A few items from this week’s ComicList:
Most of the post-New Year’s love comes from Del Rey. There’s the second volume of Akira Hiramoto’s Me and the Devil Blues, an odd but successful blend of Faust and Behind the Music that extrapolates wildly on the murky biography of Robert Johnson. Then there’s the seventh volume of Ai Morinaga’s very funny My Heavenly Hockey Club, sports shôjo happily divorced of anything resembling athleticism or romance.
But I feel like pointing a spotlight at the fourth volume of Ryotaro Iwanaga’s Pumpkin Scissors, because I think it’s a fine series that deserves a larger audience. It follows a quirky but good-hearted military group focused on relief and recovery, society’s and their own. The art is a little shaky and the script could be a bit more fluid, but the characters are great, particularly ass-kicking noblewoman Alice Malvin. She’s carrying the family’s military tradition in a thankless, never-ending job, and she’s doing it with a winning blend of idealism and pragmatism.
I have a soft-spot for You Higuri, she of the tawdry, boys’-love flavored costume dramas, so I’m naturally inclined to give her new series, Crown (Go! Comi) a look. It looks like a contemporary take on her usual interests – slightly-too-close siblings and hunky bodyguards.