ナルト/ Naruto (manga)

It finally ended. After fifteen years, and overstaying its welcome by at least eight, one of the pillars of anime and manga of the last few decades has come to an end. Shounen Jump has lost one of its more recognisable figureheads, and I no longer feel compelled to complain every week about a new chapter of rushed plotting or emotion-free battles between giant blob-creatures.

As I mentioned in my review of the pre-timeskip anime series, Naruto is deeply unfashionable. But I will defend it to the ground. Of its fifteen years, I’ve been following it for twelve-ish. Twelve years of my life with these characters, at least once a week, and most times two. That’s pretty remarkable. A large chunk of the crowd at any anime crowd will have been learning to spell ‘cat’ when I started to read Naruto. So my perspective is a little different from the average, I guess.

That, I think, is why I’m keen to defend it. Or at least, what it was. Post-timeskip, Naruto was largely an emotionally flat, highly contrived, rather ugly series of battles between uninteresting men with an inflated sense of self-importance. But it wasn’t like that to begin with. Which is why, once again, I think that in a few years’ time it will be rehabilitated and remembered fondly – just as happened with Dragonball. When I first joined the anime fandom, Dragonball was hated for GT and the prolonged screaming matches of Dragonball Z. Now it’s largely adored, primarily on the strength of the first series and the early parts of Dragonball Z. I expect the same will happen with Naruto when its best parts come into focus again.

Because I maintain that early Naruto was genuinely good. It was about ninja kids who were weak but ingenious, and who had people ready to push them, challenge them and if need be, protect them. Back then, it was largely a school drama.

Naruto himself was an intentionally annoying brat, while Sasuke was uppity and smug. Yet both were likeable and oddly cute. What made Naruto huge was the quick succession of two story arcs that blended cuteness and silliness with genuine emotionally heavy-hitting moments: first, the battle against Zabuza and Haku, which brilliantly had the enemies be sympathetic thanks to their deep bond and also immediately pitted the kids against someone genuinely dangerous. Naruto had a lot to prove and did it well – even if it had to rely on the cheesy ‘he didn’t really die!’ moment. Kishimoto proved this wasn’t just a one-off by following up with the chuunin exam arc – first, with the compelling character of Gaara, who was tortured, antisocial and merciless. The idea that this was a world of incredibly powerful warriors was cemented, and Orochimaru was a genuine threat in the background. While there was a certain laziness to then going into a tournament arc, as so many series do, Kishimoto did these battles better than most, with almost all of the fights between low-level opponents being won thanks to some genuinely clever little trick. Itachi was an enigma, part of an organization that seemed genuinely threatening and cool (back then), and the summons of the sannin seemed like absurdly powerful, more or less exclusive talents.

It all fell apart around then. Big summons led to bigger and bigger ones, and then the use of tailed beast powers, ending up with dull fights between big blobs. There was a time skip and the characters were no longer underdogs. The tricks were no longer clever because the stakes had to constantly be upped. Naruto couldn’t get away with being annoying because he was adorable any more, and Sasuke just became annoying. Akatsuki were revealed to be largely ridiculous and could mostly be defeated by being made to realize their evil actions were – gasp! – evil. Itachi was given redemption, but not before being made to look completely ridiculous in what should have been a series highlight. The final battle with a very old man and some almost random summoned goddess woman was entirely without tension and the last clash of all, prefigured for fifteen years, was rushed into very unconvincingly, over very quickly and entirely without emotional weight.

Like so many shounen titles – particulary Dragonball and Reborn – as well as a fair number of Western kids’ stories (like Harry Potter), the big problem with Naruto is that it started fun, jokey and cute, then tried to take itself too seriously. It lost the balance and became largely tedious, and unable to have much emotional impact.

Thus, which the classic ‘see-them-as-adults-with-their-kids’ ending of Digimon and yes, Harry Potter had some small smiles in it, mostly for minor characters, I can’t say I’m sad to see this era come to a close. But I remember that Naruto was once great, and that’s the main thing I’ll always take from it.  

Scanslation release! Psychic Force doujin anthology chapter 4!

