Tag Archives: Yen Press

Review: Doubt

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Doubt, Vol. 1
Written and Illustrated by Yoshiki Tonogai
Published by Yen Press
Genre: Horror/Suspense
400 pages | US $18.99 | CAN $20.99
ISBN-13: 978-0316245302

Werewolf is a game for 7-20 people. The idea is simple. You live in a village beset by evil lycanthropes who are eating townspeople left and right. Each turn is split into two phases, night and day. Two or more players are “werewolves” who have the power to remove a player from the game during the night phase. The villagers then (along with the werewolves) discuss the killing and it impact and choose a player to hang during the day phase. Any player hung divulges their identity. Werewolves win the game if only the werewolves remain at the end of the game, and the villagers win if they manage to hang all of the werewolves.

This, with a few exceptions, sounds a lot like the basis for the plot of Doubt, the new omnibus manga from Yen Press. Players of Rabbit Doubt “a cellphone game that has taken Japan by storm” meet to hang out and go to a karaoke room. While there, the players, who really aren’t important honestly, except one girl has the power to hypnotize people (surprise, this is the big reveal). Strangely, all the folks at karaoke are knocked out and arrive at an abandoned psychiatric facility where one of the players (the hypnosis girl) has been hung. One person in the facility is the killer, all the rest are rabbits. Now everyone gets to play a real game of Rabbit Doubt!

If you sensed some apathetic hand-waving in that last paragraph, you have keyed into the biggest issue with Doubt. By a large margin the biggest flaw with Doubt is its lack of well-defined characters. The only thing that passes for development is a collection of small character tropes that aren’t even exploited; there is nothing to differentiate each character from one another. Without differentiation, there is no unique behavior. So Werewolf (Rabbit Doubt) which is normally a very brainy game based on intuiting another person’s goals and will from their behavior and speech, is turned into a husk of itself. Everyone acts shady, everyone does weird stuff, everyone attacks other people for strange reasons, and no one’s personality shines through. Maybe that is the point, but it makes for dull reading. If a major character in a comic book dies and you are supposed to care, but don’t care at all? That’s a huge problem.

The art is gritty, and serviceable. It also has the tendency to give a lot of things away if you know where to look, which is obviously the point. You can miss stuff on the first read through if you aren’t paying enough attention to small details.

(BIG POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT IF I’M RIGHT BUT I HAVE LIKE A 0.001% CHANCE OF BEING WRONG ABOUT)

Another problem of note: the solution to the opening problem of “who is the werewolf” is so obvious. You don’t have to be a genius to see that the “dead” hypnotist is actually alive and controlling another character in the game. The hypnosis angle is far fetched at best, mostly because of reality and the kind of stimuli you would need to force people to murder a bunch of people, but we’ve seen it in media before (Jason Bourne is a great example in literature and film). Honestly though, who cares how the violence manifests itself? Without well informed characters, there’s not really a point.

(SPOILER DONE)

Basically Doubt needs a lot of things to make it work, and the best tool it has at its disposal is smartly created, well-developed, rational players. Without good players, Doubt isn’t a very interesting game. And metagaming the “who is the werewolf” problem the way this book does (see big spoiler alert for speculation I know I’m right about) is a cop out. What could have been a really fascinating book turned out to be severely disappointing in content, style, and delivery.

For Fans Of: Durdling horror movies where things are supposed to be logical but nice try no cigar, Saw 4, great ideas that whiff on execution
Final Verdict: Not Recommended

Review: Soul Eater Not! vol. 1

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Soul Eater Not!, written and illustrated by Atsushi Ohkubo
Publisher: Yen Press
Genre:  Slice of Life/Action/Fantasy
|203 pgs|$11.99 USA| $12.99 CDN|
ISBN-13: 978-0-316-21362-2

It makes sense to me that one of the most cutting edge manga in Yen Press‘ manga collection is Soul Eater Not! The series is published on the same day and date in the USA as it is in Japan, and is the only series that Yen Press releases with that schedule. In Japanese comics, it stands beside Rumiko Takahashi’s Rin-Ne from Viz Media as the only other mainstream* comic that is released day and date in both Asia and America. The reason why this makes sense to me has quite a bit to do with the characteristics of Soul Eater Not! - it is neither shojo, shonen, or moe, but rather a strange mix of all three.

