New manga are coming into my house faster than I can read them lately—because my kids have vacation but I don’t, I guess. Anyway, I’ve finally made my way through the top of the stack, so here are my short takes.
Yotsuba&! Don’t be put off by the cutesy typography of the title. That’s the only false note in this cheerful comedy manga by Azumanga Daioh creator Kiyohiko Azuma. The premise is simple: Yotsuba is a little kid who moves into a new neighborhood and seems mysteriously ignorant of everyday things like swings and air conditioners. Impulsive, curious, likely to go to extremes, Yotsuba is like a little engine driving the plot and all the characters around her. Azuma has done a nice job of channeling her characters’ manic tendencies to make this a very funny book but much more readable than Azumanga Daioh.
Full Moon Stricken with fatal throat cancer, 12-year-old Mitsuki has only one chance at survival: an operation that would remove her vocal chords. But Mitsuki would rather die, literally, than live a life without singing. Two bizarre harbingers of death, in cat and bunny costumes, show up to speed her along the path to the Great Divide but end up derailing their own plans when they help Mitsuki become a singing star. With only one year to live, she wants to find her old friend and true love Eichi, and naturally the only way to track him down is to become a 16-year-old singing sensation. If you are willing to suspend all disbelief, and wade through the very busy art, there is a decent story lurking in here.
Last Hope The premise of Last Hope is not terribly original: That hunky guy at school is really a prince from another dimension who is on the run from an evil uncle—and his dimension-hopping machine is broken. The dark and brooding Hiroto quickly gets entangled with a gaggle of classmates and accidentally (the machine is broken, remember?) transports everyone to some other dimension where the school has been taken over by authoritarian teachers and thuggish security guards. Nope, never seen that one before. What makes it work—and it does work—is not only the cleanly drawn art but also the characters: spunky Colleen, nerdy genius Alvin, and the mangarrific shy-and-sweet Ikuko. If Tohru Honda throws you into insulin shock, Colleen is the antidote. Throw in some obnoxious jocks, and you’ve got… high school. Writer Michael Dignan lets his characters break out of their stereotypes a bit while still keeping the plot simple. A longer-than-usual set of character sketches at the end of the book shows that he and artist Kriss Sison put more thought than usual into these characters. It shows.
