Renaissance Josei

Sit down everyone, because I'm going to tell you a story.  Long ago in the dark days of the mid-90s, if you wanted to enjoy a bit of shoujo in the United States you had to work for it.  Sure, there was  Sailor Moon  on TV, but if you didn't go for magical girls your options were mostly limited to whatever VHS bootlegs you could get your hands on.  Even the manga world didn't have much to offer until Mixx Magazine came along. Knowing that, it's pretty easy to understand how a series like  Fushigi Yuugi  could get popular. It was a series about a girl getting sucked into another world and having adventures with a bunch of pretty warrior boys. With elements of fantasy and romance, it was all but made for teenage girls to throw money at it.  Teen girls did indeed throw lots of money at it, which not only proved there was a market for shoujo in the State and making creator Yuu Watase wealthy in the process.  For many yea...

t's been a while since we enjoyed our last sampler.  Since then, the number of manga on Crunchyroll just keeps growing, so the Crunchyroll Manga Sampler menu only grows bigger.  Today's trio is a rather dark and grim set of works.  In a way, it feels weirdly appropriate for the atmosphere of the world today.

There are few things more thrilling for a manga fan than to see one of their favorite series make the jump to television.  It’s not just the joy that comes from seeing the story and characters you enjoyed previously come to life, there’s also the delight of new viewers becoming new readers and fellow fans and the occasional satisfaction in seeing these adaptations become critical, if not commercial successes.  More than a few of us have been enjoying this feeling recently as we watch the latest adaptations of  works like  The Ancient Magus’ Bride  and  Land of the Lustrous .  That being said, for every successful adaptation there are countless others that simply miss the mark.  Few of those shows can be said to be as disappointing as the 2001 anime adaptation of Kouta Hirano’s  Hellsing .

Bookwalker  is one of the few digital manga sites of recent years that could be considered a success.  It started merely as a digital spinoff for Kadokawa with only a barely localized site and a handful of titles to its name.  These days they've got partnerships with Viz, Seven Seas, Yen Press, and other notable manga publishers and their digital manga offerings represent one of the biggest and most diverse selections to be found.  While digging around in their library, I found a trio of food-themed manga that practically begged to be examined for our most literal Manga Sampler yet. Bookwalker Manga Sampler: Ekiben Hitoritabi, Shiawase Restaurant & Seiwa High School Bento Club!

Previous to the last couple of years, just about any anime and manga fan you could find would tell you the same thing:  JoJo's Bizarre Adventure  would never be popular in the United States. It's not like people didn't try to make it otherwise.   We got some of the manga, a couple of OVAs, even a fighting game on the Sega Dreamcast and PS1.  All of them still have followings to this day, but all of them failed to reach the mainstream at the time. Audiences were put off by the long-running continuity, the inherent weirdness of the story and art, and Hirohiko Araki's fondness for naming characters after musicians made licensing any JoJo material a balancing act between avoiding music rights issues and staying faithful to the original.   JoJo's Bizarre Adventure  might have a beloved franchise in Japan, but until quite recently it was relegated to a few memes, even fewer hardcore fans, and the depths of the scanlation scene.  Then something truly ...

his might be the weirdest sampler we've looked at yet.  It's time to plumb the bottom of Crunchyroll's manga page a little for our latest Crunchyroll Manga Sampler: Course Six: Barom One, Takahashi-San Is Listening, & The Diary of Ochibi-San

We may be currently caught up in the dark, cold, bitter depths of winter, so what better way is there to pass the time than to stay in and read some digital manga?    After all, Crunchyroll added a few more series before the end of last year, so maybe we’ll get a chance to look at some of them!  

So stop me if you’ve heard this one before: there’s a story about a teenage boy.  He’s not particular good at social graces, lives alone for entirely contrived reasons, and generally doesn’t have a high opinion of himself.  Then one day he unexpectedly does a good deed; maybe he saves a child or stops a criminal.  The nature of the deed doesn’t really matter as the end result is that he ends up dead, only to be reincarnated in some wacky form which puts him into contact with at least half a dozen pretty girls who all fit within any number of otaku-friendly stereotypes.  Naturally, this is all based on a series of light novels by no one you’ve heard of in particular. What I’m trying to say is that  Dog and Scissors  is not a very original show.  Indeed, the only thing that would make it more predictable would be to send the protagonist to a fantasy world that may or may not be a literal video game.  Nonetheless , it does have a few qualitie...

It's a new year and that means it's the perfect time to resolve to read more manga online! I hope you all saved some room after your holiday feasts and your New Year's Even drinks as we've got another Crunchyroll Manga Sampler of three very different series.