The best way to describe Soul Eater Not! is that is not the same manga as Soul Eater, another popular release from Yen Manga. Written and illustrated by the same author and set in the same world, it even uses some of the same characters to tell a much different story. Tsugumi, our main character, is a girl enrolled in the DWMA, a international organization in charge of training meisters and “weapons” in order to make sure they are able to control their abilities and support the greater good. Think of it like a Tim Burton-flavored Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Students are categorized into two different groups – the EAT group, full of characters from the regular Soul Eater and badassery, and the NOT group, the mostly nonviolent portion of meisters and weapons at the school.

While Soul Eater is firmly in the camp of shonen with its ridiculous battles and the odd wars with witches (as far as I was reading at last mention), Soul Eater Not! is more slice of life fare, wherein its three female characters fit neatly into three separate manga tropes, do very cute things like work at a café, and go to class together, and more actiony things like decide what two people are going to be meister/weapon partners, fight some zombie-like interlopers, and protect each-other from marauding dorm-room evils. The tropes that the girls fall into are recognizable from manga like K-On!, but the action and potential love interest business also push it into both shonen and shojo territory. Frankly, it’s a bit of a everything, and because of that, it’s a pretty fresh read.

Ohkubo’s art is quite similar here when compared to Soul Eater, albeit a bit more refined. The volume itself has a lovely matte cover with glossy illustrated overlays. The pacing works for the odd mix of comedy and action, and the page layouts flow seamlessly from goofy moe-style humor to extreme action scene.

While I am not certain where Soul Eater Not! will head after this initial volume, I can say that it a fun, lighthearted popcorn read that offers a well formed fantasy world and hints of darkness lurking underneath a metric boat-load of cuteness. I found Soul Eater Not! fun and amusing, and having read some of the original Soul Eater, it’s a nice complement to Yen Press‘ more shonen-oriented flagship title.

For Fans Of: Soul Eater, a softer side of your favorite shonen beat-em-up
Final Verdict: Recommended

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*GEN Manga‘s releases are all same day and date, however the GEN Manga Anthology
 purposefully represents itself as cutting edge doujinshi manga.

Guest Post: Rescue Me! Kyo Kara Maoh!

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While I intend to get my Rescue Me! series back up and running in the near future, I recently received an email from a reader of Manga Widget asking if I would be interested in discussing one of her favorite manga that is currently in need of a rescue. After a little discussion, Teresa wrote a nice guest post below. If you have a license you want rescued and would like to have your writing featured at Manga Widget, please contact mangawidget *at* gmail *dot* com. Teresa tweets at @Vineyardelf.
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Kyo Kara Maoh! is a fantasy series originally licensed by Tokyopop, but remains unfinished in English after the company closed shop in 2011.  It started out as a series of light novels written by Tomo Takabayashi in 2000, and was adapted into a manga illustrated by Temari Matsumoto  and published in Kadokawa Shoten’s Asuka anthology. The first seven English volumes are available from the secondary market, but the series is still ongoing, with at least a 15th volume in Japan currently published.

The series details the story of Yuri Shibuya, a seemingly typical 15 year-old Japanese boy, as he is transported into an alternate universe where humans and demons coexist. It turns out that Yuri is actually not of our world, and is the next king of the demons.  The story follows Yuri as he tries to make sense of his new role, from making peace with the humans next door to handling his accidental engagement to another man. He is helped along the way by his advisors and his new fiancé, all of whom have their own ideas about his kingship and how he should rule. The focus of the story seems to be on the relationships between the new king and his advisors as they struggle to bring peace and prosperity to the land, and it’s engrossing to watch Yuri develop from the different perspectives of his advisors and guardians.

At first blush, Kyo Kara Maoh! seems to be a simple male harem fantasy story, but it actually has surprising depth.  Yuri is a genuinely likeable protagonist while still managing to have flaws. In fact, one of the most appealing parts of the story is how flawed but relatable and lovable the characters are. There are no perfect Prince Charmings in this story; even the most affable of the advisors has his secrets.

