Ed Note: This piece was supposed to run in June, but your erstwhile editor missed it. So here it is a little late, my apologies.
Happy Pride Month, VIZ fans! To celebrate, I bring you… the heterosexual Goodbye, Eri, a memoir manga by a nonbinary artist, and a manga about Spider-Man. That’s just the way it goes sometimes. Anyway, let’s get to it! First, the news.
Read Different With VIZ Summer Picks
In addition to last month’s recs of NANA and Skip Beat!, VIZ is recommending Haikyu!! (my beloved) and Black Clover (haven’t read it) to read in the summer heat. And if you’ve already read Haikyu!!, why not pick up the new art book collecting every piece of color artwork made for the manga? Take it from me, it’s absolutely beautiful. Read different. Get into fictional volleyball. And do it now while digital volumes of Haikyu!! and Black Clover are 30% off! I really can’t tell you anything about Black Clover though besides the fact that it is a shonen manga, sorry.
Something I can tell you about, however, is…
VIZ offers portfolio reviews at Anime Expo 2023
Cartoonists! Comic writers! Comic artists! If you’re attending Anime Expo 2023, now’s the time to sign up for an in-person portfolio review from VIZ editors, including the former editor-in-chief of Shonen Jump Hisashi Sasaki. Wow! I was fortunate enough to land one of these last Anime NYC back in November (though not with Mr. Sasaki) and heard a lot of useful feedback for my artistic career. The linked blog post details what kind of sample work the editors want to see if you’re interested in this opportunity. Good luck to everyone!
Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War Part 2 Streaming Date Confirmed
Even more Bleach! Congratulations to Bleach fans everywhere. There is now a trailer for part 2 with subtitles in six languages and a date upon which to start watching it (July 8, 2023. Hulu in the US, Disney+ most everywhere else.) Ichigo Kurasaki and Uryu Ichida diverged from lifelong friends to eternal enemies at the end of part one, so what’s going to happen to them now? Tune in next month to find out!
Speaking of things hitting streaming soon…
Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead Anime drops on July 9
This weekly anime will be premiering the day after Bleach: Thousand Year Blood War Part 2 on Hulu and Netflix! Check out the trailer here. A surprisingly optimistic take on the zombie apocalypse as an escape from the pressures of capitalism? Sounds fantastic! … I still haven’t read the manga, but it’s on my (haha) bucket list.
Spider-Man: Fake Red, volume 1
Yusuke Osawa
June 13, 2023
I read this the day after I saw Across the Spider-Verse and I don’t know if that made the reading experience better or worse. I did find myself wondering how/if this fit into the movie continuity, which was distracting for me. The main character emphatically not being Spider-Man and being really into bouldering is a pretty fun twist on the extremely familiar origin story, but it does make the whole thing kind of feel like a side plot to a larger Peter Parker-focused narrative. Like chapters 162-167 of a 300-chapter shonen epic or something. The fight scenes are a bit hard to follow, but the drawings are dynamic and technically competent. I’m one of the least superhero-following members of WWAC (don’t ask me how many X-men there are) so I was wondering if the manga format would make this kind of story click more with me than a 32-page floppy. It… didn’t really. I think I’m just fundamentally uninterested in this kind of story, I guess? I don’t know why.
Until I Love Myself, volume 1
Poppy Pesuyama
June 20, 2023
This is part one of a two-volume memoir about sexual assault, trauma, healing, and gender identity! Which also ended up not being really my thing. The extremely serious and painful situations Pesuyama discusses here are difficult to read about, though the simple art style does make them more accessible. I’m reminded of Nagata Kabi at her rawest, but like… even more horrifying? And without a lot of levity to balance that out. This is not a book I would tell anyone to read without giving them a list of content warnings first, or a book I would recommend for light summer reading. That being said, I do think it is an important book that should be published and read. It’s definitely not a book for everyone, though.
Goodbye, Eri
Tatsuki Fujimoto
June 27, 2023
What can I say here about Goodbye, Eri that hasn’t been said about Goodbye, Eri already? The comic was published digitally in April 2022, which is when most people read it for the first time before the print release. It’s a phenomenal one-shot, technically masterful and emotionally resonant. A heartfelt story with “a pinch of fantasy” that felt like the fruit of the seeds being sown in Tatsuki Fujimoto’s early one-shots (collected in the two-volume Tatsuki Fujimoto Before Chainsaw Man). A fantastic love letter to movies and filmmaking from the biggest movie fan in comics. If you’re intimidated by the violence and crude humor of Chainsaw Man, Goodbye, Eri is an excellent entry point into Fujimoto’s work. It’s just a good comic, I dunno what else to say here!
And that’s all I’ve got for you this month! Tune in next month for more VIZ news and reviews!
