Anime Review: Love Bullet: Yuri Kuma Arashi

Going into the winter 2015 anime season there wasn't much I was looking forward to but this was one of the title; Kuniko Ikuhara's latest work which he described as "Attack on Titan but with bears" and I thought he was talking figuratively, that it was going to be as big a hit as AoT which did seem off. But no, as with all of his works I should've looked at it a little bit more literally, it really was a series about girls, a dividing wall, and on the other side of it bears.

Love Bullet: Yuri Kuma Arashi

Manga Review: Wandering Son (volume four)

This review is late in more than one sense of the word, can you believe I placed a hold on this volume back in December, shortly after I reviewed volume 3, and even though I was first in line I didn't get the call saying the book was in until July? I know that libraries are big, complicated systems with procedures to follow but that's flat out ridiculous, I had assumed that if the book was already in the catalog it wouldn't be long until it was on the shelves. So, yet again I am behind in the series and it has to once again gently remind me why I'm so frustrated about it.

Wandering Son (volume 4) by Shimura Takako

Manga Review: Wandering Son (volume three)

I was at a different library than usual recently and had just enough time to browse their comics section before I went racing for my bus and was delighting to see that they had the third volume in this series, no more multi-year waits for me! And I discovered that another library has the fourth volume so expect a review on that one in the next month or so, now if only I can convince the library to pick up the fifth and sixth volumes soon and I'll be a happy reader.

Wandering Son (volume three) by Shimura Takako

Manga Review: Wandering Son (volume 2)

Goodness it's been a while since I last talked about this series, and since I'm not sure if my current library system has volumes three and beyond it might be quite a while again before my next review. But at least all of this material is still new to me, I believe the material the anime covered started in volume 5 (ie, the ones that people who actually purchase the books are receiving now) so I still have a ways to go before I'm in familiar territory!

Wandering Son by Shimura Takako

Summary: Shuuichi and Yoshino continue to muddle their way through life as elementary school kids and deal with gender and sexuality issues that would confuse many a full grown adult.

The Good: I remember feeling frustrated after the first volume since something just seemed off and, when I looked online, found that many other people felt that way and that the story really hit it's stride around the third volume. Perhaps I just approached the manga differently this time, I don't feel like I did, but I felt like this was a much stronger, more interesting work with a firmer grasp of where it wanted to go and how to get there. The side characters were more interesting, I was able to follow the story better, I connected more with the character emotionally, it was great, I just have no idea why it changed so quickly!

The Bad: Having seen the anime I know that ultimately Yuki and her boyfriend Shiina are good people but, after a lifetime of being told not to talk to strangers as a child it still made me feel weirdly protective of Suuichi and Yoshino visiting them by themselves. Well, that and Shiina's actions, that felt almost out of character for this story and that was easily the biggest dissonance for me. I do wish that Yuki had been introduced differently, although I can't think of a way myself, but that's really a complaint I should have been making about the first volume, not this one.

The Art: Even though much time can't have passed between drawing the first two volumes I already liked the style here a bit better (it seemed more sure of itself, more polished) and it was easier to tell the side characters apart. In fact, the only compliant I have is that when I was looking up images for the review I noticed how odd the title looked and I'm a bit baffled by the word placement choice since I thought you never split up a word in a title. Although honestly I'm just as confused why I didn't notice it earlier, I must have had it piled under some other books when I wasn't reading it.

So I'm once again interested in this series and really hope it doesn't take me nearly two years to find the next volume, although I suppose in the meantime I could go rewatch the original show if Crunchyroll is still streaming it.....

Webcomic Review Month 2013: Penny Dreadful, Polterguys Prince of Cats, Princess Princess

Whew, got the biggest batch of reviews for the month here, even though I'm a little sad I don't find as many great webcomics every year I have to admit it's nice that I don't have to make as many huge posts as this. Oh and the ComicMix March Madness tournament is still going on so if that's your thing make sure to go out and vote, think they've reached the quarter-final round as of writing this so it's going to finish up pretty soon!


Penny Dreadful by Maggie G Vicknair

The 20th century is barely a decade old and Penny Hart has found herself lost and alone in it. Through a series of strange events she finds herself in the employ of the Harker Institute of Super-Natural Studies and while she finds herself starting to enjoy her new life of adventure it's still a bit much to simply take in a stride.