Can it be? Yes! After a gap of over three years, I've finally restarted my little scanslation project. I've done other bits and pieces around the net since, but this has always been my pet project I meant to go back to: the official doujinshi collection for the first Psychic Force game.

This fourth chapter is a cute little episode from the lives of the good guys, centred on my favourite character, Emilio. It's a great place to start if you're new to the series, though I also recommend chapter three.

Previous releases can be found here, though I think that their links have likely long expired.

Without further ado, then, here is the release:

Psychic Force Shinseisha Doujinshi Anthology vol. 1 chapter 4: A Reason to Fight. 

Mirror 1: Mediafire
Mirror 2: Speedyshare

Also previous chapters re-uploaded: Chapter 1 (1. 2.), Chapter 2 (1. 2.), Chapter 3 (1. 2.)

Deadman Wonderland (manga)

There’s only a few manga like this I’m reading – where I started with the manga, then watched the anime adaptation when it came out, and then continued with the manga – but they’re some of my favourites of all time. There’s Fullmetal Alchemist, Rozen Maiden and MÄR, though the latter had a disappointing adaptation. Well, there’s also Death Note and Bakuman, but I never have gotten around to finishing the anime for those.

But Deadman Wonderland was posited a while back as the next big thing, and for a while it was everywhere. But then its anime came out and ended just as it was getting big. OVAs followed, but frankly they were too slow getting a continuation to happen, which may have been down to a delay in the newer chapters materialising – almost coincidental with the ending of the anime, the manga went on hiatus for a good two years, and only recently concluded. Twelve episodes was enough to make a small splash but there was definitely potential to get to a much higher degree of recognition. Alas, it didn’t happen, and as I feared in 2011, the anime will likely never continue, and to see the conclusion, one must read the manga.

But fortunately, that’s exactly what I can do. On the other hand, Deadman Wonderland has never quite been quite as high up in my affections as Rozen Maiden or Fullmetal Alchemist, despite me describing it as a favourite in my review of the anime. When it went on hiatus, it fell out of my regular reading and I never really missed it…and when the final chapters came out, it took me a while to get around to reading them, unlike what happened with Soul Eater. The trouble was that for me, Deadman Wonderland attempted what I described as one of anime’s strengths in my thoughts on Shingeki no Kyojin, but fell a bit short – it started with a truly absurd premise (a themepark prison where for outside entertainment, prisoners take part in games and suffer extremely violent deaths) and then attempted to get very serious and personal. The trouble was that – as was one of my problems with the Harry Potter series – the initial episodes of daft humour, exaggerated cartooniness and plot contrivance were so prominent and memorable that the transition didn’t work. The second part of Deadman Wonderland had its awesome cast functioning outside the context of the Wonderland, but the sheer absurdity that something that ridiculous was allowed to exist in what actually seems a much more grim and normal world never sits well and becomes something of a pink elephant. I just don’t find the last chapter of the characters becoming members of a normal society compatible with the bizarre world we were introduced to where people accept the grotesque entertainment of the theme park-prison. The two elements are just not compatible for me.

Which is a shame, because I really liked the action sequences, the characters – especially Ganta – and the central tension of his relationship with Shiro and the ‘Wretched Egg’. The conclusion of their story, though – which is also the conclusion of the manga in general – feels a bit obvious, though, and rather as if mangakas Kataoka Jinsei and Kondou Kazuma (whose story I already detailed in the anime review) wracked their brains for something clever and ended up with only the obvious conclusion to fall back on. It works, but it feels underwhelming, especially after a hiatus.

Deadman Wonderland was well worth the time I spent on it – but ultimately it feels like an opportunity missed.

Soul Eater (manga)

It seems like a slew of manga I started reading a few years back have come to an end, though really it’s just this and Deadman Wonderland. I’ve been reading Soul Eater for longer, though, and in the end have certainly enjoyed it more, so I’m quite sad to see it come to an end.

When the anime adaptation ended with a rather rushed and dissatisfying final arc – though I did enjoy Crona’s central place – my main thought was that it was fine that it got botched together, because I could continue to read the manga for the true ending, and hey, maybe one day the rest would get animated in a special, a movie or a revival. And that’s remained my attitude as the series has faded from public view (as most manga do when their anime ends) and tied up its loose ends.

