Daemonium, vol. 1
By Kosen
Rated OT, for Older Teen (16+)
Tokyopop, $10.99

Kosen is a Spanish duo who have been writing and drawing BL manga for some time now, and their professionalism shows through in this horror story about a teenage boy whose world gets turned upside down.

Daemonium starts out like a lot of high-school graphic novels. Seisu is returning home from a trip to an amusement park with his parents, everyone is laughing and happy, and then in a moment, the car crashes, Seisu’s parents are dead, and he is left with a terrible scar. Fast forward to high school, where everyone notices the jagged scar running down Seisu’s face and no one notices the fact that aside from that, he’s very handsome. Instead they call him a freak and the school bully beats him up. Seisu’s awesomely beautiful sister, Alys, rescues him from the thugs and cheers him up—just like she always does, apparently.

A few pages later, Alys announces that she is going to take her brother on a surprise trip, and off they go to a remote monastery where they are practically the only guests. What could possibly go wrong? The story takes off from there in a things-are-not-what-they-seem direction that is at once comfortably familiar to fans of the genre and unpredictable enough to be interesting. The story is a bit offbeat, with two hunky angels fighting to save Seisu’s soul, a trip to a hospital where angels go to detox after being in hell (complete with fetish-y angel nurses in old-fashioned nurse uniforms—nurses never wear scrubs in manga), and our hero taking a mad drive down a dark road with a straitjacketed girl in the passenger seat.

The storytelling lopes along at a nice pace until the last third of the book, when suddenly the plot gets a lot more complicated and the dialogue gets a lot more expository, as the characters explain the rules of heaven and hell in order for the plot to make sense. It all moved too fast for me, and it felt artificial, as if people were being put into place in order to have a dramatic moment.

All this sped-up storytelling might have made sense if there had been a volume 2, but Daemonium must have been one of the victims of Tokyopop’s restructuring, as I see no evidence that a second volume was ever published.

BL fans should be aware that there is only the very faintest hint of yaoi in this book; it’s a horror story, not a love story. There is some horror-style female nudity (i.e. nude female hanging upside down from the ceiling). Kosen fans might want to pick up this volume to enjoy the art or to complete their collections, but it’s a tough sell for the rest of us.

(This review is based on a review copy provided by the publisher.)

You’re So Cool, vols. 1-6
By YoungHee Lee
Rated T, for Teens
Yen Press $10.99

Review by Melinda Beasi

Tomboyish Nan-Woo is the class klutz. Impulsive, accident-prone, and chronically late, she provides a daily dose of schadenfreude for her eager classmates. Seung-Ha is the class prince. Gorgeous, mature, and kind to everyone, he is admired by students and faculty alike. After Nan-Woo pays accidental witness to Seung-Ha’s rejection of a pretty upperclassman, Seung-Ha explains to her that he’s looking for someone who will accept all of him, “even the dark and selfish parts,” at which point Nan-Woo naïvely proclaims, “If I had the chance, I wouldn’t care. I would love you completely and without regret.”

These prove to be fateful words indeed, for though Nan-Woo is granted her dream boyfriend faster than even most fairy godmothers could reasonably manage, she quickly discovers that the boy she so admires is nothing more than an elaborately constructed fantasy. Though his model-student act is impressively well-practiced, out of uniform Seung-Ha is a bona fide thug who belittles Nan-Woo, bullies her into buying his meals, and gleefully sends her off to be tortured by his ruthless fan club.

Now that she’s met the real Seung-Ha, can Nan-Woo possibly live up to her own rash promise?

Yes, yes, your groans are audible from here, and with a premise like that it’s difficult to protest. Even by the end of the second volume, there’s not much grounds for defense. Though Nan-Woo displays more genuine spunk and idiosyncratic charm than her typical Japanese counterpart, it’s hard to invest in even the spunkiest heroine when she’s willing to be pushed around by her sneering, bad-boy love interest for more than a panel or two. Even as Seung-Ha’s growing attachment to Nan-Woo begins to erode his class president persona, it’s unsatisfying as long as Nan-Woo remains in his control.

Fortunately, midway through the series’ third volume, Lee forgets that she’s writing a hopelessly clichéd, emotionally-backwards romance and gets caught up in the real heart of the story: how people (especially families) shape each other, for better or worse.

