Anime Review: Wish Upon the Pleiades

As the spring anime season starts winding down it's time for me to finally start talking about it's current shows and I suppose the best way to completely sum it up is "not as bad as expected". There were plenty of shows I enjoyed enough to keep watching week to week but I'll talk more about the season as a whole in my Round-UP next Sunday. In the meantime, out of my roster of shows Wish Upon the Pleiades (literally After School Pleiades in Japanese which actually works a bit better with the show) was the first to wrap and it's a show I enjoyed so I'm glad to talk about it early on, also glad to see some non-franchise magical girl shows every few seasons!

Wish Upon the Pleiades (Houkago no Pleiades)

Anime Review: Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE!

Once again, sorry for the delay in this review, writing through a headache after a six day work week is never tempting enough for me to want to do it. Plus, I've reached the stretch of shows which I did enjoy enough to finish watching them but don't actually have a lot to say on them and as a reviewer that's a little stressful. How do I manage to convey why I thought that they were worth finishing if I have such a flat opinion at the end of the show? Middle of the show reviews really are the toughest ones to do, thank goodness every year I get pickier and pickier about what I continue so I watch fewer of them. 

Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! (Binan Koukou Chikyu Boei-bu LOVE!)

Manga Review: Carat

So, I'm out of town for the weekend and it didn't occur to me that the retirement home where I was staying wouldn't have wifi or even an ethernet jack. Elderly people use the internet right, they can't all be luddites. In any case, I now feel rather hip using my laptop in a coffee shop eating something not-coffee, talking about an unlicenesed manga title that probably not many people have heard of

Carat by Watanabe Yoshitomo

Summary: Two girls, Yuni and Melissa from  Carat have been chosen as candidates for the next queen and now have to fight each other over jewels that have been unleashed on Earth, the first to collect five wins. Buuuuut the girls don’t really want to fight each other, they’re best friends after all, so they both recruit someone to fight as a magical girl in their place and thus is the start of a truly bizarre adventure.

The Good: In case the summary didn’t make it clear enough, this is a magical girl parody and one I found much more amusing than ones such as Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan or Puni Puni Poemi. I think it did help that I read some of Sugar Sugar Rune recently, since this has a really similar identical set-up, but I think that a lot of fans of the magical girl genre have come across these tropes before and can easily find the humor in it. The story is also well paced, it’s not too long, doesn’t draw anything out (except the ship tease), as I said earlier I liked a lot of the humor so this ended up being a quick, fun little read for me which was good. 

The Bad: I will admit that I wanted a few things to be a little more conclusively resolved by the end (heck, I wasn’t expecting the ending to be as odd as it was so it caught me off guard and I didn’t realize at first that this was the end) but I should have seen that coming considering this is a parody that plays almost no trope straight. Some of the jokes, especially concerning the villains, became a bit too repetitive by the end, and I would have liked to have seen at least a little more character development than actually happened (I hadn’t realized the story was so short when I started or I would have nixed that hope) but overall it was short enough that it didn’t have time to develop any huge problems.

The Art: The art was not exactly generic, since there isn’t really a “this is how all magical girl stories look!” style but if I was to read something else by the artist I wouldn’t even notice since there was nothing that stood out and made the style distinctive or even recognizable. I liked all the designs, they were cute and everything was certainly consistent enough for everything to look like it was from the same story but it didn’t stand out the way the art in other series has for me.

Licensing Chances: This is something I’m going to add in for unlicensed manga that I talk about (probably not anime but I might) and sadly I think that this series has next to no chance to being licensed. It is pretty short which does work in it’s favor and it’s from the publisher Mag Garden (ie, no company has “dibs” on it, although this does mean Kodansha Comics can’t license it and since they got a lot of Del Ray’s old titles which included a fair amount of shojo/magical girl titles that is a shame) but I noticed something weird about that. I went to Wikipedia, looked up what magazines Mag Garden has (a shojo one and a shonen one, ______ and _____ respectively) and as far as I can tell every title from those magazines that was licensed in the US was done by TokyoPop who hasn’t been around in a few years (I’ll believe they’re back when they do more than sell back stock through Right Stuf). I have no idea if they had a special contract or if they were just a good fit for each other (which is more likely the case) and sadly this does fit in best with TokyoPop’s line of titles, much better than any other company currently out there. So at this point I doubt we’ll be seeing this in English, if you want to buy it you’ll have to do so in Japanese.

