My new manga this week:
Hana-Kimi 12 - the end of the Christmas dance! Will Mizuki ever get to dance with Sano? This first part of the book was ridiculously sweet and romantic. Awww! Later, Mizuki gets a summons from her family to return home for New Year's where she runs into her first love Gilbert. Then of course a couple of the dorm guys show up (so convenient!) and Mizuki has to scramble to keep everyone from finding out about the cross-dressing thing.
Crossroad 3 - Kajitsu is out on a romantic date with her teacher Akai and wants it to be a perfect fantasy evening. The fantasy is tarnished when she finds out later that Akai won't be leaving the school after all and she's going to be stuck with a real guy instead of a glorified memory. The tension between Kajitsu and Natsu also fires up as they try to come to terms with their relationship - do they want to stay siblings or is their love changing into something else? The next volume looks like it will focus on poor neglected Taro, the older brother with the cute sibling complex.
Tenshi Ja Nai! 3 - Hikaru gets stuck playing the Beast in the school play, which is bad enough, but then threatening letters start appearing warning her to drop out of the play or else. Meanwhile she's struggling with the decision of whether or not to confess to her teacher Ayase, which gets even more complicated when bank robbers crash the school festival. I must say that Izumi looks much better as his guy self than Makoto (from W Juliet) does. Much more manly. :) It's also very amusing to watch the arrogant Izumi slowly falling for an oblivious Hikaru. Though what's up with all of the teacher/student relationships in the manga I'm reading lately? Why are so many teachers attracted to their 15 year old students? That's just creepy, even if I am trying to turn off my morality filter for the sake of the story. Perhaps it's just jealousy over the total lack of young, hot teachers when I was in high school…
Aishiteruze Baby 2 - Kippei decides he needs a girlfriend (and Kokoro would be perfect if he can convince her) but Yuzu isn't quite ready to share him. Especially when Kippei starts forgetting his mommy duties so he can hang out with Kokoro.
Hot Gimmick 11 - yeah, I've already gushed about this one. Only one volume left!
Nana 3 - poor Nana! The goofy one, not the band one. She gets to discover the fun of being broke in a big city while the other Nana makes a start on forming her new band. Meanwhile Shoji runs into temptation when a new, cute girl starts working with him. After a slow start this series is really growing on me. I'm liking it more with each volume, but I think some of the problem with the rocky start was reading individual chapters in Shojo Beat each month. I much prefer the whole volume approach to manga. :)
School Rumble 2 - heh. I like this title. The weird humour is the kind that appeals to me. In this volume, we get to see the fateful first meeting between Tenma and Kenji (they're both so clueless it's wonderful), and class 2-C turns cleaning the school pool into a pool hockey grudge match with the class project for the culture festival at stake. (Only two chapters of many, of course.) One of my favorite things about this manga are the little messages they have at the edges of the page, like: Harima Kenji: Finally Considers the Events of Chapter 6. I find stuff like that funny. Uh, it also helps if you can see the panels the messages are supplementing. :)
Oh My Goddess! 23 - Keiichi's parents finally make an appearance! His poor father has a horrible fear of women, though, and ends up trapped at the temple with three of the goddesses. Then his mother shows up and makes Keiichi race his father as proof of his love for Belldandy. To make things a little more interesting, she makes a side bet with Bell - if Keiichi loses, Bell must reveal who she really is. The problem? Keiichi's never even managed to pass his father in a race before, let alone win against him. It was interesting to finally see Keiichi's parents. His father is abnormally quiet and amazing with machines (so you can tell where Kei and Megumi get their love of tinkering and racing from) and his mother is unusually sharp and seems fun loving, but they don't quite have time to get into her character as much. I guess we'll find out more about her in the next volume if Keiichi manages to win!
D. Gray-Man 1 - haven't read it yet, but it looks interesting. Hopefully more about it later.
Boogiepop Doesn't Laugh 1 - I haven't read this yet, but it looks like a manga adaptation of Boogiepop and Others, the first novel in the series.
Basilisk 1 - a quick and easy description would be Romeo and Juliet with ninjas, but it's a little inaccurate to put such a simplistic tag on it, even if the idea is funny. Two rival clans have settled into an uneasy truce which is dissolved in order to choose the next Shogun. Each clan must enter ten ninjas in a fight to the death to determine which side will gain power and young lovers Oboro and Gennosuke find themselves on opposite sides of the battle. I stopped reading about half way through this and haven't managed to get back to it yet, so I haven't actually gotten to the part where Oboro and Gennosuke find out they're supposed to be fighting each other. (Right now there are ninjas being introduced right and left who then all run off to find someone to kill before news of the contest spreads to Oboro and Gennosuke, who are being deliberately kept in the dark by the other ninjas.) Considering that this is one of the higher priced Del Rey titles I'm supposed to feel okay with paying $20 for since it's a higher quality "adult" title, that doesn't bode well for me. They also have sucky margins. :) One of the guys at the comic store read it too and he also thought it was a little boring, but to be fair I suppose that only reading the first part of the first volume of a series isn't enough to judge the whole thing. It has the potential to be interesting, and some of the character designs are pretty good even if I'm not a huge fan of the art… I think I'd read it, but wouldn't buy it.
Go! Comi very optimistically printed June as their release date for volumes 4 of Tenshi Ja Nai! and Crossroad, and since I just got to buy their "April" release of volume 3, well… I don't think I believe them. Amazon lists volume 2 of Her Majesty's Dog as being released July 5 while according to the Go! Comi website it was released in February. (I haven't seen it anywhere, though. Are they the company that's pre-releasing manga to one of the bookstore chains in the States? One of the publishers I get newsletters from does but I can’t recall which one at the moment.) You know, they pick great manga to publish, but wow, do they need to work on getting their books out on time.
And after my earlier complaints about the creeping margins into the spine thing, I have to give credit to Viz - the Shojo Beat and Shonen Jump titles I read this week had great spine margins. :)
16 comments June 8, 2006