This begins with an affectionate look at Nan-Woo’s unconventional (but loving) parental figures. Nan-Woo’s mother, Jae-Young, a badass guitarist with a decidely masculine frame, is objectively terrifying and fiercely protective of her daughter. Though Nan-Woo’s father is absent (and apparently unknown), their household is rounded out by Nan-Woo’s uncle, Jay, an unselfconsciously feminine homemaker who acts as the nurturer of the family. Though this familial grouping is clearly presented as a happy one, as individuals they each have their own issues. Jae-Young is habitually inconsiderate and prone to violence, and Jay will do almost anything to avoid being alone. Interestingly, though their weaknesses factor heavily into the person Nan-Woo will one day be, they are perhaps more responsible for her strengths than anything else.

In contrast, the weaknesses and failures of Seung-Ha’s family have contributed mainly to warping his personality. As the illegitimate child of a wealthy businessman, Seung-Ha was abandoned by his self-involved mother as a middle-schooler and taken into his father’s household. There, an environment of cold antipathy taught him to mask his true existence just to survive. Though this could easily be played as a “poor little rich boy” scenario in order to gain sympathy for the misunderstood bad-boy, it is actually in studying Nan-Woo’s family that Seung-Ha is humanized rather than through his own sad circumstances.

Though she herself fights with Nan-Woo on a daily basis, it is the attitude of Nan-Woo’s mom that is key in influencing reader concern. Her ability to see through Seung-Ha’s façade and her outrage over his unprecedented control of her free-spirited daughter implies a harsh authorial judgement unusual for this type of story. Instead of preaching the coolness of her bad-boy love interest, through the eyes of Jae-Young, Lee calls Seung-Ha out on every move from his pathetically manipulative playbook, assuring readers that there is no way this guy is going to make time with Nan-Woo unless he figures out how to shape up. This assurance makes it easier to let go of our deeply ingrained feminist reflexes and view Seung-Ha (and by extension, everyone else) as an individual rather than an archetype. Suddenly, all of Lee’s characters are relatable, even in their worst moments, and it’s hard to write off anyone as just another (insert your cliché here).

It is this move, more than anything, that frees You’re So Cool from its origins in bad-boy romanticism. By viewing her characters through sharp, honest eyes, Lee gives them the context they need to shed their relationship’s worst clichés, or at least diminish their meaning. Though the story continues to follow the basic structure of teen romance, at its core it’s a examination of friendship between two fumbling teenagers who, despite a foundation of false pretense, become important influences in each other’s lives, mainly for the better. That the story’s secondary romance (between Jay and a quiet loner he meets at the grocery store) ends up stealing most of the series’ romantic thunder is likely no mistake, leaving room for Nan-Woo and Seung-Ha’s relationship to take a more ambiguous path.

The series’ transformation does have its share of stumbles. Lee’s ambition occasionally exceeds her skill, especially when she’s trying too hard to dig deep. A sequence in the final volume, for instance, featuring Seung-Ha in a drawn-out mental showdown with his pre-teen self, reads as contrived and convoluted rather than insightful. Through most of the series’ later volumes, however, Lee maintains a solid thread of lighthearted humor that keeps her from sinking too far into depths she’s not quite ready to tackle.

The series’ character designs are typical of Yen Press’ girls’ manhwa line, with its characters’ thickly-lined eyes, full lips, and delicate, pointed chins. And though even Lee’s most beautiful characters can’t quite achieve the delectable pout mastered by Goong‘s Park SoHee, Lee more than makes up for it with her heroine’s pug-nosed, tomboy glower, which is just as expressive and miles more fun. Her visual storytelling is energetic and easy to follow, and her use of dramatic imagery for humorous effect is key in establishing the series’ breezy, lighthearted tone.

Though it would be difficult to recommend the series’ early volumes on their own, for those willing to commit to the not-so-long haul, You’re So Cool offers a lot to enjoy.

This review is based on review copies supplied by the publisher.

Read more from Melinda Beasi at her blog, Manga Bookshelf

Deadman Wonderland, vol. 1
By Jinsei Kataoka and Kazuma Kondou
Rated OT, for Older Teens
Tokyopop, $10.99

This tale of an innocent young man trapped in a prison that doubles as an amusement park isn’t exactly blazing a new literary trail, but the strands are twisted together very nicely, with clear art, good storytelling, and a bit of foreshadowing to tie it all together.

It starts with the first few pages, a hazy view of a boy and a girl playing together while a woman plays piano. The action is accompanied by a song lyric about a woodpecker who is poisoned by the gods and cannot touch his friends for fear he will poison them. Then a mysterious red man appears, armed guards storm him, and the apartment blows up. After which, Tokyo is destroyed by an earthquake.

