Why I don’t like digital-only manga: four series I can’t check out from the library!

While I certainly don’t mind having the option to collect manga digitally I am a little put out by the sheer number of digital-only manga titles coming out these days. They’re largely being put out by Kodansha USA and while I have several little complaints (they put out so many it’s hard to keep out, they release them so quietly I never see any buzz, etc) but my chief complaint is that I can’t check them out from the library! 

There may be some way for my library system to get say, a kindle or comixology version of these manga for patrons to check out, or heck maybe even try to make Overdrive do something useful for once, but as far as I know my library system hasn’t done this so I’m just bummed out. I’d love to read these series but heck, I can’t even keep up with buying series that I already love, I can’t keep dropping money for new stories sight unread!

So, here are four titles that I’d love to read but haven’t yet (and skipping over the elephant in the room, Chihayafuru, and skipping over the couple that actually have gotten later print releases).

Manga Review: Magi (volumes 13 - 17)

Well I guess this is the once-yearly Magi post, based on when I last posted. Since I'm trying to review Magi by arc now I should note that this isn't the end of an arc, going by summaries for future volumes and accounting for my library taking a little bit of time to acquire the volumes, I worked out that if I waited until this arc was over that I wouldn't review this batch of volumes until January 2017. So, plan B, I kept looking through the summaries and this appears to be the calm before the storm of the climax of the arc and therefore the next best stopping place to talk about what is going on (I also might've forgotten to review volumes 11 and 12 in the past???). So, let's get to it!

Magi by Shinobu Ohtaka (volumes 13-17)

Manga Review: Millennium Snow

Title: Millennium Snow
Genre: Romance
Publisher: Hakusensha (JP), Viz Manga (US)
Story/Artist: Bisco Hatori
Serialized in: Lala in 2001, Lala DX in 2013
Original Release Date: June 3, 2014
Review copy provided by Viz Media
Review originally posted on The Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses 

Bisco Hatori’s name may not be well-known in the west but her most famous work, Ouran High School Host Club, still finds new readers and viewers every year who enjoy the comedy mixed with bits of romance. Millennium Snow both predates the series and was finished after it. Hatori took a break from it to work on Ouran and it shows: the story doesn’t feel disjointed but the first two volumes have a very different tone and goal than the latter two do.

Manga Review: Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou (volume one)

This review originally appeared on OASG

Title: Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou

Genre: Slice of Life

Publisher: Shonen Gahosha (JP), Crunchyroll (US)

Story/Artist: Ruri Miyahara

Serialized in: Young King Ours

Reviewed: Volume 1 of 6

Review copy provided by Crunchyroll.

As I mentioned last time, there are many different kinds of slice of life manga out there. Some rely on character growth to move the story along and others use the passage of time to keep the story flowing. Bokura wa Minna Kawaisou, which was adapted into an anime titled The Kawai Complex Guide to Manors and Hostel Behavior, doesn’t use either of those methods and in this first volume it’s hard to believe that any time is passing at all since nothing in the story seems to change.

Manga Review: Joshi Kausei

This review originally appeared on Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses

Title: Joushi Kausei
Genre: Slice of Life
Publisher: Futabasha (JP), Crunchyroll (US)
Story/Artist: Ken Wakai
Serialized in: Manga Action
Reviewed: 15 out of 26 chapters
Review copy provided by Crunchyroll.

These days savvy anime and manga fans will be fairly familiar with the slice of life genre and the various subgenres in it. Everyday school stories, cute girls doing cute things, and workplace comedies, among others, all fall into the category along with another where the name isn’t as familiar but the premise is, iyashikei or “healing” stories. While they don’t possess any medicinal value, these stories are sweet, simple tales where you simply feel uplifted and happier after reading one and that is precisely the point of Joshi Kausei. This simple, wordless manga (although it does include text and sound effects) follows Momoko through various scenes in her everyday life and these stories aren’t connected by either plot or even character development. The idea is for the reader to relax, smile, and enjoy it.

Manga Review: Cronos Haze

This review originally appeared on Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses.

Title: Cronos Haze
Genre: Action
Publisher: Futabasha (JP), Crunchyroll (US)
Story/Artist: Takano Masayuki
Serialized in: Manga Action
Reviewed: 7 out of 11 chapters
Review copy provided by Crunchyroll.

Readers could be forgiven for looking at this series, which involves fights using sentient “jackets” and the original publication date, and thinking “is this a Kill la Kill rip-off?” Since this series is a reboot of a 2001 title of the same name the answer is no and upon a closer look the details of these two series are rather dissimilar after all. In Cronos Haze, Touya aims to find out more about his missing father by attending the same high school he did, Amagiri Academy, and quickly discovers that this school is bizarre by anyone’s standards. The school possess mecha, the student body president wields a military gun, and as mentioned earlier some of the students fight using “jackets” which when not activated take the form of a person and change their appearance to suit their wearer. Despite all of it’s shonen trappings the series runs in Manga Action magazine which means it’s actually a seinen series although it hasn’t done anything that would feel out of place in a shonen manga aimed at 14 year olds yet.

