Comic Review: This One Summer

Well I feel topical for once, this book came out last year but it's getting awards now in 2015, I had honestly been wondering if it was a bit award winner when I saw just how many copies my library had. And the author's names are familiar but I don't think I've actually read anything else by them, I do remember trying Skim in college but the main character was going through a life just so different from my own (both in terms of experience and how she mentally handled stress and set-back) that I decided it was better to drop the book than to be continually frustrated by it. That was not the case here thankfully, although there was still some frustration involved

This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki

Book Review: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

Since this is really late I'll be brief, I was aware of this book when it was first a serialized novel online but was always too busy to get around to reading it. I've also been hesitant to try it out since I've seen reviews of the later novels (the book was later picked up by a traditional publisher, hence why my library had a copy) that say they've gone downhill. The good news is that this book could be read entirely on it's own so if you're nervous like me worry not, no obligation to keep reading!

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by  Catherynne M. Valente, illustrated by Ana Juan

Movie Review: Song of the Sea

Unusually enough for me, I actually saw this film in a theater in one of the last weeks it was in DC (the Angelica Pop-Up which was a nice theater but in a borderline sketchy part of DC, got nervous when a bus passed me heading for Capitol Heights, you do not go to South-West DC if you can at all help it). I really wanted to make the effort to see it on a big screen considering how much I loved the visuals in The Secret of Kells which was also made by Tomm Moore/Cartoon Saloon and the art in the trailers for this film looked gorgeous. But actually watching it made me realize that seeing something on the big screen just isn't that much of an improvement for me, it was nice but I feel like I could've gotten the same impression if I had watched it on a nice tv back home.

Song of the Sea

Book Review: Goose Girl

Shannon Hale is an author who I feel like I hear about more often than I should, which isn't a bad thing but just a curious thing. She started writing mostly middle grade books once I was already in mid-late high school at least so while I've read a little of her work before (The Princess Academy, also one of the graphic novels she's written for, Rapunzel's Revenge) I haven't been actively looking for her work since it's a little young for me. I forget how this one ended up on my kindle from the library recently (my to-read list is the size of a small mountain so it's rare I do remember recommendations these days) but wasn't too worried, I did enjoy The Princess Academy after all.

Goose Girl by Shannon Hale

Comic Review: Sisters

While I wasn't that fond of Drama (the characters acted too maturely for middle schoolers and there was too much, well, drama!) I did like Telgemier's first work, Smile and since this was another autobiographical work and set in the same time period I was more than happy to find out why her books don't stay on the bestsellers list for days or weeks but rather months and years. Seriously! Every time an old-school comics fan writes a lament about kids not reading comics anymore and that they must simply do something my twitter feed is filled with people pointing at her work and reminding the rest of us how insular the comics sphere can be. 

Sisters by Raina Telgemier

Book Review: Greenglass House

For my final entry in Middle Grade March I return to a familiar author, Kate Milford who also wrote the The Boneshaker and The Broken Lands set of books. As far as I can tell, this book is set in the same world as those two and her novellas (the style of the stories within stories matches up and I haven't seen Milford say it isn't) but this book is standalone so a newcomer can come in easily (or someone like me who really needs to do a massive re-read of this whole collection!).

The Greenglass House by Kate Milford, illustrated by Jamie Zollars

Book Review: Children of the King

After I read Nightingale's Nest I was wondering if I should go ahead and review a MG book on my blog, even if it was really good, but after I read this book and it was also MG and excellent I felt like I had to. All of these great books make me sad that MG really got big when I was already in high school, just a few years earlier and I wouldn't have felt like I needed to start reading questionable adult science-fiction in middle school! (I would also like to note that I think this is a very pretty cover but I'm sure everyone knows I'm a sucker for illustrated covers)

The Children of the King by Sonya Hartnett

Book Review: Nightingale'sNest

As I've said before, I've been waffling over whether or not to continue putting up reviews of middle grade (and adult) books here or if I should try and keep my book reviews more consistent and only talk about YA. That is the majority of what I read but over the past month I requested a number of books which turned out to be MG and they were all rather good too! So I still want to talk about them but these will be shorter reviews, that just tends to happen when it's a shorter work and that's part of the reason why I don't read MG as much, I feel like their shorter length doesn't always develop the story as fully as it could but I thought that the next few books were the perfect lengths.