(Spoilers after the jump)

Fast forward ten years, and say hello to Ganta Igarashi, a survivor of the Tokyo earthquake (and presumably the little boy in the opening sequence). Comfortably ensconced in junior high, Ganta is doing typical teenage things—goofing around with his friends and looking forward to the class trip—when suddenly, the mysterious red man appears in the window. Next thing you know, everyone in Ganta’s class has been reduced to slashed-up corpses. As Ganta stands up, still dazed, the red man advances on him and thrusts some sort of red jewel into his chest.

So, in the first 20 pages we have done the normal-life-shattered-by-unspeakable-violence thing twice, and we still have no clue why. But the book continues to rocket forward, and the creators drop just enough clues along the way to keep it interesting.

Ganta is quickly tried and convicted for his classmates’ murders, sentenced to death and sent to Deadman Wonderland, a prison that doubles as a theme park. This gives the creators plenty of scope for combining violence with goofy pop-culture cuteness, and they take full advantage of it, with a cartoony guide for prisoners and loudspeakers concealed inside super-cute roosters in prison stripes. The prisoners perform in deadly competitions for the entertainment of the spectators, who are told the whole thing is faked. In fact, the contests are just one of the highly creative ways that the prison administrators have of executing the prisoners’ death sentences.

Away from the public, of course, the prison is a brutal place, with a dominatrix of a guard, Makina, overseeing the prisoners and bullies imposing their will on the weak. All this is pretty much standard-issue prison-fantasy stuff. The twist comes in the form of Shira, a cheerful albino girl in a skin-tight jumpsuit who comes crashing into the story to act as Ganta’s protector and cheerleader. Shira is the ultimate manga girl—she is naïve, cheerful, unfailingly kind, and incredibly acrobatic. She absorbs much of the pain intended for Ganta, even taking a knife in the back at one point. She seems to be immune to any sort of physical harm, but it’s hard to tell whether she has some special power or it’s just dumb luck that keeps her from getting killed.

What emerges out of all this, and you can see it coming a mile away, is that there is Something Special about Ganta. On the one hand, he is determined to survive in a system that is stacked against him, and he wants to somehow prove the red man exists, in order to prove his innocence. At the same time, the whole thing is rigged: The prison administrator knows all about the red man (who is known as Original Sin and kept locked up in the same prison), and he has a special interest in Ganta, who saw the red man and lived. So Ganta is not going to be shrugged off and sliced into ribbons or tossed into an electrified tank of water like some ordinary prisoner.

Deadman Wonderland is an entertaining if somewhat gory read. The creators seem to delight in coming up with challenging and painful competitions for the prisoners, and Shira’s unexpected appearances keep the story from being too predictable. The test for this series will be whether the creators continue to bring in new ideas or allow it to become a simple series of battles, but the first volume shows a lot of promise.

This review is based on a review copy supplied by the publisher.

Black Butler, vol. 1
By Yana Toboso
Rated OT, Older Teen
Yen Press, $10.99

Black Butler is set in Victorian, or maybe Edwardian, England, but anyone who is looking for a male version of Emma will be sorely disappointed. This is really an action story, and by the second half of the book—when the car chases begin and the characters all whip out their cell phones—all pretense of period elegance is gone.

The problem is that there is no action in the first half of the book. It’s all about Sebastian, the perfect butler, pleasing his 12-year-old boss, Ciel Phantomhive, with his superhuman butlering skills. This is made difficult by the fact that the rest of the household staff is bumbling idiots, a setup that the creator is desperately trying to play for laughs. It doesn’t work; the staff are too exaggerated and shrieky, and the pratfalls quickly become monotonous.

Ciel is apparently the last remaining member of the Phantomhive toymaking dynasty. He lives alone, except for his household staff, in his enormous, luxuriously appointed mansion, and he alternates between whining and lounging around looking bored. He’s your basic affectless manga guy, and he is the least interesting character in the first half of the book. You would think a toymaker would have some interesting toys scattered around the place, but all Ciel has is a generic boxed board game that serves as a plot device but has no entertainment value of its own. Instead, the focus is on the household staff, with the butler obsessing about the garden and the food and everyone else getting in the way.

The first half of the book should be setting up the story and providing some context. Who is Ciel? Why does he wear an eyepatch? What happened to his parents? Is there something sinister about his family’s toymaking business? Has something terrible happened to the rest of his family? These are things the reader wants to know, but we get no answers, just more poorly drawn teacups and mutterings about poached salmon. Then his childish girlfriend shows up and dresses everyone in frills and bows, throwing tantrums to get her way. Halfway through volume 1, there has been zero plot exposition, but the annoying side details have reached critical overload.

