I love a Wednesday that makes it rough to select a pick of the week. This week’s ComicList is a cornucopia of crack.
I thought Saika Kunieda’s Future Lovers (Deux Press) was a one-shot, which was pretty much the book’s only disappointing aspect. I was happily mistaken, and a second volume about a mismatched but devoted couple is due out Wednesday. I love comics about grown-up gay men in actual relationships.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Anything Fanfare/Ponent Mon releases in English is automatically a contender for the week’s best release, and My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill, by Jean Regnaud & Émille Bravo, will likely do nothing to buck that trend.
Tokyopop can’t be entirely sanguine about the release of the final penultimate volume of Natsuki Takaya’s uber-shôjo masterpiece, Fruits Basket. I can’t say I’m thrilled either, but I know that we’ll all get through this together. As to content, I would hazard a guess that, in this volume, all of the characters find their lives becoming less alienating and difficult to varying degrees. I would also hazard a guess that I will sob.
Viz picks up the baton of miserable adolescence with the launch of the VizBig edition of Miki Aihara’s Hot Gimmick. This book is emphatically not for everyone, and I don’t say that in a condescending “Your tastes might not be refined enough to enjoy this” kind of way. I say it in a “Really horrible, anti-feminist things happen in this book from beginning to end, and you will likely want to scrub your brain clean after reading it, but it’s addictively crafted” way.
On the Signature front, the second volume of Pluto, Naoiki Urasawa’s homage to Osamu Tezuka, arrives.