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Saturday, March 13, 2010 ( 3/13/2010 11:29:00 AM ) Bill S.  “I’VE TRANSFERRED TO A LOONY BIN!” When slender schoolgirl Souka Hirayama transfers to a technical school, she doesn’t realize how different it’ll be from her old private school. The only girl in a school packed with 850 hyperactive boys, Souka finds herself in a setting characterized by regular pissing contests between her fellow classmates and a testosterone heavy “war” between juniors and seniors. “They still have them in the 21st century?” she says of the school’s gang-styled hierarchy, though circumstances will place her at the very top of the junior class pecking order.An admittedly preposterous shojo comedy, Maya Fujikata’s My Darling! Miss Bancho (CMX) centers on Souka’s misadventures after she inadvertently knocks out the class’s reigning “bancho” (gang leader) and is forced to take his place. Her besotted classmates are all too eager to place her on a pedestal, and whenever someone comes around to challenge her place as Miss Bancho, slapstick contrivance -- and the support of handsome classmate Yuuji Katou -- keep her in the position. “In a sense,” manga writer/artist Fujikata unnecessarily tells us at one point in a free-floating note, she’s “the strongest of them all.” Of course, the fact that her largely indistinguishable juvenile delinquent classmates are about as imposing as the Sweat Hogs keeps this fact from being too impressive. Fujikata’s treatment of her sitcom premise is broadly dramatized and frantic: suited to the brand of adolescent posturing that fuels her episodic comic manga. If she occasionally over relies on editorial comments (“Treats her like a pet,” she appends to a panel where Yuuji condescendingly pats our heroine’s head), for the most part, the Teen-rated My Darling! Miss Bancho works as a lightweight riff on school-themed stories and boy/girl sex roles. I can see this silly series appealing to a young teen girl audience -- particularly those feeling frustrated by what idiots boys their age can be . . . Labels: sixty-minute manga # |Friday, March 12, 2010 ( 3/12/2010 06:11:00 PM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: A shot of Boo the Cat snuggled up in our kitty condo. Yeah, I know, she's cute as shit.  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | Wednesday, March 10, 2010 ( 3/10/2010 06:26:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VIDEO: Here’s a studio track of 10CC’s “I’m Not in Love” that’s not as familiar as the one we all know from the radio. Still a great song, tho: # | Sunday, March 07, 2010 ( 3/07/2010 01:53:00 PM ) Bill S.  “YOU WITH A COMPULSORY EXECUTION UNIT?” A crisp “Mature”-rated sci-fi horror series, Tsutomu Nihei’s Biomega (Viz Signature) doesn’t waste any time plunging us into the action. Set a thousand years in the future, it opens on Earth’s “first manned flight to Mars in seven centuries.” Why so long between trips? We’re not told in the first volume, though it could have something to do with the virus that the space travelers bring back home. Called the N5S infection, it quickly spreads across the planet, transforming most of its carriers into droopy decaying zombies with extra bits of this-and-that dangling from their bodies. Cut to six months later, and we're following Zouichi Kanoe, a motorcycle riding agent for Toa Heavy Industries as he tries to navigate his way through the wasted city of a Pacific island, looking for a girl named Eon Green.In addition to Kanoe, young Eon is also being pursued by agents of the Public Health Service, who appear to have sinister designs. Eon, we learn, is an “Accommodator” of the N5S virus, which means she has it but has not transmuted into a mindless “Drone.” As a carrier, she also appears to have the ability to rapidly regenerate parts of herself: small wonder that competing interests wanna get a hold of her. Protecting her from both groups is a talking Russian bear(!) named Kozlov Loewic Grebnev. He carries Eon to a castle-like Maxi-Security Containment Facility, but her presence draws the zombie Drones as well as the blank masked agents of the PHS. There’s not much more plot than that in the first volume -- though we’re given hints of a third player called the Data Recovery Foundation which may know more about the N5S virus than it’s telling. Instead, Nihei provides a series of visually arresting action sequences and grotty looking zombies, as Kanoe careens his motorcycle though Nihei’s sinisterly towering architectural landscape. There are a lotta extended wordless sequences in this manga -- the most striking features Kanoe’s rescue of Kozlov from the exploding Containment Facility -- but not much character detail in this opening entry. The only two figures who display even a fraction of emotion in the first volume are the bear and a distraught newsman who provides much of the exposition. Our cycle-straddling hero largely remains a cipher in the first book, though we’re given hints that he, too, is somehow “enhanced.” Nihei’s handling of his imposing future landscape, kinetic skirmishes, and quirky plot details commands our attention so strongly that you don’t really mind that you haven’t been given a whole lot of solid information in the first book. (The faceless PHS agents are a particular enigma.) Whether he can maintain this over the course of multiple volumes remains to be seen, but his handling of the opening is slick enough to get lover of horror action coming back for the next few books at least. Me, I’m hoping for some of that bear's back story. Labels: sixty-minute manga # | |
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