Now that that’s out of the way, I give this 3 out of 5 stars for being fun, something I would pick up since it’s so short, but probably not something I would go to the trouble of importing (honestly if shipping was cheaper than it was then I’d be much more likely to consider importing manga from Japan, curse you Earth having an ocean and a continent between me and comics). However, even though I said I probably wouldn’t be able to identify the artist since the art style wasn’t very, stylistic, I do plan on looking up and seeing what else they’ve made, I wonder how their sense of humor translates into stories that aren’t straight up parodies.

Webcomic Review Month 2012: Mahou Shonen Fight, Modest Medusa, Monster Pulse, My Finn

Just moving right along here, I've honestly run out of witty things to say about webcomics here by now (except that yes, I read some really odd ones but I think I said that at the very beginning) so let's keep this brief, provide a short link to the comics from last year, and then move onto all of the lovely comics here today.

Mahou Shonen Fight by DustyJack and JadePrince

Mike just wanted a normal life at his new high school, something average and boring. However, as luck often has it for heroes who wish for ordinary lives, he instead gets an exciting, adventure filled life as he is possessed by the spirit of summer who, along with the other spirits and teens possessed by them, decide the best thing to do in this situation is use their powers to save the world.

This comic is simply fun, although this is coming from someone who really likes magical girl stories and still starts giggling whenever she finds magical boys. The art is cutesy and the story is a bit cheesy but that's what you need in these situations, magical girl shows usually have an overall light-hearted tone so why shouldn't a magical boys series? I am glad that the series seems to be introducing a main antagonist however, now to see if it really follows in the vein of magical girl stories and has one boss after another until the series finally ends....

  Modest Medusa by Jake Richmond
One night Jake came home to discover that his toilet had flooded and there is now a child gorgon living in his house (since his toilet is the portal to another world, who knew?). They're none too polite, eat all the chocodiles, have no idea how this world works, and act like a general freeloader. But at the very least Jake and his niece Marah are getting some exciting stories out of this.

I swear, I feel like I walked into an alternate world and found their version of Squid Girl, it's a bit unnerving. Comparisons aside, Modest Medusa is a comedy which sometimes has arcs, it's currently in it's longest arc to date, but often the day to day gags are unrelated and it works alright. It's not my favorite comedy comic out there, some days I simply don't find the strip amusing, but it's not terrible by any means and considering how subjective humor can be I'm sure that plenty of people will love it more than I like it. And on a side note, I had no idea chocodiles were real until I put together this review, guess that's what I get for living on the east coast.

 Monster Pulse by Magnolia Porter

From the creator of Bobwhite a very different kind of comic, a fantasy story where various kids have had body parts (a heart, an eye, etc.) changed into monsters and they both fight and try to evade the government agency that made this happen.

The premise is a simple one but still rather neat, I can only think of one story with a similar premise* and it's certainly unlike most for kids/all ages comics I've seen. For one thing the story fully embraces the creepiness and horror of kids suddenly having their body parts come to life and the fact that this was done on purpose by a government agency, the story wouldn't be nearly as interesting if the government had been sympathetic or if the story had been more light-hearted. The comic is still in it's early stages but updates regularly and is paced briskly so I can give it a very solid recommendation regardless of that.

My Finn by Daiku

Set in an alternate fantasy world version of Ireland called Glen, Glen is a peaceful island nation which has recently come under attack from the invading nation in the south, Sem Icim. Along with the also un-conquered nation of Patrio the people of Glenn start to fight back and at the center of this conflict is a young girl named Lalin who has no memory of her past but apparently did SOMETHING big....

I'll admit that part of the reason I started reading this webcomic is because I find the art adorable, the style looks a bit like the "made in America manga!" which were all the rage five or six years ago but the style works well here. The plot is also interesting, it moves quite quickly (it doesn't seem like who Lalin "really" is will be a secret much longer and that's normally a plot point that really gets dragged out), it's always nice to see more than two sides in a conflict, and it's simply unusual for me to enjoy a story where "it got worse" seems to be a running theme. Sometimes it's hard to take a story of invasion seriously where the invaders are roundly trounced every time they fight the "good guys" but so far that's not what's happening here and I'm really curious where everything is going to go next (as a quick warning though, the story is currently on hiatus and stopped at a rather dramatic point so potential readers might want to check back in at the beginning of April to give it time to get going again).

 

*Variante which is an older and kinda obscure title that's currently out of print