I liked the first volume of Oishinbo (Viz) very much. I flat-out loved the second, and I think this is only partly because it’s focused on booze.

Anyway, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the series, it’s a sort of “best of” sampler of a long-running, much-loved culinary manga. Viz is publishing the A la Carte collections, which focus on a particular aspect of cuisine. In this case, it’s sake and some lesser beverages, like champagne.

Many have noted what we might call the “hometown pride” of these stories, written by Tetsu Kariya and illustrated Akira Hanasaki. I don’t really find it problematic; I sort of expect a culture to favor its indigenous cuisine. And since Kariya reserves most of his teasing for the French, who are no slouches in the culinary pride arena themselves, it reads more to me like entertaining trash talking than anything more sinister. (I kind of wish there was a bande-dessinée response. “Oh, non, vous n’avez fait!”)

On the beverage front, Kariya seems to have a grand time smacking around the drops of god. Champagne is perfectly lovely, intrepid food journalist Yamaoka insists, unless you try and eat anything with it. Beaujolais nouveau is little more than a French prank that the Japanese have fallen for hook, line and sinker. After such flat dismissals of another culture’s beverages of choice, you’d expect sake to be swaddled in adoration, right?

Well, no, and that’s when the volume goes from amusingly snarky to downright fascinating. Yamaoka is trying to convince a co-worker of the virtues of sake, which she dismisses as booze for old men, by taking her to a small, local brewery. Sake, he insists, can be transcendent if it’s made properly. Unfortunately, profit-mongering corporations and nonexistent oversight have lined the nation’s liquor up for every manner of abuse. Alas, the small, local brewery is about to be forced to make the same kind of grocery-store swill Yamaoka abhors, unless our heroes can help the owners secure a loan.

Can the local brewery be saved from ruthless corporate forces? More importantly, can sake as it was meant to be be saved from those same forces? Never fear, for the foodie-journalist equivalent of Mystery, Inc. is on the case! They don’t quite put on a show in someone’s barn to save Japan’s national beverage, but they come hilariously close in the multi-chapter story that follows. The heightened charms of the story aside, it has really interesting things to say about the importance of preserving cultural traditions and looking to dedicated, artisanal producers to do that. It’s even reasonably fair to the money men who have their eyes fixed on the bottom line.

As someone who keeps at least one eye on the resurgence of locally grown, sustainably produced foods and the associated embrace of food quality, this volume really struck a nice chord with me. While 90% of the Food Network’s programming seems to be reaching for the can opener and dumbing down everything Julia Child hoped popular culinary education could be, it’s nice to pick up a comic that cares so passionately about food and the way it’s made.

I love a lot of shôjo for its embrace of emotional ambivalence, but even I can admit that a lot of that ambivalence can come in a fairly narrow flavor profile. How many times can I be asked to care which generically attractive, somewhat condescending boy is the right boy for the heroine? Now, some series execute that conundrum beautifully, and I really care, but books that go a different route always catch my eye.

Yuki Obata’s We Were There (Viz) seems to be one of those welcome alternatives to triangular angst. The first volume demonstrates a sharp appreciation for ambivalence of the internal variety.

Like many of the sisterhood, protagonist Nanami is starting high school and hoping to make friends and have fun. She isn’t yet engaged in the boyfriend hunt, which is a nice change of pace. Of course, active engagement isn’t always required for the boyfriend hunt to begin. Nanami finds herself evenly divided between irritation and infatuation when she meets Yano, a cute classmate. Circumstances conspire to bring them closer. Her heart races and she doesn’t know why. And the school festival looks like it’s going to be a disaster! Slide your Scantron sheet into the Shôjomatic 3000X, right? Well, not quite.

Obata uses a couple of approaches that make We Were There distinct. The first is what I can only call a kind of flatness of affect. It’s like she’s minimized the stylistic extremes that have become shôjo stereotypes to get back to the emotions that inspired those stereotypes in the first place. Second is the fact that she does the hard work of translating stereotypes into actual characters. Yano actually is half irritating, half admirable.

The core question of the book is whether Nanami really knows Yano at all. His first love has died, and Obata examines the messy emotional fallout of that scenario with intelligence and restraint. What exactly is lurking under Yano’s shôjo-prince façade, and why is he giving Nanami peeks under the veil? Does he actually like her, or is he trying to appear normal? Is he in touch with his own feelings at all, and how can Nanami sort her own feelings out with so many questions?

That’s a really meaty, emotional foundation for a story. We Were There doesn’t wallow in emotional lows or titter through shrill comedic highs, and I think it’s more interesting for that. I like wallowing, and I like tittering, but introspection can be engrossing too.