Renaissance Josei

It’s kind of shocking that it took Viz so long to start a yaoi imprint of their own, SuBLime. Over the years it seems that most of the major publishers have at least dabbled with the genre, if they didn’t have a dedicated imprint or were themselves dedicated to the genre.    SuBLime certainly has been far more wise in their title selection than most, and by being more selective about what goes to print, they can afford to explore more unconventional titles.    Amongst the most unconventional of the lot is  The Man of Tango  by Tetuzoh Okadaya. The titular man is Angel, a renowned tango dancer who himself has never experienced the sort of passion that tango is renowned for.   He’s become something of a heartbreaker over the years, and one of the few constants in his life is his fellow dance teacher/best friend/roommate Bene.   A performance at a local bar leads to the two of them meeting Hiro.   Hiro is half Japanese and half Latino, an...

So as teased in the intro post, I'm opening myself up for commissioned reviews!  Here are the guidelines: $20 A manga review of a single volume of your choosing $30 One feature-length anime film OR One OVA series of your choosing up to six episodes $50 One manga or light novel review featuring up to three volumes of any given series OR One cour (up to 12 episodes) of any given anime series OR One OVA series of your choosing up to 12 episodes $75 One manga or light novel review featuring 4-6 volumes of any given series Two cours (up to 24 episodes) of any given anime series ADDITIONAL NOTES: Any requests for media that is currently out of print and/or not available digitally through legal means may be subject to a surcharge determined at the writer's discretion. I will not accept any requests for media which has not been licensed in English Payment can be made through either Paypal or Ko-Fi Want to make a request?  Have further quest...

Osamu Tezuka created many, many manga over the course of his career. Some were long-spanning and ambitious, exploring philosophical, even experimental ideas. Other were short and strange ideas seemingly done on a lark. Personally, though, I find that his best works were those that were simple, straightforward, with universal appeal. This is true for works like  Princess Knight, Astro Boy,  and the subject of today's review:  Unico. Unico  is the story of a lovely little unicorn who belonged to Psyche, an ancient Greek princess renowned for her beauty and gentleness. The love goddess Venus envies her and does her best to foil Psyche, but not even her son Cupid is immune to Pysche's charms. Thus, Venus decides that if she can't get rid of Psyche, she will get rid of her unicorn with a curse. She commands the west winds to steal him away and spirit him through time and space, far from where he could be loved. Regardless of where and when Unico lands, he always ends...

Once again, the rumor mill is churning about Digital Manga Publishing's future as one Kickstarter is all but confirmed to be dead and others face an uncertain fate.  While it may be a little too early to start writing the eulogies, it's not too early to look back upon the many works they've licensed and wish for some of them to see print again.  With over a decade's worth of books scattered over a handful of imprints, there's more than enough to make a Top 10 list's worth. Naturally, there are a few caveats.  These are my choice and my choices alone; your choices may (and likely do) differ.  They are listed in alphabetical order because trying to rank these numerically would be too arbitrary even for me.  There's no Project H titles included because I don't read hentai manga, so I leave it to others to determine what titles there are worth saving.  Finally, his list is far from a complete one, but it's one that I feel represents a reasonable slice...

It's a difficult thing to write a story about sex workers. A big reason for that is that regardless of place or time period, prostitution is a distinctly unglamorous thing. The women who perform it often come from impoverished, abusive backgrounds. Their lives are often equally impoverished and abusive, not to mention short and tragic. In fiction, such women may be used to drive home some moral point, a demonstration of what happens to those women who stray from conventional morality. They may be the focus of some tragedy, showing the downfall of some poor noble creature who is either saved from her wretchedness by an outside force or by killing herself to escape her life with some sense of honor or dignity. More often than not, they're nothing but sexy, trashy window dressing for the real story. That's what makes a manga like  Sakuran  all the more unusual. It's not just about how the main character became a prostitute, but also how she rega...

"est em" is not a name you’ll hear on the lips of most manga readers.   She doesn’t have the multi-million sales of someone like Yuu Watase or CLAMP.    She works in two genres that are decidedly niche in the North America manga scene – boy’s love and josei.    Even her name is low-key, being purposefully lower case like e.e. cummings.    Her name may be small, but within the boy's love fandom, she is a giant.   Few of her works have seen any sort of release here, save for a few one-shot anthologies from Aurora Publishing and a few of her josei works appearing on the late, lamented JManga site.   You can only imagine the excitement amongst those in the know (myself included) when one of her latest works was picked up by Viz via their SuBLime imprint.   Like the other works that got physical releases,  Tableau Numero 20  is a one-volume anthology of stories, with no real theme tying them together beyond est em...

It's been a good long while since our last course.  Indeed, just enough time for Crunchyroll to clean out a bunch of Kodansha titles and replace them with a few more .   That just means that our manga palates have been nice and cleansed, just in time for the latest round of titles: COURSE EIGHT: LOVE THEORY, AS THE GODS WILL, & NANBAKA