Nightingale's Nest by Nikki Loftin

Cartoon Review: Over the Garden Wall

I give up, there is no way to watch this series legally online unless you're in a very specific situation. io9 has the full first episode streaming legally and the Cartoon Network website has the entire series, but unless you can log in with your cable subscriber information (and only from certain providers) you can only watch clips, that is total bullcrap and thus I pirated episodes two through ten. Clearly I didn't have to do this, I could've waited until this eventually popped up on DVD and hoped that my library would have it, hoped that it streamed on Netflix, or tried to arrange my entire free time schedule around re-airings of the show on tv but none of these are good solutions either. This has nothing to do with the show itself but I am very, very frustrated with how much harder it is for me to find American-made television legally online than it is to find anything else online, that's just dumb!

Over the Garden Wall

Book Review: Dragon Sword and Wind Child

Last February I ordered a microphone from Amazon, got a package direct from Amazon, thinking that I didn't remember that it was an Amazon fulfillment, and opened it up to find a kindle instead. I then remembered that my birthday was in about a week and that this was probably a gift from my mother considering I had mentioned off-handedly that I was thinking of getting on in the next year and confirmed when I started getting email notifications about books from my wishlist being added to my account. Obviously this book was one of them, I forget where in the manga blogosphere I first heard of it but it was an out of print title that had recently popped up in ebook form and it sounded like it had potential so why not?

Dragon Sword and Wind Child by Noriko Ogiwara

Book Review: The Boneshaker

A couple of years ago I read The Broken Lands and found myself regretting that it had taken so much time to get to the book since I whole heartedly adored it and yet never got around to reading the book it was a prequel to. My to-read list is so long I had nearly forgotten about it until I saw the author talking about the kickstarter she was doing (I believe it was either a companion novella to this or for another, unconnected novella she had written) that prompted me to check my new library systems to see if they had a copy and to reserve it. And so, here are my thoughts on it, and I am also so glad the library seems to have found their copy again, this is the second book in four months they've said I lost after I turned it in and I had to find the first one on the shelves myself.....

The Boneshaker by Kate Milford

Comic Review: Drama

Despite the fact that I had heard good things about Smile by Raina Telgemeier it took me a number of years to actually get around to reading it, and of course once I did I rather liked it! And then I just repeated the process by taking quite a while to track down Drama, even though I had heard good things about it and even heard Telgemeier speak about it at Small Press Expo this past fall. I guess my only excuse is that when you only get your books from the library you don't develop the habit of checking out their catalog immediately to find new books, they just aren't designed very well to keep people up to date with what new-ish things they have.

Drama by Raina Telgemeier 

Comic Review: August Moon

For those who haven't seen the post below this, I'm going to start putting as on NI (provided that Google approves me, just hoping that I don't have to code them all in myself) so if anyone sees anything inappropriate, makes noise, etc, take a screenshot and let me know please!

I didn't realize it until I picked up the book from my pile to read but I looked at the cover and went "hmm, that animal looks like Totoro" was was relieved to see someone else (I believe on the back cover) mention Totoro as well. I felt like it was too big a visual similarity for anime/manga fans at least to not notice but still didn't want to be the first person to bring it up, as if I was accusing it of copying and truly this story has nothing in common with that film other than that one character design.

August Moon by Diana Thung

Summary: Fi and her dad live just outside the town of Calico and when they stay there for a bit while her father tries to identify a strange new creature found in the town she gets caught up in both the local legend of Soul Fires and a plot by an outside organization to bulldoze the town's beloved forest.

The Good: The story plays out at a good pace and despite a few scenes of violence and death I think it's more than fine to let the middle school crowd read (it's funny since even though it's listed as grades 9 and up I feel like it was written more to a 6-8th grade audience, especially since Fi at least is 11). And, well, there's certainly nothing terrible with it, I'm sure plenty of people will like it but I just didn't find anything about it amazing.

