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Mar. 17th, 2008 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2I spent part of Friday and Saturday watching the rest of the 3-DVD set of Princess Princess anime series so I could lend it to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
skyoxford, who as it turned out wasn't at writer's night on Saturday. Oh well, I lent it to miertam instead. It's a silly fluff series but I enjoyed it, and it's fairly true to the manga. This is a manga that is not quite a "boy's love" manga, but flirts with that idea quite a bit.
One of the fun things about this series is that one of the main characters, Mikoto, was the boyfriend of the main character in the author's previous series, Day of Revolution. In addition, one of the other important characters in Princess Princess was the main character in another series of hers, Family Complex. I need to go out and pick that one up -- I think it's just one volume, or at least, that's all that is available in English at the moment.
I also spent part of Friday and Saturday finishing up the last of the 4 volumes I have of the manga series Vampire Doll Guilt-na-zan... so I could lend them toskyoxford, who I guess will get them at Norwescon. This is another silly series -- extremely silly, in fact -- but with fun characters. There are a lot of stupid jokes and breaking of the 4th wall in this one. At one point near the end of volume 3 and into the beginning of volume 4 they tell a fairly serious story about Guilt-na's past, and it has a sad ending. In the next chapter when Guilt-na goes looking for her master (a bishonen man who dresses in frilly gothic shirts -- one of the big jokes in the series is that most of the characters are typical gothic/bishonen pretty-boy men, and the actual plotline is anything but) and he's in his room with a Hawaiian shirt on playing on a ukelele. When Guilt-na asks him what he's doing, he rattles off the Hawaiian name of the song. When she yells at him to stop spouting gibberish, he says, "Oh, are we still doing this comic? The last chapter had such a sad ending, I thought we were all done." In another story one of the characters appears near the end of the story simply to say that tea is ready, and someone else comments that he's apparently desperate to get himself into that chapter's storyline.
So, like I said, quite silly stuff.
I picked up some comics at my comic shop on Saturday. One of them was the latest chapter of Negima!. I have to say, this is one of my favorite manga right now, and lately it's been a real tour-de-force. Never mind that the author is juggling a cast of at least 100 characters (I think), he's constructed one of the more convoluted and lengthy plotlines over the last two years, and he's nearly reached the end... and it's just flat-out fun stuff.
This particular plotline started off with a big school tournament/festival. This is a typical manga convention, but the school in Negima! is massive in size, and so was their school festival. Negi Springfield (the hero -- sort of a young Harry Potter magical genius kid who is teaching a class of Japanese high school girls -- you get your Harry Potter references and your anime harem-style setting, and a lot of magical adventure and combat all wrapped up in one comic) promises to visit all of the different events that his students are involved in -- much more than he can actually accomplish. However, with the use of a techno-magical time traveling device given to him by one of his extraordinarily (and mysteriously) brilliant students, he is able to travel back in time and experience the fair more than once. In fact, if I remember right, he does this at least twice, because he also signs up for a big martial arts tournament going on. The tournament itself takes up more than one volume of the manga and gives the author time to really delve into all of the different characters and their styles of combat and fighting abilities.
But that is only the opening salvo of the storyline -- the main plot involves the brilliant student Chao, who (as it turns out) is a future descendant of Negi and who has traveled back in time to change her own future, by revealing the existence of magic to the entire world. This pits her against Negi and all of the magical staff of the school, but Chao has access to technology that nobody in present-day has ever heard of, and has been planning her attack for several years. Plus, she's a genius -- not just at technology, but magic as well.
Negi and his friends make plans to stop Chao, only to realize too late that they've already been thwarted -- Chao has trapped them and sent them a week into the future. Her plan has already been carried out. Negi is to be held responsible and stripped of his powers, and of course will not be allowed to teach (or even see) his students ever again.
Unless, of course, they can break Negi out of prison and travel back in time one last time to try once more to stop Chao's plan.
Like I said, it's a convoluted plot that takes many issues of the manga to play out. There are many, many characters to keep track of. On top of that, the martial arts moves and especially the magical spells are many and varied -- Negi is a Western magician and his spells are all in Latin, but others cast spells in Japanese or Chinese or Sanskrit or Greek. A lot of these are quoted lines from various ancient texts -- they aren't actually spells, but still I can't imagine how much research has gone into finding the right Greek text for a fire-based attack spell, and to make certain it's written out in Greek properly. Well, it's only because of a lot of footnotes that you even have a clue what some of these spells are actually about, but it's impressive. The artwork is no less so -- many parts of the comic are modeled in 3D on a computer, but you wouldn't realize it if they didn't say so in the notes afterward. Some of the detail in this manga reminds me of the complex detail you see in Battle Angel Alita or Five Star Stories, even though Negima! is a much less serious story overall.
