Yamda-kun and the Seven Witches by Miki Yoshikawa
Showing posts with label genderbending. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genderbending. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
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).
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Webcomic Review Month 2013: Witch's Quarry, Worsted for Wear
And the month is starting to wrap up, I'll have one more post on Sunday (a bit of a rant about how to properly set up a webpage, spoilers most people are doing it right to start with) and then I'm going to take the rest of the week off (mostly to write-up reviews for all the currently ending anime, some of them had some really interesting endings) and start back up April 7th (and until further notice anime reviews are moving to Tuesday night because I just can't find the energy to write them up Monday nights after the rest of the day). In any case, let's talk about these final two webcomics and why I think they're worth reading!
Witch's Quarry by Jen Lee Quick
Sir Veolynn Moreshire wasn't expecting to go to her brother's wedding only to find that he's swapped places with a body double and run off with his lover. And she certainly had no way of knowing that her brother's fiancee to be a selkoi who picked him out soley for his genetics and isn't above turning his sister into a man so she can still obtain it. Thus Veolen, her brother's double, his fiancee and her sisters have set out on a journey to find her, now his, brother while tensions between various factions and countries begin to rise in the background.
When I first stumbled across this comic I was a bit surprised I hadn't heard of it earlier, it has pretty solid art and plotting and updates rather frequently so it has a more than a few chapters under it's belt too. But, assuming it's been hosted on smackjeeves from the beginning, the comic is just over a year old so I'm even more impressed, over 300 fully colored pages in not even a year and a month is nothing to sniff at! The story feels a little less strong currently that it did in previous chapters since it's focusing a lot on the magic of the world and we (the readers and in some cases the readers and Veolen) are still in the dark on a lot of the ins and outs of magic. Hopefully there will be an infodump or such soon or maybe I just need to go back and reread part of the story, even when a story updates this fast it's still really easy to forget details if you only read it a page at a time.
Witch's Quarry can be read on it's Smackjeeves site or the MangaMagazine site (which has nothing to do with manga, they're all English webcomics, nor is it presented in a magazine format so I'll admit the name irks me) but you have to be a subscriber to get the updates as quickly or something strange like that. No print version as of writing.
Worsted for Wear by Rachael and Joshua Anderson
Knitters, speaking from my own personal experience, tend to be odd ducks to start with and Camden is a bit weirder than most. Thankfully she has plenty of friends who are also into various fiber arts to try and keep her in check or to even encourage her more insane ideas.
This isn't the first knitting webcomic I've read before, I know I talked about Knit Princess a few years back, but I think that this one is the much stronger comic. The larger cast of characters helps (I'm of the opinion that there is a limit to how strange even a fictional character can be so having multiple characters to focus on in the story really helps), since it talks about more than just knitting it has a wider range of gags available to it, and recently they did a flash-forward comic which makes me excited since it seems like the characters will develop in the next few years (of comic time). Even if it's a gag a day comic I still like to see character development, my favorite comics in that genre do that, so now I'm more excited about the comic than I used to be and should probably recommend it to more of my knitting friends now that I think about it.
Worsted for Wear can be read online and they are also currently holding a kickstarter which should be winding down in just a few days and has already met it's goal.
Witch's Quarry by Jen Lee Quick
Sir Veolynn Moreshire wasn't expecting to go to her brother's wedding only to find that he's swapped places with a body double and run off with his lover. And she certainly had no way of knowing that her brother's fiancee to be a selkoi who picked him out soley for his genetics and isn't above turning his sister into a man so she can still obtain it. Thus Veolen, her brother's double, his fiancee and her sisters have set out on a journey to find her, now his, brother while tensions between various factions and countries begin to rise in the background.
When I first stumbled across this comic I was a bit surprised I hadn't heard of it earlier, it has pretty solid art and plotting and updates rather frequently so it has a more than a few chapters under it's belt too. But, assuming it's been hosted on smackjeeves from the beginning, the comic is just over a year old so I'm even more impressed, over 300 fully colored pages in not even a year and a month is nothing to sniff at! The story feels a little less strong currently that it did in previous chapters since it's focusing a lot on the magic of the world and we (the readers and in some cases the readers and Veolen) are still in the dark on a lot of the ins and outs of magic. Hopefully there will be an infodump or such soon or maybe I just need to go back and reread part of the story, even when a story updates this fast it's still really easy to forget details if you only read it a page at a time.
Witch's Quarry can be read on it's Smackjeeves site or the MangaMagazine site (which has nothing to do with manga, they're all English webcomics, nor is it presented in a magazine format so I'll admit the name irks me) but you have to be a subscriber to get the updates as quickly or something strange like that. No print version as of writing.
Worsted for Wear by Rachael and Joshua Anderson
Knitters, speaking from my own personal experience, tend to be odd ducks to start with and Camden is a bit weirder than most. Thankfully she has plenty of friends who are also into various fiber arts to try and keep her in check or to even encourage her more insane ideas.
This isn't the first knitting webcomic I've read before, I know I talked about Knit Princess a few years back, but I think that this one is the much stronger comic. The larger cast of characters helps (I'm of the opinion that there is a limit to how strange even a fictional character can be so having multiple characters to focus on in the story really helps), since it talks about more than just knitting it has a wider range of gags available to it, and recently they did a flash-forward comic which makes me excited since it seems like the characters will develop in the next few years (of comic time). Even if it's a gag a day comic I still like to see character development, my favorite comics in that genre do that, so now I'm more excited about the comic than I used to be and should probably recommend it to more of my knitting friends now that I think about it.