The Bad: I just didn't see anything special about this story, none of the character's grabbed me, the plot wasn't anything new or anything old done extraordinarily well, and I just didn't feel a sense of whimsy that I had expected when I read the synopsis and saw the cover. I didn't like Fi or Jaden as much as the story wanted me to (in retrospect, Jaden reminds me a lot of Hajime from the currently airing anime Gatchaman Crowds, an eccentric who really does know what's going on and what to do about it but is terrible at communicating, he's even worse than Hajime is) and since I didn't like any of those individual aspects of the story it's no wonder that the whole thing didn't gel for me.

The Art: It feels odd to say this about an English comic book instead of a manga but the character designs were just simple enough that I read a bit into the book, stopped, flipped back, and then realized there were two point of view characters instead of just one. I can't remember why now I initially got them confused, it could have been that I expected one POV character instead of two and that's how I started reading it, but I think that does mean that the designs should have been a tad more distinct. Or perhaps it just needed to use some shading, this is yet another comic that goes for the just black and white approach which I'm starting to dislike a bit, I just feel like it makes everything look a bit too simple and scenes which are supposed to look stunning to the character, and therefore create an emotional response in the reader, just don't accomplish that at all.


So, two out of five stars here for being a bit bland and unimaginative, even though I say that a middle schooler could read it I don't think I'll be recommending it anytime soon.

Book Review: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian

This was a book I had seen before, in bookstores and on lists of good books to read, but had always ignored it because of the cover since, well, whenever I saw it I thought "Cowboys vs Indians? Pass, not my thing" and ironically it was the coverflip of the book that got me interested in it (for those who don't want to read the whole article, which is odd since you obviously want to read a book review, it's changing the cover of books if the author was of the other gender and how you think the marketing would have been done differently). This is ironic because that coverflip completely misrepresents the book and the book's actual, more abstract cover is closer to the real thing, although funny enough the blog where I pulled the cover image from seems to agree with me, having the book come off as "the problems of a girl" instead of "the problems of a guy" does feel just a bit more interesting and appealing to me. Hmm. In any case, shortly after that I saw it at the library, grabbed it, and put it high up on my to-read pile just to make sure I actually got through it this time and wasn't turned off by the cover again.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie Art by Ellen Forney

Summary: Junior lives on the Rez with his family and few friends and one day just gets fed up with his school and how his entire future is a bit hopeless and switches to the all-white school over 20 miles away to try and change his life.

The Good: Junior is more mature than realistically most kids would be at his age but I think that was a necessary choice since with all of the things going on in his life the book needs a more mature narrater who can pick up on and explain the situation to the reader a bit more fully than they might have (especially since the target age group is 12-16 year olds, I know that I would have missed one or two things at that age if Junior hadn't explained them). I also don't mind this choice since I ended up really enjoying this story and how it never shied away from the complicated parts of Junior's life and didn't necessarily try to provide solutions where none actually exist. Yet the story also didn't forget to show the good parts of Junior's life as well, such as how even though his parents were drunks they did love him and care for him as best as they can, that he loved them back and that this wasn't a bad thing at all, just another complicated part of his life. And I was also surprised by how much I liked the illustrations, not really on a technical or aesthetically level (although the notes in the back about how they chose all the different styles to include made me appreciate them more) but they just worked well with the story and felt like a natural part of it, not as if it had been added in later but as if it had been planned from the very start.

The Bad: I'm a little torn on how it ended, while things have changed in Junior's life for good and for ill in the end it felt like still not a lot had changed. I'm not sure what could have been done differently however, for Junior to have been at a crossroads in his life where he could have made major changes he would have needed to be much older, say about to go to college, and I don't think the story would have worked as well if it was set over so many years, I suppose I would have just liked this story to have ended on a definitive event instead of the "life goes on" ending it had which is ultimately the most realistic one it could have had. 



In the end I'm giving this book a 4 out of 5 for being a book I truly enjoyed and think would actually be a great book for middle/high schoolers to read, one I certainly would have enjoyed much more than many that I had to read, although I don't think I'll be picking up a copy for myself since it's not a book I think I'll feel the need to reread anytime soon.

