Hi everyone! I’m back from my trip to an Undisclosed Location—all will be revealed shortly! Thanks to Kate for her able stewardship while I was gone!
I’m a bit late in mentioning this—tomorrow is the last day—but JManga is running a yuri promotion right now: They are giving a 100-point rebate (about a dollar) on each yuri manga, although they only seem to have three. Interestingly, the JManga front page is starting to look like the front of a Japanese manga site, crowded with small banner ads offering various deals (50% off on Tsugumomo!) I like this—it’s not very elegant, but it has a feeling of richness—so many bargains!
In other digital manga news, Khursten Santos reviews Viz’s SigIKKI site, which delivers the goods in every way but one: The manga is free, it’s really good, and it is available worldwide, but the site hasn’t been updated since December, presumably because Viz is shifting its efforts toward its app and VizManga site.
Ed Sizemore wraps up the Manga Moveable Feast, which highlighted the work of Jiro Taniguchi, and he also revisits the question of whether manga can be defined in any strict, formal sense.
Reviews: Anna reviews some Harlequin manga from the JManga site at Manga Report.
Zack Davisson on vol. 1 of .hack//CELL (Japan Reviewed)
Johanna Draper Carlson on vol. 19 of 20th Century Boys (Comics Worth Reading)
Sean Gaffney on vol. 5 of Bunny Drop (A Case Suitable for Treatment)
Kristin on vols. 8 and 9 of Dengeki Daisy (Comic Attack)
Leroy Douresseaux on vol. 8 of Kamisama Kiss (The Comic Book Bin)
Lesley Aeschliman on vol. 1 of One Piece (Blogcritics)
Lesley Aeschliman on vol. 1 of Sand Chronicles (Blogcritics)
TSOTE on vol. 22 of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (Three Steps Over Japan)
Erica Friedman on vol. 16 of Tsubomi (Okazu)
It’s true that JManga has only three yuri series, but two of them have three volumes available each. So if you hadn’t bought any of the seven total volumes of yuri they offer yet, if you picked up four of them under the current sale conditions, you’d probably save enough points to buy a fifth one, effectively getting it for free—at least compared to the normal price. I’d already bought the one-volume “Love My Life” (lesbian college student comes out to her dad only to discover that he and her late mother are/were both gay, too) and the first two volumes of “Poor Poor Lips” (a comedy about Nako, a wacky—and somewhat oblivious—poverty-stricken girl, who gets hired to work at a jewelry store run by a rich young lesbian who keeps telling Nako that she isn’t her type, but becomes fond of her despite herself—much to the displeasure of her mother, the actual owner of the store). So I just took advantage of the sale to pick up the recently-released “Poor Poor Lips” volume three.
I also already had volume one of the third JManga yuri series, “Girlfriends,” but didn’t like it as much as either of the others—it’s more like a rather slow-moving standard shoujo romance, except that both romantic leads are girls. So I’m still undecided about whether or not to get the next two volumes.