Manga Review: ‘Teasing Master Takagi-san’

Teasing Master Takagi-san, written and illustrated by Soichiro Yamamoto. 11 volumes (ongoing). Yen Press, 2019–2021.

Over the past few months, my social-media feeds have been full of mentions of a manga called Don’t Toy with Me Miss Nagatoro, which recently saw an anime adaptation. There’s been a lot of controversy surrounding that title for various reasons I don’t care to get into in this post; suffice to say, the story is about a strong-willed girl who bullies a timid young man into being her boyfriend.

Today, I want to look at a title that has a similar premise but is considerably gentler in execution. Though less funny than Nagatoro, it’s also more pleasant.

Soichiro Yamamoto’s Teasing Master Takagi-san currently stands at eleven volumes in the English-language version, though the next two volumes are already listed as forthcoming. There is an anime series as well, currently with two seasons and rumors of a third, though it’s slightly difficult to find: The first season currently resides on Amazon Prime, and the second is on Netflix. More weirdly, there is also a virtual-reality anime that puts the viewer in the role of the harried male protagonist. I haven’t seen any of those, so I am here discussing only the manga.

Continue reading “Manga Review: ‘Teasing Master Takagi-san’”

Manga Review: ‘My Senpai Is Annoying’

My Senpai Is Annoying, written and illustrated by Shiromanta. Seven Seas Entertainment, . 4 volumes (ongoing). Full color.

There’s a change happening in manga, and I suspect most of us on this side of the Pacific are oblivious to it. I was, at least, until quite recently, though I’ve been out of the loop while working on my books and getting married and buying a house and stuff. But in any case, manga is becoming more social media-driven: Many artists are now getting discovered on Twitter or using it to promote their work.

We may also be seeing the rise of internet manga magazines: The title before us is published digitally in the online Comic POOL, and because it is online, it is published in color; although the coloring is fitful at first, My Senpai Is Annoying becomes a legitimate full-color comic as it develops.

It has also grown popular enough to earn an anime adaptation, which is set to debut in October of this year. At the time of writing, four volumes are available in English, and the fifth is set to release later this month.

Continue reading “Manga Review: ‘My Senpai Is Annoying’”

Prepare Yourselves: I’m Going to Hate on ‘Chobits’

My nine-part series, “Why I Hate Cardcaptor Sakura,” is consistently the most popular thing on this blog. In the last essay of that series, I promised a similar discussion of the insanely popular and bestselling Chobits, which is CLAMP’s homage to—or possibly their sly takedown of—the magical girlfriend/robot girl genre.

I hadn’t got around to this for several reasons, the main one being that, due to life circumstances, I did not until recently have access to my two-volume omnibus set of Chobits. The other reason was that I detested the story so much that I was loathe to pick it up again. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it on my first attempt.

Of course, as an author, I’m not above swiping stuff even from things I hate. Readers familiar with my novel Jake and the Dynamo may have recognized that I borrowed from Chobits—or mocked it, rather—in my depiction of Grease Pencil Marionette.

This essay may take me some time to complete, not because it’s hard to express my hate (that part’s easy), but because it will take a lot of time to explain, thoroughly and carefully, exactly what’s wrong with Chobits, exactly why it is a failure as a story, a failure as a hamfisted and amateurish attempt at philosophy, and generally loathsome.

As I stated before, my hate for Cardcaptor Sakura is fanboyish hatred, the kind of melodramatic grousing that fans do about things they like. But my hatred for Chobits is the real deal. It is disgusting, wretched, and more importantly, stupid, in every possible way.

One thing about it, though, is easy to point out and mock, and I have done so in the little meme I put together above. The story is actually, I kid you not, about a girl robot with a reboot switch capable of reformatting her drive, located in her nether regions. And this isn’t some dirty little gag created for a cheap laugh, either: it is actually the centerpiece of the plot, leading to the burning question of whether the protagonist will be able to shag his computer console because of her stupid switch. The whole damn story centers around where this robo-chick has her on/off button.

