YALSA top ten GNs 2011: Saturn Apartments Volume 1

Saturn Apartments Volume 1
Written and illustrated by Hisae Iwaoka.
Published by Viz (2011)

Mitsu has just completed school and is going to continue in his father's footsteps and start working at the window washers guild. Seems fairly normal, except for the fact that his dad was a window washer on a space station that houses all of humanity. Oh yeah, and his dad died while washing windows a few years ago.

The world that Iwaoka has created in Saturn Apartments is pretty interesting. The idea that Earth has been abandoned and that all of humanity now lives in orbit isn't necessarily new, but it's not one that I've seen frequently in comics. There is, however, one pretty gaping plot hole: why does there need to be a window washing guild in the first place. Couldn't robots do it better? Despite this I'm curious as to why people left the Earth, and how the space station itself functions economically and socially, but not enough to read a second volume.

The major problem I had is that Mitsu is basically a non-entity. He's incredibly passive, doesn't seem particularly bright, and doesn't really seem to have any interests or characteristics. If Saturn Apartments was an anthology about various people in the space station (the couple getting married, the scientist trying to breed Earth animals, the other window washers) it seems as though it would be more interesting. Now, admittedly Mitsu is fairly young and is still figuring out who he is, and for some people the story of him discovering himself would be enough, but I didn't feel there was enough of a character there to do the discovering.

Iwaoka's artwork is fairly standard manga-style for the backgrounds, and is generally pretty competent in those regards. The technology she draws, when it shows up, is well rendered and enjoyable. However, most of the indoors scenes look as though they could have happened in the present day. Given how much living space that each person (even the poor people) appears to have, I wonder exactly how huge this space station is (or, perhaps, the better question to ask is how many humans are still alive?). My major complaint in regards to the art is with the way that Iwaoka draws faces. I found the lack of detail she uses weirdly off-putting, as well as making it difficult to judge how old a character was and making me think that the characters were all about to fall asleep.

Years ago I read the series Planetes by Makoto Yukimura, which is about a similarly mundane space job (in that case they're garbage collectors). I really loved it, and was excited when I heard people mention a couple of other manga series were said to be similar. Those two being Twin Spica and Saturn Apartments. I found both of them to be huge disappointments when I originally read them, and rereading Saturn Apartments years later doesn't change my opinions about it in any way. However, if you want a less technical, more character focused science fiction story you might enjoy it.

YALSA top ten GNs 2013: Stargazing Dog

Stargazing Dog 
Written and illustrated by Takashi Murakami.

Published by NBM (2011).

Have you heard of Into the Wild? It's about a true story about a guy who wandered off into the Alaskan wilderness and died of starvation. Some people probably think it's romantic. Stargazing Dog is a somewhat similar story, except told from the point of view of a dog.

To put all of my biases up front, I don't really like dogs, and this comic kind of provides examples of why. Specifically, their personalities and apparently unending loyalty are not things I view as positives (though I am aware that many other people do). So a comic told from the point of view of a dog (and not an incredibly intelligent one) that seems to in part about how great that loyalty is has an uphill battle with me.

A girl finds a puppy, and convinces her parents to adopt it. Like most children, she soon pays little attention to the animal and her parents end up taking care of it. The human father, referred to as "Daddy" by the dog, seems to spend more time hanging out with, and talking to, the dog than he does to his wife and child. Eventually, he loses his job, loses his family, and goes off on a doomed road trip where more bad things happen to him and he dies (not really a spoiler, since it's revealed on the first page).

What really pissed me off was the afterward, where Murakami stated that his reason for creating this comic was because:

"In the past, he ["Daddy"] would have been an ordinary, good father.
However, in today's environment, it's adept or die. And that's not right. I really feel fed up with this hideous situation."

And really? Fuck that. He may have been an "ordinary" father, but in no way was he a good one. He paid no attention to his wife or child in any way, and was so uninterested in their lives and feelings, that he is shocked when his wife wants a divorce. That's hardly a "good" father in my eyes (though maybe it says something about Japanese society and familial expectations).

