Manga/Book Post
I did nearly nothing productive this weekend. This is a bad way to start the school year, but I'm justifying it to myself as relaxation after an insanely intense week. Anyway, here's what I've been wasting my time with:
Claymore
I picked up the Claymore manga (by Norihiro Yagi) to fill in the void that Double Arts' cancellation created in my manga reading list. (*sniff* I'll miss you, Arts!).
The Wiki description for Claymore isn't kidding when it says it's a dark fantasy series. It begins with a monster-of-the-week format, introducing the main character, Clare, as a super-badass Claymore-wielding (hence the name) part-youma-part-human who goes around mopping up bad youma that are eating people's guts. The series is rife with powerful women, since only girls seem to survive the youma-human hybridization process that created the Claymores.
Claymore's initial concept is like a darker version of Bleach: youma disguise themselves by eating one family member's brains and then masquerading as the unfortunate soul in order to eat the rest of the family, and there's no way for ordinary humans to tell them apart. (Hollows were just merely invisible.) That ups the psychological angst compared to Hollows considerably.
Like Bleach, the series quickly focuses its attention on conflicts within the Claymores' Organization, including the shady motives of the higher-ups and the difficulties posed by the Claymores' youma-human hybridization. Unlike Bleach, everything's far darker and nastier - main characters die shocking, bloody, and sometimes torturous deaths; nearly everyone loses a limb at some point (though they're capable of regeneration); and the motives of the Organization are far darker than Soul Society's were.
Yagi-sensei's art is pretty good, though he has some trouble creating unique faces, so most characters can only be differentiated by their hairstyles. He's clearly better at depicting women than men, since the men often look creepy, twelve yrs old, or both, even when he's trying to portray them sympathetically. He is also very much obsessed with boobs - boobs on Claymores, boobs on monsters, boobs anywhere he can put them. If he can draw a woman naked, he will. The back inner cover art for Claymore volumes is quite scandalous, since it usually features a woman in some state of near-undress posing with a sword/katana. How on earth you can buy this in public and not be mistaken for a perv is beyond me. If you buy this in public, I guess the key is to leave the book jacket on and run for it.
There is a Claymore anime, but I don't feel like picking it up for the simple reason that the ending diverges from the manga one (they caught up quite quickly since it's a monthly series).
For some reason I'm a Jump girl - Claymore is published in Monthly Shonen Jump, which means long waits for a Claymore fix, but perhaps more mercy to the mangaka than the Weekly Jump schedule allows.
Bakuman
I picked Bakuman up out of curiosity, because it's the latest from the creators of Death Note, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. Not much of a Death Note fan, but I found it interesting and the art amazing, so I wanted to see what tricks these two had up their sleeves again.
I honestly think the madly talented Obata-sensei ought to go illustrate for someone less neurotic than Ohba-sensei is - imagine never meeting your collaborator in person! Based on the limited leaks about Ohba, it seems like Death Note was more autobiographical than I'd expect: Ohba as a paranoid wannabe "L," with the whole hidden identity/gender, never appearing in public, sitting on chairs with feet up thing.
Seems like Death Note wasn't autobiographical enough, though, so now Ohba/Obata-senseis have teamed up again for Bakuman, a series about some 9th graders who want to become mangaka. It's fairly new, so there are only 7 chapters out as of now, but I'm already disappointed.
- Sappy Romance: It seems like there's a good reason Ohba only wrote about Light's shallow, pragmatic romantic relationships in Death Note: he's almost incapable of writing a realistic one. -_-;; The romance in Bakuman tends toward *ultra*-romantic, with a boy and girl who have never spoken before being madly in love with each other, and insisting on corresponding exclusively via e-mail despite sitting practically next to each other in class! Of course, the correspondence hasn't even taken off yet, because the rule forbids him from even getting her e-mail via another means first. >.< Ohba-sensei hasn't ascertained his gender in public, but I swear he must be a guy, because only (inexperienced) men write romantic drivel like this.
- Middling Art: The art in Bakuman is not quite on the same level as that of Death Note - instead of being wowed by ultra-realism like the DN chapter cover with Naomi's slick leather jacket, I'm more disappointed at how scratchy the characters look. Obata-sensei is very much able to come up with smooth, intriguing character designs, but the kids in Bakuman aren't too special-looking. Mashiro-kun looks like a nerdy little brother of the main character in the game Persona 3 to me.
