Short Takes: Manga Hall of Shame Edition

I have a special fascination with bad manga. And when I say “bad manga,” I’m not talking about stories that are merely cliche or derivative of other, better series — for better or worse, manga is a popular medium, and popular media survive, in part, by giving audiences what they want, even if that means more of the same — I’m talking about stories so ineptly drawn, so spectacularly dumb, or so offensive that they make Happy Cafe look like Phoenix by comparison. To judge from the coverage of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, I’m not alone in my connoisseurship of wretched books; among the most widely reported panels was The Best and Worst Manga of 2010, in which a group of seasoned reviewers singled out titles for praise and punishment. To kick off my Bad Manga Week, therefore, I thought it would be a fun exercise to look at three of the titles that made the worst-of list to see if they were truly suited for inclusion in The Manga Hall of Shame. The candidates: Orange Planet (Del Rey), a shojo farce starring one clueless girl and three hot guys; Red Hot Chili Samurai (Tokyopop), a comedy about a hero who favors spicy peppers over PowerBars whenever he needs an energy boost; and Togainu no Chi (Tokyopop), an action-thriller that proudly boasts its origins as a “ground-breaking bishonen game.”

ORANGE PLANET, VOL. 1

BY HARUKA FUKUSHIMA • DEL REY • 200 pp. • TEEN (13+)

Haruka Fukushima specializes in what I call “chastely dirty” manga for tween girls — that is, manga that places the heroine in compromising situations, teasing the audience with the prospect of a kiss or a grope that never quite materializes because the heroine is a good girl, thank you very much. In Orange Planet, Fukushima’s sex-phobic lead is Rui, a junior high student who lives by herself — she’s been an orphan since childhood — and pays for her apartment with a paper route. (That must be some paper route, considering she lives in a modern high-rise apartment and not, say, a cardboard box.) Rui is one corner of a highly contrived love square; the other three points are all standard shojo types, from the boy next door and the hot young teacher to the mystery man from the heroine’s past.

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Short Takes: Super-Sized Shojo Edition

Welcome to Shojo Manga Week! For the next seven days, I’ll be shining the spotlight on a variety of shojo titles, new and old, while counting down my all-time favorite series. I admit that I’ve had a long and ambivalent relationship with shojo; though I love the idea of female creators writing stories for female readers, I often find myself rolling my eyes at the ubiquity of dopey plotlines — a massage club? — and wishy-washy heroines. At the same time, however, the raw honesty and elegant artwork of the very best titles keeps me soldiering through the Black Birds and Love Master As in search of something as moving as Sand Chronicles or The Name of the Flower. To kick off Shojo Manga Week, therefore, I look at five brand-new titles aimed squarely at teenage girls: Alice the 101st (DMP), The Clique (Yen Press), Dengeki Daisy (VIZ), Romeo x Juliet (Yen Press), and Ugly Duckling’s Love Revolution (Yen Press).

ALICE THE 101st, VOL. 1

BY CHIGUSA KAWAI • DMP • 208 pp. • RATING: TEEN (13+)

Fourteen-year-old Aristade Lang, a.k.a. “Alice,” is a musical savant; he can play complicated tunes from memory, but his technique is unorthodox, he can’t read music, and he doesn’t really understand how music works. (Translation: he wouldn’t know a seventh chord if it bit him in the ass.) Though he hardly seems like conservatory material, the faculty at the prestigious Mondonveille Academy admit him on the strength of an impassioned audition, pairing him with two very different mentors: the friendly but steely Victor de Corteau, a seventeen-year-old viola student, and the brusque Yannick Dalberto, a young faculty member who’s appalled by Alice’s inability to sight-read or play a major scale.

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13th Boy, Vols. 1-4

Like Water for Kimchi – that’s how I would describe 13th Boy, a weird, wonderful Korean comedy with a strong element of magical realism.

The plot is standard sunjong fodder: Hee-So, a teen with a flair for the dramatic, believes that the handsome Won-Jun is destined to be her twelfth and last boyfriend, the man with whom she’ll spend the rest of her life. Though Won-Jun accepts her initial confession of love — she drags him on television to ask him on a date — he dumps her just one month later, sending Hee-So into a tailspin: how could her destiny walk away from her? She then resolves to take fate into her own hands, launching an aggressive campaign to win him back: she stalks Won-Jun, looking for any opportunity to be alone with him; she joins the Girl Scouts so that she can go on a camping trip with him (he’s a Boy Scout); she even befriends her romantic rival Sae-Bom, defending Sae-Bom from bullies and risking her life to rescue Sae-Bom’s beloved stuffed rabbit from a burning building. In short: Hee-So is a girl on a mission, dignity be damned.