The back cover says that this is an "inspiring" story, but I'm not sure how I'm supposed to be inspired. A guy doesn't get his own way, so starves to death in the middle of nowhere while condemning an animal to the same fate? The message seems to be that if things aren't going your way you should leave everything behind, never ask anyone for help, and die because you're incredibly stubborn. This is even pointed out in a later part of the story where a character says "If he had gone to see you for some advice, Mr. Okutsu. He wouldn't have been dead now." 

Kind of weirdly, this manga was actually flipped so that it reads left-to-right like western books. You can definitely notice it as there are some signs in the pages where signs are backwards (and so are all of the Japanese sound effects), and there are references to right and left that don't always match up with the art. It's kind of strange to see a book published in this format so recently, as it seems the vast majority of manga is now published in right-to-left format. One of the complaints of flipping manga is that it brings out flaws in the artwork, and the awkwardness of some of the panels here seems to indicate some truth to that. Apart from that the artwork is well done. The dogs are drawn well, and the rest of the story telling is pretty clear (though there are some problems with scale).

But really, if you want to read a comic about a homeless person in Japan, read Disappearance Diary by Hideo Azuma. It's way more interesting, in part because it's an autobiography. Reading that review kind of reveals a lot more about the societal pressures that exist in Japan than this comic does. But because Stargazing Dog was created for a Japanese audience, all of that knowledge can just be assumed by the author as already known, and none of it has to be said on the page. If this comic actually explained some of the pressures of Japanese life it might have made "Daddy" a more sympathetic character. 

YALSA top ten GNs 2015: Wolf Children: Ame & Yuki

Wolf Children: Ame & Yuki

Original Story by Mamoru Hosoda. Art by Yu.

Published by Yen Press (2014)

Hana is a college student who falls in love with a mysterious guy in one of her classes. Turns out he's a werewolf. So she has werewolf babies with him, then he dies, so she moves to the middle of nowhere to raise her werewolf kids. Boring stuff happens, I don't care.

(Perhaps the most interesting thing about this comic being on the list is that its an adaptation of an anime. How many adaptations usually make it onto "best of" lists? I don't think there have been any on the YALSA GN lists before, though I could be wrong.)

I'm not a romance fan, I'm not a fan of rural stories, and I'm not a fan of of stories about children, so this book already had multiple strikes against it. Now, that's not to say that I can't read and enjoy stories that fulfill those criteria. Scott Pilgrim is a romance. Yotsuba&! is about children. Both of those are incredibly great! (I'm sure there's some rural thing I enjoy, but I can't think of it right now.)

There was a grand total of one scene in this comic that I enjoyed. It featured a bunch of girls talking about flowers and other things they found, then the werewolf girl is like "look what I found!" and brandishes a snake. Pretty funny. The same joke is repeated, to diminishing returns, on the next page, except she has a box full of animal skeletons. Great! Except the reaction from the other kids is enough to make the werewolf girl decide to change who she is, and become considerably more introverted. Later she's harassed and physically assaulted by a boy, she hurts him while trying to get away, and blames herself forever, and later there is elementary school romance between them. Dude really just needed to learn to leave people alone who say "leave me alone".

So, what does this story teach you? Don't tell anyone about your past, lie to everyone in your family, lie to everyone outside of your family, don't go to school, change who you are to please other people, no means yes, be a total dick to your mom who loves and cares about you.

Was there anything about this that I enjoyed? Well, it was a quick read, so didn't take that long, and I borrowed it from the library, so I didn't spend any money on it. Oh, and the way sound effects were dealt with was good: the Japanese sound effect was left unedited, and in a small font size it was transliterated into the Roman alphabet and translated into English. Everything else I hated, and if it hadn't been a library book I probably would have thrown it across the room. However, I am clearly in the minority, as the vast number of reviews online seem to have loved it. I honestly can't really understand that, but I guess I'm just clearly not the target audience for this book.

YALSA top ten GNs 2010: Children of the Sea Volume 1

Children of the Sea Volume 1

Written and illustrated by Daisuke Igarashi.

