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Heat Guy J manga review

I usually stay away from manga adapted from anime, figuring (usually rightly) that they’re cheap, poorly-made cash grab attempts. But I’d heard a lot about Heat Guy J, it was only 1 volume long and the summary seemed decent enough, so I figured, how bad can it be? And surprisingly enough it wasn’t bad at all. I wouldn’t have minded a second or third volume, in fact. The only, massive flaw was the excessive and unnecessary fanservice (when is fanservice ever necessary?) which wasted space that could have been better spent on character or story development.

From the back of the book: Daisuke Aurora works with the special division of peacekeepers in the city of Jewde, one of the largest cities on the planet. He and his android partner, Heat Guy J, team up to make sure that anything illegal stays off the streets and out of circulation.

However, their presence doesn’t sit too well with the local mob leader–a ruthless, unbalanced, well-armed son of the late Don, who is out to prove that he is not too young to take over the family business. In the city that never sleeps, will Daisuke and Heat Guy J end up sleeping with the fishes? The anime favorite as seen on MTV is now an action-packed manga!

Well… it is pretty action-packed, I guess. I rather liked the contrast between the girly character designs (apparently done by the character designer of Escaflowne) and the manly deeds of derring-do that take place within. The blurb is lying a bit, though: the son of the late Don doesn’t show up much and doesn’t do much when he does. They probably took the summary directly from the anime instead of from the manga itself.

As you may have guessed by now, I quite enjoyed Heat Guy J. I liked the Heat Guy android himself, and his interactions with his partner Daisuke are more father-and-son than typical cop-movie stuff, though there are the usual rescues of each other you normally expect from the genre. Each chapter contains a largely self-contained story that makes sense even without watching the anime. And while the setting and the incidents can be quite serious there’s also plenty of humor to lighten the deal, usually at the expense of team auditor Kyoko. Humor, action, nice art, buddy-buddy feel, it’s all good.

The only fly in the ointment, as I said, was the fanservice. Women in skimpy clothes come out of nowhere and prance around usually for no good purpose except to titillate easily-pleased readers. It’s one thing if it’s an ecchi manga to begin with. Or if a mangaka realizes his ratings are sliding and includes something to pull them back. But in my opinion Heat Guy J didn’t need to resort to that sort of cheap thrill, so it a bit of a shame that they included it.

Now then, to pick up the Heat Guy J anime or not? Sadly enough the back of the volume includes a ton of spoilers for future events and characters. That and Geneon, who licensed the anime, went belly-up several years ago. If I could find it cheap somewhere or get the chance to stream it legally I guess I would, but otherwise I won’t go out of my way to pursue the issue. It was good, but not that good.

Haridama Magic Cram School manga review

I must say Haridama Magic Cram School is a slight improvement over some of the stuff I’ve read lately. Instead of being actively bad it’s just meh through and through. After stuff like Ayako, Remember and A Single Match, this is actually a breath of fresh air. That doesn’t mean the manga is particularly good, though.

Summary: Kokuyo and Harika are a little unusual – and not just because they’re sorcery students. They’re Obsidians, wizards who must use enchanted swords to help them cast spells. Their fellow students think Obsidians are inferior to “normal” wizards. But Kokuyo and Harika have something that their cohorts don’t: the power of friendship!

The manga itself is slightly less cheesy than the summary makes it sound, but only slightly. The cover also says “Atsushi Suzumi, Creator of Venus and Virus,” a series I’ve never heard of, but I guess it was famous enough, or successful enough for Del Rey Manga that they thought it worthy of localization. In fact I’ve going to venture out on a fairly sturdy limb and say Venus and Virus must be a very popular series, because there’s no other way a sensible localization company would consider wasting good money on something as mediocre as Haridama Magic Cram School.

I can summarize the manga as follows: Harika and Kokuyo bicker while pretending not to like each other. When a monster shows up, they work together to defeat it. They bicker some more. Another monster appears. They work together to defeat it and discover they actually work quite well together. They bicker a little less but still pretend not to really like each other. And they all live happily ever after, the end.

So it’s really juvenile, predictable stuff, but there’s nothing annoying, confusing or offensive in it. On the other hand it’s not particularly funny or interesting or heart-warming either. It’s only 1 volume long and it does cover what the author wants it to cover in that length (i.e. everything works out when we work together) but I can’t help feeling a simple message like that could have been conveyed just as well in one chapter instead of four.