Worsted for Wear can be read online and they are also currently holding a kickstarter which should be winding down in just a few days and has already met it's goal.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Webcomic Review: The Meek and Misfile
Sorry for not posting yesterday folks, it was double club night for me and the speaker at my second club took a good deal longer than I thought (I even snuck out early along with the rest of the back of the room) and DST tried me out as well. So I'm being smart today and putting out the reviews early, wohoo!
The Meek
When this comic launched it sounded like the whole internet was talking about it and, since I was newer to webcomics at the time, I wasn't quite sure what all the fuss was. Now however I get it, this comic has amazingly detailed art and it seems to be setting up a story on-par with long running novel series, something far beyond what most webcomics do. I say "seems" because unfortunately the story isn't that far along yet, we're on the third chapter, focusing on the third group of characters (out of how many I have no clue) and the creator has had to put the comic on hiatus many times to work on freelance jobs. However, they said just the other day that they finished up their latest work and there aren't any more planned hiatuses so now would actually be a great time to start the comic. The first chapter is NSFW due to a topless character (and it's not erotic art or anything, it's "oh, that character is running around naked as a sign of her innocence, cool" but still, reading that at work isn't a great idea) but chapters two and three don't have that issue. Finally, if the promise of an epic-sized plot isn't enough to intrigue you, the art is gorgeous enough to warrant at least a quick glance. Tons of details (the close-ups of the pages are humbling for those of us who can't draw), a really good grasp of shading, and even the color scheme in each chapter is different, it's amazingly well thought out. The first chapter is published and I plan on getting it sometime so seriously, go browse through it now.
Misfile
With a premise that wouldn't be out of place in a manga, an angel in heaven mixes up some people's files which control their lives and makes one girl lose two years of her life and turns another boy into a girl, hijinks ensue. The pot smoking angel responsible for all of this, Rumisiel, is the only person besides these two (Ash the-boy-now-girl and Emily) who remembers what happened and is worried that his superiors might make the change permanent has fled to Earth and currently can't get back to Heaven to change the files even if he wanted to. As the story progresses Emily eventually becomes happier with her life since it gives her a chance to do the last two years of high school over and actually have fun with them (especially since she thinks this change may have saved her life) but Ash is still trying to figure out just what they feel about all of this and rather disturbed by some of the changes. Before he was rather distant from his divorced parents but now she has a good relationship with both (her mother even helped pay for a nice engine for her racing car) and a couple of other differences in his/her life just serve to confuse them even more about if going back to being a boy would be better or not. When the story isn't talking about that (and those kinds of philosophical thoughts come in starts and bursts, they're not the main bulk of the comic) it's mostly about car racing and, as someone who watches Top Gear for the humor not the car bits, I think all the car racing bits are really cool and really well done (the cars are probably the best drawn bits of the comic). It's a surprisingly fun ride so, even though the art here isn't nearly as good as some other comics I've suggested, I say go though the archive and check it out!
Tomorrow it's onto the letter P (because I don't follow any currently updating webcomics that start with N or O, although I do have a couple of them on hiatus) and then no more skipping until V. So, short of my British Lit paper proving even trickier than it already has, see ya tomorrow!
The Meek
When this comic launched it sounded like the whole internet was talking about it and, since I was newer to webcomics at the time, I wasn't quite sure what all the fuss was. Now however I get it, this comic has amazingly detailed art and it seems to be setting up a story on-par with long running novel series, something far beyond what most webcomics do. I say "seems" because unfortunately the story isn't that far along yet, we're on the third chapter, focusing on the third group of characters (out of how many I have no clue) and the creator has had to put the comic on hiatus many times to work on freelance jobs. However, they said just the other day that they finished up their latest work and there aren't any more planned hiatuses so now would actually be a great time to start the comic. The first chapter is NSFW due to a topless character (and it's not erotic art or anything, it's "oh, that character is running around naked as a sign of her innocence, cool" but still, reading that at work isn't a great idea) but chapters two and three don't have that issue. Finally, if the promise of an epic-sized plot isn't enough to intrigue you, the art is gorgeous enough to warrant at least a quick glance. Tons of details (the close-ups of the pages are humbling for those of us who can't draw), a really good grasp of shading, and even the color scheme in each chapter is different, it's amazingly well thought out. The first chapter is published and I plan on getting it sometime so seriously, go browse through it now.
Misfile
With a premise that wouldn't be out of place in a manga, an angel in heaven mixes up some people's files which control their lives and makes one girl lose two years of her life and turns another boy into a girl, hijinks ensue. The pot smoking angel responsible for all of this, Rumisiel, is the only person besides these two (Ash the-boy-now-girl and Emily) who remembers what happened and is worried that his superiors might make the change permanent has fled to Earth and currently can't get back to Heaven to change the files even if he wanted to. As the story progresses Emily eventually becomes happier with her life since it gives her a chance to do the last two years of high school over and actually have fun with them (especially since she thinks this change may have saved her life) but Ash is still trying to figure out just what they feel about all of this and rather disturbed by some of the changes. Before he was rather distant from his divorced parents but now she has a good relationship with both (her mother even helped pay for a nice engine for her racing car) and a couple of other differences in his/her life just serve to confuse them even more about if going back to being a boy would be better or not. When the story isn't talking about that (and those kinds of philosophical thoughts come in starts and bursts, they're not the main bulk of the comic) it's mostly about car racing and, as someone who watches Top Gear for the humor not the car bits, I think all the car racing bits are really cool and really well done (the cars are probably the best drawn bits of the comic). It's a surprisingly fun ride so, even though the art here isn't nearly as good as some other comics I've suggested, I say go though the archive and check it out!
Tomorrow it's onto the letter P (because I don't follow any currently updating webcomics that start with N or O, although I do have a couple of them on hiatus) and then no more skipping until V. So, short of my British Lit paper proving even trickier than it already has, see ya tomorrow!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)