Published by Viz (2009)

Ruka is a girl who is slightly too violent at hand ball. Not violent enough to be kicked out of school or get in any serious trouble, but violent enough that she's not allowed to play with the school team all summer. It's the first day of summer vacation, but fior Ruka it feels as though it's already over.

Ruka's parents both used to work for the Tokyo aquarium, but they've split up and now only her dad works there. Ruka lives with her mom, who drinks a lot of...alcohol? (It shows her drinking cans of something, but it's not translated or explained, so I can only guess that she's drinking beer. I mean, it's probably beer, I'm not sure why they'd show piles of cans in the garbage otherwise. The translator's notes in the back of book "helpfully" point out that people recycle cans in Japan.) Ruka doesn't seem to have the best relationship with either of her parents, or any of her classmates at school, and she's looking at a pretty lonely summer until she encounters Umi and Sora.

Umi and Sora are kids who can swim really well and spend most of their time in the water. They were apparently raised by dugongs (those weird sea cow things) for the first few years of their life, and are "prone to dryness" (e.g. they need to be soaked in water a lot). It's a mystery where they came from, or how they ended up being raised by sea mammals, but they've turned into normal(ish) kids. Umi and Sora feel like they have some sort of connection to Ruka, though as they're don't know their origins, they can't really explain what it is.

So that's the main plot of the comic right? Finding out what the deal with these kids is? That's what I thought until I read the description on the book flap. It says that this comic is about "the mystery of the worldwide disappearance of the ocean's fish", which isn't something that gets introduced in the (300 page) first volume. Because of that I'm left to wonder what this book is even about. Is that description accurate, and the mystery will be brought up in later volumes? Or is it wrong and the plot is "who are these weird kids who were raised by dugongs?". I'm not sure if I'm interested enough to find out, but I think that this sort of book could definitely appeal to teenagers (which is what the YALSA books are for). It's about outsider kids, loneliness, broken relationships, and mysteries. What's not to love?

Daisuke Igarashi's art kind of reminds me of a cross between Moyocco Anno and Taiyo Matsumoto, and while that at first sounded kind of strange to me, all three artists are listed on the Wikipedia article for La nouvelle manga (probably due to their inclusion in Japan as Viewed by 17 Creators) so they have at least one thing in common. (Oh wait, here's an interview where Igarashi says to Matsumoto "I actually read your work just to steal [your ideas]".) The storytelling is generally clear, and there are some pretty cool drawings of aquatic animals.

I don't read that much manga anymore. That's kind of relative I guess, I've read thirty something volumes of manga so far this year, but to be honest that pales in comparison to the other comics I've read (somehow I read 56 graphic novels in April) _and_ is the result of me trying to read more manga. But I used to read a lot _more_ manga than I do now. Either way, I am at least familiar with manga as a medium. Somehow, despite that, I still frequently seem to forget that the pacing in manga can be completely different from western comics. Case in point, Children of the Sea takes 70 pages before it introduces Umi (and Sora takes even longer).

It's kind of funny that the last thing I reviewed was Rust Volume 2, which was another comic that I described as slow, but unlike that one things do actually happen in Children of the Sea. Characters are introduced, events occur. There's no 60 page robot fight scene, but there's also no people discussing farms. So really, on that level alone I have to call it amazing.

YALSA top ten GNs 2010: Ōoku: The Inner Chambers

Ōoku: The Inner Chambers (Volume 1)
Written and illustrated by Fumi Yoshinaga
Published by Viz (2009)

I complained in my review of A Bride's Story that I found it incredibly boring when it would spend pages just showing characters doing everyday menial tasks. So when I started reading this and saw drawings of people dusting and doing other chores I really wasn't convinced that I'd find it interesting.

But the world that Yoshinaga has created is fascinating. A disease has ravaged feudal Japan, killing 75% of all males. Females take over basically every role that men used to take, and men are reduced to little more than sex objects in order that the population might continue to survive. The main character of the first book, Mizuno, is a man who refuses to be married off by his parents, but instead enters the service of the shogun, joining what is basically a male harem.

