Rocket Bomber - reviews

originally written for and posted on Comicsnob.com [Dec ’06 – May ’08]

School Rumble, Vol. 1
Published by: Del Rey Books
Writer & Artist: Jin Kobayashi

192 (162) pages
Original Language: Japanese
Orientation: Right to left
Vintage: 2003. US edition February 2006.
English Translation & Adaptation: William Flanagan
Letterer: Dana Hayward
Publisher’s Rating: Older Teen, ages 16+

Rating: 2 out of 5

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Premise: High school romance, the comedy.

Synopsis:

A collection of 18 ’shorts’, each smaller story featuring a different problem in the love lives of a small group of High School students.

Tsukomoto Tenma is a second-year student, and she has a big ol’ crush on Karasuma Oji. He’s calm, cool, collected, and completely clueless as to how she feels.

Harima Kenji is a delinquent, a drop-out, and a motorcycle-riding badass who generally gets along by beating up or running over anything in his way. It turns out he has a big crush on Tenma. But she’s also clueless as to how Kenji feels. Well, she’s clueless in general.

After the first few chapters set up this love triangle and the rest of the story, events proceed as you’d expect, with any number of good ideas to get close to or to confesses to the object of one’s affection going horrible awry, or just failing with a comedic flop.

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Review:

Let me say a few good things first. The art is nice, the girls are cute, there is a fairly tight story focus and the short chapters make for a brisk read.

Another nice touch is the differing art styles employed; when Tenma is the main character the art is crisp, if perhaps a bit manga-generic, but when the delinquent Harima is featured, Kobayashi switches to a looser, grittier style, with screen tones often replaced by cross-hatching and other hand-drawn shading, especially in the fights and other action sequences. It’s a neat gimmick, and certainly gives you the feeling that poor Harima really has been dropped from another comic entirely, right into the middle of white-bread suburban high.

The bits of background and other scenery are sparse, though. In quite a few panels (and regrettably, a few whole pages) it seems like the characters are floating in white space.

The cast is small, though additional teachers and students– nameless extras– step in as needed. It looks like the series is going to concentrate on Tenma, her sister Yamuko, and three of Tenma’s friends, with Harima as added comic relief and the enigmatic Oji only there as an object for Tenma’s affections.

The back cover and other promotional materials have pitched this as an ‘over the top’ comedy. And at it’s best, it is chuckle inducing– usually when there is some excuse for Harima to whop someone upside the head. Some of the setups shade a bit dark for real comedy, though, and there may have been some losses in translation.

Del Rey has done a decent job with the adaptation, with lots of notes (the end notes not only explain some of the trickier translations, they reprint the panel in question so you don’t have to flip back through the book) and some care in keeping a lot of the flavour of the original Japanese. They leave written foley in the original katakana script (with translations in small subscript) for example. But even with all that effort, it doesn’t always play well. The manga didn’t make me laugh out loud, which might generally be considered a failure.

From the setting (high school) to the characters (students) to the setup (crushes, love triangles, and unrequited love), School Rumble is close to being a typical (or even stereotypical) plain-vanilla manga. Kobayashi uses all the usual visual conventions– including intercutting with cute, cartoony versions of characters and similar wild-takes to emphasise a punchline– so if that aspect of the manga style is hard for you to take in large doses then even the good jokes won’t make you laugh.

Sometimes the comedy and the story work, sometimes they don’t. If you like the premise, or perhaps if you’re closer (in age, temperament, or relative hormone levels) to the whole high-school-crush thing, then this manga might “work” more often for you than it does for me. But I think a lot of us would rather go read something with more explosions in it.

originally written for and posted on Comicsnob.com [Dec ’06 – May ’08]

Captain Nemo, Vol. 1
Published by: Seven Seas Entertainment
Art: Aldin Viray
Story: Jason DeAngelis

192 (166) pages.
Original Language: English
Orientation: Right to left
Vintage: February 2006.
Tones: Roland Amago
Letters & Graphic Design: Jon Zamar
Editor: Jason DeAngelis
Publisher’s Rating: Teen

Rating: 4 out of 5

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Premise: Napoleon beat Wellington at Waterloo in this alternate history, and now the Son of Nemo seems to be the only one who can fight a French Empire on which the sun never sets.

Synopsis:

At our opening, we join French Vice Minister Pierpont (and his hot daughter, a stowaway) as he sets out on a mission to find and nullify whatever the cause that is sinking so many French ships.

The cause, of course, turns out to be the dread pirate Nemo. After a brief action interlude, our Young Nemo rescues Camille Pierpont from a shark (or course) and varied and sundry dramatic tensions and relationships are set up between the newly arrived outsider and the members of the Nautilus crew.

Character and background exposition follow, though this is done with a Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea backdrop and a bit of life-and-death-jeopardy, along with the set-up and introduction of a new villain and the conflict foreshadowed for volume 2.

