This week’s requests were both born of… well… getting off the subject, basically.
In this week’s installment of the seinen alphabet, someone mentioned Reiko Shimizu’s Moon Child (CMX), which… isn’t seinen, but hey, I never want to stop people from talking about comics they love. This reference came in service to a passionate endorsement of Shimizu’s Himitsu – The Top Secret, which is… also not seinen, and doesn’t start with the letter “M,” but it sounds interesting, and Moto Hagio likes it a lot. Here’s Hagio’s description:
“It’s a story about an organization that examines the brains of dead people to find out everything they’ve experienced, everything that they’ve done. Because their brains are full of all kinds of secrets. [laughs]”
The series is running in Hakusensha’s Melody magazine, which I believe straddles the shôjo-josei age line and is home to Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ôoku: The Inner Chambers (Viz), so it’s obviously a nice neighborhood with good schools. I can’t quite tell if Hakusensha has collected it in its older-skewing Jets imprint or not. [Update: Michelle Smith informs me that it is in the Jets imprint.] It’s been nominated for awards at the Japan Media Arts Festival at least twice. It’s being published in French by Tonkam.
When I was trying to figure out how I feel about March Story (Viz), I was trying to get a handle on the kind of manga published by Shogakukan’s Sunday GX. I’m not really a whole lot further down that road, because I got totally distracted by the fact that the magazine was home to a series called Rubbers 7. Because, all forensic evidence to the contrary aside, I am nine years old. Here’s the Baka-Updates summary:
“Welcome to Rubbers 7, a small Japanese convenience store with a reputation for some odd owners. Rumors of mob connections and one rather eccentric boss with a passion for Ping-pong tend to keep business low. But when a young, quiet girl is framed for shoplifting and ends up working for the store. Can her touch, with the help of her unusual coworkers, including a shy boy and a drag queen, turn the fortune of the store around?”
It ran for seven volumes, and was written and illustrated by Sukune Inugami. I like the premise, and I think there’s always room for goofy seinen created by women.