And like a harem, there's very little sex going on (in part because the current shogun is a seven year old girl), but lots of politics, intrigue, menial tasks, and dressing in fancy clothes (and, okay, there's some gay sex). Only men are allowed into the inner chambers, and so they have to take care of everything: cooking, cleaning, sewing, and so forth. When men are such a sought after commodity the hundreds of men the shogun has in her service doing basically nothing is an indication of her power.

A lot of the content of this comic is based around ideas of elaborate social structures, prestige, status, and old cultural traditions. I'm not sure how aware Japanese readers would have been of this, but my reaction is generally "this is stupid" when I hear that there are people who do not have enough status to be seen by the shogun. Bah! Aristocrats! Still, you don't have to be knowledgeable of Japanese culture to understand this section, it's all fairly well explained in the comic itself.

Thankfully, part way through the volume a new character is introduced who seems to share at least some of my opinions regarding that sort of thing. Then an incredibly interesting plot line comes to light when some characters from Europe are briefly featured. The reader immediately has to wonder if this plague that killed so many Japanese males was isolated to the island and the rest of the world has carried on as if nothing unusual has happened (since the story happens during the sakoku period, this seems at least possible).

I'm really not sure where this series is heading (or even what characters will be featured), and while I wasn't totally on board with the fist volume I am willing to check out the next couple in order to see what happens. I hope that the mysteries that the first volume eventually raised become the focal point, as that's where my interest really lies.

YALSA top ten GNs 2012: A Bride’s Story

A Bride’s Story (Volumes 1-3)
Written and illustrated by Kaoru Mori
Published by Yen Press (volumes 1-2, 2011; volume 3, 2012)

Only the first volume of this series was on the YALSA list, but I happened to see the first three in the library, so I picked them all up. To be honest because I didn't look at what this book was about I mistook it for Ooku: The Inner Chambers, which was on the 2010 YALSA list, and I kind of can't believe that I read about six hundred pages of this stuff.

A Bride's Story is set somewhere in central Asia in the late 19th century. At the time when women were married off to other families for money or political connections or any number of other reasons. As the comic begins Amir has been married off to another family, and she is positively ancient by bride standards (she's twenty), while her husband is only 12. The comic basically just follows the day to day activities of Amir as she becomes used to living with a new family.

It is incredibly boring.

Now, I find this kind of shocking as (spoilers ahead) Amir's old family comes and attacks the village she's living in, and in a later volume someone gets thrown into jail. Yet despite this it is just the dullest comic I have read in quite some time. Pages will be devoted to a character, who is never named, carving wood. Or there can be page after page of characters doing embroidery. Or, even worse, page after page of characters just _looking_ at embroidery.

But none of that is my real problem with this comic, my major problem is with the character of Amir. I realized somewhere in here that Amir is not actually a human being. Amir is a robot. Now you might be thinking "What? You said this book was set in the late 19th century, how is she a robot?", but I don't mean that she is a robot made out of mechanical parts (because really, nobody that knows me would ever think that I'd find that a problem). No, Amir is a robot in that she does not have human emotions or react to events like a human would. Instead she is absurdly innocent, verges on being an idiot savant in regards to her capabilities (she's an amazing archer!), who is amazed by _everything_. OH MY GOSH YOU CAN BAKE BREAD! Or you can sew, or there's a horse, or any other incredibly mundane thing astounds her utterly as though she has never seen it before. Amir reacts to events as though she has no prior history of doing or experiencing anything. She also becomes overwhelmingly devoted to her husband for no apparent reason whatsoever, which reminds me of robots who are devoted to their creator because, well, why not? It's kind of creepy.

Now this title has a lot of positive reviews online, and Kaoru Mori also had a title (Emma) on the 2008 YALSA list, so clearly she has many people who enjoy her work a lot, but I pretty clearly don't see the appeal of this comic. I will say that A Bride's Story is considerably better than Emma for two reasons. First, while the main character in both series is incredibly docile and passive, Amir is at least capable of doing _something_ (shooting arrows at things), while I don't think the main character in Emma did anything other than be embarrassed and polite, and second the art is really nice. I just wish it was being used on a comic I actually cared about.

YALSA top ten GNs 2008: King of Thorn

King of Thorn (Volumes 1-2)

Written and illustrated by Yuji Iwahara.