When Touya isn’t on screen there’s a subplot emerging in the background: Gigantes is a group of beings who have ruled the world (secretly I assume) for centuries and Amagiri is the one group that has been able to oppose them, despite their supernatural abilities. The abilities themselves are a bit vague, all of the ones presented so far seem to be related to probability, but more confusing is the fact that they have never caught onto the fact that their mysterious nemesis shares a name with an enormous, famous school and then when they’re searching for the headquarters (tipped off that it might be found at sea) run straight into the island.

None of this is portrayed humorously, which therefore means that the readers are supposed to take these characters seriously, yet the series hasn’t explained why Gigantes and Amagiri are fighting each other besides making vague speeches about ruling the world. Touya is as flat as a protagonist can be, with the vague goal of “I want to learn more about my father” but shows no interest in actually doing anything and the side characters are nothing more than walking exposition speech bubbles (except for when the series indulges in some particularly pathetic fanservice, just because you had a girl in a guys dorm instead of the other way around doesn’t suddenly make it funny). The exposition is also among the worst I’ve ever seen, the series literally waits a few chapters and then has one, two-page monologue by a new character explaining everything he thought Touya already knew and it still doesn’t answer many key questions.

If you want a series with the characters uncovering complex, hidden schemes there are better series out there and there are also plenty of series which combine that with action as well. If it wasn’t for the fact that this is a reboot I would have assumed Cronos Haze was a manga-ka’s first work where they were really passionate about their story but had no storytelling skills. As it stands I’m scared to look at what they’ve created in the 13 year gap between these versions.

Manga Review: Vinland Saga (volumes 1 - 5)

Well this is not the reasonable time I hoped to have this review up, my apologies. So let's not waste anymore time and talk about vikings. 

Vinland Saga (volumes one through five) by Makoto Yukimura

Manga Review: Magi (volumes six through ten)

Funny enough, when I posted my review of the first five volumes of Magi I thought "yeah, I'd really like to read more of this" and went back to my library website where I found volumes nine and ten. I requested them and kept scrolling (my library, like every other one I've known, doesn't always have an author's work appear chronologically in searches) only to realize that nope, volume ten had only dropped the previous week but they had never gotten six through eight! I had a similar situation with Gundam The Origin some people might recall so I do plan on submitting a purchase request for everyone else who wants to read it (my library doesn't just ask for the title and author, I have to put in things like original publication date, publisher, and ISBN which seems like a safeguard against spam but a really inelegant way to do it). So, scanlations were used for those missing volumes and man I am glad for professional translations, I have known some scanlation groups who do a pretty good job but these were inferior to the Viz ones in style and word choice!

Magi by Shinobu Ohtaka

Manga Review: Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches

Sorry for the lateness here again, as I said in my round-up post yesterday I actually did finish writing this on Monday but my late work shift left me too drained to do all of the copy editing. And this is going to be the last of my manga Mondays, the winter anime season ends this week so next Monday I'm diving back into the anime reviews with new shows and comics every other week (well, and manga reviews every week on OASG, at this rate I'm set to review about 70 different comic and manga series this year which is a bit of a terrifying number).

Yamda-kun and the Seven Witches by Miki Yoshikawa

Manga Review: Spirit Circle

Funny story, I actually had this post all ready to go last night and completely forgot until 11:30 to actually hit post so I decided to wait until morning. Which means, this post originally appeared on Organization of Anti-Social Geniuses!

This is one of the many manga I first tried out when I was using friends' guest passes on Crunchyroll and frankly my luck for finding good series on there was pretty terrible. Honestly it still is but I'm lad I stumbled across this one, I actually had no idea it was by the same manga-ka as The Biscuit Hammer and after I enjoyed this series so much I was convinced to try The Biscuit Hammer again and I think that one is growing on me too!

Spirit Circle by Satoshi Mizukami

Manga Review: Orange

As an aside, this review was supposed to go up on OASG first but is going up here first. This only matters since I did read this manga using the press account with Crunchyroll so "a review copy was provided". This won't apply to my other two manga titles this month however, I read both of those thanks to many guest passes from friends!

I went to the Crunchyroll Manga panel at Katsucon a few weeks back (and ran out of the room to take a phone call AND ended up sitting next to some other people from "Anitwitter") where Dancia and Evan spent part of the panel talking about some of the manga they personally liked. Orange was brought up and Danica said something to the effect of "the Japanese editors had no idea people were even reading it overseas since they didn't think it would appeal to anyone else". That made me giggle a bit since a few months earlier I had mentioned in passing that I hadn't read it yet and wanted to I immediately had friends offering me guest passes for the express purpose for reading the series. I am sure that that the editors are completely correct that the overseas fanbase is small but at least it's a dedicated one!

