Phew, I actually did not know if I was going to be able to review this title until last night when the last page was posted, talk about down to the wire! Especially since, like last year's Friends With Boys the full version of this comic is only going to be online for a short while longer (until the 7th, I suspect a part of it will remain up as a preview) so I really wanted to tell people about this as soon as I could. I mentioned Friends With Boys for a reason there, this is Faith Erin Hick's newest (I think?) work, although this time it's a sorta-kinda collaboration with the author Prudence Shen. What happened was that several years back Prudence Shen wrote a book, shopped it around, and an agent who had worked with Faith before read it and then bought the rights with the intent to develop it into a graphic novel instead which is something I'm sure must have happened before but I can't actually recall hearing another case like it. This did make me a little hesitant going in, since I seem to like Faith's work when she's writing and drawing it but not just drawing it, but it seems like a combination of Shen's writing and how Faith adapted it just worked for me.
Nothing Could Possibly Go Wrong by Prudence Shen and Faith Erin Hicks
Summary: Charlie was having a fairly good start to the school year, even if his girlfriend (Holly, the head cheerleader) suddenly broke up with him, and things go downhill quickly when his friend Nate starts a fight with the cheerleaders over misplaced school funding that both groups want and Charlie finds himself in the middle of a bizarre scuffle that involves student body elections, family drama, and a robot rumble.
The Good: As noted earlier, Shen wrote the original novel but Faith adapted it to work as a graphic novel style (and sized) story and I would have never guessed that since it's such a good fit. The author notes on various pages note that there was only one major change to the story (a scene near the end and I completely agree with the change) so I guess this means I should keep an eye out for Shen's other works as well. As for the actual story, much like Friends I was pleasantly surprised to see that Charlie is dealing with divorced parents because, well, I've been there and once I started looking I noticed that most YA books that had a protagonist with divorced parents either glossed over it or it happened so many years ago that the protagonist was okay with it. Here it's still a very raw part of Charlie's life and I really wish I had had this story a few years earlier. Other than that, the character felt fleshed out, I really like the choice to portray Holly the cheerleader as cool and distant instead of bitchy and all the major players get enough fleshing out to feel like real characters by the end.
The Bad: The ending felt a little rocky to me but that could be because again I wasn't sure when it was going to finish and really wanted it to be soon so I could actually review it, I'm sure it reads much better when all read at once. Likewise, while the pacing felt fine more or less I'm sure the robot fight scenes will flow much better when people aren't reading them page by page and that's a really tricky kind of pacing for people to master and considering that this was created to be a print book I would have been incredibly impressed if the book's pacing flowed well both ways.
The Art: The art is rather nice, the characters look distinct from each other with a variety of body shapes, faces, noses, and no two hair styles look alike, and all of the many action scenes look fine. There are a few pages where it's a bit hard to follow what the robots are doing but I think that's because I'm less experienced with robot fights so in a way I don't know what to expect and that makes it harder to figure out what happened (versus say a fistfight which I've seen plenty of in movies over the years and that gives me the context to figure out what's going on in a comic book fistfight*). So anyway, by and large the art is rather nice and very solid with just one or two rough patches, the paneling is pretty nice as well.
A fun read and while I haven't ordered a copy yet (because finances, guys moving out on your own is TERRIFYING) but I highly recommend people who enjoyed it to do so and then to post in the preorder campaign page so that they can unlock even more tiers/prizes in their special campaign. More about everything, and the comic itself, can be found over here and remember that the whole thing will be online only until the 7th so if you want to try it now is the time!
*unless you're Sailor Moon but that was two weeks ago)
This was a bit of an odd show for me, I was really excited for it going into the fall season, I had tried out some of the manga beforehand and liked it, got a bit bored with it, and then right around where I had stopped reading (about the midpoint of the show) it picked up again for me and then I liked it for the rest of it's run. Interestingly enough, even though I consider one of Studio Bones' trademarks to me "really strange anime original endings" I think this might have been the same ending the manga had, they both ended right around the same time and from the poking around I did it seems like they stayed pretty similar up to the end at least. Although, guys who was in charge of the English title for this show? It already had the perfect subtitle/English title already, The Civilization Blaster, and while the title makes sense around 2/3rds of the way through (or even earlier depending how much time you spend thinking about it) it's still so awkward that I feel silly just saying it.