As a heads up, this is one the webcomics which has a fairly dramatic art shift early on, apparently Vicknair completely changed the way she drew it starting in chapter two, so if you don't like the art very much in chapter one be sure to look at a later chapter before writing off the comic for that reason (and of course the art style does change and become more sophisticated as the story progresses as it does in practically every comic out there). As for the characters and plot I'm really fond of this one since the characters are just a touch sarcastic (well, more than a touch at times) and being a sarcastic person myself I occasionally wonder why characters aren't commenting on how strange their lives are. Despite this little extra self-awareness the copious supernatural elements of the story manage to feel just right for the story without anything out of place (although a little more exposition about how magic works in this world would be nice, I'm assuming that's simply coming later) and the story seems to be slowly revealing that there is a greater plot lurking behind the events of the individual chapters, can't wait to see what's going to happen!


Penny Dreadful can be read online and does not have a print version as of writing.


Polterguys by Laurianne Uy and Nathan Go

Fans of shojo manga will undoubtedly find something familiar about Polterguys but in a fun, enjoyable way. Like many a heroine, Bree finds herself living with a bevy of cute guys under strange circumstances but her's are a bit stranger than normal. While she's simply moved out of the dorms for a bit of piece and quiet the five guys living in her old house are all dead, none of whom can remember how they got that way, and there are demons out there who will happily hunt down a lost soul and send it off to wherever those souls go. In a moment of impulse Bree puts her own life on the line to give the boys a chance to find peace before they move on but can she really do anything to help? 

Bree is a likeable heroine whose relatable, has spunk, and also has a rather realistic experience of having college turn out to be different than she expected (although most of us didn’t have demons and ghosts to make the shift even harder). This first book neatly wraps up one plot while leaving plenty more for future installments and introduces a new one which might prove even more interesting in the end. I'm not sure when the comic is going to start updating again (as far as I can tell, from twitter and tumblr, I think Uy and Go have started outlining it but haven't gotten much farther so it's likely to be a while) but even if it's only as consistent as this first installment then I think it'll be worth the wait.

Polterguys can be read for free online or purchased as a book.


Prince of Cats by Kori M. Handwerker

Lee might be able to talk to cats but frankly that isn't a really big problem or concern in his life currently, high school is. In a small, conservative town where you can be rich or poor but never anything but straight and that certainly doesn't help when his relationship with his best friend Frank starts to change and neither of them feels quite sure where they want, or even expect, it to end up.

Yep this is another story with queer characters in it and, while there hasn't been anything that would be considered graphic by anyone so far, the about page does indicate that there will be some non-graphic sex scenes later on, readers with delicate sensibilities or a habit of reading webcomics at work be warned. Funny enough this is also yet another comic done in watercolors which I'm seeing more and more of these days and I rather like it. Obviously this has no impact on the story but I still like the feeling it gives. Getting to the actual story, it's a little slow moving and awkward but honestly that sums up a lot of high school as well. I am happy to hear that there are going to be other gender/sexual identities present in the story as well (since it always seems odd to me whenever you have a large cast of characters and every single one of them is straight and Prince of Cats is developing a pretty large cast of background characters), although a bit sad that it sounds like there will be an asexual character but they won't even recognize what they are in story. I can certainly relate to that, and it sounds like they'll be a minor character in the story anyway, but I at least hope I can recognize who it is.

Prince of Cats can be read online and the first few chapters are also available in print form.

Princess Princess by StrangelyKatie

I know I said that I wasn't covering any finished comics this year but I completely missed that this one was in fact finished so I'll just slip it in here. Princess Princess is a rather quick tale about a princess locked up in a tower whose recused by, well, another princess. The story is based on that simple idea but fleshes out its two princesses quite well into distinctly different people with their own problems and lives, it doesn't just change one of them from a prince and call that a day. It's cute, quick, funny, yes the two girls do like each other as well, and smarter than you'd expect so I recommend everyone to check it out over here if you have some time. And while you're there I'd also recommend another of Katie's comic's, which I've seen around on tumblr before but hadn't realized it was hers, which is even shorter and nicely bittersweet.


