April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers

Manga/manwha


Tezuka Osamu: Phoenix vol. 3: Yamato/Space, and Phoenix vol. 5: Resurrection
(the latter in particular is kind of sticking with me. The former was surprisingly creepy.

Tangent: one of the two and a half panels I attended at Anime Boston was The Absolute Worst of Osamu Tezuka, which featured some entertainingly bad stuff, and some stuff that was actually really good. The intro to Phoenix 27somethingsomething, for instance: the female robot who turns into all sorts of random mecha shit in a sexually charged sequence--it's certainly weird as hell and laden with all kinds of...of...things, but it's gorgeously choreographed and animated, and there's a real sense of intent there; I'd love to see it unpacked. Or the massive box-office flop that was Cleopatra--I'd love, love, love to see it with some decent subtitles, by the way--yes, the rotoscoping was hideous and ill-concieved, but the opening past sequence was one of the most lush, colorful, energized pieces of 70s animation I've seen in awhile. And, so, Caesar was blue and there were anachronistic bathroom jokes. This is Tezuka. You're surprised? That was how Tezuka rolled, bitch).


Tezuka Osamu: Black Jack vols. 2-3
(dingos did not eat his kidneys!).


Yamamoto Naoki: Dance Till Tomorrow vols. 3-5
(fuck, VIZ did great work way back in the day; this is such a cool title, the likes of which you don't see anymore--silly, sexy, adult characters with a peculiar blend of cleverness and manipulativeness and heart that always makes me think of the 80s, and that surprising undercurrent genuine emotion that makes it as affectingly romantic as the sweetest, sincerest shoujo. The translation in this thing thrills me--it's so very funny and clever and engrossing. It reminds me of the experience of reading Ranma 1/2 and Maison Ikkoku; witty language to match the witty art. I miss that. I wish it wasn't so unfashionable now to actually fucking adapt a translation so that it can convey the spirit of the material along with the literal meaning. Speaking of which,)


Otsuka Eiji, writer, Yamazaki Housui, artist: Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service vol. 8
(I don't want to downplay the fundamental merits of this title, which are numerous, but it occurred to me during the con, as I pawed through the library's thousand+ books, more than half of which I'd probably hand-picked, that one of the great pleasures of Kurosagi is the quality of the translation: it's witty and lively and the English is the natural, conversational English of fluent native speakers. That's so uncommon as to really stand out, and I think that's a large part of its appeal. Dark Horse, Carl Gustav Horn, I love your work).


Yozaburo Kanari, story, Sato Fumiya, art: The Kindaichi Case Files: The Mummy's Curse
(OMG retsuko, you're right, this is the most absurd revenge plot imaginable. Just...just shoot them, Jesus Christ, stab them, poison them, garrote them. Hell, hack them up with an ax; it'd be more straightforward.

By the way, at the Edogawa Ranpo panel at Anime Boston, the panelist, who clearly knew his stuff otherwise, thought the Kindaichi Case Files were actually adaptations of Kosuke Kindaichi stories. Presumably, he hadn't read them, since I think they have even more tenuous a connection to the original Kindaichi than The Beekeeper's Apprentice has to Sherlock Holmes. Not that this matters in the slightest. It was a decent panel, although I knew the subject well enough that I didn't learn much that was new to me, and the audience--a particularly stereotypical crowd of male otaku, all six of them, one of whom repeatedly derailed the panel by sharing his obsession with Nazis--were a little creepy. And dammit, they stank. I felt genuinely uncomfortable in the room because of them).


Nakamura: Skip*Beat vols. 16-17
(I already gushed in meganbmoore's journal about these. You know, the art in these things is nothing to write home about, and the pacing is too slow--less happens in a whole volume than in a single chapter of Nana--but by god, Kyoko is one of the best female characters I've ever run across in manga. The author permits her a really unique kind of inner strength, something I'm just not used to seeing in manga--a sharpness that, once exposed, isn't dulled for anything, not even for the object of admiration).


Yazawa Ai: Nana vol. 16
(but, thanks to an overly enthusiastic scanlations-reading fan, I am now spoiled for a certain major event beyond this volume. Dammit. Oh well, I can't claim I saw it coming, but I can't claim to be surprised, either.

Speculate in the comments on what that spoiler might be, and I will eat your kidneys like a ravenous dingo.

I'm also spoiled for every major character death in Naruto in the last twenty volumes, which also ticks me off, but I admit that being 20 volumes behind the English adaptation and all, I haven't got much grounds for complaint there).


Kye Young Chon: DVD vol. 1
(I hadn't realized this was only volume 1. I'd been meaning to get around to it ever since I bought it for the library last year...a year and a half of the build-up of anticipation did not serve it well. It's okay, I guess? Not my favorite manwha of the year).

Graphic novels:

Guibert, Emmanuel: Alan's War: The Memories of G.I. Alan Cope
(in Guibert's introduction, he describes how the stories of WWII that Cope told him were mostly nothing spectacular. He's right, they're not. Guibert's renditions of the stories are simple: black-and-white, illustrative art paired with Cope's unembellished memories. But I think I understand why Guibert wanted to draw them: there is something in war and the lives of people who fight in wars, something about the dull minutia of that daily existence that's very important that we know. This is how citizens become soldiers, this is being a soldier in wartime, and this is what soldiers do with their lives when the war is over. We should all of us know this: it's so matter-of-fact. War isn't drama).


Cotter, Joshua W.: Skyscrapers of the Midwest
(shit, I just don't care. I got through I think five pages and gave up on account of shit, I do not care about your male adolescent traumas told via pupil-less space cat superhero pastiche anomie. For god's sake, I have to read ten books on cataloging this semester, and that's not even counting the class reading. And I have to annotate those cataloging books. I have poor judgement and I started with something by George Lakoff, which is super fucking hard and six hundred pages long and not actually cataloging, but linguistics. It's brilliant and fascinating and dense and did I mention very hard as well as six hundred pages long? I have a week to read it and write a five page paper on it before I move on to the next one. I have no time for dumb shit like this depressed cat thing).


Jung and Jee-Yun: Kwaidan
(or this. The art's bonus, but the story is dull and cliched).


Manga:

Mihara Mitsukazu: Doll vols. 1-2
(I fuckin' love Mihara's manga; she's a breath of fresh air. I don't run into a lot of manga--or a lot of comics, period, actually--that actually live up to science fiction's honorable tradition of exploring the consequences of an idea, not simply using it to entertain.* I have seen Mihara accused of being flat and one-note; I would call her refreshingly restrained, with an art style that complements her storytelling. Here, as with some of the stories in IC in a Sunflower, she's working with the classic idea of the robot, and how human beings react to robots; the theme isn't new, but the emotional insights still don't feel stale to me--the question of what makes us human is more, not less relevant than when science fiction authors first picked it up. The short stories of Doll are variations on a theme, but so were a lot of Asimov's stories about robots, and if you dislike Asimov, we're probably not going to agree on much about science fiction anyway).

*I love being entertained. I just also like being challenged, and in science-fiction-themed comics, challenge is novel in its scarcity.