Published by Tokyopop (2007)

Sometimes a book can deliver everything you want, despite what the author's original intents were. But more on that later. I'm trying to get into the habit of reading books and comics without knowing anything about them. I don't read the blurb on the back (spoilers!), and it's often so long since I added the book to my "to read" list that I don't even remember why I wanted to read it in the first place. So I go in with no knowledge of what's going to happen at all except for whatever's on the cover. This means that early twists and surprises actually surprise me!

The cover of King of Thorn doesn't really reveal anything about the story at all (there are humans and monsters?), but I remember years ago thinking about reading this book because I really enjoyed the way the cover was designed. The use of blank white space within the "thorns" seeming to "eat" into the rest of the image, while the soft purple-y colour of the cover made it stand out to me for some reason. Maybe it's just that the colour purple being used on the cover is supposed to sell more comics.

Inside the story starts by revealing that a terrible disease, the Medusa virus, is turning people into stone and killing them and...hold on, isn't this the plot at the beginning of Eden: It's an Endless World? Kasumi is one of a pair of twins who have contracted the virus, but she alone has been chosen as one of 160 people to be placed into suspended animation in hopes that a cure will be uncovered. There's plenty of angst about leaving her sister behind as she's placed into the capsule and put to sleep.

And then...dinosaur attack! Okay, the dinosaur attack doesn't happen _yet_. First we jump forward some unknown amount of time into the future. The lab which holds the cryo-capsules has been completely overgrown with huge vines covered in thorns. Some of the capsules seem to be completely destroyed, but a number are still intact and people start to wake up and wonder what on Earth is going on. Then the dinosaur, or at least a giant lizard creature, attacks. In the ensuing fear, panic, and stampedes most of the survivors end up dead, leaving only seven people alive. The rest of the book follows their attempt to escape from the building, but floating over their heads is the dark realization that the virus which caused them to be placed into cryogenic sleep in the first place hasn't been cured, and the longest any of them has to live is six weeks. Gripping stuff!

So what was the thing I disliked about this book? The main character. The girl on the cover with huge glasses and who, as you can probably guess if you've ever read any manga, is a shy and awkward teenage schoolgirl who is also nice and kind and maybe brave. She has seemingly no characteristics beyond that, practically sleepwalks through the plot, getting rescued multiple times, and could, in my opinion, just not have been included at all. I feel like I've seen this character in numerous manga before (though, I could not actually tell you which ones), and they're not a character type that I really care for. A character can have self doubt over their actions, but Kasumi's self doubt (at least in this volume) is whether she should even bother continuing to live. It's survivor's guilt that starts before she even enters the capsule. I'm assuming that Iwahara wants us to identify with, or at least care about, Kasumi, but it wouldn't bother me if she died in volume two. Actually, that'd be pretty gutsy so I'd be impressed, but I'm doubting that'll happen.

The other characters aren't that much better: there's a kid, a woman (who of course ends up looking after the kid), an older rich business man guy, another guy (who apparently has less of a personality than Kasumi), a black guy (who is of course big and strong), and a super 1337 hacker criminal (the big muscley guy with the tattoos on the cover). The hacker is, at least so far, the real protagonist insofar as he has driven pretty much every element of the plot: leading the characters, suggesting plans, coming up with ideas, saving people, thinking about what's going on. He's a stereotype too, but one I'm more interested in reading about.

Still the entire plot and situation of the comic really grabbed me, even if the characters themselves didn't seem like anything particularly special. I'm totally ready to read more of this series (especially since, as it's only six volumes long, it will actually end), but unfortunately the VPL only has volume 1 and every volume is out of print since Tokyopop, its original publisher, has basically not existed as a company in several years. Thankfully it doesn't look like prices on the secondary market are that high, so hopefully I can pick them up somewhere. I'm also interested in checking out some of Iwahara's other series, two of which, I've just discovered, have been translated into English.

