Pervy Prison School

Dear Readers,

My apologies, but I have been neglecting this blog recently.  I've somehow kept forgetting, no matter how many new manga/anime I've started.   I think I've even finished the entirety of the Viz translated Bleach since my last post!

And now, without further ado, my review of what is apparently the hot new anime this season: "Prison School".

When I initially read the summary on Wikipedia, it didn't seem all that bad.  I was picturing a combination Deadman Wonderland/every pervy manga series ever, but what I got was something...slightly different.

In a school with over 1000 female students, the rules have recently changed to make it coed.  We follow these five new male students: Kiyoshi the normal guy, Gackt the Three Kingdoms geek, Joe the shadowy guy, Shingo the bleach blonde and Andre the fat guy with the freaky little face.

A peeping incident goes horribly wrong one night (and just after Kiyoshi finally got a date with one of the girls!) and the hot student disciplinary council throws all five of them into the "school prison".  There they are abused and forced into hard labor.

Therein lies the difficulty: Kiyoshi escaping in time to meet the girl on the appointed date.  A date, of course, on which he still happens to be in prison.

The setup sounds pretty basic, but there are some serious problems here.  I have no problem with nudity fanservice (from the girls), but there's a lot of really gross stuff in there too.

One part of the plan involves faking a trip to the bathroom and then sneaking out through an air duct.  This requires the use of an MP3 player to provide the sounds of someone making a bowel movement.  And, if that weren't gross enough, in order to get the sounds just right, Gackt actually shits himself in class and records the sounds.

There is also a scene of a girl peeing, the other boys' desires to be dominated and humiliated by the hot glasses-wearing girl pictured above, and an unfortunate shower scene that winds up insinuating that Kiyoshi and Gackt are gay.  Plus Andre's tiny face on his giant body is really freaky, especially with his English Funimation voice.

A big part of the puzzle is that there is some supernatural element that seems to be there, but not quite.  The girls are not allowed by the rules to fraternize with the boys, or else they'll be thrown in the prison as well.  And they are especially wary of talking to them in front of the school's crows.

This is because one of the council girls is rumored to be some sort of "crow user" and does indeed find out about the peeping incident through them somehow, but, at least in the first volume, this is never brought up again.

The only strange thing seems to be the prison setting.

I almost don't want to continue reading it, because of all the gross parts and the fact that it can really only end one of two ways.  But stuff with logistics like this isn't all bad now and again.  And I'm a little intrigued as to exactly which way the series will end.

You can read it if you want; just don't expect a lot of really good hot chick fanservice.

"Hardly The Greatest Show On Earth"

This particular entry may come off as a mite bit odd to some of my more long-time readers.  The last time I was down at the bookstore, I saw that the manga version of Karneval had released in English.  However, unfortunately, I did not have enough time to read it before we had to leave.  So I decided to content myself with watching the anime, which I knew had been released in English by Funimation.

In a strange, European-inspired world, a mysterious organization known as Kafka seeks to accelerate the evolution of humanity into high-powered monsters called Varrukas through drugs.  The national defense force known as Circus seeks to stop them.

A mysterious boy named Nai, searching for his lost patron, carries with him a bracelet-shaped ID from circus when he meets hard-hearted thief Gareki.  Suddenly pursued by a Varruka, they quickly encounter Circus and begin searching for both Kafka and the missing patron.

The voice acting in this anime is passable, particularly its use of Greg Ayres as Gareki and two voice actresses from Haganai (Sena's and Kobato's).  Story and action-wise, it reminded me pretty much of almost Black Cat meets Sakura Wars.

Perhaps I should clarify: Circus is called Circus because, for some reason, in addition to keeping the peace, they also see fit to put on parades and stage shows and such-like for the populace of wherever they happen to touch down.  But, unlike Sakura Wars, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with increasing their spiritual powers for combat.

Maybe it's because I didn't watch every single episode back-to-back, or maybe it was just the limitations of it being condensed into a single 13-episode anime season, but I didn't really feel like I could connect to any of the characters.  It was good to see Gareki starting to find a purpose, but that was about it.  Most everyone's backstories and motivations felt more than a little cliched, and the battle sequences weren't really anything to write home about.

