I know I should be saving my pennies for SPX, but one of the bookstores in town was having a buy-two-get-one-free deal on some of their Tokyopop titles, so I succumbed. I initially viewed it as an opportunity to catch up on some favorites, but there seemed to be some weird probability field that guaranteed that the volumes I was looking for weren’t there. (How can a big chain bookstore not have a complete run of Fruits Basket? How?!)
I’d been circling around Shohei Manabe’s Dead End for a while, appreciating the striking visuals but nervous about the grit factor. In it, an angelic girl falls from sky, landing at the feet of an every-shlub who gets drawn into mysterious and deadly conspiracy. It’s not bad if you like that sort of thing, and it seems to have a reasonable sense of humor about its paranoia-noir mechanics.
I picked up Ho-Kyung Yeo’s Honey Mustard pretty much at random. There’s nothing like a wacky, drunken case of mistaken identity and draconian behavioral standards to spur romance, is there? There’s something unsettling going on here, though I haven’t narrowed down precisely what it is, beyond the “Forced marriage can be fun!” set-up. Yeo seems to rely heavily on chibi-ish sequences, though, and I suspect part of that reliance may be aimed at getting the pages done.
While there seems not to be a single copy of Fruits Basket 9 to be found in town, I did pick up the eighth and enjoyed it very much. At Completely Futile, Adam noted something I neglected to mention over at CWN:
“…as we learn more about the characters’ backstories, things that seemed uncomplicated, or even mainly comedic, in the early volumes take on new meanings.”
It’s very true, and the manga really does reward rereading. It’s a lot of fun to go through earlier volumes with a (you should forgive the expression) “knowing what you know now” approach.
And while I’m usually reluctant to suggest that, if you like title A, you might like title B, I do think fans of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim might browse through Minoru Toyoda’s Love Roma (Del Rey) the next time they see it on a store shelf. It’s got playful illustrations, and the two titles share an off-kilter approach to character and romance. I talk about Love Roma at needless length in this week’s Flipped.