Comic Review: Mercury

As a heads up, starting tomorrow I'm going to be out of town for a week and while I should still have wifi allowing me to post regular updates if they don't go up, well, assume that that didn't work out the way I had hoped. In any case, this was yet another grab from the not-so-local library, I think at this rate I'm going to achieve my goal of having read everything that interests me in their comic section by the end of summer after all!

Mercury by Hope Larson

Summary: In 2009 Tara is living with extended family after her and her mother's ancestral home burned down. In 1859 Josey is living in said home and her family is being tempted with the promise of a gold mine on their property. Since if there's one thing this family needs, and wants, in both time periods it's money yet this gold may bring more problems than it solves. 

The Good: While The Sight (not that the book ever explicitly names it as much) feels a bit gimmicky in Tara's story I liked how it was integrated into Josey's, actually I liked Josey's story more than Tara's in the end since it felt a little more complete and the character's seemed a tad more fleshed out. Although I do wish the story had been able to expand on the other supernatural elements that popped up later, they're so brief that I do wish the story had either expanded on them or just left them out all together (which would have been worse since they then pop up again in Tara's story).

The Bad: Both of the halves in this book, the past and the present are perfectly fine stories  with beginnings, middles, and ends yet I just don't think they work that well together. Either story could have easily stood on it's own yet putting them together hasn't given Mercury any deeper meaning or made it structurally any better. In the end I wish that the story had chosen to focus on just one story instead and gone a bit deeper, such as Tara's relationship with her mother which I felt was so superficial that I had a hard time believing it was even causing conflict. Finally, I found it rather odd that the story needed to have so many asterisks for Canadian slang instead of just putting them in a glossary or simply taking them out. Just about all of them I would have been able to figure out through the dialogue anyway and it was more distracting than useful to see "loonie* *a one dollar coin is called a loonie for the loon on the back" instead of just "dollar" or even "loonie, you can pay me back". 

The Art: I'm starting to realize that I'm just not as fond of the stark, black and white only with thick outlines style of art I've been coming across a lot lately since I just find it a little boring and, well, I don't want to read boring looking comic books. That aside, I also found the paneling layout a bit boring as well since it only uses rectangles and squares and I don't recall it even making the squares larger or smaller for dramatic effect. I read a lot of manga and webcomics where the creators go wild and try all kinds of layouts to get the look they want and while not everyone does that I seem to find more people in those two mediums than I do in US/Canadian produced comics which puzzles me since plenty of those webcomic artists are in the US/Canada. So in the end, while the art was solid and I could certainly follow the flow of the story it just didn't interest me and that's bad when something that's literally half of the story bores me.


In the end I can only give this 2.5 out of 5 stars and raised eyebrows over the fact that the cover proclaims that this was an Eisner Award Winner. While certainly not terrible I just didn't see anything in the story that I thought would elevate it up to what I would expect out of an Eisner winner, makes me wonder what the other nominees were that year (2010 I believe).

Book Review: Where Mountain Meets the Moon

And now to mooch off of family wifi to see if I can get this review up on time. This is another book that I grabbed in desperation towards the end of the school year yet I wasn't able to read it until I got home and checked it out from my local library (silly school had me return the books a few days before graduation). Once I started reading I got a little nervous since it became clear that it was middle grade not young adult, and well, middle grade books just engage me less these days (considering I'm about ten years too old for them this shouldn't be a surprise). But, since I am still in a slump, plus this was on my list, and I was enjoying it, I decided to perserve and finished it rather quickly regardless.

Where Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

Summary: Minli lives with her family on the Fruitless Mountain and, even though she knows why the stories say the mountain is so barren, after hearing another story from her father and on the advice of a goldfish she goes off to see the Old Man on the Moon and ask him herself.

The Good: I liked how the story was able to incorporate a half dozen other stories told by the characters into itself and create a history and a precedence for what Minli is doing that way. I have no idea how closely any of these stories resemble real Chinese fairy tales but they have the same feeling, the same kind of stories and storytelling, that “real” fairy tales I’ve read had and that’s not the easiest style of story to recreate.

