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Ro Meishi ga Yuku manga review

This will be fairly short since I didn’t read more than a volume of Ro Meishi ga Yuku. It’s a one-volume manga by Takao Saito, better known as the author of Golgo 13. While personally I would favor the title Lu Ming-tsu ga Yuku, sites like Mangaupdates tend to write the title of this manga as Ro Meishi ga Yuku because in Japan “Ro Meishi” was how they pronounced the name of the Taiwanese player (呂明賜) that this baseball manga profiles.

So, what’s so interesting about Ming-tsu Lu (or Ming-soo Roo depending on how you romanize it) and why would a veteran mangaka spend a whole volume on him? Well for us modern fans it’s not that interesting, I suppose. Ming-tsu Lu was signed by the Yomiuri Giants and spent some time cooling his heels in the minors because of the Japanese “2 foreigners per team” rule (said limit was later waived precisely because Lu played so well).

His chance finally came in June 1988 when Warren Cromartie went down with an injury courtesy of a dead ball. Lu moved up to the majors and performed spectacularly, enough to garner him his own manga which purports to track down Lu’s history and find out the secret behind his stunning abilities.

The first chapter started off innocuously enough, showing bits of Lu’s personality (he works hard, eats a lot and has lots of friends) as well as the circumstances that led to his call-up and then his first few games for the giants. After that the manga rapidly goes downhill with the appearance of an extremely annoying reporter who is sniffing around to learn more about the player… for no good reason, really. It would make sense if there was some big secret Lu was hiding, or if he came out of nowhere, but we quickly learn that Lu was spotted when he played for the Taiwanese Olympic team, there was some debate over whether to sign him or some other player but Lu was better, so they got him.

All that makes for a very simple and straightforward manga and I guess that wasn’t good enough for Takao Saito, so he opted instead to throw in first the annoying reporter then another reporter, a female one who the first one has the hots for. They bicker and compete and run around and generally get on my nerves, so much so that I quit pretty quickly because it was obvious there wasn’t much story or drama to go around beyond what the author felt like inventing.

The other reason I quit was that while the manga does admit that Ming-tsu Lu is a naturally-gifted player with a great build and a great work ethic, they’re not content to leave it at that. That’s good and all, but in their search for that “something extra” they choose to play up a so-called “Taiwanese connection” between Lu and the great Sadaharu Oh, manager of the Giants at the time.

Now it is an established fact that Lu went to the Giants because Oh was there, but it still seemed to be like they were playing up the foreign-ness of both players by hyping their ‘unique Taiwanese background’ blah blah kind of thing. It’s like urgghh, why can’t he just be a great player on his own? Even the conversations he has in Chinese are largely transcribed as gibberish instead receiving any meaningful translation. It’s a bit sad. Ultimately the two reporters bugged me so much that I just skipped through the rest, so maybe it gets better. A quick skim told me later chapters focus on Lu’s childhood and introduction to baseball, but I wasn’t interested enough to stick around to find out.

At any rate the art is excellent and it’s not a bad manga per se. If you’re a fan of the player or of the mangaka, or if you’re interested in 80s Japanese baseball then Ro Meishi ga Yuku is a worthy read in a history book kind of way. Since it’s only 1 volume long, you don’t have much to lose either way. But to be honest, I found it a bit disappointing for the reasons I’ve just stated.

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.

I found a new Cantonese TV livestream – Guangdong TV!

It’s been a while since I last posted about my Cantonese learning adventures. First I took a break from posting about it, then in the past 6 months or so I haven’t learned much at all. The reasons for that are both myriad and nebulous. What matters is that I’m finally back in the saddle and ready to take my studies seriously once more.

Thanks to the unfortunate break I have once again reverted to an intermediate-level learner just when I was on the verge of breaking through to advanced. But I learned all that stuff once and I can learn it again if I just focus my energies in the right direction. And since I do find just reading (or trying to read) about Cantonese boring, not to mention I like the sound rather than the sight of that particular language, it’s time to go back to finding good media to listen to or watch.

The bad news is, the ATV stream I used to watch all those terrible dramas on has apparently gone down for good. Boo, hiss. In fact I wondered for a second whether the company itself was still in business, but apparently they are. The good news is, I found another Cantonese TV station to watch: Guangdong TV! Yay~ I’ll even share the link with you: http://www.wcetv.com/asx/LIB/LIB106170_v5.asx

Since Guangdong is part of Mainland China and has historically been under their rule, I hear their Cantonese is more heavily influenced by Mandarin than Hong Kong/Macau Cantonese is, but a beggar like me hardly has a choice. I’ve only watched a little bit of it, but the commercials at least are in normal Cantonese, and that’s the best part of watching TV, right? ^_^ So I’m in a really good mood right now, yay!

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.