Anime shorts don't get a lot of respect from American anime fans. After all, they're mostly meant to fill the time between full-length shows. They tend to be left out of many seasonal previews and reviews. Very often they're lucky to be licensed anywhere outside of Crunchyroll, and a physical release outside of Japan is exceedingly rare.  It's a shame that these sorts of shows tend to fly under the fandom's radar, because in doing so people miss out on great shows like  Tonari no Seki-kun  ( My Neighbor Seki ).

As I noted before on my review of  The Man of Tango , it's unusual that Viz took so long to get into the yaoi business. Still, you can't say that they haven't tried their hardest to distinguish their  SuBLime imprint  from yaoi publisers of the past. They've got a slick website with a fairly active social media presence. They've not only amassed a solid collection of original works in both print and ebook form, but a equally sizeable collection of digital license rescues. All their digital offerings are available for DRM-free download in all the standard e-book formats along with free previews of just about everything in an easy-to-search format. I'm genuinely impressed at how hard SuBLime has worked to push their distribution model into the 21 st  century at a time when so many manga publishers (including their parent company Viz) have struggled to do the same. That being said, I'm not here to talk about the site, but the works they have to offer. Than...

Adapting visual novels to animation is not an easy task. There have been dozens of shows over the years that have tried their hands at it and the results have been decidedly mixed. How do you condense hours upon hours of story and multiple romantic (if not outright sexual) routes into something comprehensible, suitable for television, and able to comfortably fit into one or two seasons’ worth of half-hour installments? I don’t know if anyone will ever come up with a perfect formula for adapting visual novels to television, but there are plenty of examples of how NOT to do it. One of the more recent examples is 2014’s  DRAMAtical Murder . Don’t recall it? I don’t blame you. The summer of 2014 was one that was loaded with many big name shows that are still worth remembering:  Tokyo Ghoul ,  Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun ,  Barakamon ,  Terror In Resonance , just to name a few. That’s not even counting the sequels and second seasons to shows like  Space Dandy ,...

Once again, we've got another strange trio of titles to choose from with this course, ranging from shonen romance to seinen slice-of-life to a bit of corporate synergy. Let's serve up yet another course of the Crunchyroll Manga Sampler!

I swear I did not rig this week’s selection.    I just happened to get very lucky with the random number generator this time around.    That’s probably a good thing considering the rather eclectic offerings we’ll be looking at today.    Without further ado, let’s take a look at the second course:

Whenever I’m asked to talk about bad anime that I’ve seen, I usually don’t have much to talk about.    That seems to be kind of unusual, at least from my perspective.    Most of my peers in this fandom grew up in the bad old days of the 1990s when the vast majority of anime available were crappy OVAs, and there are plenty of others that will watch something bad yet popular so they can keep up with the latest social media discourse.    As for me, I’m heading into my seventh year as an anime fan and I’m still playing catch-up with older classics and a seemingly endless backlog of notable shows from more recent years.    Making time for bad shows didn’t seem like a good use of my time. Recently, though, I’ve been rethinking this point of view.    It’s not like I’m a stranger to enjoying so-bad-its-good media.    I grew up on  Mystery Science Theater 3000 .    I hung around sites like  The Agony Booth ...

Sometimes the simple act of choosing what to read can be daunting.   When you don’t have a clear idea in mind, a shelf of books can leave you feeling frustrated as you sort what looks good based on the cover art or your mood or whatever other sort of random criteria you want to choose.   Digital distribution sites are no different, which is how I found myself staring at Crunchyroll’s manga library one night, trying to decide just where to start.   That’s when a thought struck me: how many other people were out there having just the same problem as I was?   How many other people were staring at their screens, trying to decide which bit of cover art or which blurb sounded the most appealing?   Wouldn’t it be useful if someone could take a quick look at all of them and sort out which ones were worth anyone’s time? I knew then what I had to do. I set a couple of rules for myself early on.   First, I would look at the first volumes of three series at a time ...

Want just the manga reviews?  Head over to The Manga Test Drive! Want more writing from me?  Check out my previous articles at Anime Feminist ! Want to hear me talking with friends about manga?  Check out my takes on Wandering Son , Tropic of the Sea , X-Day , Sweet Rein , Legal Drug , and Clover on the (sadly defunct) Rainy Day Reading podcast and on The Key to the Kingdom at Shojo And Tell ! Want to hear me talking with friends about (mostly bad) anime?  Check out my takes on Diabolik Lovers , Miracle Train , Perfect Blue , Another , Vividred Operation , High School DxD , Lance 'n' Masques , and Upotte!   at the Heavy Storms podcast! Want to give me money for what I do?  You can do so either through Patreon or buy me a Ko-Fi ! Want to commission a review?   The details are here!