The final arcs have had problems – I found Noah’s final design very lazy and unappealing, the ‘I am your brother’ reveal (or close enough) is overdone and rang hollow for me, and both in the arc where the characters enter the ‘book of Eibon’ and have their genders reversed and in the painful first half of the very last chapter, which really ought to have been spent on better things, mangaka Oukubo Atsushi’s attempts at racy humour are without fail swings that miss. It actually stung that rather than giving more attention to my favourite character Crona’s grand and tragic gesture closing out the series, he wanted to do a series of bad boob jokes.

But still, Soul Eater was well worth the time I gave it. As I said, I adored Crona, completely gender-ambiguous, kooky and so vulnerable behind all that strength. Excalibur remains one of manga’s funniest creations, but his scenes with Shinigami at the end were judged so perfectly and his presence made the scene so much more poignant, which was deeply unexpected. Kid became far more interesting in his interactions with the witches (nyamu!), Black☆Star became ever less of a cliché (though never main character material) and of course Maka remains one of the only effective shouen protagonists that is not only a girl, but a girl absolutely held peer by the fighting boys around her. That she is also not at all written so that her gender is an issue or even a focal point makes her remarkable, and she is quite simply a good character at the centre of it all, which ought not to be something strange, but absolutely is – in all action series, not just shounen, with her closest parallel in my mind being the eponymous main character of Avatar: Legend of Korra. Of the newer characters, I found Gopher to be hilarious, for even if he was somewhat one-note, the daft variations on that theme were fantastic.

There wasn’t really much in the manga that would surprise those who stopped at the end of the anime, but that just shows a consistent story arc throughout a work – and there was one thing I didn’t see coming, the highly distinctive sun and moon ended up being given a bit more attention in quite a brilliant little twist. But to really see the way the story ought to have ended, the manga definitely does what the anime didn’t manage, which is to satisfy.

Though if we were to have some more, and there is certainly scope for more about what happened at the very end, I would not complain. Until then, there’s always the fun little Soul Eater Not! 

バクマン/ Bakuman: manga impressions

With chapter 176, Bakuman came to an end – something I was very happy to see. If anything but ‘End’ had been written at the climax of that chapter, my reaction would have been ‘ugh’. A lot of the final chapters seemed to have a focus on it not being the right thing to do for mangaka to let a title drag on past its natural end, and thankfully this title stayed true to that – though from the start it made me wonder whether it was a way of the creators expressing regret for the way Death Note ended up continuing past where it ought to have ended, introducing new, vastly inferior antagonists.

Because this title was a follow-up to Death Note in several ways. And as I wrote in my Death Note impressions, that meant it was drawn by one of my favourite manga artists, Obata Takeshi, who provided the art for Hikaru no Go. Apart from Blue Dragon Ral Grado I’ve loved everything he’s done since, and though his art has become more stylised and – to me – less appealing since the brilliant latter chapters of Hikaru no Go, I still took a liking to Bakuman.

The hook of the piece is that it turns the imaginary camera around – this is a manga about the people who create manga, the kind of thing that is usually confined to funny little omake at the end of volumes. It revolves around two boys who despite seeming very different, decide to get together to create a manga, one writing the scripts while the other puts his artistic talents and the equipment left to him by his mangaka uncle to use. Driving the plot is the artist Mashiro’s personal life – his regrets about his deceased uncle never having found real happiness and his hilariously over-romantic relationship with class-mate and later seiyuu/idol Miho: they almost never talk, blush profusely in each other’s presences and yet promise one another that when their professional dreams are realised, they will marry.

Although the writer here was Ohba Tsugumi, who also wrote Death Note (and whose real identity is much speculated-upon), this actually feels closer Hotta Yumi’s writing for Hikaru no Go than to that title: much of the drama comes from the boys getting a rival very different in temperament from them, and the silly comedy characters on the periphery of the story often steal the show – Otters 11 and its creator are probably the best things to come out of this title.