The story is also light and easy to read while still being engaging. I started to read the first volume with a healthy sense of skepticism, but was completely absorbed by the middle of the book.  Kyo Kara Maoh!  manages to be serious while still funny enough to keep me giggling out loud at the lighthearted parts, to the point that I was garnering stares from people nearby. I also am impressed at the way the male-male engagement has been handled so far in the first seven volumes. It’s an important part of the story that does not overwhelm the rest of the story, and it’s really heartwarming to see the relationship develop at a realistic pace outside of mere physical attraction.

I’ve been dying to continue Kyo Kara Maoh! ever since I learned that there were more volumes. Given their previous rescue of other old Tokyopop titles, I can definitely see thing being picked up by Yen Press, perhaps in collected volumes as the single ones are somewhat thin. Jaded as I am, it’s rare for me to get so absorbed, and I would hate to see a series with such broad appeal languish.

Rescue Me! The Stellar Six of Gingacho

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I know what you all are thinking – Alex hasn’t been updating his blog lately, so he probably forgot about some of his ongoing series of articles. Well, dear reader, I am happy to prove you wrong this week with an update to my Rescue Me! series, where, for the new reader, I talk about some of my favorite and incomplete manga series published by now defunct publishers. I try to explain the reasons I liked the series and the reasons why I think the series should be rescued (and sometimes even suggest what publisher might benefit from licensing the series). This week, I am taking a look at a really low-key shojo slice-of-life series, The Stellar Six of Gingacho (Kirameki Gingachou Shoutengai, キラメキ☆銀河町商店街).

For anyone interested in looking at older entries in the series, here are the links!

1. Stolen Hearts
2. The Secret Notes of Lady Kanoko
3. The Stellar Six of Gingacho
4. Skyblue Shore
5. Happy Café
6. Argentis Apothecarium
7. The Lapis Lazuli Crown
8. Suppli

The Stellar Six of Gingacho is a shojo manga series from author Yuuki Fujimoto, and it ran for a total of 10 volumes published in Hakusensha‘s Hana to Yume. It was part of Tokyopop‘s last wave of releases and licenses before Stu closed up shop and took the business out behind the woodshed. They managed to print two of the ten volumes en masse, and the third volume is somewhat of a manga rarity – copies do exist, but finding them is somewhat of a difficult proposition.

The series follows the lives of six friends whose parents all work at the Gingacho Street Market; each of the characters is a unique piece of a giant friendship puzzle. All together, they conquer their fears and the problems of the Street Market in their own way. As the group moves into middle school, they start to drift apart, but Mike (pronounced “Mee-kay”) is bound and determined to keep the group together. Mike is the lead of the series, and she is a food obsessed, emotional girl who is a lot of fun to read. Each of the other five street market kids is also really fun to read, and each has their own little quirks.

Other shojo “group of friends” manga certainly exists, but I have yet to come across a series that does it as well as The Stellar Six of Gingacho. It is a fun romp that still manages to capture a healthy dose of mono no aware and not be too dramatic about it. The Stellar Six of Gingacho is a great “growing up” story, and it’s a definite comfort manga – nothing too deep, but it certainly evokes a feeling of peace and contentment.

I would certainly love to continue reading this series, and I am certain a publisher like Yen Press would benefit from having this series in its stable. If no one bites to do a physical print run, I could certainly see JManga bring this to their digital storefront. It is a fun series that needs to find a new home.

Review: Bunny Drop, Vol. 1-3

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Bunny Drop Vol. 3
Written and Illustrated by Yumi Unita
Publsiher: Yen Press
Age Rating: Teen
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Price: $12.99 ($14.50 CAN)
ISBN: 978-0-7595-3120-8

I’ve been fairly candid in the past about mentioning my love for Bunny Drop, a Yen Press title with a twice-yearly release. The series so far has been an absolute delight to read. I’ve neglected reviewing the first two volumes, so I will try to rectify that issue with a review of the third volume.

