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The Manga Revue, 3/26/19

Have you been checking out Kodansha Comics’ digital-only and digital-first releases? I have, and I love this initiative: it lets me sample dozens of series that might otherwise never see the light of day in North America. Rugby manga. Karuta manga. Really weird, impressionistic horror manga. Medical melodrama. Josei. As you might expect, there’s a good reason why no one was clamoring to bring out print editions of some digital-only titles, but lurking among the pedestrian, the awful, and the amateurish are gems such as Dragon Head, PTSD Radio, Shojo FIGHT! and Tokyo Tarareba Girls. This week, I previewed one of Kodansha’s most recent digital offerings, Starving Anonymous, which, according to Kodansha’s editorial staff, is “an intense dystopian horror thriller in the apocalyptic vein of Dragon Head and Attack on Titan, from the team that brought you zombie actioner Fort of Apocalypse.” Translation: high body counts ahead!

Starving Anonymous, Chapter 1 Story by Yuu Kuraishi, Art by Kazu Inabe, Original Concept by Kengo Mizutani Kodansha Comics Rating: OT (Older teen)

Imagine an Eli Roth remake of Soylent Green in all its gory, sadistic intensity, and you have some idea of what it’s like to read Starving Anonymous, a manga that strives for topicality but settles for cheap thrills. Like the 1973 Charlton Heston film, Starving Anonymous takes place in a heat-ravaged future where supplies are scarce, birth rates are plummeting, and people are crowded into fewer and fewer cities. The series’ protagonist is I’e, a normal high school student whose life is violently upended when he’s snatched off a bus and deposited at an enormous industrial facility where the main product is — you guessed it — people.

A concept this potentially repulsive lives or dies by the thoughtfulness of the execution, and it’s here where Yuu Kuraishi and Kazu Inabe stumble. The writing is efficient but artless, establishing the direness of the world’s condition through news flashes and pointed conversations but revealing little about I’e; he’s a blank slate on which the reader can project himself into the narrative, barely registering as a character in his own right. The artwork, by contrast, varies from slickly generic — Tokyo apparently looks the same 50 years from now — to willfully ugly; once inside the factory, Inabe draws rooms and conveyor belts filled with distended bodies, rendering every roll of fat and bulging eye in fetishistic detail. If Kuraishi and Inabe were trying to make a point about the ethics of factory farming, or the evils of overconsumption, that message is quickly shoved aside in favor of a more conventional escape-from-prison plot in which I’e and a group of young, healthy rebels fight their way to the outside. Nothing in the first chapter suggested that Starving Anonymous has anything on its mind other than characters doing and seeing horrible stuff. Hard pass.

Must-Read Manga Review

Don’t miss this review! Erica Friedman offers a sharp, funny take on Junko Mizuno’s Ravina the Witch?!, which was released by Titan Comics last year. In what may be my favorite opening gambit of all time, she compares the experience of reading Ravina to that of looking at a cute animal picture on Twitter:

Imagine if you will, an image of two goats looking at each other. Maybe a younger animal looking up at an older one. “The younger, cuter one is looking up at the older and wiser one,” your brain immediately fills in for you. You then tell yourself a story about how the older goat is teaching the younger one, or scolding it, or… And in the end, you have created meaning in what is a picture of two animals who are literally just looking at one another for one brief moment… Ravina The Witch? by Junko Mizuno is the fairytale equivalent of two animals looking at one another. We can be moved deeply by the story and we can find all sorts of meaning in it – whether it is truly there or not.

Also worth a look is Helen‘s review of Astra Lost in Space, “a fun adventure series with a great cast and a surprisingly well-thought out plot holding everything together.”

New and Noteworthy

Again!!, Vol. 1 (Sarah, Anime UK News)

City, Vol. 1 (Justin, The OASG)

Dragon Half, Vol. 1 (Sean Gaffney, A Case Suitable for Treatment)

Fire Punch, Vol. 1 (Kate O’Neil, The Fandom Post)

Flying Witch, Vol. 1 (Crystal Holdefer, Comicsverse)

Helvetica Standard Bold and Helvetica Standard Italic (Patrick Moore, BentoByte)

Inuyashiki, Vol. 1 (Kathleen Townsend, Looking Glass Reads)

Kasane no Tao: A Fateful Encounter, Vol. 1 (Justin, The OASG)

Kiss Me at the Stroke of Midnight, Vol. 1 (Ross Liversidge, UK Anime Network)

One Week Friends, Vol. 1 (Crystal Holdefer, Yatta Tachi)

Shojo FIGHT!, Vol. 1 (Justin, The OASG)*

Tales of Wedding Rings, Vol. 1 (Justin, The OASG)

Voices of a Distant Star (Gabrielle Dulys, Comicsverse)

Wolfsmund, Vols. 1-7 (Seth Hahne, Good OK Bad)

Ongoing Series

Angels of Death, Vol. 2 (Alisha Taran, Reality’s A Bore)

Astra Lost in Space, Vol. 2 (Dustin Cabeal, Comic Bastards)

Baccano, Vol. 2 (Josh Piedra, The Outerhaven)

Bungo Stray Dogs, Vol. 6 (Josh Piedra, The Outerhaven)

Golden Kamuy, Vol. 4 (Aaron, Manga Energy)

Graineliers, Vol. 2 (Alisha Taran, Reality’s A Bore)

Is It Wrong to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, Vol. 8 (Richard Gutierrez, The Fandom Post)

Kemono Friends: Welcome to Japari Park!, Vol. 2 (Helen, The OASG)

Murcielago, Vol. 5 (Erica Friedman, Okazu)

My Hero Academia, Vol. 11 (Trevor Richardson, AiPT!)

orange: future (Brittany Vincent, Otaku USA)

Strike the Blood, Vol. 9 (Richard Gutierrez, The Fandom Post)

Sweet Blue Flowers, Vol. 3 (Sean Gaffney, A Case Suitable for Treatment)

To Your Eternity, Vol. 3 (Aaron, Manga Energy)

Twinkle Stars, Vol. 5 (Sean Gaffney, A Case Suitable for Treatment)

Ultraman, Vol. 9 (Dustin Cabeal, Comic Bastards)

Wake Up Sleeping Beauty, Vol. 3 (Aaron, Manga Energy)

Your Name, Vol. 3 (Josh Piedra, The Outerhaven)

From the Vault

Hikaru no Go (Megan R., The Manga Test Drive)

No. 6, Vol. 8 (Eric Cline, AiPT!)

Uncomfortably Happily (Sayalee Karkare, Women Write About Comics)

* Denotes a digital-first or digital-only release

By: Katherine Dacey

#Anime #News #Manga Bookshelf

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