I also picked up the latest issue of XXXholic. I just finished watching the fifth DVD of the animated Tsubasa, which is the sister series of XXXholic, and that concludes their first season -- and I checked online, and as it happens they did a combo movie with one hour-long movie for each series, plus they're releasing an XXXholic anime series on DVD too.
skyoxford, who as it turned out wasn't at writer's night on Saturday. Oh well, I lent it to miertam instead. It's a silly fluff series but I enjoyed it, and it's fairly true to the manga. This is a manga that is not quite a "boy's love" manga, but flirts with that idea quite a bit.One of the fun things about this series is that one of the main characters, Mikoto, was the boyfriend of the main character in the author's previous series, Day of Revolution. In addition, one of the other important characters in Princess Princess was the main character in another series of hers, Family Complex. I need to go out and pick that one up -- I think it's just one volume, or at least, that's all that is available in English at the moment.
I also spent part of Friday and Saturday finishing up the last of the 4 volumes I have of the manga series Vampire Doll Guilt-na-zan... so I could lend them to
skyoxford, who I guess will get them at Norwescon. This is another silly series -- extremely silly, in fact -- but with fun characters. There are a lot of stupid jokes and breaking of the 4th wall in this one. At one point near the end of volume 3 and into the beginning of volume 4 they tell a fairly serious story about Guilt-na's past, and it has a sad ending. In the next chapter when Guilt-na goes looking for her master (a bishonen man who dresses in frilly gothic shirts -- one of the big jokes in the series is that most of the characters are typical gothic/bishonen pretty-boy men, and the actual plotline is anything but) and he's in his room with a Hawaiian shirt on playing on a ukelele. When Guilt-na asks him what he's doing, he rattles off the Hawaiian name of the song. When she yells at him to stop spouting gibberish, he says, "Oh, are we still doing this comic? The last chapter had such a sad ending, I thought we were all done." In another story one of the characters appears near the end of the story simply to say that tea is ready, and someone else comments that he's apparently desperate to get himself into that chapter's storyline.So, like I said, quite silly stuff.
I picked up some comics at my comic shop on Saturday. One of them was the latest chapter of Negima!. I have to say, this is one of my favorite manga right now, and lately it's been a real tour-de-force. Never mind that the author is juggling a cast of at least 100 characters (I think), he's constructed one of the more convoluted and lengthy plotlines over the last two years, and he's nearly reached the end... and it's just flat-out fun stuff.
This particular plotline started off with a big school tournament/festival. This is a typical manga convention, but the school in Negima! is massive in size, and so was their school festival. Negi Springfield (the hero -- sort of a young Harry Potter magical genius kid who is teaching a class of Japanese high school girls -- you get your Harry Potter references and your anime harem-style setting, and a lot of magical adventure and combat all wrapped up in one comic) promises to visit all of the different events that his students are involved in -- much more than he can actually accomplish. However, with the use of a techno-magical time traveling device given to him by one of his extraordinarily (and mysteriously) brilliant students, he is able to travel back in time and experience the fair more than once. In fact, if I remember right, he does this at least twice, because he also signs up for a big martial arts tournament going on. The tournament itself takes up more than one volume of the manga and gives the author time to really delve into all of the different characters and their styles of combat and fighting abilities.
But that is only the opening salvo of the storyline -- the main plot involves the brilliant student Chao, who (as it turns out) is a future descendant of Negi and who has traveled back in time to change her own future, by revealing the existence of magic to the entire world. This pits her against Negi and all of the magical staff of the school, but Chao has access to technology that nobody in present-day has ever heard of, and has been planning her attack for several years. Plus, she's a genius -- not just at technology, but magic as well.
Negi and his friends make plans to stop Chao, only to realize too late that they've already been thwarted -- Chao has trapped them and sent them a week into the future. Her plan has already been carried out. Negi is to be held responsible and stripped of his powers, and of course will not be allowed to teach (or even see) his students ever again.
Unless, of course, they can break Negi out of prison and travel back in time one last time to try once more to stop Chao's plan.
Like I said, it's a convoluted plot that takes many issues of the manga to play out. There are many, many characters to keep track of. On top of that, the martial arts moves and especially the magical spells are many and varied -- Negi is a Western magician and his spells are all in Latin, but others cast spells in Japanese or Chinese or Sanskrit or Greek. A lot of these are quoted lines from various ancient texts -- they aren't actually spells, but still I can't imagine how much research has gone into finding the right Greek text for a fire-based attack spell, and to make certain it's written out in Greek properly. Well, it's only because of a lot of footnotes that you even have a clue what some of these spells are actually about, but it's impressive. The artwork is no less so -- many parts of the comic are modeled in 3D on a computer, but you wouldn't realize it if they didn't say so in the notes afterward. Some of the detail in this manga reminds me of the complex detail you see in Battle Angel Alita or Five Star Stories, even though Negima! is a much less serious story overall.
I also picked up the latest issue of XXXholic. I just finished watching the fifth DVD of the animated Tsubasa, which is the sister series of XXXholic, and that concludes their first season -- and I checked online, and as it happens they did a combo movie with one hour-long movie for each series, plus they're releasing an XXXholic anime series on DVD too.