- Really. Unrealistic. Plotting: Death Note characters' impulses seemed to come out of nowhere sometimes, but at least there was some semblance of reason/reasonability to their decisions and subsequent plot developments. In Bakuman it's totally random - "I've never spoken to you ever before, but I waited a few hours here for you, since I happened to see your random doodles, and I think they're really awesome and so YOU MUST WRITE A MANGA WITH ME OR I'LL NEVER LEAVE YOU ALONE!" Eeesh. And that's just the beginning! Unlike DN, whose realism gets the benefit of the doubt due to the supernatural premise in the first place, Bakuman's supposed to be taking place in the Real World, and stuff just doesn't work that way in reality.
- Meta Like Whoa: It's a series in Jump about people who are obsessed with Jump. (*yawn* Gintama did that, and much more humorously too.) To make it worse, it's a series in Jump about people who are hoping to be published in Jump, which incessantly flatters Jump ("best manga in the world" yada blah). And what's their big strategy? "Let's copy what Jump series are already doing!" (Is that really creativity?!)
I highly doubt you can get an appointment with an editor just by phoning in and saying, "Hi I'm liek some middle schooler with a random manga idea," so I do hope kids don't take Bakuman all seriously, and then get their hopes crushed when the Shueisha folks send reality crashing down on them. Either way, I most likely won't hear about it, because it's unlikely I'll keep reading unless I'm deathly bored. If Jump editors decide to let Bakuman live but axed Double Arts, then I'm going to write to them in protest.
Neil Gaiman's American Gods
I've never read anything by Gaiman before, so when I randomly stumbled upon an eBook of American Gods, I decided to take the plunge. The premise is quite interesting, but Gaiman's writing is what makes it exceptional - smooth, clear, quirky, and very realistic when it comes to depicting human emotion. There's some scary stuff that happens, but the calm, detached way Gaiman presents all of it makes you temporarily numb - it's only when you sit back and think about it that you realize how disturbing some of it is.
And now some randomness...
Thank you tvtropes for finally explaining what that Thing That Goes Doink is!
I've always wondered what that bamboo thing that goes "doink" is. It's been in > 70% of the series I've watched - Naruto, Bleach, Code Geass, Gintama, and Samurai Champloo to name a few. I always knew it connoted "really wealthy/traditional Japanese folks," but I didn't know what it was called or what it was for. Still, shishi-odoshi (deer-scare) sounds like a weird name - why would deer run away from a periodic "doink"? And if it's really to scare away deer, then why does Shikamaru's family in Naruto have one when the entire Nara clan specializes in funky deer medicine/jutsu?
Anyway, now I know, and I can even find links online to build one for myself someday as a finishing touch to my future suburban McMansion.
Claymore
I picked up the Claymore manga (by Norihiro Yagi) to fill in the void that Double Arts' cancellation created in my manga reading list. (*sniff* I'll miss you, Arts!).
The Wiki description for Claymore isn't kidding when it says it's a dark fantasy series. It begins with a monster-of-the-week format, introducing the main character, Clare, as a super-badass Claymore-wielding (hence the name) part-youma-part-human who goes around mopping up bad youma that are eating people's guts. The series is rife with powerful women, since only girls seem to survive the youma-human hybridization process that created the Claymores.
Claymore's initial concept is like a darker version of Bleach: youma disguise themselves by eating one family member's brains and then masquerading as the unfortunate soul in order to eat the rest of the family, and there's no way for ordinary humans to tell them apart. (Hollows were just merely invisible.) That ups the psychological angst compared to Hollows considerably.
Like Bleach, the series quickly focuses its attention on conflicts within the Claymores' Organization, including the shady motives of the higher-ups and the difficulties posed by the Claymores' youma-human hybridization. Unlike Bleach, everything's far darker and nastier - main characters die shocking, bloody, and sometimes torturous deaths; nearly everyone loses a limb at some point (though they're capable of regeneration); and the motives of the Organization are far darker than Soul Society's were.
Yagi-sensei's art is pretty good, though he has some trouble creating unique faces, so most characters can only be differentiated by their hairstyles. He's clearly better at depicting women than men, since the men often look creepy, twelve yrs old, or both, even when he's trying to portray them sympathetically. He is also very much obsessed with boobs - boobs on Claymores, boobs on monsters, boobs anywhere he can put them. If he can draw a woman naked, he will. The back inner cover art for Claymore volumes is quite scandalous, since it usually features a woman in some state of near-undress posing with a sword/katana. How on earth you can buy this in public and not be mistaken for a perv is beyond me. If you buy this in public, I guess the key is to leave the book jacket on and run for it.
There is a Claymore anime, but I don't feel like picking it up for the simple reason that the ending diverges from the manga one (they caught up quite quickly since it's a monthly series).
For some reason I'm a Jump girl - Claymore is published in Monthly Shonen Jump, which means long waits for a Claymore fix, but perhaps more mercy to the mangaka than the Weekly Jump schedule allows.
