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Posts Tagged DMP

Review: Knights (Vol. 02)

Reviewer: Shannon Fay
Knights (Vol. 02)
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Manga-ka: Minoru Murao
Publisher: Digital Manga
Rating: Older Teen (16+)
Release Date: August 2010

Synopsis: “In this second instalment of the exciting medieval tale, Mist’s lady-friend Nina goes missing, while dark memories from his tortured past are brought to the surface. Unexpected help comes from a former adversary, and the self-confessed “true” witch Euphemia is always by Mist’s side, but will they be help enough for Mist to overcome a new assault from the Saints and win the battle within himself?”

Knights isn’t going to change the way you look at manga. It will never be a huge juggernaut like One Piece or Naruto. But what it is, is a solid, fun shounen manga with likable characters and an interesting plot. While for the most part it’s your standard action adventure, the way it deals with things like sex and race sets it apart from other hack-and-slash fantasy stories.

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ANN Review: Tale of a White Night

ANN Review:  Tale of a White Knight

Newish manga review of mine over at AnimeNewsNetwork is for a one-shot horror/fantasy book from Digital Manga, Tale of a White Night.

I’m a fan of these types of suspenseful ghost stories so I really enjoyed the majority of this book. The art was also really pretty (note the gorgeous cover) – the combination reminded me of Matsuri Akino’s Pet Shop of Horrors, so I think fans of it would enjoy this as well. The last story in the book was a big let-down though; sharp change of subject matter and art style that was a real surprise, sadly though not a good one.

Still, a good overall read with some nice work on it by Digital Manga so I’d recommend fans of the genre checking it out. Shannon Fay also wrote a full review on the book which was posted earlier this week.


Review: Tale of a White Night

Reviewer: Shannon Fay
Review: Tale of a White Night

Manga-ka: Tooko Miyagi
Publisher: Digital Manga
Rating: Older Teen (16+)
Release Date: September 2010

Synopsis: “In a small quiet village – There is a folk story of a beautiful female demon; nobody knows who she is but the locals calls her “Oni.” The story has it that she killed people and collected parts of their body to make a perfect human figure. A young man named Sho, is spending his summer with his grandmother and meets Oni while he’s taking a walk in the woods. Blinded by his beauty, he is lured into Oni’s house… nobody can hear him crying for help…”

Tale of a White Night is a collection of short stories: four horror tales and one fantasy story. It’s a strange collection in that the fantasy story sticks out like a sore thumb. Not only is it a different genre from the rest of the book, its tone is totally different and the style so dissimilar from the other chapters that I wondered if the same manga-ka actually drew it. It’s not a bad story, but it’s just strange to cap off a series of horror shorts with a high fantasy piece.

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ANN Review: Crimson Cross

ANN Review: Crimson Cross

Missed this when it was originally posted to the site but mid-August my review of Crimson Cross was posted over on AnimeNewsNetwork.

What to say about this one… well, it wasn’t bad, persay, but I’d felt like I’d read a near-exact story a hundred times before. It’s a vampire story about the son of Van Hellsing who is turned half vampire and thusly spends his grim days hunting the uber-power vampire who turned him. Along the way he meets carbon-copies of the same female archtype to give him some sort term angst. He broods, he reflects and generally fails at defeating the vampire. There’s a werewolf in there too somewhere. It’s just really stereotypical, unfortunately, and I found myself bored half way through when I realized it wasn’t going anywhere different than the usual.

This book was also another case where I was really underwhelmed by their graphic design decision for the front of the book. The thick flat-colour maroon border just suffocates the artwork – I don’t understand why they wouldn’t use a full-bleed of the art itself.

Overall, it’s as my review says, I can only really recommend this book to “those entirely new to the concept, or those so smitten that they must have all there is to do with the undead-leeches.” Sadly it’s a been-there-bit-that experience.


Viewing Things Digitally – Some Thoughts on Manga Online

Written by: Shannon Fay

Reading manga online isn’t for everyone. Looking at any screen for hours can make your head hurt and your eyeballs fell like they’ve been dipped in bleach. Luckily, I was designed in a lab specifically to avoid those symptoms. I love reading manga online. I love that I control the vertical and the horizontal, that I can sharpen a single image to crystal clarity. I love that no trees were killed in order for me to enjoy a particular volume. I love that I can read the many works of Makoto Tateno and not worry about where in my tiny house I’ll fit them.

But while I like reading manga on my computer screen, that doesn’t mean I give every manga company that posts their wares online a pass. In fact, because I enjoy it so much, I want to see it done right. For the most part there’s not a big difference between publishers’ online manga viewers. It’s a pretty basic concept: it’s manga, and it’s online. This article is to point out the tiny details that differentiate them, the little things that either makes reading manga online a pleasure or a pain.

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Swag Bag – Talking Cats, Female Shogun and Making Manga

Another week, another slew of new releases! I was too late to get a hold of a copy of 20th Century Boys (Vol. 10) but there was still plenty of other good titles to pick up (now with some pictures):

Voice or Noise (Vol. 03)BLU, the boys’ love imprint of Tokyopop, had a couple of new titles out this week. The most exciting of which was the third volume of Voice or Noise. The second volume was released in February 2008 so it’s been quite a wait for this follow-up. None the less I’m as excited to finally purchase a copy now as I was looking forward to it after finishing the last. Great boys’ love series!

