Asadora! Volume 4 is the latest volume of Naoki Urasawa (creator of Monster, Pluto and 20th Century Boys)’s ongoing series about teenage stunt pilot Asa Asada and a mysterious ocean monster threatening to ruin the opening ceremony of the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, and it continues to be awesome.
VIZ Media Pubwatch: November 2021
Welcome back to another VIZ pubwatch! This month we’re taking a look at some newer comics by long-established creators, including the brand new Show-ha Shoten! by Death Note co-creator Takeshi Obata. But first, the news!
REVIEW: Pokemon Adventures Vol. 9: Dexoys and Emerald Shine
In the previous Pokemon Adventures volume, we saw Team Rocket leader Giovanni set a course for Viridian City to locate his long-lost son Silver. At the same time, Pokedex holder Silver arrived in Viridian City after recalling a memory of the place while in search of his roots, but he doesn’t know that Giovanni is…
REVIEW: The Treasure of The King And The Cat Is Filled With Magical Furry Fluff
With boys’ love manga being such a popular subgenre, you’d think that there would be more variety. There is so much potential for it beyond schoolboy romances, and newer manga such as You Kajika’s The Treasure of The King and The Cat is one example of this. Published in English by Tokyopop, this single-volume fantasy…
VIZ Media Pubwatch: January 2021
New year, new manga! For our first VIZ Pubwatch of 2021, we’ll be taking a look at some classic long-running series as well as newer, less-established work. But first, the VIZ news.
Viz Pubwatch November
What a year this month has been. With everything going on in the world recently, you might have missed these news items and volume releases from VIZ media. Luckily, the monthly VIZ Pubwatch is here! This month we’re mostly focusing on long-running fan favorites and some classic series, including Mermaid Saga by Rumiko Takahashi. First,…
Bodacious Space Pirates Shoots for the Stars … And Misses
Bodacious Space Pirates Tatsuo Sato (writer), Chibimaru (illustrator) Media Factory December 2013-September 2014 Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers for Bodacious Space Pirates. When I happened to come across the title Bodacious Space Pirates, I was definitely interested. It’s pirates! In space! And they’re bodacious! What’s not to like? After reading both volumes, though, I found the…
Women in Men’s World: The Feminism of Basara
Stories about gender and women have always fascinated me. Seek me out as a kid and you’d find me watching Mulan with a copy of Bruce Coville’s The Dragonslayers clutched to my chest. Discovering a relatively obscure series called Basara during my college years was just an extension of that. Basara follows the journey of…
Juliet Looks Through a Fishtank at Romeo: Romance Manga Aquarium
There’s a sweet and lovely feminism to the shoujo romance stories found in Tomoko Taniguchi’s Aquarium. Femininity is their strength. Tomoko Taniguchi was active in the Japanese market by the early nineties, but those same stories experienced a second, translated wind a decade later, in the bubble days of the American manga market. There’s very…
Trading Outpost: Genre/Gender/Generic
Hello! And welcome back to another of The Trades, the world’s only comic podcast by people who don’t know anything about pen nibs. This month, we swear off literacy in order to better live out deconstructionism. Also, Aaron reads award nominated comics, while Webtoons is taking over my life, and I don’t know how to…
You Be You: a Review of Princess Jellyfish
Princess Jellyfish, Volume 1 Mangaka: Akiko Higashimura Translation: Sarah Alys Lindholm; Lettering: Carl Vanstiphout; Editing: Haruko Hashimoto; Kodansha Comics Edition Cover Design: Phil Balsman. Kodansha Comics March, 2016 Disclaimer: This review of Princess Jellyfish is based on a review copy provided by the publisher.
If It Fits: Shoes, Sex, and Eroticised Withdrawal in Okazaki Mari’s “&”
Okazaki Mari’s romance comic “&” is about romance as a connection that springs from sensual experience. Its heroine, Kaoru, works in a hospital and is attempting to build her own business as a nail technician in her own time, and at the site of each job, she has a suitor.