Bunny Drop, for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, is the story of a single man who adopts his grandfather’s illegitimate child after he passes away. Daikichi, a salaryman who works in sales at a small company, now has the responsibility of taking care of this child, Rin. The entire process isn’t trivialized – we see Daikichi go through the steps of getting Rin signed up for schools, getting her a desk, going shopping for her, and all the while stepping down from a much busier position at work to a lower paying job that gives him more freedom so that he can make sure to pick up Rin from school and be there for her. Bunny Drop has its funny moments, but they are more subtle, and more gentle than the similar Yotsuba&!.

Daikichi also attempts to discover who Rin’s birth mother is, and finds out piece by piece who she is, and arranges a meeting with her to discuss Rin’s future. Subsequent meetings help delve into Rin’s life before she was adopted, and this interaction seems to add a certain weightiness to the entire book. While it would seem natural to heap anger and blame on Rin’s mother for abandoning her child, the story is much more complex. Unita does not let her story become so simple as to allow readers to heedlessly take sides –like real life, both sides have their own stories.

Unita seems determined to create a cast of memorable, true to life characters, and has done really well with Bunny Drop. We get to see Daikichi’s co-workers and the other single mom who’s son hangs out with Rin quite a bit. We see Daikichi deal with Rin’s birth mother, and the advances of a manipulative newbie at his workplace. The whole story is so… complete that it is hard to remember  at times that Rin and Daikichi are not real people.

Another interesting thing about Bunny Drop is the unconventional art style. Unita uses a light hand when illustrating, and most panels are devoid of any shading or shadow – instead, she uses textures and screen tone in forms, which gives the art a very unique look compared to most shojo or josei manga. This doesn’t make the book look unprofessional or poorly illustrated – in fact, it is quite the opposite. Bunny Drop looks beautiful, and definitely has a distinctive style virtually unmatched in Japanese comics.

I have heard things are about to drastically change for this series, so I hope that further volumes retain the simple charm of the first three volumes. Bunny Drop, so far, is an emotionally honest comic that looks at the challenges and rewards of adoption and parenthood – I highly recommend these first three volumes. They are a refreshing change of pace from super powers and ninja tabi.

Manga Widget Investigates: Barakamon

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My birthday is on a Monday this year (March 28th if anyone wants to get me something!) which means new comics are released the day after my birthday. That means that I get a late birthday present from Yen Press – the third volume of Bunny Drop by Yumi Unita will be available to purchase on the 29th. I have been looking forward to this book for a while now, so I’m glad to get my hands on the next volume. What does this have to do with Manga Widget Investigates? Why, the subject matter, of course!

Bunny Drop is a manga about an adult man and his interactions with a young child. Yen Press has multiple series (Bunny Drop, Yotsuba&!) that fit into this odd category. Since Yen Press has a corner on both the “adult men and their fatherly interactions with female children,” as well as the corner on all of Square Enix‘s titles, I thought I might look around for another series that might fit into their catalog – and have I found it. This week we’re going to look at a manga series called Barakamon.

Barakamon is a slice of life manga written and illustrated by Satsuki Yoshino about a haughty young calligrapher who goes into self-exile after attacking another calligrapher who criticizes his work. After arriving at a small rural island, our protagonist meets all the island folk and settles into a life of “country living.” He meets a little girl who is spectacularly interested in this new stranger (and of course, using his house as a fort to play in), and apparently drives a lot of the humor of the series. His acclamation to this environment and his befriending of the local children and families is the source for what I am sure are antics galore.

Barakamon is currently published in Gangan Online, and online effort that Square Enix is doing, and was originally published Gangan Powered. Interestingly enough, the Gangan anthologies are a source for much of Yen Press’ material. Barakamon, in Gangan Powered, was published alongside content like Hero Tales, Higurashi: When They Cry, Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime, and video game-inspired titles.

Currently the series is available online, and you can read it (in Japanese) at this link.  The more information can be found (and presumably run through Google Translate, if you are so inclined) at this link.

As we get into license announcement season, I’m keeping Barakamon on my list. It looks like a fun and cute slice-of-life comedy that is similar to Bunny Drop, and Yotsuba&!, which, if you think about it, is probably the best praise I can give a series.