Orange by Ichigo Takano

Manga Review: Magi (volumes one through five)

In case anyone has looked at their title and then double-checked their calendar, yes this week should technically be a Webcomic Wednesday. However, in March all of my Wednesdays will be Webcomic Wednesday and that means if I don't review Magi now I won't get to it until April, nearly four months after I read it. So fret not, webcomics are coming next week and I would now like to talk about a series which was hot stuff in Japan for a while (and may still be) but never quite caught on in the US the way some other shonen series have.

Magi by Shinobu Ohtaka

Manga Review: Gundam: The Origin (volumes one through six)

I remember when this title was announced by Vertical a few years ago (it was actually a license rescue from Viz from ages ago) and it was something that sounded cool and exciting but not only were the books completely out of my price range at nearly $30 a book, the print runs were going to be tiny, 2-5,000 books (I want to say closer to 2.5k than 5) so there was no chance I could ever own the series, even once I had a chance to save up some day in the future. Well, thankfully the series did much better than expected so the print runs are larger and it's gone to re-printings (especially since my paychecks still aren't big enough to cover these books!) and this past summer I found volumes 3-5 at my local library. I got a librarian to show me how to use the book request system to ask them to buy the first two volumes and they obliged and even tossed in volume 6 as well. While I was waiting for my holds I discovered that the website Comic-Walker was also posting the chapters, completely independent from Vertical so their translations may be different but it's still a chance for more people to check out this series since it really is one of the best manga series I read in 2014.

Gundam: The Origin (volumes one through six) by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko

Manga Review: Paradise Kiss

This series falls into the "I've been trying to read this for years but have had the worst luck finding it!" category of this blog which seems to be exclusively dominated by well-regraded shojo stories (heck, I've got a post from years back when I got ahold of the first volume again so that I could finish it!). I did discover reading this that I must have gotten quite far along in one of my previous attempts since there was less new material than I remembered but even if half of this was a reread it didn't diminish just how good this story is.

Paradise Kiss by Ai Yazawa

Manga Review: My Little Monster (volume 3)

Man it's getting tough to do reviews of each volume in a manga series, I think part of my problem with this series is that 1. I remember a lot of the anime so I've got a few volumes to go before anything makes a real impact on me and 2. There's just not a lot changing in these books volume-to-volume since it's a rom-com, not a plot-heavy story. So bear with me with these shorter reviews, I am still enjoying the series for sure but there's just not as much to say unless I go page by page!

My Little Monster (volume 3) by Robico

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: Mars

Long time readers probably recognize this title because it's one where I've been trying to find a complete collection of it to read for years, I seem to recall I first came across it in high school which even for me was quite a few years ago now. Once I finally discovered that one of my library systems had the complete set I carefully set up my request for when I would have a ride (since I 1. wasn't going to request one book at a time again, heck now and 2. was not going to walk over a mile each way in the DC heat with 15 books) and then over the course of many nights spent babysitting worked my way through the series to see once and for all just what actually happened in it.

Mars by Fuyumi Soryo

Manga Review: Nana

When most people think of anime with "broad crossover appeal" they tend to think of the shows like Fullmetal Alchemist and Attack on Titan, shows with flashy action that also spend quite a bit of time making their characters sympathetic so that any audience can follow their actions, not just hardcore anime fans who know what it means when a sister sighs after her brother. Nana doesn't have that flashy action that tends to grab people and yet I have heard so many people say that they don't usually read manga/watch anime or that they're fans but their parents aren't and yet this is one of the few series that has really grabbed them. I've been trying to get a hold of the series for years but given that, even unfinished, it's 21 volumes I've had a bit of a hard time, heck there's probably a review or two of volume one floating way back in my backlogs here. But when I had a lot of free time this past winter I decided to just go ahead and check out as many books from the library as I could carry at once (especially since it was a 30 minute walk each way to the silly place) and found out that the series was well worth my time indeed.

Nana (volumes 1-21) by Ai Yazawa

Manga Review: 20th Century Boys (volumes 15-18)

My new library has a few more volumes of 20th Century Boys which I was pretty thrilled to discover. True I'm still six volumes from the end but I think it'll be a lot easier for me to bug them and convince them to buy six volumes of manga for me to read instead of 10....

20th Century Boys by Naoki Urasawa

Manga Review: Sailor Moon (volumes 11 and 12)

Well this is months later than I had hoped but I finally found a library with the last couple volumes of Sailor Moon! And lucky for me volume 10 actually wrapped up the fourth arc so I wasn't left hanging in the middle and the characters in this series always have such, uh, interesting, wow the 90s sure were a thing, designs that I was even able to remember what the scouts had just defeated! So let's get to talking about this one last story and then my feelings on the series as a whole, especially since I never imagined I would read this story all the way to the end.

Sailor Moon (volumes 11 and 12) by Naoko Takeuchi