Blast of Tempest (Zetsuen no Tempest: The Civilization Blaster)
Summary: One year ago Aika Fuwa died under mysterious circumstances and neither her brother Mahiro or his friend/her secret boyfriend Yoshino have really gotten over it. Mahiro has disappeared and one day when Yoshino is by her grave he's interrogated by a strange lady at gun point about Mahiro as a swarm of butterflies appear and herald the beginning of a strange and sinister plot
The Good: One thing I wasn't expecting this show to do as well as it did was all of the relationships between the characters and the show wouldn't have worked nearly as well without it. Heck, around the two-thirds mark the characters have all split up, there are so many factions I couldn't begin to keep them all straight, and I thought "oh well I guess they'll be fighting against each other now and then will team up against whatever the even greater villain is at the end in a tsundereish fashion" and nope, the story was too smart for that which I was pretty thrilled about. And related to that, Yoshino and Mahrio (Mahrio especially) really grew more than I expected, for a show that I started because it had kind of a cool plot and some really cool looking action I got way more out of it than I expected.
The Bad: I'm still not sure however why I had a little slump in the first half of the series, around the one-third mark. Maybe it was because I had already read the manga up to that point and, since this show does rely more than a bit on a few key plot twists, it might not be something that holds up well if you already know them. Or maybe I was just bored, from what I can tell I was the only person who was bored/frustrated by the show at that point. There are however two other good reasons to get frustrated with those show, one is the afore mentioned reliance on plot twists (there are two, maybe four depending on how you count them) and I'm less fond of series that rely on "twists" more than "plot" to be entertaining. The other is that the series doesn't exactly go through a genre shift halfway through but it shifts from being more or less all action to 50-75% action, 50-25% new genre. I thought it pulled it off well but that might have been because I knew it was coming (I saw people complaining about it in advance online and managed to guess rather accurately what it would be) but again, some people aren't going to like it so just try to keep an open mind in the second half of the show.
The Audio: Right, I know I'm in the minority here but I really liked the first opening song, yes Engrish and all. The Engrish was comprehensible enough that I think it made sense (or as much sense as you could hope for) plus there was some fantastic timing with pairing up the lyrics and the beats to the images. The second opening grew on me after a few episodes but I was never really a fan of either ending, they were both a little too light and cheerful for me. All the voice acting was pretty solid as well, I've seen some other people praising the shows soundtrack but when I looked for it and gave it a listen I was only lukewarm about it. It worked just fine within the show but it isn't something I'm going to remember by the end of the year.
The Visuals: Pretty good looking art throughout the entire series and all the fight scenes looked great, I didn't see any drop offs in quality and the choreography and the camera work, as odd as it sounds to apply those words to a work of animation, were spot on. And that's about it, the animation was nice, the fights were good, the characters didn't look ridiculous, the color schemes generally made sense (although I do keep staring at some things, like Mahiro's really yellow jacket and go "why?"), there's just nothing really stand-out here.
I'm giving this a solid 3.5 out of 5, maybe a 4 and yes would like to own this on DVD. Which is in and of itself it's own problem, it's been licensed by Aniplex which generally means really expensive releases (I have some issues with the way they do their pricing scheme but that's a rant for another post). Hopefully this release will be a bit cheaper and simpler than some of their others since it wasn't a mega-hit like Madoka Magica or Sword Art Online (or Magi to an extent I guess), although hopefully this also doesn't mean they won't release it at all, I'm just going to be a bit nervous about this one until I see an actual product listing online. I also do hope someone brings the manga over since I'd like to read that again as well, it's a Square Enix title and Yen Press has brought over a lot of their stuff in the past so I think there's a pretty good chance it'll be licensed, just that YP is a bit slower these days to bringing out stuff that was on air recently.
I feel a little weird only talking about three out of the four shorts for this year's Young Animator Training Project but these three have been out for a while and I can't even find raws of Ryo (Studio Gonzo's short) after looking around. I know it must be somewhere since I saw someone commenting along the lines of "Gonzo was, ....Gonzo" which honestly doesn't make me want to search out the short, bad Gonzo is usually pretty boring and more than slightly terrible in the writing department. So, if I do ever find it I'll watch it and add onto the review, in the meantime let me tell you about everything else!