The problem is that apart from a very few moments, this whole series felt at arm’s length. I never felt like I knew either Mashiro or Takagi, or cared much for them. Their accomplishments always rang hollow because they either came very easily (like their first successes) or they revolved around imagined manga that didn’t actually sound all that good. There’s fascinating insight into the world of manga, into pleasing the editorial team, into deadlines and assistants, into how hard the work can truly be (though where HunterXHunter fits into any of it I couldn’t tell you), but the novelty wore off after a few months and a tendency soon arose for very artificial drama to be inserted (the soulless writer who got an online team to come up with stories for him returned! This time with a whole team of employees!) and to be resolved within a few issues, so that the abiding impression from Bakuman was a fragmentary and not very engaging one.

Bakuman was memorably and occasionally genuinely gripping, but it never hit me in emotional terms, and in truth I’m not at all sad it’s over. On the other hand, I am keen to see what Obata does next. And willing to watch the anime version – possibly in a few months, when the story will seem fresh and new again. 

Death Note (manga)

It was through Hikaru no Go, still my favourite manga of all time and unlikely ever to be toppled from that spot, that I first encountered Death Note. Back when the translation group hadn’t finished with Hikaru’s adventures in board games and subtextual homosexuality yet (indeed, they never would finish it), they scanslated and released the one-shot pilot of Death Note, which was the first work Hikago's artist Obata Takeshi had done after the series finished. It was a good idea: a schoolboy finds a mysterious notebook, and after using it as a diary, discovers that it kills anyone whose name is written therein. A Shinigami (God of death in Japanese mythology – very much a vogue subject in manga and anime at the moment…see Bleach, Shinigami no Ballad etc) appears, explaining that it is his notebook, and the boy has to explore the moral ramifications of his actions.

It was a good enough one-shot, though in a very poor twist, the moral core was ruined by the inclusion of an eraser that could bring people back to life, which ensured that it had little scope for a series proper. Therefore, when the main series began, big changes were made. I read the first chapter and (simply because of convenience) didn’t go back to the series for many months, but I’m glad I did. I found the eraser gone and the central character now an older teenager (raising the target audience) who became intoxicated with his power and aimed to become a god. Pitted against him was L, a mysterious figure who solves mysteries and captures elusive criminals when international police forces fail. All very over-the-top, but all very cool. L of course turns out to be another teenager (with a great character design), and the main plot becomes a battle of wits between the boy with the ‘death note’, Light, and super-detective L.

This format gives a very interesting dynamic to the story: we see things through the perspective of the ‘bad guy’, who has very good reasons to believe he’s in the right. The detective story happens with us already knowing everything Light knows, so other characters struggling to figure things out are seen from a very different perspective than in most crime fiction. With cliffhanger after cliffhanger, the story is a compulsive page-turner, not always well-told (lots of plots get abandoned, lots of deductions are very far-fetched), but always readable, and impressive given that chapters have to be turned out weekly. However, it was always in my mind that it’s very easy to string together a supernatural mystery when you are making up the rules that have to be figured out for no other reason than because that fits your purpose as a storyteller.

The major flaw of the series is how talky it gets. Characters expound, speculate, pontificate, preach and explicate at great length, often with huge leaps of logic and rather unlikely trains of thought, but this does help give the impression of great intelligence, and the backbone of the plot is the clash of superior minds. Halfway through there comes a major twist, which upends the whole story, and to be honest, it would have been better if it ended there, for everything that happened subsequently trivialised, recycled or failed to live up to what went before it, though some interesting new character designs appeared.

I’m excited by the prospect of a movie, and not just because Ryuk (the shinigami) looks so damn cool. Condensing the plot (of the first half, undoubtedly) into a single movie will keep things brisk and action-packed enough that it will likely be a ‘greatest hits’ of the manga. And that suits me fine, because the action scenes, moments of high tension and revelations are what made me keep coming back to this manga. Not on a par with 20th Century Boys, which uses similar tricks to stay addictive, mostly because the characters were all quite one-note (ha! Pun! Light, after all, has two notes!), but the novel concept of watching a villain side-by-side with a man who wants nothing more than to figure out a way to expose him is what will always endure in my mind. Impressively different.