2012 "P" comics

2011 "P" comic (which weirdly enough also finished up within hours of me writing about it, I'm amused by the similar timing anyway)

Webcomic Review Month 2013: O Human Star

Sorry about no review yesterday folks, Mondays are quite tiresome with my schedule and I thought I needed to also write a little post on tumblr about something that would come up in this review (so I wouldn't just ramble on in the footnotes) but then it turned out that I didn't have too much to say on the topic after all. I am going to probably push back the rest of the reviews by a day to compensate (although this means I'm supposed to post another review next Monday, that might not work). In any case, let's just get to the review!


O Human Star by Blue Delliquanti

16 years ago Al Sterling died and despite all the work he had done in robotics he never got to see the robot revolution. That is, until he wakes up those 16 years later in a robotic body with an artificial, yet complete copy of his mind and no idea why he was brought back. His old partner Brendan also has no clue why or even how Al was resurrected since he already tried many years ago and got a rather different result.

The premise alone for this story has a ton of things in it that I like, it's a seemingly happy future (or at least, not one where the world has gotten worse), it's got a large focus on technology (personally I like my science fiction to have a focus on, well, the science, hence part of my problem with dystopias, which was going to be my tumblr post for those curious), and queer characters! All of this has blended together very well and even though the story is only on it's third chapter it's already fleshed out it's main three characters incredibly well and has good pacing. I feel like I'm seeing more comics that are partially colored, like this one where instead of being in grayscale everything is in well, blue-scale (or red-scale for the flashbacks) and I rather like this trend since seeing everything in black and white gets boring after a while and I know that coloring a single page takes hours. Delliquanti uses a wide range of shades on each page, the character all look different from each other, and the backgrounds strike a nice balance between being simple and yet still working*. This one grabbed me from the start and I can't wait to see where it eventually goes!


O Human Star can be read online and the first two chapters are in print. Also, like TJ and Amal, while there isn't any outright pornography the story doesn't bother to hide that two of the guys are having sex so some of the pages certainly NSFW, just wait until you get home to read them.





*as opposed to "simple because the artist doesn't know how to draw backgrounds" which is completely understandable but I'd rather an artist draw backgrounds and improve rather than just leaving them blank, although that's REALLY a personal preference.

Webcomic Review Month 2013: The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal

WELL it's been an exciting 24 hours in the in the comic-reading section of the internet and sadly I don't mean the fun kind of exciting. Last night google announced that they would be discontinuing their RSS reader, google reader, come July and I saw a lot of webcomic artists going "but wait, I use that to read comics!" I never used google reader, found the interface a little too clunky, I use feeder which is a plugin for Chrome which works for me since I subscribe mainly to webcomics feeds and I want to look at every single update that comes through. But after seeing what some alternate feed aggregators can do I think I'm going to try out some of the alternates that people were suggesting for following blogs, hope everyone finds a good fit before July!
And then this morning I woke up to an email in my inbox saying that JManga was shutting down by the end of May and absolutely no explanation for that. Manga fans can imagine the conversations that followed on social media/various websites (hell they may have been part of it) and as per usual one of the factors was blaming pirates/scanlators/people who want to read comics for free for it. It was the phrasing of that last group of people, people who think that comics should be free, that irked me a bit since, while I agree with the statement, there seemed to be an accidental implication that if you don't have the money you can't have access to fiction and to suck it up. As someone who is now on their third year of promoting free-to-read webcomics and gets most of their other material from legal streaming sites and libraries I think you can guess what my opinion on that is. There's not much more to say on the matter that hasn't been said elsewhere, constructive or mocking, so I'm just gonna continue doing what I've been doing and tell y'all about some pretty cool comics that are out there, for free, no DRM, and this one in particular is also available in print!


The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal by EK Weaver

Amal has had a bad day, he's called off his arranged marriage and come out to his traditional parents in the process and can't even remember what he did that night. But when he wakes up he realizes that he's agreed to go on a cross-country trip with a complete stranger, TJ, paying for the way. It may be crazy but Amal needs to get to Providence anyway to see his little sister graduate which is coming up soon so why not?