The Bad: Since the story is middle grade it was a little too simplistic for my taste, that combined with the fact that it’s a quest means that Minli rarely faced true adversary or hardship and I do wish the story had thrown in a little more of that (even though I do prefer quest type stories to "defeat the evil lord" kinds of stories and liked how no villain suddenly appeared at the end for Minli to vanquish). But, since a middle grade book doesn’t need to be the most complex thing out there, nothing really does and when your readers are 11 this is doubly true, this isn’t a terrible thing and with the story’s quick pacing this also would have been hard to pull off.

I’m giving this one a 3.5 out of 5 for being a rather solid book, even if it wasn’t precisely what I wanted, and would easily recommend it to any middle grade reader who wanted something fantasy to read. 

Comic Review: Smile

Sorry that this one is late guys, weirdly enough it wasn't exams that threw me off schedule but all the last minute errand-y thing I had to do before graduation, gonna see if I can catch up by Monday but since my graduation isn't until Sunday that might not happen. And also, I'm gonna try but I might not have a comic review for this upcoming week, I've plain ran out of books that catch my eye at the libraries, heck I even read Abandon the old in Tokyo by Yoshihiro Tatsumi and you know what, I just didn't feel like reviewing it. Part of this might be because I saw the blog post by one of the First Second editors talking about how they would rather have someone review a book (that they got from them) if they felt like they wanted to write a review rather than they were obligated. And I just don't feel like I would have anything meaningful/important/useful so yep, I read it, liked A Drifting Life more which I recommend and let's talk about this book now which I do have things to say about!


Smile by Raina Telgemeier

Summary: Raina was excited to get braces since all her classmates had them and this would make her more normal, although when she knocks out her front two teeth her braces suddenly become a lot more complicated and end up being a part of her life a lot longer than she expected.

The Good: Last week I praised Nothing Could Possibly Go Wrong for the mundane aspects of it and, unsurprisingly since this story uses braces as part jumping off point part unifying theme, I'm going to do the same thing here. Usually braces, and glasses, only pop up in stories (middle grade stories anyway) as a device either to denote someone as a nerd or as a "look this character is just like you and me!" one off story which has always struck me as odd since so many kids in America do have braces. And wow did I emphasize a lot with Telgemeier's story (headgear? Yep. Crying in the orthodontist's office? Yes and worse!) and even though it's set a few decades back it doesn't feel dated in the slightest and I think that people, kids and adults alike, will be able to enjoy it for another few decades. Even if braces are replaced with something less painful the rest of Telgemeier's story will still be more than relevant.

The Bad: This was a pretty solid story and I don't have any real criticisms of it. It did take me a little while to realize when it was set, although that was me being silly not really the story's fault, but it felt paced well within the story and it was easy to see what choices Telgemeier was going to make. Best of all, as I semi-mentioned earlier this is a middle grade story and even though I normally don't like those as much I think this works great as an all ages book and it doesn't talk down to it's audience, honestly since it does that right just about any problem would seem minor by comparison.

The Art: The book was in full color which I thought was a good choice, it gave the art a certain color it just wouldn't quite have had if it was just in black and white tones, it wouldn't have fit with the art's nice rounded style. I guess it sounds odd to talk about if an artist's style fits the story or not, especially since I don't often run across a story where I feel like the art is completely wrong for it, but what i mean here is that this is a autobiographical comic and even though the art is what people would call cartoony it doesn't use things like over-exaggerated reactions or huge sound effects which would have felt totally out of place in the story. In that respect it's also a good example of how you don't need a super realistic art style to tell an autobiographical story, then again I could have pointed you to half a dozen webcomics to also prove that point.


So, a good 3.5 or 4 out of 5 stars for this and a hearty recommendation. I've heard that Telgemeier has another book out there and I will need to make sure to track it down in the near future and see what that one is about, probably sooner than later given my lack of buffer.....

Book Review: The Broken Lands

A few years back I read Boneshaker by Cheri Priest and was pretty meh on the book in general. And then shortly afterwords confused since I saw people talking about a book called Boneshaker that was completely different from what I read, turns out it was this book by Kate Milford. I'm still a little surprised that Milford's book kept the same title since I can't have been the only person confused by these two but in any case I wasn't that interested in the book and the cover art was just odd enough to keep me uninterested. The cover for the prequel however grabbed me a bit more and something about the synopsis made me curious and, well, while some might disagree I think it's best to read a series chronologically so this was also the most logical place to start!