(originally written 15.6.06)

Fire Candy (manga)

I think few people knew what they were in for when they started Fire Candy, the mangaka included – something that’s more or less admitted in the apologetic afterword. The concept is quite interesting – half-human half-animal teenagers in a future that seems quite heavily influenced by Akira cope with their status as pariahs by forming rollerblading gangs, inevitably ending up surrounded by the passions and tragedies of gang warfare.

This is a seinen manga, meant for older teenaged boys and young men, so everything is stepped up a notch, made adult in the same way that Western comics tend to be made adult. An emphasis falls on sexuality, with emotionally fraught sex scenes and rape. And then of course the violence becomes extreme, more extreme than I’ve seen in any manga as far as I remember. When reading the chapters about Ryoaki, our main character, being angsty and trying to replace one girl with her sister and having occasional scraps with other rollerblading delinquents, or some middle-aged man who looks like a little girl being sexually provocative, I most definitely did not think that we’d eventually end up seeing kids getting sexual kicks from decapitating their enemies and sticking their thumbs through the eyeballs of the severed head. It walks a fine line between shocking and just plain melodramatic, but somehow, making vicious murder sexual keeps it the right side of cheesy crap. Some stunningly good art doesn’t hurt, either. The plot is loose, meandering about with no encompassing story, but each mini storyline is fairly direct and carries the characters to interesting places.

But the real shocker is that this ultraviolent, testosterone-fuelled and gang-centred bloodbath is that its mangaka is female. There are telltale signs (using, of course, huge generalisations): the sexualised representation of the teenaged boys, the delight in flustering them with a headstrong older man who looks like a sexy young girl, the close relationship between Ryo and his close comrade Leo (a rare positive, attractive representation of a young black guy in a manga), but really, given the kind of things you see in Bleach and Naruto, those aren’t obvious indications of the creator's gender. In the end, it makes very little difference what gender the people writing manga are, but sometimes expectations are confounded.

A strange, subversive little manga I only read because it was scanslated by one of my favourite groups, it’s far from world-shaking, but I certainly enjoyed it.

(originally written 6.11.07)

: ヴァンデミエールの翼 / Vandemieeru no Tsubasa / Wings of Vendemiaire

I read Wings of Vendemiaire for one reason: because it was written by Kitoh Mohiro, also behind the excellent and harrowing NaruTaru and Bokurano. And I ended up wishing this obscure two-volume title could be less obscure, and could be animated to a high standard, perhaps as an OVA series. It may not be the best of his works as a whole, but I think it quite probably the best of his premises.

His debut manga, it is remarkably sophisticated and elegant, with many of the themes of his later work, including adolescents sacrificing themselves, flights in airships and jaded cynicism about the value of life. In a European post-war setting, there exist strange living puppets, made of wood but living beings with distinct personalities and, it would seem, feelings and desires of their own. The puppets are known as Vendemiaire, which they also take as their names. Some are somewhat empty slates, learning mannerisms from others, while others have manipulative owners who have forced them into specific roles.

Prefiguring Rozen Maiden, and particularly the more angst-ridden sub-plots featuring Souseiseki and Suigintou, the whole work is pervaded by Kitoh’s characteristic melancholy. The stories are beautiful and tragic and simple, and the art is his usual mixture of fragile youths, faces that do not necessarily signify beauty and beautifully-rendered aircraft in the midst of a lot of white space.

The only way I would see this improved would be the addition of more than a handful of small references to tie together all the Vendemiaire puppets, perhaps some common cause for them as a climax. But the disparate, episodic nature lends to the bleakness of the situation and this is after all not intended as a conventional story. But it is too beautiful to be an obscure two-volume release read only by fans of other Kitoh Mohiro works. I want it to find a wider audience.

Bokurano: manga

Uninstall, uninstall…

The same pattern occurred here as happened with Kitou Mohiro’s last manga, NaruTaru: I first encountered it as an anime, later picked up the manga, and ended up far, far more deeply emotionally invested in it than I had expected to be, and more deeply moved by what happens to these characters than those of almost any other manga, novel, book, play – any story in any media. As I said when I finished reading the penultimate volume, as someone who almost never cries, and never at all over fictional stories, I was astonished how often this manga took me close.

