Quick reviews

Tokyopop sent me some first volumes of some new series debuting in August, and I will handle most of them as quick reviews rather than try to write a full-length review of each one, as I did with Bird Kiss and Mitzukaru Mihara’s The Embalmer. I’ll be posting these in batches over the next few days.

Because I’m the Goddess, by Shamneko

Pandora is apparently the goddess of fanservice, as she arrives on earth clad only in a few shreds of fabric and has her first wardrobe malfunction on page 5. You could write a physics thesis on the various contrivances she uses to hold up her outfits and a psych thesis on the Freudian aspects of this book, which are legion. Just looking at Pandora turns men into drooling idiots eager to do her bidding, but when she uses her goddess powers she turns into a flat-chested little girl and loses all her abilities. Only an awkward young man named Aoi is immune to her charms, and kissing him brings back Pandora’s powers as well as her voluptuous appearance. In a vague reference to Greek mythology, Pandora has been sent to earth to collect some evil “gifts” that she once let loose, and she drafts the reluctant Aoi to help. The plot is complicated and almost hallucinatory in places, as when Pandora turns Aoi into a giant pair of clippers to cut a supernatural chain. Nonetheless this is a funny and very likeable book, as long as you’re not offended by the copious amounts of fanservice. The writing is witty, the characters are engaging, and the situations made me laugh out loud. I’ll be picking up volume 2.

Grenadier, “created by” Sousuke Kaise

Lillian Diaz-Przybyl described this at SDCC as Tokyopop’s big fanservice title, and in a lineup that includes Because I’m the Goddess, that’s saying a lot. If you like big boobs and even bigger guns, this is the book for you. Rushuna, the heroine, is a good-hearted lass, but don’t get in her way: She ends one episode with a lecture about how we should all get along and trust each other, but two pages later she’s mowing down a field full of samurai with her big, blazing guns. Devotees of gritty realism can look elsewhere; while most of her assailant’s bullets go whizzing right by Rushuna, she calmly reloads her gun by popping bullets from her cleavage, lines up her bullets in single file so each one increases the power of the last one exponentially (arguably the only time that mathematical term has ever appeared in such close proximity to a sweaty bosom) and stuns bandits with a bright light that shines from her crotch. While there are a few moments of clarity in which people have real conversations and actual plot exposition occurs, the book consists mostly of fight scenes that range from chaotic to extremely chaotic, interspersed with different views of Rushuna’s anatomy. If you like this sort of thing, well, here’s a book for you; for the rest of us, just move along, nothing to see here.

Go with Grace, by George Alexopoulos
[No link because it has disappeared from the Tokyopop website; I’ll update if it reappears]

I found this manga disturbing. The setup is standard enough—bedridden girl longs to overcome her illness and enjoy life, mysterious stranger appears and helps her out—except that in children’s literature the story has a happy ending, whereas this one ends with Grace’s suicide. And that’s not a spoiler: She slashes her wrists on page one, and the rest of the book is a flashback, which makes it painful to read. The story of the ghostly Alex and the sickly Grace is the best part of the book, but the other characters are two-dimensional and the ending is hasty and contrived. A book this emotionally wrenching needs more depth to be satisfying. The artwork is absolutely lovely in places, but I can’t figure out what time period we’re supposed to be in. Grace’s sister has sausage curls and walks down a cobblestoned street with horse-drawn carriages, but a few pages later Grace is watching the news on TV. At first I thought there was some sort of parallel-universe thing going on, but this inconsistency is never explained. The best part of this book was the omake section at the end, which shows that Mr. Alexopoulos is indeed a talented artist and writer. I hope he gets right to work on his next book, and I hope he lightens the tone a bit and lets his wit shine through.