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Short Takes: Flower in a Storm and Rin-ne

This week’s Short Takes column looks at two recent VIZ releases. The first, Flower in a Storm, is a rom-com about a high school student with superpowers and the billionaire playboy who loves her; the second, Rin-ne, is Rumiko Takahashi’s follow-up to the award-winning, best-selling InuYasha. I admit that I didn’t have high expectations for either manga, but both turned out to be pleasant surprises, the first for its goofy, over-the-top premise, and the second for its playful skewering of the “I see demons!” genre. Read on for the scoop.

FLOWER IN A STORM, VOL. 1

BY SHIGEYOSHI TAKAGI • VIZ • 200 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Flower in a Storm begins with a bang: seventeen-year-old Ran Tachibana storms a classroom where self-proclaimed “everyday, ordinary high school student” Riko Kunimi is making plans with friends. Brandishing a gun, Ran declares that Riko is his bride-to-be, a pronouncement that doesn’t sit well with Riko, who tells him off, then jumps out a third-floor window, landing gracefully on the pavement below. That death-defying leap is our first clue that Riko is anything but an ordinary teen; as we soon learn, Riko possesses a variety of superpowers — strength, speed, agility — that would make her a solid addition to the Justice League. Riko, however, just wants to fit in with her peers, a desire fueled by the memory of a boy rejecting her because she “wasn’t normal.” What she doesn’t grasp — at least in the early going — is that Ran likes her precisely because she isn’t ordinary; he finds her strength and grit irresistible, even if he doesn’t express his feelings in the most constructive, socially responsible fashion.

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Short Takes: Crown of Love, Itazura na Kiss, and Natsume’s Book of Friends

This month’s third and final “second takes” column focuses on three manga that have garnered good reviews here and elsewhere: Yun Kouga’s Crown of Love (VIZ), a romantic drama about teen idols; Kaoru Tada’s Itazura na Kiss (DMP), a comedy documenting a ditzy girl’s quest to bag the class genius; and Natsume’s Book of Friends (VIZ), an episodic drama about a teen with the power to control demons. Which of the three had strong second volumes, and which ones turned out to be duds? Read on for the scoop.

CROWN OF LOVE, VOL. 2

BY YUN KOUGA • VIZ • 192 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

The premise: Handsome teen Hisayoshi signs away his life to become an idol after meeting the girl of his dreams. Unfortunately for him, Rima, the object of his affection, views him as a threat to her already-established career as a singer and actress and won’t give him the time of day. Eager to be near Rima regardless of how she receives him, Hisayoshi agrees to tutor her for a high school entrance exam. The catch? Rima is petulant and not very bright, making Hisayoshi’s task an uphill climb.

What I said about volume one: “Yun Kouga spins a surprisingly good yarn, filled with complex characters and emotionally resonant scenes that rise well above the usual idol-fantasy fare… Kouga employs a simple, direct style that’s reminiscent of Keiko Nishi’s; stripped clean of the fussy costumes and distracting screentone patterns that are a hallmark of the idol genre, Kouga’s artwork focuses primarily on the characters’ faces, allowing us a glimpse into their turbulent inner lives. It’s this kind of attention to emotional detail that makes Crown of Love so engaging, even when the plot capitulates to genre convention.”

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My Girlfriend’s a Geek, Vol. 1

The frog who presents as a prince is a staple character in romantic comedies: what Jane Austen novel didn’t feature a handsome, wealthy suitor who, in the final pages of the story, turned out to be ethically challenged, penniless, or engaged to someone else? My Girlfriend’s a Geek offers a more up-to-the-minute version of Mr. Willoughby, this time in the form of a nice young woman who looks like a dream and holds down a responsible job, but has some rather unsavory habits of mind.

The hapless protagonist of My Girlfriend’s a Geek is Taiga Motou, a perpetually broke, somewhat flaky college student who aspires to be a novelist. Taiga is on a quest to find the perfect job, one that “pays big” and is “close to college and easy to do and not too sweaty”; bonus points if the staff includes “a beautiful, hard-working big sis-type chick.” When he stumbles across a clothing company with a “Help Wanted” sign in the window and an attractive manager in the office, he jumps at the chance. Once employed, Taiga does his best to flirt with the beautiful Yuiko, though his opportunities are few and far between: a chance encounter in the lunch room, an after-hours search for missing inventory. Yuiko’s signals are hard to decode — she blows hot and cold, and ditches him to fiddle with her VCR — but she eventually agrees to go on a proper date with him.

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