The Anime Almanac

Tezuka.

Tezuka! Tezuka! Tezuka!

You cannot be into manga without having hearing that name mentioned at least once every few months of your otaku wanderings.

Osamu Tezuka has come to be known as the grandfather of manga – the pioneer of the medium – and his works like Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion have been staples in both American and Japanese popular culture.

Unfortunately, my problem with Tezuka is that he’s at least one generation away from me and my tastes. The man died when I was only five, and most of his work would be better known from my father’s childhood than my own. So while I recognize Tezuka and his place in manga history, I have never read or watched any of his work and mostly stuck to the comics and anime of my generation.

But Tezuka, like most fixtures of pop culture’s recent past, is making a comeback in the 21st century with many of his works finding a refresh in recent years. Niche publisher Vertical is leading the manga charge by diving deep into the Tezuka archives and releasing many of his works to the American audience. Thanks to this publisher, decades-old titles like Dororo and MW are now being seen in English for the first time ever.

At the forefront of Vertical’s Tezuka revival is Black Jack, the story of a rogue doctor who’s purpose in life is to save anyone who needs saving, despite the circumstances or option of payment. The series has seen almost universal approval from the manga community since its stateside release.

So when Vertical’s brand new marketing director Ed Chavez offered up review copies of their fifth Black Jack collection, I very eagerly requested a copy to find out what all the hype’s been about.

And wow, now I know, because reading Black Jack has changed my view and perception of the medium I thought I knew completely.

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It’s been a long time since I last read shojo manga. As a fan of the more moé and shonen series, I very rarely pick up shojo titles in my eight years of collecting manga. But some time ago, I had a girlfriend who was also into manga, and she (literally) forced me to take in series like Hot Gimmick, Marmalade Boy, and Fushigi Yuugi. Fortunately, the girl had good tastes in manga, so despite following outside the target demographic of these titles, I found myself enjoying them a lot.

But again, that was many years ago, and I haven’t picked up a truly shojo title since then. So when CMX sent me a copy of Mai Nishikata’s Venus Capriccio to review for this site, I was worried that I might be a little rusty in being able to evaluate such a title.

Much to my surprise, however, Capriccio was an enjoyable read.

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I love visual novel games. It’s an unique genre that is hugely popular in Japan yet is only known in America by otaku. It’s probably because of this cultural oddity that I find myself fascinated with the genre. Since learning Japanese, I would occasionally import a game and play through them in their native language. Just recently, I’ve been playing The Idolmaster SP import on my PSP system. In college, I gave my final presentation in Japanese pop-culture studies about this genre of video game. I even wrote an essay about the Phoenix Wright series and its impact on American otaku culture on this blog a year ago.

We very rarely see visual novels translated into English and released into the US, so when one does come around, I usually play through it with a lot of praise and fanfare. So when I was offered a review copy of Ignition’s American release of the Nintendo DS game Lux-Pain, I gave them quite an enthusiastic “yes!” at the opportunity.

Lux-Pain puts you in the position of a paranormal investigator in search of the truth behind a series of unexplainable murders and suicides in the quiet Kisaragi City. Your special weapon, Sigma, is the ability to erase through the physical world and uncover the Silent, little psychic worms of tragedy and despair. Going undercover as a typical high school student, you search around the city for these worms left around the crime scenes or buried in the psyche of your friends and classmates.

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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.

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Manga artist Akira Toriyama must have some strange fetish for dragons. If you are an American anime fan and you haven’t been living under a rock for the past decade or so, you are probably familiar with his Dragonball manga franchise. But video game fans will also be familiar with him providing the character designs for Dragon Quest, a Japanese RPG franchise that has been around since the mid-80’s and still continues to be produced to this very day.

In late 2006, Toriyama provided his familiar character designs to Blue Dragon, a new RPG for the Xbox 360. This was significant for two reasons. 1) It was one of the first Japanese RPG’s on the Xbox 360 and 2) the Japanese don’t play the Xbox 360.

But the game sold moderately well in Japan, which lead to the need to expand the franchise to be just as popular and have the same longevity as Toriyama’s previous Dragon projects. Along with a shonen anime series (currently available for free on XBM and iTunes), Mistwalker studio teamed up with Brownie Brown to put together Blue Dragon Plus, a sequel to the original game. However, this time around they are going portable by releasing the game on the Nintendo DS.

Plus takes place a year after the events of the original game. Shu, the game’s main protagonist and young-Goku doppelganger, is living in peace with his friends after they have defeated the evil villain Nene. However, Nene is not actually dead, and when he takes away the soul of Shu’s robotic friend, Shu is once again on the quest to get his old pal back. He’s joined up all his other friends from the first game, and they split up to fight all the evil monsters and robots that stand in their way.

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I have to admit, when I first heard the news that official applications based off of the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise were coming to the iPhone App Store, I had mixed feelings over it. I was excited because I am both an Eva fanboy and Apple fanboy, so combining the two seemed to me like a recipe for awesome. However, being an extensive iPhone user, I know all too well how crappy most of programs coming out of the App Store actually are… especially those promoted as “official” apps… (>_>)

Well, we didn’t have to wait for long to see what coming out. Tokyo software company Appliya, makers of the feline attention-grabbing app Meow Cam, released two Eva-inspired creations into the apps store earlier this week, the Evangelion Clock (iTunes link) and Evangelion Picture Stamp (iTunes link).

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