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Review:

While after the first third you could perhaps accuse this volume for forgoing story in favour of set-up for the whole series, that’s hardly something to complain about when we’re only in the first book.

While a bit sketchy, there is enough of a plot to keep the action moving forward through what are basically character introductions, and the story setting is nice bonus. We may just be walking through sets on our way to act two, but the scenery is nice: Sea monsters, sunken continents, along with the whole half-remembered backdrop drawn from both the book and numerous movie adaptations; all these help flavour a story that might otherwise seem a bit slow and clunky.

There is a lot of promise here. The character designs are a bit generic, but nicely executed and different enough one from another that each will stand alone in the context of these books. The original source material is given enough of a twist that the reader has no idea what to expect next– while at the same time it is all comfortingly familiar. And any story where we get to hate the French? Classic villainy is always a nice extra.

I look forward to future releases (…see next) and hope the writer and artist can live up to the promise of their first volume.

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So let’s back up a step: Take a look at the credits cited above. Here we have an American take on Japanese manga. These guys are obviously students and big fans of the genre. They even went so far as to draw it backwards, right-to-left, though there is no particular reason to do so. I’ve heard various terms for this sort of creative endeavour, though the one that makes most sense to me is the boringly-descriptive Original English Language (or OEL) manga.

Not that manga really means anything but “comic book”. But I won’t get into that argument here; there are in fact enough differences in style and execution that manga is a meaningful term when applied to comics. Here we just so happen to have some Americans doing the manga-styled-thing.

I won’t fault them for that. In fact, the only complaint I might bring to the table is that some of the grand underwater scenes could, in fact, be grander. There are a couple of panels that are just too dark– but maybe I’m nitpicking. It is set underwater, after all. But a beam from a helmet light picking out a patch of detail on some ancient sunken ruins in a double-page spread, now that would have been a nice touch and also some good artistic contrast.

(on the flip side: panel layout over two pages with decently rendered sunken ruins. what am I complaining about?)

Seven Seas Entertainment is a smaller company who has made the laudable decision to not only license some good-but-overlooked Japanese titles, but to also find American artists and writers and publish the best of those good-but-overlooked efforts as well. That can only be a good thing, in my opinion, and I think Captain Nemo is as convincing an argument as any to that point.

The only complaint I have about OEL manga releases is that they are sloooow. About one a year, give or take. While I might prefer a monthly fix, I guess I can wait the time it takes to fill a hundred and some odd pages with story and art. From the looks of things in this first volume, Nemo will be one worth waiting for.

originally written for and posted on Comicsnob.com [Dec ’06 – May ’08]

Read or Die, Vol. 1
Published by: Viz Media
Writer: Hideyuki Kurata
Artist: Shutaro Yamada

224 (212) pages.
Original Language: Japanese
Orientation: Right to left
Vintage: 2000. US edition March 2006.
English Translation & Adaptation: Steve Ballati
Cover & Graphic Design: Janet Piercy
Touch-up Art & Lettering: Mark McMurray
Editor: Urian Brown
Publishers Rating: Older Teen

Rating: 4 out of 5

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Premise: World’s most bookish superhero-slash-secret-agent saves the world and the girl. and the book.

Synopsis:

Yomiko loves books. She really loves books. She is a Paper Master, one of those with the ability to manipulate paper into tools, shields, & weapons.

Yomiko Readman, aka “the Paper”, is a sometimes substitute teacher who also works as an agent of the British Library– which is not only a collection of rare and wonderful books, but also a top tier covert special ops organization. (who knew?)

We join Yomiko as she is called up by her handler, “Mr. Joker”, for a sting operation to catch the thief of a rare book of fairy tales, a neat opening which introduces her powers and her personality, while also giving the reader some of the background in which this series is set.

The rest of volume one follows Yomiko as she meets her favourite author, a couple of new adversaries, and a guy who also loves books, but in a creepy, disturbing way.

As you might have guessed, it all ends in a flashy action-packed showdown. The confetti runs like blood…

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Review:

From concept to execution, this is a pretty good comic. It’s black and white, but the artist makes good use of shading and screen tone to bring real depth to the frame and ‘colour’ to most of the characters. There is a real sense of motion to the action sequences, and the explosions have oomph. The art does such a good job at conveying the action, in fact, that it’s a real shame the lame written sound effects cover so much of the pages’ real estate.

I don’t know if this was a decision made for the English adaptation, or if the flaw is something inherited from the Japanese original, but most of the sound effects are just in the way.

Aside from the superfluous written bangs and kracks, the adaptation seems to be well done. The story and dialogue proceed clearly, there is only one side note (to explain a Stephen King reference, actually) and honorifics are retained where appropriate and in a way I’m sure most American readers will be able to follow. (”Sensei” is a term most of us are familiar with by this point…)

This is a solid opening to what promises to be an exciting series, while also serving as a good stand-alone story.