Just as with NaruTaru, Kitou starts a series with familiar clichés that the systematically get disassembled, examined and ultimately reimagined in the most harrowing and tragic ways that end up leaving very deep impressions. There, it was magical girl archetypes, while here it is that age-old fantasy of giant robots. If 20th Century Boys took the idea and showed audiences how it might look in reality, Bokurano examines the real psychological impact of giving that much power to emotionally unstable adolescents, exacerbated by a very real, immediate cost each has to pay.

And once again, while the anime skipped some of the most adult subject matter and ended prematurely, the manga is given freedom to really explore the ideas of death, self-sacrifice, revenge, family and the survival instinct. Sadly, while the anime’s ending gives some degree of relief, it rather betrays the principles established at the start, while the manga gets to take them to their conclusion, even if of course, each individual’s situation is unique.

Despite similarities in characters and circumstances, the dynamics are very different from those in NaruTaru. The sense of empowerment is completely different, and while no-one suffers or learns quite as much as Sheena, they better understand what is happening to them, which makes for a more reflective work with characters better able to embody ideals and, ultimately, a much tighter plot. I was probably even more emotionally invested in NaruTaru, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel a great deal for the characters of Bokurano, or very surprised at the pasts unfolded, the decisions made by these kids or the surprising way the series comes to an end.

A lot of licence has to be given in order to swallow the premise, the pseudo-science, the arbitrariness of appearance and facilities and the extremely reductive concept of infinite universes in infinite divisions of time, but really, to fixate on the mechanics is to miss the point – the emotional and philosophical place that the pilots find themselves in when they receive great responsibility and power at great personal cost.

The reason the manga is such a success is that it takes its concept very seriously and imagines how people face death and sacrifice, fear and love, while retaining the adrenal rush of mecha. Normally, giant robots don’t interest me, precisely because shows featuring them tend to come with shallow posturing and a total lack of real consequences, which is why Bokurano is so refreshing. If a show like Gurren Lagann will take the shallow aspects of a concept and make them ridiculously fun, a manga like Bokurano goes for depth, and produces exactly the opposite emotions. Sometimes, it is good to feel those, too, and tragedy has always been perceived as more worthy than comedy. Both have a valuable cultural place, but you can’t beat something genuinely powerful and moving, like this.

Bremen (manga)

It’s been a long time since I started to read Bremen. It was one of the first series I started reading when I discovered the joys of online fan scanslations, so it has a special place in my heart. There’s also the fact that it’s just good. Very silly indeed, but great fun. The scanslators fizzled out when their flagship series all got licensed or ended, leaving Bremen with three chapters remaining unreleased. Fortunately, I’ve finally gotten hold of the last ones from a different group and finished the story.

Bremen is a manga about a rock group of that name – indeed, I almost wish I’d thought of the name myself because it’s such a good name for a band, being a reference to the Aesop fable The Musicians of Bremen. Unlike, say, Beck, which tried to be realistic and thus looked ever more goofy as it got harder and harder to swallow the drama injected into the story, Bremen dispenses with realism from the off. Putting emphasis on rock spirit and ridiculous excess, it follows the Mohawk-toting guitarist and straight man Renji as he meets Romio, a wild teenager with ridiculous strength and total amnesia but a great singing voice. They set off to make the perfect rock band, soon joined by a convincing transsexual named Ryo on drums whose sideline in S&M helps develop the whipping action needed to play, and a bassist called Ran whose previous band won’t let him go so easily. Their names all beginning with ‘r’ is never commented upon.

The band have to fight their way out of all sorts of scrapes, be it the members’ pasts catching up with them or challenges from other bands with extreme philosophies, but usually end up getting in a big fight, then playing with such great energy and such amazing vocals that they win over even the people who wanted to kill them. They get more and more successful until the final chapters, where there’s a half-arsed and silly story arc about a hidden society that really drags the whole thing down a bit.

But when the manga is just having a lot of fun with big exaggerated fights and a celebration of the spirit of anarchy, fun and community inherent in rock, it really puts a smile on the face. Well worth a read, and if there’s ever an anime adaptation, I’ll be the first in line.

