Like most American manga fans, I was introduced to the medium through tankouban; and also like most of them, the only other way I can read manga is through scanslations. Reading manga this way, one usually goes unaware of the magazines that series come from. This leads to an interesting difference in the way that manga is consumed as a whole, and it's a difference I'm becoming familiar with as I progress in manga fandom.
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Alright! New Fran! Kigitsu Katsuhisa's Franken Fran is my favorite currently-running manga, and even though I said I don't plan on blogging anything release-by-release, I'll gladly post on Fran every month just for fun—forgive me if I don't have much to say about it.
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These past 4 days, I've been searching unsuccessfully for new manga to read. I like action series with cute girls, so I looked for works in that vein, but time and again I was confronted by failures in illustrating action. Finally, I stumbled across Taboo-Tattoo by Shinjirou, an exciting new series that works to show exactly where all of the others failed.
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I don't plan on blogging anything release-by-release, but what a pleasant surprise to see chapter twelve of Karasuma Wataru's Deus x Machina finally done! As the subject of my first post, this series is somewhat special to me, and I was sad when the scans halted just as things were getting good. In a funny twist of fate, Horobi no Michi finally released the chapter just days after a new scanslator called Riceballicious took the initiative himself. Because I saw Riceball's scanslation first, the images in the post will be from his version.
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My name is Se Dice Bisonte, and I've been having fun with Is That You, Moatilliatta? for about a month now. ITYM? was accepted onto the Anime Nano blog indexer after my last post and received its first traffic, so it's been revealed to the world, and I welcome the world with open arms.
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Tamaki Nozomu's Hakodate Youjin Buraichou Himegami (which I shall henceforth refer to as Himegami) is a fun and well-illustrated action manga with plenty of notable moments, especially during fights. The mark of a great action manga isn't just good-looking fights, but fights that can't easily be found elsewhere - Himegami has both of those qualities. It wouldn't do much good to go into detail about a fight scene for obvious reasons, so instead, I'll be highlighting another great aspect of Himegami: the facial expressions of lead-character Hyou-chan (particularly in the first chapter).
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Mori Kotarou's Stray Little Devil presents a rare conundrum in manga art. On one hand, Mori's art is incredible—the level of background detail and the beauty of the world he creates are on par with the likes of Nihei Tsutomu. His character art and designs are even a step above Nihei's, having an unrivaled crispness from panel to panel. These qualities, along with an entertaining story and intelligent writing, ought to make Stray Little Devil an instant classic, but taking a look at these pages from the first volume reveals where its perplexing trouble lies.
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Itou Ei is an excellent character artist, and I'm sure that his illustrious portfolio of pornography is worth a look, but Tetragrammaton Labyrinth is a terrible manga. Nevermind that the plot and dialog are an incessant bombardment of poorly-delivered cliches; the action scenes are crippled by a poor sense of space and direction, and there's no sense of 'flow' between images. Besides the character art, there's really no reason to read this manga, but even that suffers from a failure in communication. This image from the fifth chapter perfectly expresses my point:
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While doing research for my last post, I got interested in one of Tamaki Nozomu's other works, Hakodate Youjin Buraichou Himegami (which I shall henceforth refer to as Himegami). It's a decent action manga with a focus on gratuitous ass shots, but one thing that caught my eye in the first chapter was this important-looking woman:
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Love can do some interesting things to people, and the first three chapters of Noguchi Takashi and Yumemakura Baku's Kurozuka are a great example of how someone's face can change evolve while falling in love. This post will study the gradual change in Kuromitsu's facial expressions over the course of the first three chapters while she rapidly falls in love with Yoshitsune.
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