And then, a few pages into chapter 3, after another slapstick scene in which the household staff spazzes out about mice, the whole story starts to change. Suddenly Ciel is playing pool with adults and practicing a little extortion as well, in exchange for getting rid of … someone. Everyone speaks in metaphors, so it’s hard to say who. Then there’s more business with pastries and dropping the china before the book takes a final lunge in the opposite direction: Ciel is kidnapped and beaten, and Italian mafia guys threaten to kill his household staff because apparently Ciel has stolen some drugs from them. Then there’s a lot of yelling and speedlines and eventually Sebastian shows up and kicks everyone’s ass with some slick moves, including a cool Wolverine thing with the cutlery (which, sadly, shows the sort of potential this book would have if the author had tried a little harder). But wait! There’s a Sinister Secret! Ciel and Sebastian have a special bond, and Sebastian is no mere mortal butler, which of course comes as no surprise—it’s the sort of thing you expect to happen in this sort of book, even if the creator has neglected to foreshadow it at all. The end of the book is only marginally more coherent than the beginning, but at least the characters seem to have some motivation and the story is morphing into an action/revenge kind of a thing.

Black Butler has the makings of a great story, but it’s never really realized. The toys, for instance, could have been exploited for atmosphere, and toys are much more sinister than pastries and tea sets. The first two chapters are just floating out there with no context; if Toboso had used them to fill in some of the backstory, they would have been a lot more compelling. As it is, the Victorian schtick has an off-the shelf feel to it, and the whole Upstairs, Downstairs thing is so poorly executed that it detracts from the main story.

The book’s one redeeming feature—and it gives me hope for volume 2—is the way Sebastian totally kicks ass in the last chapter. Toboso’s artistic weakness—his figures are too thin and insubstantial—becomes a strength when Sebastian starts swinging from the ceiling and delivering kicks to the face. There is a nice, dynamic feel to those last pages that is totally missing from the beginning.

Dedicated shonen fans who like slapstick and prefer ass-kicking to narrative will probably enjoy this first volume more than I did, but I’m willing to stick with the series to see if it gets better in the long run.

End note: I read Lianne Sentar’s review of the anime, and if you don’t mind spoilers, you should check it out, if only for her excellent descriptions of what went wrong. Like this:

Unfortunately, most of the comedic potential is wasted on a bevy of side characters who couldn’t be less funny if they were gassing kittens, and the homoeroticism between Sebastian and his pre-pubescent charge is definitely more disturbing than amusing.

Yup. But here’s the thing: Lianne likes the story, and she explains that the anime gets better as you go along. Hopefully the same will be true of the manga.

(This review is based on a review copy supplied by the publisher.)

Sexy Voice and Robo
By Iou Kuroda
Rated T+, for Older Teens
Viz, $19.99

There’s a lot to like about Iou Kuroda’s Sexy Voice and Robo. I like the basic idea—a perceptive teenager moonlights as a paid phone friend and uses what she has learned about human nature to solve mysteries. I like the art, most of the time. I like the characters. I like the oversize format, which shows off Kuroda’s art at its best—this book would feel cramped if it were published in the standard manga size.

And yet, I feel like it could be so much better. This manga has a half-baked feeling, as if Kuroda realized what a good idea he had and started running with it before he was completely ready.

The strongest evidence of this is the structure of the book, which begins with eight self-contained stories and then, a little more than halfway through, shifts to a longer, more complex storyline. At around that point, for the first time, the characters start to develop more self-awareness, and the story gets a lot more interesting. Then, a few chapters later, the book ends, leaving some threads dangling.

Even in the earlier stories, though, Kuroda seems to get carried away with how good his ideas are at the expense of execution. The first story, for instance, is about a kidnapper whose ransom demand is a strange one: Hold off on turning on the traditional Christmas lights in a Tokyo shopping district. Working with the thinnest of clues, and with a great deal of help from coincidence, Nico finds the kidnapper and frees the young boy, but the kidnapper’s true motivation is never revealed. It’s one of the conventions of the mystery genre that bizarre elements like that must ultimately be explained. Nico does come up with a possible reason, but it is never confirmed, and the story seems unfinished as a result.

