underloved manga part 1
Or at least, they seem underloved. Then again, I think Kekkaishi gets a lot of love (right?), but pretty much no fandom. So maybe everybody already loves these and I haven't noticed.
(It's secretly just an excuse to babble about them anyway.) :D
Kieli
author: Kabei Yukako
artist: Teshirogi Shiori
This was originally a series of novels...and I have no idea whether the novels have been translated into English or not. Someday I'll have to go on a quest. Until then, there is the manga, which almost feels like an outline of the story. It's complete at two volumes, and you get to the end and say, "What, ALREADY?" But it's a great outline!
It's about a girl named Kieli, who sees ghosts, but that's okay, because she's sort of a little sociopath anyway. With living people, that is. She's completely sweet when it comes to dead people. On a day to day basis, though, she's the bitterest young teen in the whole of her world.
Her world isn't Earth, and it's been utterly taken over by The Church (think Spanish Inquisition Catholic). Kieli, true to form, doesn't believe in God. She thinks He got tired halfway between Earth and the new planet and just gave humanity up as a bad job. You might say she has a dim view of the Church.
She's not wrong. At some point, the Church felt the need for supersoldiers called the Undying, made from dead people and machinery and almost impossible to kill. I think this was during the 'crushing heathens' phase. Once the heathens were crushed, the Church had no further use for the Undying, and set about wiping them out. Of course, they missed a few.
Such as Harvey, who's been wandering around aimlessly for 80 years, smoking compulsively and hating everything.
The great thing about Harvey is that they haven't fallen into the trap of making him act young just because he looks young. He acts like the crotchety old man he is. He hardly looks any older than Kieli, but he has a very 'damn kids' attitude toward life. :D It is awesome.
The two of them start running around together because Kieli is so enthused about finding someone else who can see ghosts that she's of a mind to cling, and Harvey is basically too apathetic to stop her. So it's the story of the two of them and Harvey's haunted radio. *firmly recommends*
Until Death Do Us Part
author: Takashige Hiroshi
artist: Double-S (AKA Song Ji-Hyung, who is the author of the manhwa XS Hybrid, which Dark Horse is freaking REFUSING to translate/publish past volume 3, or else I'd be recommending it, too. *shakes fist at Dark Horse*)
This is about a young, blonde precog and her blind samurai bodyguard.
WAH HA HA.
God, it could have been terrible if the author hadn't had a sense of humor. But he does! He has an awesome sense of humor. And so does the artist (YAY), and between the two of them, I suspect that an unfair amount of fun is being had writing this.
Imaginary conversation between them:
T: Then there must be an exotic spy.
S: Can she be KICKASS?
T: Obviously she MUST be kickass.
S: Can she and Mamoru have an epic swordfight?
T: ...Plotwise, that wouldn't make any sense. But.
S: But she can still have a huge knife fight and steal guns and take out a bunch of guys and then stand there and be like, "Blood is sexy. What."
T: Well. Okay.
S: YES.
There is plot; it may even turn out to be good. Too soon to tell. The main characters belong to an organization that hunts down criminals. They TRY not to kill the criminals, but sometimes it seems like they're not trying all that hard. The members of this organization generally have relatives who were murdered, and their goal is to prevent this from happening to other families. They are angry. Any attempts to be rational about violent crime are...well. You can see where it goes a little awry.
There is excellent characterization. And there are gleeful fight scenes, and usually I don't care at all about fight scenes, but these were obviously created with such...glee...that I have to love them. :D
Haruka the precog is fun with the way she can be so calm, cool, collected and all-knowing, and then the next minute have a full-on tantrum that causes you to remember that, OH YEAH, she's twelve.
Mamoru the blind samurai is so made of awesome it's...really funny, actually. But in a great way. He's got a shady past, but if he feels badly about anything he's done, he's hiding it really well. His reasons for being in the crime-fighting organization are mysterious. Maybe it's just a good excuse to beat the crap out of people all the time. That said, he and Haruka have an eerie mutual understanding that no one else gets. Although there are moments, usually during tantrums, when he asks things like, "Have we been too easy on her? Is she going to turn out a brat because of us?"
Igawa the techie...he is the big brother, the voice of reason, the normal guy in a sea of madness. He is so my favorite. Living with Haruka and Mamoru means a lot of awkward silences, and bless him, he always tries to fix it. And everything else that's wrong. Everything on earth. *pats his head*
This is on onemanga, so that's lucky! Because there is no official translation yet.
Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
author: Otsuka Eiji (who also wrote MPD Psycho, which was so damn creepy that I couldn't face it after vol. 2)
artist: Yamazaki Housui (also the artist and author of Mail)
This is the story of five unemployable graduates from Buddhist College.
There is Sasaki, who's a great hacker, but has no interest in locking herself into the salaryman thing. Fair enough; that would suck for a man, and ten times as much for a woman. Why would she do that when she can just, who knows, steal credit card numbers or whatever it is that she does?
Numata is a dowser. Not for water, though. For corpses. One of those totally useful skills.
Makino studied abroad in America, learned embalming, then went back to Japan where pretty much everyone gets cremated. Oops.
Yata is a channeller, but the only thing he channels is this very loud alien named Kere Ellis who inhabits the sock puppet Yata always wears on his left hand. From there, he does such useful things as embarrass Yata in public every day.
Last but not least, Karatsu. Kere Ellis said it best: "My space alien senses reveal that you are the weirdest motherfucker here!" Karatsu talks to the dead.
They formed the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. They find dead bodies, ask them for their final requests, grant them if they can, and then demand payment. Stashes of valuable stuff, karmic payback on a lottery ticket, whatever.
Sasaki: "Listen, Mr. My-Karma-Is-So-Spotless, we're running a business here, not a charity. Did you check the corpse's credit?"
They are usually broke.
Despite the premise, the plot, and everything else about this story, it is hilarious. All the time.
That said, I've been constantly amazed that it gets published in Japan. I mean, by the end of volume 4, there had been unflattering references to the Rape of Nanking, the 731 experiments, and the offensiveness of the Yasukuni Shrine. And then there was a snarky comment by a cop turned social worker, who said something like, "Oh, you kids probably don't know about this, now that they're teaching patriotism instead of history in schools."
...SERIOUSLY?
Because my understanding was that it's STILL an enormous fight to get a passing reference to ANY of those things put into a textbook in Japan. But it's okay in manga? Which, let's face it, school kids are paying way more attention to than their textbooks?
I don't understand. But hey, you go, Eiji. You teach history in your manga. In your FACE, censors.
And those are the recs. There will be a part 2 sometime. Maybe even a part 3. There's a lot of underloved manga!