Bakuman
I picked Bakuman up out of curiosity, because it's the latest from the creators of Death Note, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. Not much of a Death Note fan, but I found it interesting and the art amazing, so I wanted to see what tricks these two had up their sleeves again.
I honestly think the madly talented Obata-sensei ought to go illustrate for someone less neurotic than Ohba-sensei is - imagine never meeting your collaborator in person! Based on the limited leaks about Ohba, it seems like Death Note was more autobiographical than I'd expect: Ohba as a paranoid wannabe "L," with the whole hidden identity/gender, never appearing in public, sitting on chairs with feet up thing.
Seems like Death Note wasn't autobiographical enough, though, so now Ohba/Obata-senseis have teamed up again for Bakuman, a series about some 9th graders who want to become mangaka. It's fairly new, so there are only 7 chapters out as of now, but I'm already disappointed.
- Sappy Romance: It seems like there's a good reason Ohba only wrote about Light's shallow, pragmatic romantic relationships in Death Note: he's almost incapable of writing a realistic one. -_-;; The romance in Bakuman tends toward *ultra*-romantic, with a boy and girl who have never spoken before being madly in love with each other, and insisting on corresponding exclusively via e-mail despite sitting practically next to each other in class! Of course, the correspondence hasn't even taken off yet, because the rule forbids him from even getting her e-mail via another means first. >.< Ohba-sensei hasn't ascertained his gender in public, but I swear he must be a guy, because only (inexperienced) men write romantic drivel like this.
- Middling Art: The art in Bakuman is not quite on the same level as that of Death Note - instead of being wowed by ultra-realism like the DN chapter cover with Naomi's slick leather jacket, I'm more disappointed at how scratchy the characters look. Obata-sensei is very much able to come up with smooth, intriguing character designs, but the kids in Bakuman aren't too special-looking. Mashiro-kun looks like a nerdy little brother of the main character in the game Persona 3 to me.
- Really. Unrealistic. Plotting: Death Note characters' impulses seemed to come out of nowhere sometimes, but at least there was some semblance of reason/reasonability to their decisions and subsequent plot developments. In Bakuman it's totally random - "I've never spoken to you ever before, but I waited a few hours here for you, since I happened to see your random doodles, and I think they're really awesome and so YOU MUST WRITE A MANGA WITH ME OR I'LL NEVER LEAVE YOU ALONE!" Eeesh. And that's just the beginning! Unlike DN, whose realism gets the benefit of the doubt due to the supernatural premise in the first place, Bakuman's supposed to be taking place in the Real World, and stuff just doesn't work that way in reality.
- Meta Like Whoa: It's a series in Jump about people who are obsessed with Jump. (*yawn* Gintama did that, and much more humorously too.) To make it worse, it's a series in Jump about people who are hoping to be published in Jump, which incessantly flatters Jump ("best manga in the world" yada blah). And what's their big strategy? "Let's copy what Jump series are already doing!" (Is that really creativity?!)
I highly doubt you can get an appointment with an editor just by phoning in and saying, "Hi I'm liek some middle schooler with a random manga idea," so I do hope kids don't take Bakuman all seriously, and then get their hopes crushed when the Shueisha folks send reality crashing down on them. Either way, I most likely won't hear about it, because it's unlikely I'll keep reading unless I'm deathly bored. If Jump editors decide to let Bakuman live but axed Double Arts, then I'm going to write to them in protest.
Neil Gaiman's American Gods
I've never read anything by Gaiman before, so when I randomly stumbled upon an eBook of American Gods, I decided to take the plunge. The premise is quite interesting, but Gaiman's writing is what makes it exceptional - smooth, clear, quirky, and very realistic when it comes to depicting human emotion. There's some scary stuff that happens, but the calm, detached way Gaiman presents all of it makes you temporarily numb - it's only when you sit back and think about it that you realize how disturbing some of it is.
And now some randomness...
Thank you tvtropes for finally explaining what that Thing That Goes Doink is!
I've always wondered what that bamboo thing that goes "doink" is. It's been in > 70% of the series I've watched - Naruto, Bleach, Code Geass, Gintama, and Samurai Champloo to name a few. I always knew it connoted "really wealthy/traditional Japanese folks," but I didn't know what it was called or what it was for. Still, shishi-odoshi (deer-scare) sounds like a weird name - why would deer run away from a periodic "doink"? And if it's really to scare away deer, then why does Shikamaru's family in Naruto have one when the entire Nara clan specializes in funky deer medicine/jutsu?
Anyway, now I know, and I can even find links online to build one for myself someday as a finishing touch to my future suburban McMansion.