The other title I picked up from them is Scarlet, a one-shot by the same creator who did Cute Devil. Honestly, I don’t have much interest in this artist or this premise but I bought the painfully overpriced book all the same because it marks a new (potentially continued?) book style and I wanted to check it out/support it. It sports a larger-than-the-norm trim size and colour inserts at the front. I flipped through it and it was actually a bit disorienting reading a BLU title suddenly notably larger, though snazzy all the same. It’s great to see, especially since it takes a step closer to almost justifying the $18.99 price tag.

Continuing on the semi-boys’ love trend, I was amazed to see a whole slew of DokiDoki titles on the shelf of Chapters (the B&N/Borders equivalent to you Americans out there). They’ve only ever carried sparse copies of Vampire Hunter D from Digital Manga so seeing them branch out to this varied imprint was exciting, plus very promising to the local boys’ love fanbase who are too timid to special order. Though not boys’ love, I purchased a physical copy of Alice the 101st which I reviewed earlier in the month for ANN.

Butterflies, Flowers (Vol. 04)Moving onto other genres, I picked up a copy of Bakuman (Vol. 01) – the team of Death Note makes a manga about making manga – and the fourth volume of Ooku in which it feels like the faux-Shakespearean speech that I really dislike seems more toned down (or is that just me?). In the mail I got a copy of the newest volume of Butterflies, Flowers which is hilarious – I am completely enamoured with the mature silliness of this series and I hope many others are too.

And lastly, thanks to my local library, I’ve been reading the Manga Guide to Databases. After reading the Manga Guide to Statistics last week and being impressed with how much I actually retained from it, I sought out this one as I’ve been wanting a basic introduction to databases. Yay for learning?


Review: Taimashin the Red Spider Exorcist (Vol. 02)

Reviewer: Lissa Pattillo

Author: Hideyuki Kikuchi
Manga-ka: Shin Yong-Gwan
Publisher: DMP
Rating: Older Teen (16+)
Release Date: March 2010

Synopsis: “In a serendipitous moment, a young girl meets Akamushi, finds him so beautiful and unforgettable, falls in love with him at first sight. Turns out her grandfather and mother are haunted by a “Waraigao” demon – a demon that attacks living human bodies from inside the body to erode and eventually deteriorate their nerves that kills them. Akamushi senses that her family is in danger, follows her home, only to discover that she is being attacked by her own family member that was fully possessed by “Waraigao.” Can Akamushi eliminate the demon and save her life?”

The story that made up the entire first volume ends fairly swiftly here in the second. It comes as a bit of a surprise since the first volume felt as though it was setting up what would be the continuing plot throughout the series. Turns out to the story’s benefit however that this isn’t the case.

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Review: Knights (Vol. 01)

Reviewer: Shannon Fay

Manga-ka: Minoru Murao
Publisher: Digital Manga
Rating: Older Teen (16+)
Release Date: July 2008

Synopsis: “It is an age of paranoia, superstition and religious fanaticism and the kingdom of Excludo is being engulfed in flames. The people are under the thrall of witch hysteria and burnings and executions have become a common sight. But the witch trials and inquisitions are a fraud and countless innocent women, falsely accused as witches, are being burned at the stake. Just when all hope seems lost, along comes the Black Knight-Mist, and his sidekick Euphemia, a “true witch” to avenge the innocent and force their own brand of justice on the wicked!”

Knights is a throw-back to the sword and sorcery anime of the nineties such as Slayers or Record of Lodoss War. It wasn’t until I read this manga that I realized how much I missed the genre’s appearance in anime and manga. Knights has a little bit of everything: sword fights, interesting characters, and a unique magic system. Even if you’re not a fan of medieval fantasy though, it’s still worth giving volume one a try.

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Anime Expo 2010: Digital Manga

Anime Expo 2010 - Digital Manga

Anime Expo, North America’s largest anime convention, is upon us once again this weekend! The internet’s been buzzing with excitement from industry folk, bloggers, guests and attendees alike in the weeks leading up to it – and though I can only speak as a spectator to the spectators – it certainly feels like the excitement has reached a level greater than the decline of last year, which saw less industry-presence and fewer announcements.

The big manga news to start goes to Digital Manga who had their panel on Thursday evening. AnimeNewsNetwork is covering all the major events of the convention and thanks to them I’m able to offer the abridged version here for your curious eyes:

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Review: Fevered Kiss

Reviewer: Jaime Samms

Author: Arika Kuga
Manga-ka: Taishi Zaou
Publisher: DokiDoki
Rating: Older Teen (16+)
Release Date: November 2009

Synopsis: “On the night of the year-end party, in high spirits and under the influence of the party’s free-flowing alcohol, Satori ends up sleeping with Asou. Since then, every day that Asou comes over, he does nothing beyond kiss Satori over and over, and as much as it perplexes him, Satori is unable to resist his advances. But one day Satori hears a nasty rumor that Asou has a girlfriend!”

This is the first boys’ love novel I’ve read that isn’t a June publication, though it is published by another Digital Manga imprint, Doki Doki. I enjoyed it – for some reason, it had a different feel to the prose. It maybe sounded a little less like it had been translated from Japanese than the June novels tend to do, and a little more like the English you might expect from a native speaker. I don’t know that either style is necessary better, or even that I like one or the other better. They’re just different.

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