YALSA top ten 2008: After School Nightmare

After School Nightmare (Volumes 1-5)
Written and illustrated by Setona Mizushiro.
Published by Go! Comi (Volume 1, 2006; Volumes 2-5, 2007)

When I read a comic (or a book, or watch a TV show, etc.) and I really have problems with it I tend to go and read reviews to see if other people had similar problems or if they could justify their experience in a way that made sense to me. (I also do this with media I really enjoy, except then I read reviews of people who hated whatever I liked.) However, when the opinion I have is not only not reflected in any other review I can find, but not even mentioned, I guess I feel as though I'm not reading the comic "right". That's really the case with After School Nightmare: I have multiple problems with it, but nobody else even talks about what I think are sorta serious issues. Now, this is a ten volume series, and the first five were all listed (as one item) on the top ten list, but I only read the first book. (The copy I borrowed was also missing a page at the beginning, that was actually kind of important, but I read it online.)

First of all I admit, and this is going to come up multiple times as I read the comics on these YALSA lists, that I am not a teenage girl and, in fact, have never been one. Thus, shojo comics (Japanese comics aimed at teenage girls) are not something I enjoy very often. I haven't read that much, but other than like Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth (both of which I read back in the '90s), I'm not sure if I've actually enjoyed any shojo comics at all. So why is this? I mean, I've read and enjoyed the Baby-sitters Club graphic novel that Raina Telegemeier did, so I'm clearly not _that_ averse to comics aimed at young females (though there are lots of western ones that I also don't care for), but clearly something about these titles hasn't clicked with me. However, even saying something like that is unfair, as shojo isn't a genre, and the titles published under that title can be anything from sports to science fiction. But of the ones I've read, the overly dramatic characters and focus on absurd "romances" have left me cold.

After School Nightmare is set in a bizarre school where students have to attend a "class" where they are put to sleep and must reveal their true selves/darkest secrets to other students. In order to graduate they have to find a "key" which is hidden inside the body of another student. This is kind of weird, though I'd be more okay with it if there wasn't so much non-consent involved. The mysterious "nurse" who tells the main character that they have to do this doesn't tell them what it is they have to do or what's going to happen beforehand (or even afterwards!), instead they just drug them with some weird type of tea, and another student eventually explains what this "class" is about. After the main character has unwillingly entered a dream world where students get to repeatedly relive horrible experiences like sexual and physical assault.

But that's not even my real problem with this comic, and we'll get to that in a second after I give a brief plot overview. The main character Ichijo Mashiro's "upper half is male" and their "lower half is female", and a major element of the plot is them trying to come to terms with their own gender identity. This is fine, good even! Teenagers frequently struggle with elements of sexual orientation and gender identity (amongst other aspects of their personal identities), and providing media about that probably helps them understand that they're not alone in how they feel.

However, my problem with this comic is the way the nurse, who is basically the only adult/person in a position of power/supposed role model in the entire comic, acts. Upon meeting Ichijo this character says "I know everything about you. After all, I am your teacher". When Ichijo says "I'm a guy" the nurse says "No, you're merely wear a man's clothing and hope to be believed". Similarly, other characters repeatedly say that Ichijo's "true self" is female, because that's how they show up in the dreams (whereas other students appear as a suit of armour, a person with huge holes were their face and chests are, a disembodied arm, and so forth). It just seems super transphobic to me to have almost everyone refuse to accept this character as the gender they identify as, but nobody else discussing the comic seems to have ever mentioned this, so maybe I'm just reading it wrong.

Thankfully, it isn't all like that. One of the characters (a love interest) actually says "I prefer you being a boy". There's a reasonable story to be told in characters trying to figure out if they're gay or not when they don't identify with their physical gender, and it seems as though later volumes of the series discuss that more. But those aspects didn't really click with me until I read reviews of the series, and then reread this volume (and geeze guys, I just reread a comic I disliked in order to properly say why I disliked it.).

Ignoring any positive or negative thoughts regarding the plot of the book, I found the romance aspects of this incredibly boring. Like there are pages of dialogue that I cannot believe I read as they are just so banal. This is clearly my personal opinion and I'm not saying that _this_ part of the comic is bad, just that it's not something that I generally enjoy, and based solely on that (but also for other reasons) I won't be seeking out any more of this title.