The Broken Lands by Kate Milford, illustrated by Andrea Offermann

Summary: It's the 19th century New York and, while the Brooklyn Bridge isn't quite finished yet the city of New York and Coney Island are becoming more and more joined regardless. And as any afficando of fairy tales knows, a crossroads, especially as one so massive as the Brooklyn Bridge over the East River, is a source of power and some, people, have come calling to NYC to take it over for their own purposes. Cities have protections however for these times but out villains already know about those and seek to twist them to their own dark needs. Sam is only a cardshark living on Coney Island and Jin is even less connected to the city but when both of them end up in the wrong place they become determined to do what they can to save the city and keep all of it's people safe.

The Good: There is just something about the way that this story unfolds which makes it work and it's one of my favorite books so far this year. Maybe it's the setting, I suppose you could call this book urban fantasy and it does a remarkably good job at focusing on both the mundane (urban) parts of Sam and Jin's lives and on the fantastical elements that have worked their way in. Often when I read urban fantasy I see stories that would rather focus on the magic and how another world, in a sense, lurks behind street corners and focuses on the fantastical instead of the ordinary. That's fine but here the city of New York is so pivotal to the story (and the time, the story is set roughly during the Reconstruction after the Civil War which isn't a time period I see many books set in, especially middle grade/young adult) that if the story had tried to focus more on the magic than the normal then it would have been hard to see where the characters got the motivation to save it. Much like the setting, the story balances out the page time that both Sam and Jin get quite nicely and both develop very well (and the development also feels very natural given that the story takes place over about a week, it's not too much yet with the circumstances the two face it's believable that they do change). After looking at the summary for Boneshaker I was sad that I didn't see either of their names in there since I would love to read more about their adventures and I'm crossing my fingers that they do appear after all.

The Bad: There were some moments towards the end where things just seemed to work out too well for both Sam and Jin which threw me out of the story a bit. Yes good/advantageous things will happen to characters in stories, that's what happens in real life. However, it was just the way that some things right near the climax occurred that frustrated me, other than that this was a really good book and I don't have any major complaints about it. I am curious to find out how it connects to Boneshaker, once I was completely finished with the book I looked up a summary for it but couldn't figure it out which also makes me wonder what purpose this story served then.


So I didn't give the illustrations their own section this time since 1) I don't have the book with me so I can't really talk about them without looking at them and 2) while okay I didn't feel like they added anything really important to the story that was worth mentioning. That doesn't mean I didn't like them, technically the ones in Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series didn't add anything either and I loved those, so I just didn't really have anything to say. Regardless, I give this book four stars out of five and now that I've finally reviewed it I'm going to go ahead and get a hold of Boneshaker and hope that I like it just as much.

Comic Book Review: Cat Burglar Black

Getting back into the swing of things here with another book from the North American publisher First Second. As I think my reviews on their past books has shown they're really a hit or miss publishing house for me, either I like their stuff or hate it and it doesn't even matter who the actual creator is! So I came across this one at my school library and hoped it would be another hit and, well, it didn't work quite like that.


Cat Burglar Black by Richard Sala

Summary: K has had an unhappy life, orphaned at a young age she was raised in an orphanage where all the kids were taught how to steal and punished when they wouldn't so she's happy to finally have left that life behind and to be starting at a new boarding school. But her bad luck seems to follow her since her new school also has plans for her which she's less than pleased about. 

The Good: K is a pretty likable lead character and the three girls she befriends are fairly likable as well. And the setting works well for the story, there are hints and details the suggest that the school and the town are even more sinister than the reader initially guesses and I liked that. Apparently Sala's other works also have that element of sinisterness to them and I don't think this story would work at all if it didn't have those little details sprinkled throughout.

The Bad: There are stories that are "family friendly" which are simple enough for a child to follow but have a depth to them that adults can enjoy and there are "for kids" stories which are so simple that they feel flat. This book falls into the later category, it rushes through the story so quickly that it's hard to feel bad about anything that happens to the side characters or even K, there's just no downtime for the reader to process what just happened (I seem to recall complaining about this in Sailor Moon recently as well). As a result of that, and the ending which felt a bit off tone/moodwise, this story didn't leave a good impression on me and I don't think I'll be recommending it.  