Talking Points: What Is Your Favorite Manga?

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I thought we would be a bit different today here at Manga Widget by asking a very simple question that generally takes a bit of thinking – what manga series do you consider your favorite?

For a bibliophile like myself, that is a hard question to answer, because I tend to categorize what I read. I love some slapstick humor and a bit of epic fighting, so One Piece is a lot of fun, but at the same time, I really enjoy progressing, difficult, adult relationships, so Bunny Drop is also really good.

Slice of life manga is my favorite type of story, and of all the manga series I read, I do have one clear favorite, which is Cross Game by Mitsuru Adachi. The second omnibus from Viz Media really stole my heart; after the end of the volume, I knew that I would be hooked until the end. This is only a recent favorite; as we grow and change, so do our favorites. For the longest time Negima! was my favorite series for its rambunctious cast, epic battles, and beautiful illustration.

Things gets even more complicated when you start asking which authors you like best. Certainly I like Mitsuru Adachi, but he only has one series in print right now, and we haven’t really gotten a good representation of his work published in the USA. With that in mind, I am a huge fan of Natsumi Ono, Jiro Taniguchi, and Fumi Yoshinaga, but I am also developing a taste for Kan Takahama, whose work has been published by Fanfare / Ponent Mon.

Now that I’ve bared it all for you to see, it is your turn! Let’s talk – what manga series do you call your favorite? What authors do you call your favorites?

Review: Sasameke, Vol. 1

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You have to give a book publisher a little credit, at times. It is often hard to pick out winners in the English language – having 100% success with all the titles you print seems absurd. I would even be willing to admit that it seems that it might, at times, be doubly hard to pick out a winner that’s printed in Japanese.

Still, my open-mindedness about publishing wins and losses does not extend so far as to include the travesty that is Sasameke.

To put it frankly, and not all that delicately – this shit is horrid.

The introduction of the book seems fine, if a little slow – Rakuichi Nagahama, a soccer whiz in elementary transfers to Italy because of his dad’s work (everyone around town thinks it is for a soccer scholarship) and then comes back from Italy in junior high. Now everyone wants him to play soccer, and he just wants to hang out. Friends try to persuade him to play, and finally he’s blackmailed into joining the soccer team. Mix in some goofy antics from a few weird students, a soccer field that doubles as a graveyard, and some childhood rivalries, and you’ll get a fun soccer shonen manga!

Except, that’s exactly NOT what Sasameke is, although I am sure that was how it was pitched to publishers before they agreed to license it. The reason? The characters. They come in two different flavors, incomprehensible or boring, and neither is very pleasant. Some characters are both boring and incomprehensible.  Their trials and tribulations are dull at best and bizarre at worst. At one point Rakuichi is in the library avoiding soccer practice, and gets accused of stealing someone’s gachapon toys. Violent chase scene occurs. This is one of the more “normal” events in the book.

To make matters worse, later on in the book, characters are added that make it go even further off the wall. Why are you adding ninjas to this soccer story again? Oh, right, because you’re bad at it. Instead of building a story around the basics of sport and competition, or even around the emotional state of the main character as he learns to love soccer again, author Ryuji Gotsubo just throws in random crap, passes it off as funny, and moves on. In the midst of the bizarre, we find out that, well, it’s pretty hard to connect with a main character that doesn’t give a crap about anything or even want to play soccer in a soccer manga.

The plot is a mix of dull and tedious, which is mostly due to the fact that all the characters are poorly written, and nothing feels natural at all. Things that happen throughout the book just seem surreal, not necessarily because that was the point, but because there was never any time to originally suspend your disbelief. I found myself in multiple parts of the book asking, what the hell just happened? Even more disturbing, half of those times, I couldn’t figure it out.

Additionally, the art is just as lazy as the writing. The characters are illustrated very poorly, and scenes are constructed haphazardly. The comic flows like a river of molasses, and is difficult to read. In addition to all the main text, there are 3-4 multiple side conversations or comments going on in each panel. Why are these even there? Have you ever heard of self-editing? This by itself would make any book hard to read, but add one of the dullest plots I’ve ever seen on top of that, and you will be able to see why I was dragging myself through the last 75 pages to finish so that I could write this review.