Young Animator Training Program 2013 (Anime Mirai)
Aruvu Rezuru - Kikai Shikake no Yōsei-tachi (Alv Rezul - Mechanical Fairies, also seen it written Areve Rezere): This was an odd entry, this was made by Studio Xebec to fill in a slot that had previously been taken by Studio Perriot and I remember this showing up on anime charts for last summer, no idea if it was supposed to be a single OVA back then or a full series and was reduced to an OVA. The charts were listing it as a full series and it’s based on a light novel series, yet out of the three I was able to see this was easily the weakest. This one felt like a pilot for a full series and, while the others felt a bit like that as well, they managed to also feel complete in 30 minutes, this one felt like we had just started a series and that we wouldn’t have everything explained until it was done (or even the basic concepts fully explained until episode three). The concept was kinda cool, perhaps it was moved from the summer so it wouldn’t compete with the slightly similar in concept Sword Art Online, but the writing felt amateur, weak, and cliché-ridden the whole way through. Oooooh, mysterious organizations! Slightly incestuous sibling relationships which are okay because they’re not blood related and then plot shenanigans to make it even more “okay”! (which in case your wondering, even if you’re not related by blood you still feel pretty creeped out by that stuff, if my step-brother ever acted like this I would smack him in a heartbeat) The art was fine, although I was confused why Shiki always looked like she was drawn in a different style than the background, props, and other characters. I’m rather sad I didn’t like this since when I first saw it on the charts I thought it sounded rather cool, too bad it’s execution was poor.
Death Billiards: Studio Madhouse has made a lot of great things for many years so it’s no surprise that they made something great this time. The story goes that two men, one young one old, show up at a bar with no memory how exactly they got to it and have to play a game of billiards with their lives on the line. They don't know much more than that but it’s soon clear that pool is a game they both have strong memories of and that there is obviously more to the game than it first seems. I’ve seen a lot of people not like the ambiguous ending but I rather liked it, given the sense of mystery that permeated the rest of the short it makes sense that it wouldn’t explain everything to it’s viewers (or even it’s characters, of the other two characters present one of them doesn’t know the final outcome of the game either). I’m satisfied with this as a short yet I can also see it being fleshed out into a full, episodic series with an underlying story revealing more about the bar and it’s two attendants, although I have absolutely no idea how likely that is to happen.
Young Witch Academia: Hotly anticipated since it’s from the new studio Studio Trigger which, if I recall correctly, is formed from a number of people who used to work at Studio Shaft, and people were also excited because it looked just plain fun and it was! Akko has wanted to be a witch since she saw a fantastical magical show when she was young but now that she’s actually at magic school she finds the lessons either boring or just plain impossible. This story could have easily been stretched into a full length film but here neatly fits into the 22 minute run time with good pacing and nice visuals, the OVA almost looked more heavily influenced by American Saturday morning cartoons than anime in places and had a really distinct look the entire way through. And the animation itself looked fantastic, very few still shots and lots of complex movements, if this is the future of animation via animators in Japan then I think we’re good! Lots and lots of fun and I’m excited to see what else Studio Trigger produces, I think they have their first full series coming this summer but it sounds like there isn’t a lot of information about it out yet. Oh and it's legally on both youtube and crunchyroll now so catch it at one of those places when you have half an hour to spare.
This was a book I had heard some things about, all good, for quite a while and so when I spotted it on the local library's shelves I of course grabbed it. I was a bit worried because it's set during World War II, emphasis on the war part, and in my experience that usually means that a lot of sad things happen. And even when some sad things started happening that wasn't enough to stop me from putting my computer away, putting my homework away, and reading a few hundred pages of it in one sitting in an afternoon.
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
Summary: Verity is in trouble, currently she's traded the last of the British military secrets she knows to the SS and her remaining time is running dangerously short. So while she endures her tortures she writes on the paper she's traded her country's future away for and begins to reminisce on how her best friend Maddie got into the military and slowly her own story unfolds as well.
