Fruits Basket Volume 13 has arrived in our house, so nothing is going to get done around here for a while.
However, there are a few things to note elsewhere. Manganews reports that Eiichiro Oda, the manga-ka responsible for One Piece, is ill, and Weekly Shonen Jump (in Japan) has put the series on hiatus.
Also via Manganews, the Japan Times looks at hate manga.
There’s a doctor in the house: Polite Dissent kicks off its examination of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster with an explanation of the cerebral aneurysm.
At Love Manga, David Taylor notes that volume 6 of Naruto is still on the USA Today Top 150, although it has plummeted to number 123.
Anime on DVD’s Jarred Pine has an early review of Claymore, which is in Viz’s Shonen Jump Advanced line (which means it’s reasonably priced at $7.99!). Jarred likes it, and after hearing Ed Chavez’s review on mangacast, I think I’m going to check it out.
Finally, David Taylor has been hosting an interesting discussion—which migrated over to Tangognat—about whether libraries and bookstores should enforce the age ratings on manga. Purely by coincidence, Wai Wai gets the last word with a worst-case scenario.
I was perplexed by Claymore. The writing is bad – bald & elementary, without charm or cleverness. The art is highly uneven – everybody but the heroine are drawn badly, even repulsively, with stick-stiff postures. Even the layout is kind of stiff and unimaginative. The only real strength is the violence, which is sudden, swift, and bloody in a slightly-more-polished fashion than Parasyte, which it sort of resembles in a distant sort of fashion. Except that Parasyte was about twenty times as clever and infinitely more engaging.
Still and all, I’m still on the bubble about sticking with it for another volume. It’s possible that it improves with time, and the backgrounds aren’t totally lame.