If you liked Black Cat enough, then maybe you would feel some attraction towards this awkward knockoff.  Don't get me wrong: I did enjoy Black Cat, but Karneval (if you'll pardon the pun) simply fails to perform to their standard.

Eyes on Nurse Hitomi

For the first time in a long time today, I stopped off at my local B&N (that's "Barnes and Noble" for the non-texting crowd).  There wasn't a lot of new stuff there, but I did pick up the first volume of a very strange new series.  It's called Nurse Hitomi's Monster Infirmary.

Our protagonist is the clumsy cyclops prominently pictured above, the titular Nurse Hitomi.  In a world that starts out looking an awful lot like ours, several students at a local high school have been going through strange new changes as a result of puberty.  Our first story introduces us to a girl whose tongue has grown to, like, three feet long.

And it only gets weirder from there.

In the first volume alone, we are introduced to Tongue Girl, an immortal zombie, two girls who are alternately growing and shrinking respectively (dramatically reversing their former size dynamic) and one girl who is turning invisible.

As the story moves onward, we gradually see that there are more and more monster-like girls in this world, walking the streets just like ordinary people like you and me.  (Apparently, they are just accepted and everyone lives in peace.  No fantastic racism here...yet.)  That makes this series a lot like A Centaur's Life or Monster Musume.

The former was a mite bit boring for my tastes, the latter too heavy on fanservice at the expense of the plot.  Thankfully, Nurse Hitomi's Monster Infirmary suffers from neither of these problems.  (Although they do mention that the growing and shrinking friends are both growing and shrinking out of their clothes, so the potential for future fanservice is definitely there.  And the other girl's invisibility is pretty sporadic, so she sometimes only makes her clothes invisible.  But all this is nowhere near enough to derail or detract from the plot.)

That being said, the art style is a little on the weird side, and the fall-apart zombie girl's body separation is a very odd mix of the comical and the surreal, maybe a hair or two creepier than the separation powers of Trafalgar Law or Buggy the Clown from One Piece.

I'm not really one for monster girls, or girls with monstrous bodies or abilities.  Some green chicks like Gamora or Elphaba from Wicked aren't bad, but that's about it.  Wings, hooves, tails...all of them instantly kill any sexual interest I might have had.  That's why I never got into Leela from Futurama.

The stories it tells aren't bad, though: friends dealing with a bizarre new inverted size relationship, learning about self-confidence after turning invisible, dealing with recklessness, learning to love oneself warts and all.  Basic school guidance counselor stuff, but with monster girls.

It's a weird series with weird art, long story short.  But we shall see if it gets any easier or any more interesting as the series goes on.  I'm not against it, not by a long shot.  Go pick up a copy and decide for yourself if it's worth it.

Wild Wild West!

From the mind that brought you Rurouni Kenshin and the later series Buso Renkin comes the three-volume Western "Gun Blaze West"!

In the American 1800's, a young boy named Viu Bannes lives with his older sister after their parents are killed by gunslingers.  One day, a man named Marcus Homer comes along and inspires young Viu to become stronger.  He tells him of a mysterious places off in the far West where the best and the strongest go.  The name of the place is Gun Blaze West.

Tragically, Marcus is seemingly killed in a gunfight right before Viu's eyes (thankfully, Viu defeats the bad guy soon after).  Years pass, and soon Viu starts off on his own journey to master the ways of the gun and discover the promised land of Gun Blaze West.  He is joined by the smart guy rope master Will Johnston and the lady immigrant samurai Colice.

Now, I'm not much of a Western kind of person.  It just seems to me like all the basic traits have been done to death: guns, horses, bathing in barrels, saloon brawls.  But Gun Blaze West takes some of the original tropes and then throws in some more wild-style crazy action elements.

For example, Viu learns a special skill called Concentration One later on, learning how to exercise extreme focus for one second at a time.  There's a freakin' armored giant with an army of knights and a freakin' super-soldier, for cryin' out loud!  This ain't yer Daddy's Western, son!

My little brother probably said it best when he called it "One Piece with cowboys instead of pirates".  Sadly, the series only lasted for three volumes.  Nobuhiro Watsuki wasn't exactly too enthused about it and it got cancelled relatively quickly.

