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Seven Seas Entertainment debuted the first collected volume of manga-ka Oshioshio's My Deer Friend Nokotan in 2020. Despite the series running for eight volumes and leading to an anime adaptation, I had not heard of it until comics critic Tegan O'Neil mentioned it in passing, somewhere around the time O'Neil had written about Maid to Skate . The book's appeal is fairly evident from its cover and…
How many posts do you think it takes to qualify as a series? If it's just two, then I guess we could consider this post the second in a series in which I check out extremely popular manga only to find out that it's not really for me, following last month's post on Blue Lock . This time it's Sumiko Arai's The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All , AKA "the Green Yuri", based on its…
Just to the right of the last set of bookshelves we discussed is a stack of books that I probably would have put on one of its shelves, if only there was room to do so. So instead, they are just kind of piled up alongside it, waiting for a day when I might actually get enough shelves to accommodate all my books and go about organizing the in a less haphazard fashion. Given the size of the stack,…
Regardless of the quality of this summer's new Masters of the Universe movie, it definitely ushered in a flood of related merchandise. And given that the film is based on a toy line, one suspects that doing so was likely always a part of the point of producing the film in the first place. While I have long since grown out of the demographic to play with or collect the toys, I did find this one…
G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #34 (1985) Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky • This is a very strong issue, and a good candidate for any "best of" G.I. Joe collection, at least among the issues I've read so far. It's a done-in-one story, with no real connection to the various ongoing storylines...in fact, were it not credited to the regular creative team, I would suspect it might have been a…
This week's bookshelf is an awful lot like last week's, in that it is a) mostly small press and b) a real mess, with no real logic as to what is on it. One thing that seems apparent is that I seem to have stuck a whole bunch of very thin books on this shelf, books that are more "prestige format" (that is, regular comics with spines) than trade paperbacks, collections or graphic novels. The sorts…
BOUGHT: Now That We Draw Vol. 5 (Seven Seas Entertainment) The previous volume ended with a pretty big cliffhanger, with high schooler and aspiring manga artist Uehara Yuu overhearing the other two points of the series' emerging love triangle discussing him in the hot spring next to the one he was soaking in. His cute childhood friend turned sensei (and successful manga artist) Love-chan asks his…
• There's been a lot of talk about superhero fatigue, and that Marvel Cinematic Universe having become less and less of a selling point in and of itself (and I agree the cross-movie mega-story has been completely unmoored and ponderous compared to the early days; the producers never bothered to replace the original hook of building The Avengers team and then building towards the Thanos conflict…
G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #31 (1985) Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky • Say, did you know that David Mazzucchelli inked this cover...? He did! • This issue sees the introduction of Spirit, who is referred to repeatedly as "Spirit Iron-Knife" ("Spirit" is his codename, while "Charlie Iron-Knife" is his real name). Spirit is technically the team's second Native American member, following…
This week's bookshelf is a real hodgepodge, with, as far as I can now discern, no real orgainizing principle. These books seem to be almost all small press and/or self-published (with a few prominent exceptions), and to be of such a size that they fit better on this shelf than they might have on other shelves. A few seem to be pretty out-of-place though, like the couple of manga volumes. The…