I think Haridama Magic Cram School might be okay for fans of Atsushi Suzuki, whoever s/he is, or maybe manga readers who like easy-to-collect one-volume manga regardless of the content (of which I am actually one, though I’m learning to be pickier). And I guess it does make a good “baby’s first shounen” kind of manga for younger readers (around 9-13 maybe) since it features characters of roughly that age. Apart from that it’s not especially remarkable or worth reading. I wager I’ll have completely forgotten it before the month is out.

Lost World manga review

Another day, another Osamu Tsuka work. I declined to read MW after seeing the trashy blurb and opted to try the more reader-friendly (I thought) Lost World instead. It was pretty bad. Apparently it’s one of his earliest works, and it shows. He claims he didn’t steal the idea from Arthur Conan Doyle’s work of the same name, but I highly doubt he wasn’t at least influenced by what he’d heard of Doyle’s work. But leaving matters of copying or otherwise aside, what’s Lost World about?

Summary: From the creator of Astro Boy comes Lost World, the first of Osamu Tezuka’s cycle of groundbreaking science-fiction graphic novels – including Metropolis and Future World – published in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When a rogue planet approaches Earth, a team of scientists voyages to the world and discovered a land out of the ancient past – a planet populated by dinosaurs! But a group of crooks has stowed away aboard the spacecraft, and the scientists must fight for their survival against both mobsters and monsters!

First off, all the stuff in the description only happens in the second half of the book. The first half is some Tintin-esque hijinks involving energy stones, a gang of thieves in a secret hideout and a plucky old detective who just won’t quit. That part actually wasn’t too bad, though it did read like something cobbled together by a high-school boy who has read too many newspaper comics (which is exactly what Osamu Tezuka was when he wrote that stuff).

The second half is where he really hits his stride – Tezuka being Tezuka, the scientists nonsensically find their way into space, people good and bad drop like flies all over the pages and then he adds one of his usual downer endings and boom, instant “classic.” Except not really. It most likely got published in the 40s and 50s in Japan because there wasn’t much better out there. And I dare say it only got a western release because of this author, because Lost World is so mediocre no publisher in his right mind would publish such a violent, schizophrenic, poorly-drawn and poorly-written manga if the author wasn’t famous already.

The sole consolation is that 1) it was written by a young man who later went on to write better things (or so we are told, but I have yet to see it) and 2) Tezuka does offer some explanation for the uneven nature of the manga in his afterword. So at least you aren’t left guessing why the mood changes so rapidly from childish humor to unpleasant violence and back again several times within the same chapter, or why the hero has a love interest who is actually an edible plant, etc.

As an aside, this “romantic” relationship is cleared up by having the two character declare that they’re actually like brother and sister. Unfortunately anyone who has read Ayako and has thus seen some of Tezuka’s depictions of a brother-sister relationship will derive very little comfort from this revelation. Especially when the commentary goes on to suggest that the two characters are going to have lots of little plant-man babies in future. Oh, Tezuka.

If you’re a Tezuka fan or maybe you’re interested in very early manga Lost World might be worth a read from a historical point of view. Despite the cute cover it’s not very kid-friendly, so I wouldn’t get it for anyone very young. Readable but not actually good, that’s about it.

Level E manga review

Did you know that once upon a time Yoshihiro Togashi could actually draw? Or maybe I should say “Yoshihiro Togashi would actually draw.” The potential is still there, but you wouldn’t know it to look at current chapters of Hunter x Hunter (a.k.a. Hiatus x Hiatus). You would know it if you read Level E, though, a short but enjoyable 3-volume manga Togashi started in 1995 after finishing Yu Yu Hakusho. The summary goes like:

Tsutsui Yukitaka is a freshman entering high school who hopes to become a good baseball player. However, when he walks into his new apartment, there is a man in the room who claims that he is an alien who lost his memory. He is in fact the first prince of Planet Dogra, known to have the best brain but the worst nature.

But the whole story is really about Ouji the prince of Dogra and the high school freshman is reduced to a rarely-appearing side character pretty quickly. And it’s not just him but the most of the rest of the cast only appear sparingly to be used and discarded and then reappear again when you least expect them. That has the disadvantage of leaving all the characters paper-thin, but on the plus side it keeps every chapter fresh because you just never know who’s going to show up.

There’s no real overarching story besides “Ouji toys with everyone for his amusement” but most chapters deal with some alien or another coming to/being on Earth and some drama occurring. Some stories are outright hilarious, but they also just as likely to be serious and even tragic. The best chapters are the ones that don’t feature Ouji at all or have very little of him, but while he can be an irritating jerk sometimes (all the time), other characters agree with the reader on his hateability and frequently band together to try and defeat him, making it fun to root for their usually futile attempts to get rid of him.