I'll admit it, I started to read this comic once before but got a bit worried by the mature readers sign and backed off*. Thankfully I did give it another shot and from what I recall there is implied sex but nothing on screen. Suggestive scenes, enough to for me to easily see why Weaver warns people about importing the print copy, but this story is not "porn with plot", the mature warning page lays it out rather well. That said, this story has fantastic character development, vital considering the story is entirely character driven, and the story gives it's setting much more detail than I see many realistic fiction stories do. Sure many of them will consider the importance of the location on the character but I haven't seen one take the year into consideration so much and I love when stories do that. The art is great (yet another reason your run of the mill yaoi manga feels like a slap in the face after this, the characters look completely distinct, all of them!), it's paced well, stays on schedule, seems to be a good chunk of the way through the story already, I'm saying people should check this out even if a story about two guys, who happen to have sex with each other, isn't really your thing because this is a pretty good thing.


As noted earlier, TJ & Amal  is available for reading online and the first two of three planned books are in print and it's also been translated into half a dozen other languages, all of which can be found on the right hand sidebar of the front page. 

2012 "L" comic

2011 "L" comic



*I just don't like reading sex scenes, kinda not relevant to my interests, see the Ignition Zero post from a few days back.

Webcomic Review Month 2013: Knights Errant

Meant to talk about this a few days ago but it slipped my mind, I seem to have finally found a partial solution to keeping up with all my comics. I've mentioned in the past that when I started reading webcomics (using Safari as my browser) I just made bookmark folders but that hasn't really worked for Firefox or Chrome. But this winter I installed an RSS feed collector right into Chrome and about 80, maybe 90% of my webcomics these days have RSS feeds so I've been able to keep up with everything nicely. Some comics don't have RSS feeds, or have ones but don't seem to be working (and whenever I mention it in the comments section I never an answer) and for those I still use twitter/facebook as a way to follow them but thankfully most of those comics also update promptly. I've seen more people using feed aggregator sites, such as Comic Rocket and Ink Outbreak, in the past year and while I can see the appeal I just follow entirely too many comics and when I find a new one I don't want to go to all the hassle to see if it's on the site already or not. In any case, onto tonight's review!


Knights Errant by Jennifer "theyoungdoyley" Doyle

Wilfrid is a mercenary who rather likes being one and is thrilled when a war breaks out between the nations of Aster-Morgaria and Vetal. They join a group of mercenaries known as the Errant Knights due to their reputation and discovers that their young commander, Oswald Dytel, is even more intriguing than he first appears.

Normally I wouldn't read a comic like this because, well, the characters are asses. But they are well-developed, amusing, and interesting asses and I like a story with good character development so why not! The summary mentions a war going on and while that's certainly a driving force lurking in the background of the story, so far everything has been rather character driven, although if the prologue is any indication that plot will kick in sooner or later, for better or for worse. The art style varies quite a bit from section to section, I have yet to figure out if there's a pattern or reason why some pages are in full color and others are not (believe me I have been trying for months now) but regardless of whatever style or color the pages are in the art is dynamic, expressive, and as it goes on increasingly detailed as well. I find the art style rather attractive, and thankfully not overly gorey, so while a bit inconsistent it's not jarring enough to take most readers out of the story. 


Knights Errant can be read on it's website and does not seem to have a print edition yet, although I'm sure one is coming down the road. It can also be read online in Russian which appears to be only a few pages behind the English version.

One thing that does have me worried about this comic is how it has a rather complicated set of character relationships and politics, which is awesome, but it hasn't updated in a bit and I'm worried that I'm going to start forgetting who was who and where they stand. And this is a worry I have with a lot of webcomics actually, the one great failing of webcomics is how they update so much more slowly than print comics (some might put out a full chapter a month, very few, and others will barely get a chapter out in a year) and that just completely messes with the pacing. I'm sure this comic will start updating again soon, I'm not too worried about that, but it does make me ruminate on what the proper way to read it is, there's no point in reading scattered updates if I know that I'll forget what happened in a month but I want to read it regardless, maybe someday I'll find a happy compromise between the two of them.