Several of the self-contained stories seem to have missing pieces like that, and as a result they seem haphazard, as if Kuroda started out with an idea but hadn’t quite mapped the whole thing out. There is a freshness and spontaneity to the book, and Kuroda’s stories are imaginative—he sets one story in a circus and another in an open-air hair salon, and one of his best characters is an amnesiac hitman whose memory only goes back three days. But somehow, each of these stories left me thinking “Wait—that’s it?” Kuroda doesn’t always wrap up all the loose ends in a satisfying way.

Another problem is a lack of depth in his characters. Admittedly, that’s hard to develop in a short story, but what I see Kuroda doing is falling back on the same pattern over and over: Cold, beautiful women who use their looks and their sexuality to manipulate men, and hapless men who get themselves into bad situations and then flounder around helplessly, making things worse. These are all basically less likeable avatars of the lead couple. Nico may be charming, clever, and cute, but she makes her money by enticing men into lengthy, expensive phone calls, and she uses what she has learned about them in their vulnerable moments to manipulate them. She really isn’t that different from the selfish lover in the second story or the suicidal prostitute in the last one.

(Actually, there is one difference: Nico is not sexy. She looks like a little kid—a smart kid, but a kid nonetheless. Her mannerisms are childlike, and she is missing the usual markers of mature sexuality—her hair is short, her chest is flat, and she wears sensible, sturdy clothing. She’s the exact opposite of what her clients want, which is why she doesn’t have to feel threatened by them.)

Robo, for his part, is a clueless guy who is led on by desires he can’t really control. That describes most of the men in this comic as well. The aquarium worker so besotted by love that he is willing to kill all the fish to get his fiancé to marry him; the young man who impulsively steals from a gambling parlor and then has no idea what to do next; the hapless motorcyclist who is led by a woman (another scheming tele-club caller, like Nico only not so nice) into an escalating series of crimes—all these men lurch forward without thinking, careening into one disaster after another, unable to formulate any sort of plan to help themselves.

Like Nico, Robo is a likeable version of this caricature: He lets himself be led around, true, but he doesn’t go on and on about his obsessions, he has a real job (until he gets fired) and he connects with people, in his own way. So neither character is an extreme; they both feel like someone you might actually know, but with a few extra twists thrown in. The other characters, with a few exceptions, are much less nuanced.

That critique extends to the old man for whom Nico works. He is really more of a plot device than a character—an aging gangster, he gives Nico her assignments, sets the story in motion, and then conveniently disappears unless he is called upon to move the plot along. Although Nico suggests that she is his lover when it’s convenient for her work, there actually seems to be very little rapport between them until fairly late in the book. He is simply a cardboard cutout who is rolled onstage when necessary.

The last part of the book shows what Kuroda is capable of once he gets going. The story starts to branch out into something larger, a framing tale that encompasses Nico’s mystery-solving. But then it ends, and much of its potential goes unrealized.

Kuroda is a good storyteller, and his art is one of the reasons to pick up this book. He works with brush and ink, which is a bold and unforgiving medium. Most of the time it works, especially when he keeps his line simple; his older characters often dissolve into a formless mass of wrinkles, and I find it hard to see any underlying form in the old man. His figures sometimes sport a stiff pose or an awkwardly foreshortened limb, which is the risk of working in this medium—you can’t really go back and fix things. (You can try, but it just ends up getting fussier and fussier.)

One of the things I really like about Kuroda’s work is the composition of pages and panels. He constantly shifts his point of view as people talk, which keeps the pages dynamic, and his backgrounds are fully realized, drawing the reader into every panel. A lot of manga artists use stock backgrounds that are so geometrically perfect that they seem flat and unreal. Kuroda’s backgrounds are more organic; every line may not be perfectly straight, but the parts all work together to build a convincing atmosphere. As the book progresses, Kuroda relies less on hatching and more on areas of pure black and white to define his scenes, and as a result, his pages become easier to read at a single glance.

Finally, a word about format. This book is an early departure from the standard manga format, and as I mentioned earlier, Kuroda’s art really demands a larger page. The problem is that the book isn’t quite big enough (or, more likely, the proportions of the original were slightly different than the U.S. version), so it looks like some of the art is chopped off by the edge of the page. At the very least, the art often seems crowded at the edges.

If I were going to republish this in a new edition, I might consider flipping it so that it could reach a broader audience—I can see fans of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s work picking this up, when they are in the mood for a less depressing read. I would tweak the format so the art isn’t cropped. And I’d hire Kuroda to go over his earlier work, fill in the gaps, and then write another volume to wind his story up. Failing that, I’d like to see more of his manga translated into English, to see if his more mature work lives up to his earlier promise.