And even though at least three of the characters are computer experts, brilliant enough to build their own hyper-realistic girl robots, not a single one of them, not one, suggests the simple solution of disconnecting or moving the damn switch.

I friggin’ hate Chobits, man.

It’s Time Again for the Annual Re-Reading of ‘Maison Ikkoku’

Rumiko Takahashi is, after CLAMP, probably the most prolific woman in manga. In the U.S., she’s probably best known for Ranma 1/2 or Inuyasha, but I think her seinen comic Maison Ikkoku will always be her masterpiece.

I discovered this title several years ago while browsing the Shady Bookstore Down the Street, which was a short walk away from where I used to live in Utah. It was the kind of little store where you could pick up any number of unexpected literary gems, manga, Z-grade Kung fu movies, and Wiccan paraphernalia. It’s thanks to that bookstore that I own the first volume of the lovingly drawn and criminally obscure comic Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and the special edition of the uneven but fantastically imaginative comic The Sacred and the Profane, and have seen Super Dimension Fortress Macross in the original Japanese.

While I was hunting through the manga one day, I picked up an old, flopped volume of Maison Ikkoku that presented a selection of chapters out of order. I read that one volume probably a dozen times and knew I wouldn’t be satisfied until I had the whole series. The entire run was released, in the original right-to-left format, by Viz Media in 2003. I found the bulk of the series on Amazon and then acquired the missing volumes from questionable, don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you booksellers.

I waited until I had all of it and then binge-read the entire thing on a Saturday in about thirteen hours. I laughed, I cried … it moved me, Bob.

The manga was originally published in 1984, which makes it ancient according to the short memories of weeaboos. It takes place in a run-down tenement house based on a real place where Takahashi lived while going to college. Her original plan was to make this a round of stories focusing in turn on the various quirky residents. However, she kicked off the manga with the tale of a luckless college student who falls hopelessly in love with the tenement’s widowed manager. Takahashi soon found that this was all her fans were interested in, so she retooled the series as a romantic comedy focusing on the fumbling Yusaku and the beautiful but hot-tempered Kyoko, with the rest of the residents as assisting characters.

The result is one of the best romantic comedies of all time, that happens to be a comic book. Yusaku Godai is a more-or-less standard loser hero, the kind who tries his darnedest and still ends up humiliated, in public with no pants (or similar). Kyoko is yet another version of one Takahashi-sensei’s favorite character types, the stubborn woman who won’t admit her feelings for the male lead but still goes ballistic if she sees him getting within ten feet of another girl. Takahashi’s huge body of work, which almost always contains some variation of this pairing, is probably largely responsible for shaping and popularizing the “tsundere” in manga and anime. Her romantic pairings are so consistent in formula that there is an entry for “Takahashi couple” over at TVTropes.

Maison Ikkoku showcases all of Takahashi’s strengths with none of her usual defects. She tends to pile on extra characters in her series and then forget about most of them, a frustrating habit that fans came to call “Takahashi character death,” where characters would disappear without explanation, their subplots forever unresolved. Although Maison Ikkoku has a large cast and a lot of subplots, Takahashi remembers everybody and wraps up everything, and she does it in only fifteen volumes—which is a very short series for her. Although there are a lot of over-the-top antics in this series, the real-world setting and the target audience of adults required Takashi to bring her A-game: The characters are more realistic and less cartoonish than her usual, and their motives more believable: Yusaku is immature and lazy; Kyoko is still in love with her late husband.

Personally, I usually enjoy a Takahashi title for about four volumes and then lose interest. This is because she sets up the main plot arc and the most important characters in the first four books, and then coasts. The first volume of Ranma 1/2 is almost perfect as a graphic novel, and after that I can take it or leave it … and then when Happosai shows up, I leave it for sure, because I can’t stand it anymore. Inuyasha starts as a beautiful, bloody epic, but eventually falls into the standard shounen rut of fight-powerup-repeat. Maison Ikkoku, however, maintains its initial energy through its entire run. If anything, it improves over time, growing more serious as Yusaku has to move from being a college slacker to a productive adult if he’s ever to make anything of himself and win the woman he loves.