2012 "K" Comic

2011 "J" Comic
2011 "K" Comic

Manga Review: Wandering Son volume 1

Back in winter of 2011 I caught the anime version of Wandering Son and really enjoyed the show and was curious about how it compared to the manga (especially since the anime skipped the first arc of the manga which sounded like a weird choice). The first volume has been out for over a year now and honestly the reason I didn't pick it up is because I usually buy my manga either in bulk at a TRSI sale (by which point I've already hit the free shipping quota and don't need any more and this is the only comic by Fantagraphics that I'm interested in) or sometimes in ones and twos at a local Barnes and Noble and I've never seen Wandering Son there. So, in short, money is once again a factor so yet again I'm thrilled to come across this at my school's library and hopefully plenty of other people check it out and read it too.

Wandering Son (volume one) by Takako Shimura 

Summary: Shuuichi Natori is a lot quieter than most boys and Yoshino Takasuki comes off as a tomboyish girl to many people around them but neither of those statements reflect who they really are. Both of them are transgendered children (people born as one sex but mentally identify as the other) but are only beginning to understand that idea themselves and how it affects every part of their lives. 

The Good: There is a lack of transgender (and genderfluid now that I think about it) characters of any age or gender in fiction and I can't think of the last time, if ever, I saw characters like that so young (or even more than one in a single story, outside of webcomics I'm drawing blank for multiple transgender characters). Some people might find it unrealistic but I've been reading some news articles over the years, especially in the last year or so, and talking to friends I have and it sounds like no, kids really do know themselves well even at a young age and given how slowly Takatsuki and Shuu put into words what they're feeling I thought it was realistic enough (plus, of course someone in that situation is going to start seriously considering gender identity earlier than someone who doesn't have that pressure). Takatsuki and Shuu really are interesting, intriguing characters and even if the story is a bit slow I like reading about them and I would like to at least read the manga up to the point where the anime started. 

The Bad: My biggest problem with this volume was that it was really hard to tell when the chapters started which is a bit of an odd problem. A lot of times there would be a couple of pages that looked like the start of a new chapter and then a random image (a shot of a character who doesn't appear in the scene at all, a title page, etc) and I was always thrown wondering if that image had any relevance to the story and if the pages before and after the image were set at different times (hence the use of an image to separate them) or what was going on. Other than that that the pacing was fine but that's kinda a big problem and I had to re-read a number of sections multiple times to try and get a grasp on the story and the story itself isn't terribly complicated. Finally, I can see why the anime choose to jump into the story at a later point since not much actually happens in this volume. It takes a lot of time to set up, doesn't really deal with a lot of the cast (and one thing I liked about the anime was how it showed a lot of variety in that way people act contrary to/within gender ideals) and it just feels a bit flat. I feel like it might be a good idea to recommend that people read the first few volumes close together (admittedly I haven't read the others that are out in English yet) or even show them the anime first since this is a bit slow going and I think that would turn away a lot of people who'd otherwise like the story. 

The Art: Apologies on not posting a picture of the cover tonight, apparently photobucket is throwing a hissy fit and won't let me upload anything. In any case, as the manga-ka herself notes in the back of the book, the art is pretty simple both in regards to character designs and backgrounds (although given that this particular part of the story is nearly 10 years old I have no doubt that's changed at least a bit). It was a little hard to tell some of the characters apart (the simple backgrounds didn't bother me as much) but hopefully just getting used to the art style will help me out.


When I was looking around for this series I came across a few statements that made it sound like not only does the art improve quickly but the plot picks up very quickly as well which does make me more likely to keep reading the manga. Of course, given that the anime isn't licensed in the US if I want to own this story at all I'll have to buy the manga, guess I need to make more of an effort to put a few volumes in my future shopping trips. 

Webcomic Review: Kagerou, Khaos Komix, Kinnari, Kiwi Blitz, The Knit Princess

Whew, I *think* I remembered every regularly updating webcomic that starts with "K" that I follow but I don't have my list with me so bear with me if I update this later. And yes this update already has five webcomics on it, what can I say, webcomic artists just love giving their creations odd names (I actually know of even more that haven't updated lately!).