(originally written 29.9.06)

風の谷のナウシカ / Kaze no Tani no Naushika / Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Manga)

When asked for their favourite directors, few anime fans would omit the living legend Hayao Miyazaki. It’s now been several years since I went to The Barbican to see what must have been one of the only UK screenings of Princess Mononoke, and I was instantly besotted. Since then, I’ve seen all but one of the great man’s films, and probably the majority of those produced by Studio Ghibli, which he co-founded. But this is where it all began, with Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Miyazaki had won some acclaim as an animator, even directing a Lupin III movie (the aforementioned lone film), but it was with this manga that his writing was shown for the first time, and where he had total creative freedom. Begun in 1982 and not completed until 1994, Miyazaki adapted the first volumes into an anime movie, which I watched several years ago and found rather less gripping than his usual work, lacking the crucial human element that makes him so appealing. Nonetheless, after hearing the manga called ‘The greatest graphic novel of all time’ in more than one place, I gave it a try.

Humanity is in turmoil. After an age of great technological progress, warfare razed the land, and suddenly giant forests of poisonous trees and fungi sprouted up, and with them huge insects like the vast maggot-like ohmu. In a valley near the brink is a small village, where Nausicaä, daughter of the chieftan, lives in harmony with nature and with the love of her people. Flying with her ‘Mehve’, a personal glider of sorts, she finds an airship that has suffered heavy damage under attack by forest insects. She attempts to save those inside, but her actions eventually lead to her becoming involved in a war between two powerful countries, so involved that she becomes the only one who can free humanity from its restraints.

Nausicaä is very long, and to be honest, like the god warrior Ohma, it seems to be falling apart, unable to hold itself together. Miyazaki is clearly a skilled artist, but his style doesn’t appeal to me, despite how keenly I love the character designs of his anime work. For one thing, the pages don’t flow well. It’s not just that he keeps his boxes square and doesn’t seem to want to use the sort of techniques manga artists like to incorporate to suggest pacing (cutaways, for example): he just seems to move from place to place, person to person, scene to scene at will, which is unsettling for the reader. It doesn’t help that a lot of his characters look VERY similar. This is true of his anime, too, but they have much smaller casts, and don’t look nearly as alike as all the ‘young-looking’ characters do here (eg non-grotesques). He likes including silly facial expressions, and while they’re perhaps quite naturalistic, they tend to spoil the mood at times.

And the story just meanders about too much. Political intrigues between different nations, great long pedagogical speeches about environmentalism (the preaching really started to grate), lots of battles between men and men or men and monsters (most of which were pretty silly), diversions that took place entirely in the mind and nice scenes of home life – all crammed in. Some were better than others, and some minor characters really made a strong impression…but the propensity to build up some powerful villain only for them to be dispatched flippantly can only happen so many times before it gets annoying. I think the last chapter, a truly thrilling, cinematic climax, was the only one I wholeheartedly enjoyed.

And the fact is that I just didn’t like Nausicaä. She was just too perfect. Too universally loved, too flawless, too bland. She can fight, she can understand animals, she can fly like none other – it was just too much. Plus she felt like a mouthpiece for idealism, like she could never be wrong, and that just made her seem like less of a character, more of a vehicle…like a pretty little wagon with schoolbooks piled up inside.

Mononoke-Hime explores similar thematic ground, only with better characters (most of whom look almost identical to SOMEONE in Nausicaä), much more interesting setpieces and a whole lot less cliché, despite the overblown ending.

Nausicaä is far from Miyazaki’s best, but certainly noteworthy as a stepping stone I can only be grateful he took.

(originally written 1.7.06. I have since seen Cagliostro.)

Release number 3!

Urrrrgh, I’m happy to be shot of this horrible, horrible chapter. Horrible to translate, that is. It was written in incredibly complicated language, using obscure kanji at every opportunity. At least I saw a whole lot of characters I haven’t encountered before. But I suspect I’ll very, very rarely see them used again. The mangaka was just showing off, really.

Still, it’s translated now, and actually reading it back I find it quite fun. Not characters you’re going to see very often, and more of Wong being evil, so check it out!


