[Found this in my pile of unpublished things...I probably intended to write more, but it was a while ago, and now I can't remember the series all that well]

Angel Sanctuary by Kaori Yuki is possible the most epic manga tale I’ve read so far, with a story setting that spans multiple levels of heaven and hell as well as earth, and a complex ( Read more... )

Like any good story, Soul Eater gets deeper as it goes on. Its philosophical meditations on the relationship between power, fear, strength and madness are just the sort of thing I expect from my fictional material. But perhaps even better yet is the glorious absurdity with which so many characters and battles are painted. Like a typical shonen ( Read more... )

Godchild (by Kaori Yuki) is the sequel to the Earl Cain Saga I reviewed last week. The premise is simple: Earl Cain Hargreaves wants to avenge his father. Along the way, Cain keeps finding himself in the middle of some crazy situations, including séances, poisons, spiders, tarot cards and the like. And he has a devoted a faithful butler named Riff ( Read more... )

First published in Japan in the early 1990s, this prequel to Kaori Yuki’s Godchild is meant to establish a bit of Earl Cain Hargreaves’ early life. It is clear how much this Victorian gothic tale must have influenced mangaka like Jun Mochizuki and Yana Toboso.

The Cain Saga series features the blasé heir to a noble family (the main character Cain, ( Read more... )

I recently finished reading One Thousand and One Nights  (the Korean manhwa version). I enjoyed the way it wrapped so many different stories (old and new, classic and original) into the larger story. The various sub-stories echoed the themes of the main story, and it was cool to see how they blended and enhanced each other. Of course, I've never ( Read more... )

I got this series by out of the library, thinking I could talk my six year old into letting me read it to her. (She's currently obsessed with the Rainbow Magic Fairies series). I was unsuccessful in convincing her, but it's just as well, because this is NOT a children's story.

It's a dark tale, full of sad, abused and unloved children. It's a story ( Read more... )

I knew I'd enjoy the artwork in Grand Guignol Orchestra, if nothing else. But I wasn't prepared to be sucked into the story and the character relationships as much as I was. So I ended up reading the first three volumes in twenty-four hours. There are five volumes in the series and the last two aren't released in English yet (there might be ( Read more... )

I’ve virtually read all the commercially available English volumes for Higurashi When They Cry (Higurashi no Naku Koro ni) and I’m enjoying it more than I expected I would, considering it is a manga based on a video game, is a warped tale of violence and horror, and the darn thing isn’t even a third of the way over yet as near as I can tell. Some ( Read more... )

Aki has done an amazing thing with Utahime…she made me consider a tsundere character as a favorite.  Normally I don’t go for hotheads, and characters about whom it can be said, “Can’t you do anything unless you have somebody to blame for your actions?” But I adore the main character of this tale, Kain.

( Utahime means )

Akabara Strauss is not your typical vampire, and Record of a Fallen Vampire is not your typical vampire manga. The story may as well be titled “Record of a Fallen King With Great Supernatural Powers.” And whatever you get out of the first few volumes, you may as well forget, because the whole story will be turned on its head several times by the ( Read more... )