As with most Togashi series the art isn’t 100% consistent and gets worse as the series draws to a close, but like in the nursery rhyme “When it was good, it was very very good, but when it was bad it was horrid!” Thus I wouldn’t recommend trying Level E for the art alone but rather for the art + the characters + the great stories within.

There’s only one story that was boring and difficult to follow – some rubbish about a baseball team that got lost in a dream. It’s ironic because I picked Level E in the first place because it had baseball in the description, but the baseball parts turned to be the worst things about it. In fact nobody ever even plays baseball, they just talk about it. So you can basically ignore that bit… wait, you didn’t care in the first place, did you? Don’t mind me and my baseball manga fetish ^.^;;

Get Level E if: you like sci-fi, especially aliens. You like comedy. You like short-story/anthology formats. You like drama/tragedy that doesn’t get too depressing. Don’t get Level E if: You hate sadistic characters that get away with their bad behavior. You prefer a consistent, well-developed cast. Btw, I hear an anime came out recently, so if you’d rather watch than read, you can give the Level E anime a try instead.

Remember manhua review

Remember how ‘Red Colored Elegy‘ was supposed to be a highly-influential work? When I reviewed it, I noted that I could see how people would be inspired by it, but the keyword was ‘inspired’ – I never expected someone to flat out copy the whole thing. Until I read Remember by Chinese artist Benjamin, that is…

The blurb goes:

What is the fine line that separates love from hate? How can a broken heart heal from a loss so deep? When is letting go of your inhibitions worth risking your life?

International artist Benjamin depicts profoundl moving portrayals of love and loss that get at the core of what it means to throw your heart into life. The artist doesn’t offer any comfort from the despair we all feel in our lives – while we know there is no answer, we are all better off for asking the question… and remembering the struggle.

Actually the real question they should be asking is “What is the fine line that separates inspiration from plagiarism?” I will give Benjamin props for being a pretty good artist (that cover just screams “Buy Me!” doesn’t it?), but when it comes to storytelling he is utterly bereft of ideas. And he is completely aware of it too, if his self-loathing author’s comments are anything to go by.

Remember is made up of two short stories. The title story ‘Remember’ deals with a Struggling artist with a bad attitude, girl who loves him for no reason, he pushes her away until she does go away and then he hates himself even more than ever, the end. I really didn’t need to summarize that, I should have just pointed to the original story, which for all its flaws does a better job at conveying the doomed relationship and almost, not quite, making the characters relateable.

Anyway, this struggling artist submits story after story to a comic publisher only to have them turned down because they’re not enough like Japanese manga. “Chinese readers don’t want originality! They want plagiarized Japanese manga!” the editor straight-up tells him. So it’s ironic – or maybe meaningful – that the story itself is a straight-up copy of Red Colored Elegy, with better art and with the sex cut out or made ambiguous to avoid censorship.

Is this how low Benjamin had to sink to get his work published in China? Maybe. But what is more likely is that he put that scene in just to cover his inability to write a Chinese manhua that would be accepted by editors. “See it’s not me, it’s the editors, they forced me to plagiarize! Left to my own devices I could totally write a great story!” If that’s the case, why is the copy even worse than the original?

Besides, the Remember collection includes a second short story as well, about students in art school being bullied, but it’s crap. I read about a third of it and then just skimmed through it because it was just more self-loathing navel-gazing twaddle. He probably copied that from a Japanese manga as well, I just don’t know enough manga to spot which one.

In any case, by that time the nice art had lost its effect on me and all of Benjamin’s shortcomings as a writer were on display for all to see. Rambling, incoherent ‘I’m so deep and nobody understands me’ characters dot the pages like so many teenagers at an emo concert. They’re all flat one-note characters – ‘quirky girl’, ‘misunderstood artist’, ‘unreasonable editor’ – one defining characteristic carries them through the whole story. Even in a short story you should be able to flesh characters out a little more than that, especially in slice-of-life kind of stories where enjoyment depends on getting under the character’s skins.

Benjamin can draw, there’s no question about that, but unless he can learn to write as well it really doesn’t profit him very much. The fact that the manga goes for less than $2.00 on Amazon despite being out of print should tell you everything you need to know about that. Still I’m not a mean person, and I can see some budding talent there. I’d advise him to work on his writing skills if he really want to make it as a mangaka (manhuajia?). Failing that, there’s nothing wrong with being a dedicated artist and illustrator, since he does have the skills to back that up. Good luck, Mr. Plagiarizer!