Sand Chronicles, Vol. 1
Publisher: VIZ Media Shojo Beat(January 1, 2008)
Language: English
Genre: Shojo/Romance
Rated: OT for Older Teen
US $8.99, CAN $10.99
ISBN-13: 978-1421514772
I have read some comics that have been melancholy, sometimes even downright depressing. They are generally stories that show how people act towards personal tragedy or how they deal with atrocities. Comic books like Maus and Years of the Elephant show us personal pain and tragedy, and do it in a very unique fashion. Sand Chronicles may not be the most unique setting (the first volume focuses on school age Japanese students, like so much other shojo), but it is remarkably poignant and oftentimes saddening piece of fiction.
The story focuses on Ann, who starts the manga as a 12-year old who has just moved back to her mother’s rural Japanese hometown after her father and mother divorce. Ann meets other neighborhood kids, Daigo, Fuji, and Shika, and things seem to be going well for her, until the unthinkable happens – Ann’s mother commits suicide.
I feel torn by this turn of events. In one hand, the possibility of her suicide is hinted at, and her breakdown is a slow, gradual process in the beginning chapters of the book that makes it believable. But it is unequivocally the most depressing moment I have yet to read in a shojo comic. I think that this is the general point of Sand Chronicles – it is a sad book, and it intrinsically deals with how people deal with sadness. Ann is dealt a pretty terrible hand in this first volume, and I think that she makes some very understandable mistakes, especially regarding her relationships, because of how her mother’s death overshadows her thoughts. It seems apparent that the relationships built in the first volume of Sand Chronicles cannot last, at least not in the forms in which they exist at the end of this volume. That would be making something very complicated far too simple.
The drama of these events, their effects on the human psyche, and the way that people deal with them, is a core feature of Sand Chronicles. Another is the way that Ashihara defrays her most serious situations with one-note jokes. And trust me, while I have dismissed other writers in the past for this same tendency, it works much better here, thanks to a well written adaptation, and for the sole fact that Sand Chronicles DESPERATELY needs these jokes. They are what keep the story from wallowing in the murk of despair and self-pity.
The art in Sand Chronicles is pretty standard fare, but it conveys all of the necessary emotion. I am reminded of We Were There and Monkey High!, but maybe with a little less fish-eye than We Were There and not quite the fluidity and bounce of Monkey High (all three series were/are published in Shogakukan’s Betsucomi, so this similarity may be on purpose).
Sand Chronicles is dramatic, and marked by sadness and worldliness that other shojo manga from Viz Media’s Shojo Beat line don’t manage to achieve. This is both a blessing and a curse; the series has the emotional gravitas to work out a mother’s death by suicide, but this gravitas also keeps the reading experience somber and heavy. Whether or not Sand Chronicles can stand out as a series past the first volume depends on its ability to develop a meaningful and reflective story that continues to acknowledge the drama and gravitas of the first volume. It will be interesting to see how volume two plays out.
Otomen is a shojo manga about a high school boy named Asuka who is proficient in kendo and other martial arts and spends most of his time at school trying to be the manliest man possible – except that on the inside, he loves crochet, sewing, and cooking. In this first volume, we see him fall in love with Ryo, a girl who is fairly manly.
Last week, I received the November edition of Yen Plus, and in it was a cute little story by George Alexopoulos called “Prom Night”, a Western independent artist/comics writer who has a 