To summarize: Bad plot, horrid writing, bad characters, poor illustration, awful pacing, and disappointing panel construction. That’s like the hole-in-one of things not to do in comics.

Yen Press, there is still time. You have until June to pull this from your publishing line up. Sometimes we need to recognize when a loss is a loss, and when it’s time to give something up. Publishing Sasameke volume two is one of those times. You didn’t pick a winner, but don’t waste your hard-earned money by finishing this series. It is absolutely terrible. Readers, the same for you. Don’t waste your hard earned entertainment money on this stinker of a series. You will regret it.

This review is based on a complimentary copy provided by the publisher.

Review: Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy

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When it comes to Fumi Yoshinaga, I’m fairly used to excellent manga. You could make a convincing argument that Ooku: the Hidden Chambers is one of the best titles, if not the best title in Viz Media’s Sig IKKI line (I might argue that Children of the Sea is better, but I digress). Likewise All My Darling Daughters and Antique Bakery offer a lot of great stories from one of the best mangaka currently in print in English.

Yoshinaga is also one of the few writers that is licensed by multiple publishers here in the US. Digital Manga Publishing was the first to pick up her work, while Viz followed shortly behind. Even TokyoPop is in on the game, having published some of her BL work in their Blu Line. Now, Yen Press has joined the crowd to bring us a one-shot volume of foodie manga titled Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy.

Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy is part autobiography, part restaurant review.The main character, Y-naga (yes, really) is a mangaka who draws BL comics, and spends almost all the time she isn’t sleeping or working out eating food with friends. Her fellow mangaka, foodie friends, assistants, and previous roommates all meet at nice restaurants and eat while Y-naga expounds on the virtues of young gizzard shad or shira-yaki.

One of the things I found most interesting about Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy was that it functions as a restaurant guide. It gives you practical advice about places to eat in Tokyo, and tells you what to expect when you eat there. The afterwards to each chapter give you a little map to help you find the restaurant, along with directions, parking availability, and operating hours. Yoshinaga also gives advice about portions, select foods to eat, and whether or not the restaurant takes reservations.

While this book might be a helpful English guide to cuisine in Tokyo, that portion of the book is almost useless to the non-traveling manga reader. Still, that portion of this book is definitely a nice showcase for Yoshinaga’s ability to illustrate food, although at some places, that ability seems varied. Her depictions of foods in chapters #9 and #12 are very well illustrated, but the sushi in chapter #4 is a bit lacking. This is fairly nit-picky, but important in a food-based manga.

On Twitter, a few manga reviewers said that they didn’t care at all about the food portion of the manga, and focused solely on the character interactions. For readers not interested in foods, this is where any enjoyment, and perhaps the sole enjoyment, of Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy comes from. Yoshinaga, as always, is adept at portraying characters that interact in a way that seems natural and polished without meaning to. It was very easy to move through this manga, even when people were spouting off about the true wonder of the food they were enjoying.

I do have issues with Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy. First, I am not at all pleased by the way Y-naga and other characters talk about food. Almost every character in Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy has moments when they fill an entire panel full of food text. This happens a bit in Oishinbo, another foodie manga, but in this case, Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy has taken the act of the monologue to a new extreme.

Another thing I noticed is that it feels as if Yoshinaga wants to talk about her favorite foods, has written a manga to detail them, but she doesn’t want to feel like she’s teaching students or talking down to people. She spends the rest of her time drawing herself as an ugly, frumpy cartoonist or writes insults into her friends dialogue. This is… bizarrely psychological, and not necessarily pleasant.

Stepping away from the content for bit, Yen Press has shown that it has what it takes to deliver high-quality comics. Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy is excellently produced, and has high ink and paper quality. The color insert at the front of the book was a nice touch which I enjoyed.

