Let’s make a wild hipster prediction. Tiny house breweries covered in reclaimed aluminum siding and vintage asbestos paint. What could be more retro and kooky than risking death be mesothilioma? Yeah, you’ve probably never heard of it. Look away as I ride my kickboard away in a flash of ninteies flannel and beard oils.
Tim reviews Keijo!!!!! which is what happens when someone tries to make a sumo inspired cheesecake shot filled manga. You’d think it was a sports manga with impressive and interesting tidbits on grappling or something similar a la Prince of Tennis. Instead it’s just reason to show weirdly drawn asses and breasts. Worse, it’s neither titilating or interesting and gets a Burn It.
Weltall then discusses revenge. The kind of revenge you can only take out on a group of martial artists who’ve killed your master but foolishly left the favored disciple, you, alive. In Gosu, that’s exactly what happens except the disiple finds out that all the people responsible for the murder of his sensei are dead. What to do now? We won’t spoil it but the premise and story is good enough to earn a Borders without getting more than a volume into it.
Let us remind you of how technological progress has erased minor inconveniences that people of a certain age group didn’t have to grow up with. Remember when the only way to send messages was private courier. These upjumped children and their newfangled universal postal service don’t know how easy they have it.
Tim reviews Tsugumomo which is about our boring average main character running into extraordinary situations. In this case, he has an obi which has become a tsukumogami. An object that’s existed long enough to manifest its own spirit as a person. It fights amasogis which are sort of demonic things made by strong emotions. Though they are like tsukumogami in that they regularly manifest within objects, they are immature and deserve to die. This weirdly earns it a Borders.
Weltall then reviews Kou 1 Desu Ga Isekai de Joushu Hajimemashita. Our main ends up in a fantasy world and tasked to exterminate a vampire girl. He, of course, earns her affections because that’s just what happens when your dick is made of pure sex pheromones and dipped in gold. He begins running through a world of sexy versions of the classic Universal monster girls like someone is writing a bad parody of Twilight. The humor is enough to keep it from dipping below a Borders.
Can you believe that the Washington Monument has been finished for longer than television has been around? Also, only 1920’s kids will remember these mountains without the faces of US Presidents on them. Are we accomplishing our goal to feed your nostalgia and remind you of the inexorable passage of time?
Tim reviews a revisit of Kumo desu ga, nani ka? Our spider girl continues in her adventure deeper into the dungeon. She then gets attacked by a monkey which she kills. Tim approves, especially when this results in a horde of other monkeys attacking and getting killed. The manga continues to hold its Read it Now by keeping the tone light and the main character likable as she struggles.
Weltall’s manga this week is also based on a light novel, Accel World. It takes place in a world where the mental uplinks from Avatar have been invented and people mostly squander their potential to play shitty MMOs. Because if ever a manga features a video game, it must always be a never ending exercise with no overarching goal that will run until someone gets tired of it. Almost as a metaphor for the manga it’s featured in. It manages to snag a Crackers based on the characters.
Back at the ranch, we’ve been farming manga reviews by hand just like our grandfathers did. Sure, you can find mass produced manga reviews for a little cheaper at those chain sites. But we feel you lose some of the care that our artisans refuse to compromise on.
Tim reviews Magikano. In it, we have our useless male protagonist who wants to get a perfect attendance award from school. That’s his major ambition and tells us that his personality is as exciting as plain oatmeal. Luckily a busty witch shows up to try and make him into a man and not the before photo in an ad for low testosterone. It manages to bump itself up to a Crackers.
Weltall then talks about City of Walls. A manga set in the now defunct Kowloon district in Hong Kong. There are people and slums, as Kowloon was known for, and they do stuff. For some reason there’s a dude who’s been working on a plane in his basement and dreams of flying it. How the hell our main characters are going to manage to get it to the ground, if not a rooftop, for this to happen is beyond us. Crackers for it all around.
We’re back onto the comics this episode and we have managed to find some rather interesting ones. They’re both centered around alternate worlds and have some wonderfully nitpicky things to laugh at.
Tim starts us off with Jaryuu Tensei. The main character is from modern day Japan and, much like the spider manga from 357, he died and was reborn into fantasy world Tolkein-A27Q. And he’s a dragon who’s incredibly powerful. He gives himself a name late in the manga, just before buying a slave to fix her up and resell her. Yes, it runs on banana pants logic. In spite of all this it somehow gets a Borders.
Weltall reviews Mirror which may be both a webcomic and an OEL. There’s a “Mirror World” which magic is flourishing after being separated from our world. As always, it’s not just separated but held apart by a barrier which is starting to fail. Our main characters end up in the magic world and fight for reasons that are kind of baffling. If nothing else, the Batman-esque style written sound effects are hilsious. Still not enough to get it above a Burn It.
Are we back on schedule yet? Maybe we need a Manga Mussolini to help us get the episodes released on time. Or maybe it’d go just as bad as the Duce and not actually fix anything but we could claim it victory when it gets sorted out naturally.
Tim reviews Aiki. It’s a fighting manga where our main character is some sort of master martial artist. He gets recruited to help train a girl at a school where people fight for control of the school, as only happen within anime/manga. They attempt to bribe him with sex, not titillation but actual boning. It’s amazing to see a character who wants to screw not be chastised by other characters for being a “pervert”. It earns itself a Crackers for breaking some of the more obnoxious tropes.
Weltall then revisits Hatsukoi Zombie. Though it scored low last time, something compelled him to keep going. It turns out that it improves quite a bit with character development. The story also develops as it’s revealed that the idealized ghost loves actually interfere with the real world and people. With those factors in play it gets a brand new rating, climbing up to Crackers.
Like a negligent father with weekend visitation rights, we get around to manga this week. Tim talks about Hajime no Ippo which is yet another sports manga. To boot, this one is about boxing and draws some comparisons, initially, to Green Boy. It differs quite a bit in that it has training methods that came from rejected Naruto chapters. This drops it down to a Crackers, held from a lower score by the characters.
Weltall then gets into Hatsukoi Zombie. Which the English title should be Ghost of Boners Past. Our protagonist is the usual neglected manga waif who was, in theory, born to two parents and not torn from the thigh of Zeus. After getting hit in the head with a baseball, he can see the idealized version of love that himself and his classmates have. His happens to be a shapely girl of his childhood crush who happens to transfer to his school and be a boy. It is saved form the flames by a few moments of humor, earning a Borders.
The phrase light novel conjurers up awful images around here at Manga Pulse. While we normally stick to mangas, we haven’t been above reading translated novels for review. This usually ends in headaches as they’re poorly plotted and translated with less than three quarters ass but more than one third. Continue reading Manga Pulse 357: Nani Fury→
Sometimes the inspiration for finding a manga comes in the form of an email. Either a helpful listener who wants to share something they love or someone who wants to watch us suffer will make a suggestion. Other times we’ll simply hit the random button and hope to hell that whatever it lands on isn’t jam packed with tentacles and pictures of roses opening which symbolize the loss of virginity for the robot monster piloted by a twelve year old. Continue reading Manga Pulse 356: Gun Wag→
What do we have for you this show? Going by the name, we have a bit of manga for a change. Rather than all that crochet advise we’re known to give. It remains Tokyopop free though we hear stirring from the dark chasm the Levy occupies. Perhaps one day it will emerge, having toiled hard on the resurrection potion. Continue reading Manga Pulse 355: Narak Academia→
An Anime Podcast. We've got our fingers on the pulse of Anime, with reviews, rants, and stories.