But it tells a good story, and the action elements are relatively unique.  If you can find this series anywhere, I would strongly advise you to pick it up.  It's a good way to kill a little time (in a good way).

No Game No Life, No Good

Oftentimes, even if I wasn't interested when I saw it at the bookstore, I will pick up a graphic novel at the library simply because it was something new on the shelves.

Sometimes they turn out to be mildly good (Attack on Titan) and sometimes they turn out to be mildly unpleasant (case in point here).

The story begins with a group of high level gamers, going off to challenge a mysterious urban legend known as Blank (who, for some reason, is not outright written as "Blank" but visually represented by an empty space).  Even though they've stacked the deck in their favor, they are all still wiped out, to a man.

When we cut away back to the real world, we see lazy and overconfident brother/sister duo Sora and Shiro.  The two of them make up Blank.

Now, Sora is stated to be a NEET (slacker with no job and no life, sponging off of his unseen parents like a parasite).  Shiro is only eleven years old, yet still, for whatever reason, speaks in a weird-cute Hulk Speak thing where she's, like, missing verbs and such.  "Brother is a NEET", for example.  She is also stated, paradoxically, to have a genius intellect, able to see all 10,000 or so possible moves in chess right out of the gate, as well as learn an entire language in one day.

Both of them are lazy and greedy, having no jobs and no friends.  They are also cheaters and scammers, seeing the world around them as a boring, rotten mess.

So, luckily for them, a mysterious email comes up and invites them into another world after beating a chess game.

Now, I know what you're thinking: .Hack and Sword Art Online, right?  Wrong!  Shiro and Sora are entirely different.  They just want to keep surviving in a fantasy world that is way more fun than our current one.  They literally have no interest in going home.

That's unexpected, to be sure, but it's not how things work.  People can't just run away to a better world when life gets hard.  People have spent your entire life teaching you how to live in the real world, and you can't just throw that away.  You have to dig in your heels and fight to prove that you can survive on your own.

Anyway, this new world is your typical sword and sorcery stuff, where all issues, large and small, are decided by games.  It is, almost literally, the perfect world for our "heroes" (and I use the term loosely).  Therein, they meet an alleged princess of that world, who is naive and bad at gaming.

And, perhaps thankfully, that is where the first volume ends.

I personally would not advise wasting your time on this series.  There is no action, little comedy, no real likeable characters, and a small amount of bathtime fanservice thrown in simply to get the pervert fans hooked.

These people have so much potential (such as it is), yet they waste their lives alone in their room, no one else around but each other.  And then they get thrown into a world that is practically just sitting there and waiting for them to manipulate it.  They seem to care about each other, but that's it.

I can only hope that these two good-for-nothing jerks get themselves a good old-fashioned wake up call, and quick.  Now I understand how my brother doesn't like people like Soma Yukihira from Food Wars, although he may be slightly better than these two.

Going to the "Manga Dogs"!

Welcome back toYaruki-Man-Manga!  Today I will be reviewing one of master manga-ka Ema Toyama's sillier works, Manga Dogs.

I picked up the first volume just because it was new at the bookstore, and now we're into Vol. 2.  It's not a great series, but not a bad one, either.

Think Ouran High School Host Club, dipping an occasional toe into Bakuman territory.

Our heroine is the published and serialized manga artist Kanna Tezuka, who joins a new manga class at her school in order to improve her quality of work.  (One of the big things in this story is that her bizarre Buddhist statuary-inspired romantic comedy manga always has one foot out the door of cancellation.)

Kanna is a standard professional, "only sane man" type of heroine, a la Haruhi Fujioka and such like.  This provides nearly all of the story's comedy, as she is constantly faced with the ridiculous actions of the three boys in her class (who are also the only other students).  None of them have ever even written a manga before, yet they continue to make wild, totally unrealistic claims of reaching the top in Jump.

It doesn't hurt that all three of them are marginally average-looking boys, but Kanna is not interested in a 3D romance.

The story is very slow to move anywhere and there's no real drama a la her previous works (I Am Here and Missions of Love), but the comedy works a little bit to make up for it.  It's a gag manga, pure and simple.  Some of the references are a little on the esoteric side (such as all the main characters being named after or having names similar to favorite manga artists of yesteryear), but that only adds to its niche appeal.