The setting in the early ’80s also helps the plot a good deal. I sometimes believe that modern information technology is antithetical to drama—and comedy. Just as Hollywood used to make romantic comedies surrounding the inconveniences of party lines, many of the shenanigans in Maison Ikkoku are driven by the fact that the tenement building has only one phone, which happens to stand next to the apartment of the biggest gossip.

Anyway, I love it, and it’s just as poignant, just as gut-bustingly funny, on subsequent readings as on the first. In the world of manga, this is my all-time favorite.

Initial Notes on ‘Wedding Peach’

I managed to finish all of Saint Tail, but I have nothing to add to my earlier review. It’s an undemanding but sweet story, and I recommend it.

I’ve moved from there to some other mid-9os magical girl titles. I’m right now watching Magic User’s Club, which Nozomi Entertainment has kindly added to its YouTube channel. I am also reading the manga version of Wedding Peach, which I am having to gather slowly, piecemeal, much as I did with Saint Tail.

Wedding Peach is a title that a lot of magical girl fans love to hate, mostly because it appeared a mere three years after Sailor Moon and closely resembles it. Its creator, Sukehiro Tomita, was in fact a writer on the Sailor Moon anime. Wedding Peach has the same relation to Sailor Moon that Day Break Illusion has to Puella Magi Madoka Magica: it’s a little too obvious in its coattail-riding, so it provokes some ire.

That being said, I like what I’ve seen of it so far. The manga, at least, one-ups Sailor Moon in its art quality (not that that’s hard). The characters are likable, and the action is a tad gritty, with an unexpected amount of blood and bruising. Continue reading “Initial Notes on ‘Wedding Peach’”

Manga Review: ‘Saint Tail’

On a mission from God.

Saint Tail, vols. 1 and 2, written and illustrated by Megumi Tachikawa. Published in Japan by Kodansha Ltd., 1995. Translated by Anita Sengupta. Tokyopop, 2001.

I was unable to complete this in time for Easter Sunday, but, fortunately, Easter is fifty days. So here we go.

The kaitou, or thief, is such a popular figure in Japanese pop culture that kaitou may be considered its own genre. This is probably thanks in large part to the wildly successful Lupin III franchise, which is written to be a sequel of sorts to the stories of Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc. Magical girls had crossed paths with gentleman thieves in franchises such as Minky Momo and Sailor Moon, so a magical girl who is also a gentleman thief—or lady thief, rather—is an obvious next step.

What is perhaps not so obvious is that the magical girl lady thief should be a devout Catholic who steals in service to God, but such is the premise of Saint Tail, and the basic concept of Saint Tail also got recycled, but given a hard twist, in Phantom Thief Jeanne, which we’ll discuss in a later post. Continue reading “Manga Review: ‘Saint Tail’”

Slow-Rolling ‘Saint Tail’

I’m sorry there has been little in the way of meaningful content here, but I’m coming toward the end of my final term of a master’s program. On Star Wars Day, May the 4th, I’m free … sort of. Or at least I’m free of school. That might not mean more time for blogging, though, at least until I’m more gainfully employed and settled.

So, anyway, in case you’re wondering if I’m just over here binge-watching The Vision of Escaflowne, the answer is, “I wish.” Actually, I haven’t watched that much of it, eager though I am, because I haven’t had the time.

