an accessible introduction to her general style and the types of characters and subject matter she gravitates towards.
Deadpool: Samurai, Volume 1
Writing by by Sanshiro Kasama, Art by Hikaru Uesugi
February 8, 2022
Full disclosure: My only familiarity with Deadpool is via pop-cultural osmosis; I’ve never read any of the Deadpool comics or watched the movies. I’ve seen trailers and internet memes about him, but I’m really not familiar with the character as he appears in “canon.” As a comic, though, this Shonen Jump+ and Marvel collaboration is pretty entertaining even for someone without an attachment to Deadpool himself. The lampshade-hanging jokes get a bit excessive sometimes (saying something’s a cliche in dialogue does not make it less cliche) but there were a few one-liners that made me laugh. I liked the new original characters the series brought in, a Japanese spider-girl named Sakura Spider (whose backstory is identical to the original Spider-Man, except in Japan), and a popular idol who has a venom-style symbiote attached to her. The art is solid. The action scenes are dynamic and the girls are cute. Fans of Deadpool or the shonen manga aesthetic will probably enjoy this series.
Witch Watch, Volume 1
Kenta Shinohara
February 22, 2022
I’ve been reading Witch Watch as it comes out on the Shonen Jump app and loving it, but I was looking forward to this volume as it comes with author commentary and bonus drawings of the characters! As it turns out, Shinohara (also known for Sket Dance and Astra Lost in Space) is pretty much just writing “a hodgepodge of various things I like. I’d be happy if you think of this as a manga you can pick up and read as casually as going to visit friends.”
In a magazine where half the series put their cast in mortal peril and traumatic situations on a daily basis, Witch Watch really is a breath of fresh air.
In this first volume, young witch Nico moves in with her familiar, the ogre Morihito (nicknamed Moi), and gets into various wacky shenanigans with him and their classmates while the threat of possible future danger looms in the distance. It’s fun and lighthearted, and the dynamic between Moi and Nico is very cute. The art is strong enough to sell readers on a lot of visual gags, and the humor, while being a bit referential at times, happens to be the kind of comedy I enjoy. Also, the cover is so beautiful. I’d recommend Witch Watch to anyone looking for a breezy, fantastical comedy to pass the time with.
That’s all I’ve got for you this month! See you in March for more news and reviews!