Overall, I think that Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy is a fine showcase of Yoshinaga’s ability to write and create good manga, but because of the narrow way that its subject matter is presented, I can’t give this book two thumbs up. If you are looking for a comic that can show you a few good places to eat in Tokyo, then Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy is a must-have. For everyone else, this book delivers a brief look into the world of Fumi Yoshinaga, and her food escapades, but doesn’t deliver excellence.

This review is based on a copy of the book provided by the publisher.

Review: Nabari no Ou, Volume 5

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When we last left our manga reviewing hero, he had tested his manga reviewing mettle with the unfortunate second, third, and fourth volumes of Nabari no Ou, a series that started with promise, but managed to drag itself down with awkward plotting and irrelevant characters. From last episode:

“Instead of knowing more, and getting a sense of the seriousness of the storyline and the character interactions, we have very little information to work with. What happens is that instead of carrying the story, the characters collapse into it… While Nabari no Ou will initially amuse you, its shoddy character development can’t sustain a complex plot into later volumes.”

Slaying the foul beast, our hero walks strides purposefully towards Vertical City and meets the disturbing but beautiful Ayako… But then! A new challenger appears – Nabari no Ou volume five!

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Nabari no Ou is certainly a confusing manga. The introduction to the series was fine, the second volume was okay, but by the third and fourth volumes, the series had reached a standstill in what looked to be my trash compactor. I’m sure that some intervening editor for GFantasy (the Square Enix magazine Nabari no Ou ran in) figured out that at the pace Nabari no Ou was going, by volume five, things were going to be an absolute train wreck.

Miraculously, the fifth volume sidesteps the main storyline for a majority of the volume to take a look at the background of a few side characters, developing their personalities and back stories. It’s a good change of pace, because it allows what is good about the series to really breathe again – the wit of character interaction, the strong, steady storytelling, and Nabari no Ou’s focus on the position that ninjas hold in conjunction with the real world.

This flashback content also allows us to look at how contentious things are in the ninja world, and gives us a more profound respect for Raikou, who up until now has been a fairly lame, mystifying antagonist and agent for the Grey Wolves. The flashback and content following it do muddy the waters a bit about who we really ought to be rooting for – one of Nabari no Ou’s distinct traits is its ever-changing look at who the protagonists are and who the antagonists are. While the character writing in previous volumes wasn’t strong enough to portray this trait adequately, volume five has significantly stronger writing, and it’s a great feature for a series that is so deeply rooted in the grey area between what is right and wrong.

Volume five also manages to patch up some of the issues I’ve had with volumes two, three, and four. The interaction near the end of the volume between Yoite and Miharu is extremely telling, and probably some of the best character writing I’ve seen in the series thus far. Their plotting and planning to control the Shinra Banshou are cleared away momentarily by their interaction with Hanai. This scene is very interesting because it gives us another look at Yoite and what is motivating him, and it allows us to get under the rock-hard skin of Miharu, if only for a moment.

I keep expecting the main character, Miharu, to break down. At some point, this is going to have to happen. His interaction with the Shinra Banshou in the first volume was a fairly large give-away that he will have to face his past at some point, and I’m wondering whether or not his plan with Yoite will accelerate this process. The very fact that I am considering these plot points goes even further to prove that the fifth volume is much better written than any of the first four books.

The art in its wispy, lanky style, does the trick for this series, but it doesn’t necessarily impress me. Backgrounds could be more detailed, but this series does not stand out to me as a work that needs help in the art department. Yen Press’ treatment of the series is much like their other work; I prefer their paper and ink to that of Viz Media, and I think the extra dollar goes a long way in making a book more durable in the long term. While private collectors may not care as much, this is a good thing for libraries, who will not have to replace their copies as often due to “too much love.”

Overall, I think that the fifth volume of Nabari no Ou is leaps and bounds better than the last three volumes of the series, but I won’t say that it is out of the woods yet. If the character development and pacing continue like the fifth volume, Nabari no Ou should be a fun shonen read for the rest of its 14 volumes. If not – well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

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As our hero exits the battlefield, another foe looms in the distance. Is our hero courageous, or is he just stupid? Will he survive another defeat at the hands of a poorly written shonen series? Can he make it until the publication of the next volume of Cross Game? Find out on next week’s program!