Review: Tantric Stripfighter Trina
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
Last week, I talked about the term “OEL manga” and how I felt that it was a genre that deserved to have a little recognition among manga fans. I even showed off Scott Pilgrim as the “Best OEL Manga Evar!!!” Yet recently another OEL manga have been making its rounds among the online review community, and not in a good way.
When Brigid Alverson of MangaBlog.net received her review copy of Tantric Stripfighter Trina from Tokyopop, she tweeted, “It’s like everything women hate about superhero comics, only in manga form.” She passed along her copy to Erica Friedman of Okazu, who lashed out that the OEL title “was written for and will appeal primarily to barely post-pubescent males…” And Deb Aoki fumed that the “time, money and effort thrown at pure junk [like this,] could have been spent on promoting the really great books that TokyoPop does have.” So in keeping with the tradition of taking out the trash, Deb sent her copy over to me so that the world could also get my take on it.
Considering all the things mentioned in these reviews, I was preparing myself for a complete failure of a comic to review for this week. I was even planning to contrast the Scott Pilgrim piece by declaring the series to be the “Worst OEL Manga Evar!!!”
But it should be noted that all three of these past reviewers are women. And while it’s been quite a while since I hit puberty, some facts still remain true through the mind of a 24-year-old male:
- I believe that boobs are still pretty freaking awesome.
- I believe that fighting and nonsensical violence can also still be pretty freaking awesome.
So all of this lead to the surprising conclusion that I found myself actually enjoying Tantric Stripfighter Trina.