I’ve promised reviews of Saint Tail and Phantom Thief Jeanne, the two magical girl stories about religiously motivated cat burglars. The latter is readily available thanks to a re-translation and re-release from Viz in 2014, but the former is, alas, quite difficult to acquire: it’s one of those early post-Sailor Moon titles, like Corrector Yui or Wedding Peach or Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, many of which subsequently became obscure. I’ve been defeated in my attempt to get DVDs of the Saint Tail anime, and the manga is coming to me slowly, piecemeal. I just got word of another volume that has arrived for me, so I should have it by the end of tomorrow.

Saint Tail a pleasant little title; reading it is like snuggling into a warm blanket. It’s not exactly deep or demanding, but it’s sweet without being cloying. The apparently sincere religious devotion of its Catholic protagonists is actually quite well handled even though the manga-ka wrote in complete ignorance (you’ll find this title listed under “Nuns are Mikos” on TVTropes).

I’ll probably have to move ahead with the discussion even without getting the whole series. As I understand it, Saint Tail hews closely to its formula and doesn’t offer any big surprises, so I’m probably safe giving it a review of sorts if I don’t go into too much detail.

I’ve already penned a draft of that review, but I was waiting for more material before I hit “publish.” It might be up in the next few days.

‘Sugar Sugar Rune,’ Volumes 4-8

Sugar Sugar Rune, volumes 4-8. Story and art by Moyoco Anno. Translated by Kaya Laterman. Del Rey Manga (New York), 2007. Rated Y (Ages 10+).

I previously reviewed the first three volumes of this series. Because this was adapted and translated by Del Rey, I speculated that a re-release might come from Kodansha Comics, since Kodansha more-or-less replaced Del Rey Manga. I learned subsequently that the rights now actually belong to Udon Entertainment, which planned to begin releasing the series sometime in late 2016.

That didn’t happen, so the fate of the English translation of Sugar Sugar Rune is currently up in the air. Since the series has been released in Japanese as a colorized web comic, I’m hoping for a colorized English version, but that may be asking too much. Also still in need of a release in North America is the anime, the English version of which, as I understand it, only aired in the Philippines.

More than once, I have seen Sugar Sugar Rune touted as one of the greatest of the “cute witch” magical girl stories—a reputation it probably deserves. But, perhaps because the series was largely ignored during its original North American release, I think it’s also fair to say that some of its fans have over-sold it. Is it good? Yes, but it’s not that good. Is it “the greatest fantasy comic of the last five years,” as Anime News Network claimed? Well, I’d have to survey most of the fantasy comics from the five-year block before its publication to form an opinion on that, but I doubt it. Yes, it’s a fine little manga, but calm down. Continue reading “‘Sugar Sugar Rune,’ Volumes 4-8”

Why I Hate ‘Cardcaptor Sakura’ (and you can, ten!)

The Final Hate: This Time It’s Personal!

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You say Tomoeda. I say Tomada. Let’s call the whole thing off.

We come now to the final day, the final hate, the final boss, of Ten Things I Hate about Cardcaptor Sakura. Fiery rage has consumed my soul and burned all to ash; in the end, nothing remains … except my hate.

Just look at that picture up at the top there. Look at the way she’s threatening us with that giant, winged claw hammer. What is she planning to do with that thing? It’s all gonna end in tears when she puts an eye out.

That’s how it goes. Magical girl battles are all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. Then they’re awesome.

… Okay, where was I? Ah, yes: hate, burning hate. Here is the final thing I hate about Cardcaptor Sakura:
Continue reading “Why I Hate ‘Cardcaptor Sakura’ (and you can, ten!)”

Let the Hate Roll On

Anybody else ever notice how Cardcaptor Sakura is always flipping us off? It’s almost as if Clamp is trying to tell us something …

Oh well. I guess it’s no worse than that guy in Sailor Moon who’s always flipping us off.

Anyway, today was to be our last entry in the Ten Things I Hate about Cardcaptor Sakura. However, real life caught up with me today and I didn’t get the post completed, so the hate will have to continue into overtime.

That means you get more hate for the same price.

The final post, the final hate, is still to come. Expect it when you least expect it.