Welcome back to the VIZ Pubwatch, everyone! Did you miss me? I spent my August crunching on convention prep and then got COVID and missed Anime NYC because of it, but I’m better now and ready to share more VIZ news and reviews with you all! We’ll talk about some shonen classics and some brand-new series, including the English edition of Ai Yazawa’s Last Quarter.
It’s Naruto’s 25th anniversary!
Also my 26th birthday is today, in case you were wondering. I can’t believe Naruto is almost as old as me! Anyway, to celebrate Naruto’s anniversary, there are a ton of sales on print and digital Naruto media on every app and at Kinokuniya. Also, much more interestingly, there will be a Naruto-themed SF Giants baseball game on September 28th for their first ever Anime Day? There will be a kickoff event before that on the 25th (which is my birthday!). Tickets include a special Naruto jersey. Datte-batter-up, I guess! For more on the various ways VIZ is celebrating everyone’s favorite orange ninja, check out their blog post here.
VIZ now offering online portfolio reviews
For aspiring manga-makers who couldn’t make it to NYCC, Anime NYC, Anime Expo or any of the other events where VIZ conducts portfolio reviews in person, you can now get a review online! Twelve creators will be given the chance to have a video call over Google Meet to discuss how to shape their work into a successful one-shot manga. From personal experience, I can confirm this advice is really helpful and interesting. Give it a shot!
Meet the voice actors of Bleach in LA and NYC
VIZ is partnering with JAPAN HOUSE Los Angeles and Japan Society New York to host events featuring the Japanese voice actors of Ichigo Kurasaki and Uryu Ichida. A screening of the first two episodes of the exhaustively marketed BLEACH: Thousand-Year Blood War will be followed by a sneak peek of episode 3 and a Q&A session with the voice actors, followed by a live voice-acting session of some sort. The event in New York will also have an opportunity for an autograph! Tickets are $23.18 for the LA event and at various price points for the NYC event depending on, if you are already a member of the Japanese Society and if you want the VIP package. Sounds like a fun time for BLEACH and seiyuu fans! I barely know anything about BLEACH, but seeing Noriaki Sugiyama (who also voiced Sasuke from Naruto and England from Hetalia, among many, many other roles, in addition to Ichida from BLEACH) in real life is somewhat tempting.
Wow, that’s a lot of exciting news! But now it’s time to take a look at…
What I’m Reading
I Wanna Do Bad Things With You, Volume 1
Yutaka
August 20, 2024
From the first chapter, I was expecting a Komi Can’t Communicate-style “shy but unrealistically hot girl learns to participate in society” story, so I was a little surprised when the majority of this first volume was devoted entirely to developing the romance between Mamori and Fuji. I was expecting more fun pranks and friendship-building before launching right into the “practice date” trope, and that made it less enjoyable of a read for me. The character designs are cute enough, but I wish there were more than three total recurring characters as of the end of the first volume. I probably won’t keep reading this one, but I am also definitely not the target audience for this shonen romance manga. Maybe it’s the right manga for you, though!
Trillion Game, Volume 1
Riichiro Inagaki (writer), Ryoichi Ikegami (art)
September 17, 2024
I was surprised at how little I liked Bad Things With You, but I was also surprised at how much I enjoyed Trillion Game: the story of how a computer nerd and a people person with a dream strike it very, very rich. The art at the beginning was a little rough, its realism bordering on an uncanny, sketch-filtered photography look at times, but the story ended up being engaging and surprisingly well-considered. The hacker challenge was both fun to read and easy to follow, while still making the protagonists seem clever and creative. I was reminded of Cipher Academy and how incomprehensibly convoluted the code puzzles were in that manga, but in Trillion Game the puzzles were actually done well. The dynamic between Haru and Gaku was really interesting too, in a way that made me want to see how it continues to develop in future volumes.
While the art was rough at first, it evens out after a few chapters, and Ikegami makes up for any awkwardness in his drawings with inventive shot choices and paneling decisions. Haru and Gaku writing their goals in soap on the windows of the big company that refused to hire Haru was honestly inspired, and there’s some really nice uses of reflections and unusual camera angles, too. And there’s an anime adaptation coming out next month! I might check it out, and maybe you should too.
Last Quarter, Volume 1
Ai Yazawa
September 3, 2024
I’ve been hearing about this comic for years. Most of Yazawa’s work is strictly realistic and contemporary to the time she was writing, but Last Quarter has a supernatural bent that honestly kind of reminded me of Aono-Kun. A teenage girl has a whirlwind romance with a mysterious foreign musician before getting hit by a car and reappearing in an abandoned house with most of her memories missing and only one fifth grader able to see and speak to her. The volume conveniently cuts off right at the cusp of resolving the mystery, leaving the reader wanting to read the next volume. Overall, I enjoyed the group of kids and their amateur sleuthing, and I found the mystery pretty interesting as someone who hasn’t read this story before (I get the feeling it’s a reincarnation story, but I don’t know for sure yet). I don’t know how I feel about the font choices for the English translation or the decision to spell out “aishiteru yo” as Adam’s last words to Mizuki. But hey, we finally got Last Quarter in English!
That’s where I’ll leave you all this month! Tune in next month for more VIZ news and reviews!