I can only hope that there is more serious talk about manga creation moving on, as it would really help sell things as being a bit more realistic, working to create a nice contrast between the out-and-out silliness that we see on nearly every page.

Long story short-looking for manga-themed comedy and brainless beauty boys, look here.  Want an actual story that moves ahead, try one of Toyama's other works.  This is good for killing 30 minutes or so, but I for one can't really see myself buying it at this point.

"No. 6 Post" (Not Actually Post #6)

Hello again, manga fans.  I was just down at my local bookstore again yesterday, and I saw that the final volume of No. 6 (or, as I like to call it, 200 pages of Ho-Yay) had released, so I thought I'd blog about it.

In the seemingly Utopian city of No. 6 (implying that there are at least five others out there), everyone follows the rules, everyone is happy, and there is no strife that anyone can see.  Of course, us being as genre savvy as we are, we just know that this is not the case.

Four years before our story starts, a young boy named Shion (which is apparently now a unisex name) meets a mysterious outlaw named Rat.  (Now, I know what you're thinking, and it used to confuse me too: his name in the original Japanese is Nezumi, which means "rat".  A possible reason why they romanized it as Rat is that he is almost bonded with a series of small mice who do his bidding and send messages.) 

In a sudden and blatant violation of the rules, Shion decides to harbor Rat by letting him in through the window.  In the end, the jaded Rat leaves Shion with a few words to try and make him question his life before escaping.

Four years later, Shion encounters Rat again after he is blamed for a death involving a mysterious Progeria-like disease attack.  And just when he had been named among the chosen future elites, too!  It is soon revealed to us that the leaders of No. 6 are testing the disease by using a certain strain of bee to deliver it.  Unfortunately, the bees cannot be used to target anything in particular.

(Also, these same bees are apparently injected into the heads of certain citizens early on as a sort of experiment in mind control.  These bees seem to be what keeps most of the populace so docile.  One diseased bee stings Shion, nearly costing him his life and changing his hair to the white that you see in the picture.)

Rat leads Shion to the outside world, where all citizens who live outside No. 6's walls are lying in squalor.  When No. 6's officials can't find Shion, they take his childhood friend Safu (another weirdo name) as a captive.  Shion and Rat, along with friends Dogkeeper, Rikiga and the city-bound rebel Yomin (they just keep coming) break into the high security prison (which is, for some reason, the true brain of the No. 6 system) to try and save her, but they are too late.

In the end, their resulting destruction of the prison not only permanently takes down the crooked No. 6 system, but also releases the "Spirit of the Forest" Elyurias, which No. 6 has apparently taken captive to try and control the aforementioned bees, who then proceeds to wreak havoc.  Rat, being both an excellent singer and the last remaining survivor of Elyurias' "Forest People" who were slaughtered in her taking, is then conscripted to sing her a song of peace and save the day.

This series had a few holes in it and it took kind of a long time (relatively speaking), but it wasn't so bad.  The dystopian atmosphere was a little cliched, but thankfully nowhere near as dark and sinister and monstrous as some others (The Capitol).  It was more like The Giver, also in the fact that Shion and Rat's conflicting personality types place us heavily on the scale of optimism vs. pessimism, a thing you don't usually find in the kind of manga I read.

The manga's biggest draw was probably the amount of pure emotion and outright Ho Yay between Rat and Shion.  They're both relatively attractive, they both care about each other yet aren't afraid to say what they really think, and they're complimentary in that "opposites attract" way.  They even share a few kisses over the course of the story, although their is no out-and-out (if you'll pardon my unintentional pun) mention of their actually being gay for each other.

Although there is one scene early on where Safu asks Shion if he wants to try sexual intercourse, but he reacts like a typical nerdy boy who is just simply overwhelmed by her sudden statement.  He doesn't exactly say no, but he doesn't say yes, either.

All in all, this manga wasn't too bad of a way to kill time, but there are many better works out there.  I certainly couldn't see myself buying it, and I don't think I'll read it again any time soon. 

Maybe once so much time has passed that I've forgotten how the story goes.