The Good: This story spends it's first half bringing you down as low as it can and then the second half starts to bring you back up to which I must say thank god, even though the ending wasn't exactly a cheerful happy one (I don't think that's a spoiler to say since again, war novel, World War II war novel, it's going to have at least some bitter bits). This book always strikes me as a bit unusual since the most important relationship in the book, which is undeniably the backbone for the entire story (hell it's on the cover!) is the friendship between Verity and Maddie and I can't recall the last time I saw a story that was about a friendship between two girls to this degree (and boy I wish I could since I want more). I can see some people interpreting their relationship as one with a few romantic undertones, after reading the entire story I decided that I didn't see it that way, although I'm torn over whether I want it to be romantic (since fiction needs more non-straight couples) or not (since fiction also needs more stories about friends, especially girls, who are so close that they will literally go through hell for each other). And, if my introduction didn't make it clear enough, this is a really gripping book and I accidentally read over half of it in one sitting, once you get going you don't want to stop
The Bad: Keep some tissues nearby folks, this book almost made me cry and I very rarely cry over works of fiction in any medium. Which isn't really a bad thing and honestly this was a really strong book without many faults. The second half was, how to put it, a little less believable to me (for reasons that are much too spoilerly to explain) but still flowed and worked well enough for me in the end for it to not be anywhere near a deal breaker.
So, 4 out of 5, hell maybe even a 4.5 out of 5 and I give this a hearty recommendation to anyone who likes young adult books in general or stories in general but friends who, well, will go through war for each other. I'm going to keep an eye out for this book at bookstores to get my own copy and will be keeping my eye out for Wein's other works (some of which appear to already be on my to-read list, excellent!). Oh, and since this seems like a good opportunity to recommend another book as well, Flygirl by Sherri L Smith. I didn't know a way to mention this in my review but Maddie's story is how she went from being a farm girl to a pilot and Flygirl is another fictional story about a female pilot in World War II, just this time in America and it stars an African-American lady who is passing for white so there is plenty of tension there as well. Another excellent book so if you like one go and read the other, you'll like it I promise!
A few months back there was a manga moveable feast held for Moyoco Anno and, as if I needed any more convincing, I really wanted to try out at least some of her work. Funny enough I remember seeing ads for this in the back of various Del Ray manga I got back in high school but Sugar Sugar Rune seemed, well, childish and silly, something I wasn't interested in. Then I glanced at some of the reviews for it during the feast and discovered that I was completely off so when I spotted the first volume at my local used bookstore I grabbed it and hoped that I would end up liking it after all.
Sugar Sugar Rune (volume 1) by Moyoco Anno
Summary: Chocolat and Vanilla are two young witches who are both candidates to become the next queen of the magical world and are sent to Earth to capture the hearts of people as a contest to see who will become the next queen. But Earth is rather different from the magical world and both of the girls already have their own issues which means it isn't going to be easy for either of them to win.
The Good: Yup, this was much better than what I would have expected from the blurbs alone, although in retrospect I might have also been mixing this story up with Save Me! Lollipop a bit as well. I was surprised that Chocolat and Vanilla managed to be both rivals and friends, I've grown rather used to the "we used to be friends but now we're enemies" trope (which I rather dislike) that I was surprised to see how neatly Moyoco has subverted it so far. And in a way that sums up both of the girls as well, they have their own reasons to try and become queen, and plenty of pressure, but they aren't going to let that completely change who they are quite yet, even if the two of them have started to grow in more subtle ways.
The Bad: After just one volume it's hard to tell what's bad about the series, it's too early to say that Moyoco is hinting at something and then doesn't bring it up again or that the characters don't grow (which is wrong anyway since Chocolat and Vanilla have already started to change) and the pacing works well enough. So I'll just say this was a strong first volume without any big pitfalls, although if you go into this expecting a "dark magical girl" series you might be disappointed since while darker than usual this story doesn't quite fit into that genre.
The Art: Overall the art looks pretty cute although there are some elements which seem a little "less cute" (there's just something off about the proportions of the faces) but, given how this story does have some darker-than-usual elements to it I suspect that was completely on purpose (especially since I looked up a few other Moyoco's other manga quickly and her art style changes more than a bit each time to suit whatever genre she's working in). As an aside, I feel like I've only seen more neagtive things about the anime instead of the manga, which already makes me disinclined to search it out, but the color scheme for the clothes there is also really turning me off, I much prefer the colors shown on the covers of the books.
So, so far so good and I would like more please! It sounds like even though the manga is OOP it's not too hard to find and at 8 volumes it's fairly short as well, and yes I do want to get to more of Moyoco Anno's work someday but I just haven't found the time (or the books near me) yet.