The Art: After reading a bit of the book I had a niggling feeling that something looked off about it and finally figured out what it was, every single page was laid out the exact same way, either four square frames (in a 2 by 2 configuration) over a large panel or a large panel over those square frames, I can't remember exactly which. Regardless, obviously I like comics that are innovative and creative in their use of panels and how it makes the story flow (I like manga after all and half the time you can't figure out which order to read the panels in) so this isn't my style and honestly I just don't think that such a formulaic approach to the art works. You might be able to pull this off in some story, perhaps, but a story should be told in comic form because the visual aspects adds to the story and when it's so rigidly defined does it really add anything? Add that to what I was already feeling about the writing and this layout makes the whole story feel rather amateurish and as if Sala needed to wait a few more years to further refine this idea before creating it.


So, 2 or 2.5 out of 5 for this one, won't be recommending to really anyone, if anyone really needs good graphic novels for girls ages 8-12 I'm sure I can come up with some better recommendations than this one.

Manga Review: Sailor Moon volumes 2-8

And I'm back with even more Sailor Moon! Technically I also requested the 9th volume from my local library but they don't actually have it yet and, since I have no idea when that will happen, I thought it would just be best to go ahead and talk about all these other volumes which does continue the first arc, completely covers arcs two and three and starts a fourth, that's more than enough material to talk about!


Sailor Moon by Naoko Takeuchi

Summary: Sailor Moon finds the rest of the sailor senshi (both those representing the inner planets and some unexpected other allies) and they continue to fight against the myriad enemies hellbent on taking over Earth and remember their own past lives in the process.

The Good: As I think I mentioned in the first review, this is surprisingly solid and a lot better than I expected so yes, I am enjoying this series quite a bit. The characters have started developing (I was really surprised to see that Tuxedo Mask actually gets fleshed out, abet kidnapped/brainwashed often, given how many people I've seen poo-poo him over the years, I guess they only saw the anime?) and the story does it's best to give all four of the supporting sailor senshi adequate page time. For me the fun part of this story isn't seeing all the action scenes (more on that down below) but seeing the girls just interact with each other and grow and there is a fair bit of that here so again, I really am enjoying this more than I expected and I find it interesting to see just how much of Sailor Moon is, well, unique to the series and hasn't really been copied by other shows (since there are plenty of people out there who swear that every single magical girl show since this one has been influenced by it which I would make a strong argument against at this point).

The Bad: I've seen/read a lot of magical girl anime/manga and they all follow fairly similar formats, a balance of the girl's daily lives and then showing them fighting whatever they need to be fighting. Sailor Moon has barely any of the girls' everyday lives in there and the constant action/making plans that will result in action, et cetera left me feeling rather exhausted and I would have liked small moments in the girls' mundane lives, especially for characters other than Usagi since there the manga does show her and Mamoru outside of fights a fair bit. Also, this series is paced really fast as you probably realized when I mentioned that technically the seven volumes here cover 3 different arcs which also lead to my fatigue. Actually, thinking about all of that, I wonder if that's why shonen series with similar premises (ie lots of fighting and "elevator bosses") are so long, because you really do need the downtime between action scenes and to pace your action properly which is going to eat up page space pretty fast. 

The Art: Someone on twitter warned me that Takeuchi's strong point isn't fight scenes and that they tend to get really cluttered when there are a lot of characters involved and yep, that is exactly what happens. Heck now I'm looking forward to the reboot just so that I can follow along with the fights, at least on screen I won't be trying to look at half a dozen different panels at once. The actual art hasn't changed much either, the characters faces are still a bit, fluid and Takeuchi still seems to have no earthly idea how to draw a cat. But the human characters look pretty regardless of consistency, the backgrounds are detailed enough, and the screentones aren't overused.

So, continuing along merrily with this and hoping that my local library gets volume 9 in soon (they might get 10 in before I graduate but I have no idea how I'm reading 11 and 12 legally since, even though I'm enjoying the series I'm not 100% sure I want to go buy all 12 volumes, money and shelving issues aside)!