Mirror 1: Sendspace
Mirror 2: Mediafire
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Manga reviews: Fullmetal Alchemist

On the 27th May 2003, I made my usual daily check of Toriyama’s World. Back then, TW was without doubt the biggest and most important scanslation site on the internet, providing scans of big shounen series like Hikaru no Go and HunterXHunter. They were also not only scanning an up-and-coming series called Naruto but even releasing fansubs of the anime – but back then, I wasn’t too keen on the juvenile-looking series, heheh.

On that day, Toriyama’s World released a chapter of Hikaru no Go, which I was very eager to read, but also announced a new monthly manga called Fullmetal Alchemist. ‘it’s about an alchemist who can do a lot of cool stuff. it's pretty good. you should read it’, went the release, somewhat unconvincingly, adding as an afterthought a little note: ‘you’d better read fma, cuz we may or may not have hidden an integral page of the hng chapter in the fma chapter… tho really, who needs a gimmick to make people read a manga this good!’

Well, if that announcement was hardly auspicious, I downloaded the chapter and loved it. Some great artwork, really appealing characters, a superb setting and the great concept of magic deeply based in science.

It’s now more than seven years later, and Fullmetal Alchemist is huge. From the first episode of the anime, where I was very surprised Al sounded like a little boy, to seeing the movie in Japan on the day of an earthquake, to the new Brotherhood remake growing from redundancy to innovation, Hagaren would seldom be out of my life. It has a huge but fickle fanbase, and even though the manga has been a constant fixture for all these years, when the first anime stopped airing, it was remarkable how many people seemed to give up on their beloved title.

I’ve summarized the series in general as an anime, so I don’t need to go into that here, but it ought to be said that it’s always been the manga I’ve enjoyed the most. The art is unique and often very odd but beautiful to look at, and the pacing is superb – other than in the flashback segment. Few series have so perfectly balanced humour and action, and this series deserves to be a classic. Its concept, characters, world and storyline are all genuinely exemplary.

But the manga rolled on, and I kept reading, through the flabby chapters of flashback and through Arakawa’s other side-projects. And now it’s all finally come to an end with chapter 108, an extended special of over 100 pages. I thought I would rail against it. I thought that it couldn’t possibly end satisfactorily in one more chapter. But I was wrong: the summation of the homunculus storyline was also the climax of all the main characters’ paths and it ended neatly, cleverly and with so many little flashes of where the characters will go next, each one fairly moving.

This is somewhat the end of an era, for me. And I can’t help but feel a little moved!

Adziu's Small Corner's second release!

My second release from the Psychic Force Shinseisha anthology is one of the cutest one-shots I’ve ever read, and one of the reasons I wanted to do this at all. It features Emilio, a little egg and a particularly sociopathic Wong. This is a much better introduction to the series and its characters (well, two of them) than the first chapter, and one I’d recommend anybody read. It’s not the…LEAST cheesy thing ever, but I find it adorable.

Psychic Force Shinseisha chapter 3 released!

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New scanslation project: Psychic Force official doujinshi anthologies

Back in the mid-90s, I fell in love with a quirky, rather unbalanced Taito fighting game called Psychic Force. The game’s superb anime intro (watch it here) played a large part in sparking my interest in Japanese animation in general and it was because of this game that I first started delving into Japanese websites, even if back then slow connections and lack of support for East-Asian fonts made it all strange and mysterious.

With a fairly large fandom in Japan, a lot of doujinshi were produced for the game, including some in an official capacity. I got hold of a couple of the Broccoli anthologies and one from the now-bankrupt Shinseisha, who used to produce spin-off manga for numerous fighting games. I’ve slowly been translating bits and pieces, and now that my Japanese is good enough to actually be able to understand chapters, I thought it was time to share with the world with some scanslations! The near-future setting was, after all, 2010, so it seems timely to do this now.

Thus, here is Adziu’s Small Corner’s first scanslation, chapter 1 of the Shinseisha anthology. It’s only a very short chapter, a rather strange little gag story about a bunny, but you get some rather lovely artwork included as well. Please don’t judge Emilio too harshly, though! This isn’t how he usually behaves! XD

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