Kagerou
While a lot of the comics I've reviewed so far have been rather short, even those comics have been around for a couple of years already but Kagero probably takes the cake since it's been around and updating (without restarting or any of that, it's been one continuous ride) for ten years. That's a really long time and, as a result, the archive is quite impressive but not nearly as impressive as the art shift (yes I want to buy these books, just holding out to see if the artist will be at my local con). So what is the story about? Well, Kano has somehow been pulled to another world and is charged with becoming the champion to protect a princess but this whole adventure could be going on inside my head. He's a young man with a traumatic past (that still isn't fully explored), has at least three other personalities (or possibly real people) living in his head, and there are some complications with the princess he's supposed to protect as well. On paper it sounds like a generic fantasy but in practice it's a colorful mindf*ck that really needs a character sheet and may require a reread every now and then. This one has a bit of an erratic schedule update by the way, what I do is follow the livejournal community for the series and get the updates that way and that's probably the best way to follow the comic (unless it has a twitter I don't know about).

Khaos Komix
A quick word, this one also gets a mature warning and the site itself provides a mature warning on the front page, there is quite a bit of sex in this series. I don't recall anything explicit in the series, I think there is some in the side comics however, but if you aren't okay with the idea of gay sex (and it's not subtle at all) you probably shouldn't be reading this.
Now that that is out of the way, this comic is mainly about a bunch of British teens coming to terms with their sexuality, some with more angst than others, and the story is formatted to follow one teen at a time. Each story builds on the previous one and each one starts in a slightly different place time wise (some earlier than the previous story, some in the middle of the previous story) and none of them end when all the issues are worked out, you still see the characters in the background of the later stories dealing with their problems. Judging by the archive, we've still got at least one more story to go now and I hope this story will have some happy endings in it. The art is alright in the story, I haven't reread it recently but some people have complained about art shifts in it yet I never noticed anything like that when reading it. So, the arts okay, the story is good, go read it if you're in the mood for something mature!


Kinnari
Part of the reason I love reading webcomics is because they're a bit more diverse than all the books/anime/manga/TV I spend my time viewing and this is a great example of that. Based off of Indian mythology, the story seems to follow Neel and Manu and, since the title comes from the word kinnara which means "slightly human," they are probably not what they appear to be. So far they've had prophetic dreams, been attacked, and had another adventure or two in the dreamscape but I'm having a little bit of a hard time following the plot. Partially this is because it only updates once a week and I sometimes forget to check but this is also a fairly new comic so the central plot hasn't made an appearance yet (I also wonder if my unfamiliarity with Indian myths is hurting me but so far there have been detailed author comments explaining the unfamiliar stuff). So I'm hoping for a little more exposition soon, otherwise I'm going to be confused for a bit longer.

Kiwi Blitz
I only discovered this comic recently, it's a newer comic compared to some of the others I read, but it's already out of the introductory phase and into the main plot, huzzah for fast pacing! Our protagonist is Steffi, a hyper young girl who loves battling in giant, animal shaped robots and when her dad (a robot designer) giver her her own kiwi shaped robot she decides to not register it for the fighting games and use it to fight crime instead. Aside from a few cusewords in German the comic is family friendly and I probably would have enjoyed it as a kid both for the plot and the very brightly colored art. The first volume is in print now but I'm on the fence about buying it. As I just said, the art is very colorful and fun but I'm not so sure if I want to reread it so I'll wait a little longer and see where the story goes before making a decision^.

The Knit Princess
There are webcomics about everything including knitting it turns out*, who would've guessed? The story is a fluffy, slice of life story that is going to be enjoyed more by knitters than anyone else (since almost all the humor is knitting based) although any craft person will probably snicker at the idea of projects moving around by themselves or pets messing them up. They recently got a new artist so there has been a dramatic art shift and I personally like the new art better (it's a bit simpler and the characters seem more energetic) but the writer is still the same so no changes to the humor.


 Sorry if this was kinda late tonight, it's been a busy day and I'm so glad I've only got one webcomic to review tomorrow, any guesses on what it is?



^Yes I recommend it, if I review it here during this review month that means I recommend it, it's just that I don't have a lot of shelf space these days so I'm picky about what I buy. Speaking of which, need to move some stuff around again, don't think I can squeeze another shelf in....
*I'm still trying to figure out if this or the webcomic about librarians is odder, Knit Princess probably takes the cake however since Unshelved is mostly realist.