To celebrate their 45th anniversary, Kodansha’s Weekly Young Magazine (famed for serializing Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Dragon Head among others) published a 1000 page tome in English collecting twenty first chapters and one-shots. Readers may vote on their favorite chapters on the Young Magazine USA website; the top five titles will be serialized on K Manga.
Where to start digging into this big book of riches? For our second week, we at Beat’s Bizarre Adventure took it upon ourselves to write about one title each and relate our experiences. This week: even more BL, magic balls, terror in Yokohama, and, of course, plushies.
Still You
Writer/Artist: Kami Nishino
“What do you think a kiss feels like?” A simple question borne out of curiosity, posed in childlike playfulness. Reo’s face is glued to his gaming console when Rui plays with the idea aloud. Skeptical at first, but convinced by his eager friend, Reo closes in and places a chaste kiss on Rui’s lips.
When time fast-forwards to 3 years into the future, Reo and Rui openly ignoring each other at school and not being on speaking terms ever since the kiss is unexpected, to say the least. Having had enough of this stalemate, Reo tips the scales one day and reaches out to Rui. He has a girlfriend now, anyway, so it’s safe for them to be friends. Right?
When we at Beat’s Bizarre Adventure decided to each review one title from Young Magazine USA, I picked Still You blindly. My friends told me I went for the best. Indeed, Kami Nishino’s work, with its tender storytelling and uncomplicated art style, is currently topping the voting list in Young Magazine.
Now that I’ve read it, and then reread it a couple of times, I’m not sure if Still You and me were a good match. Not because it was an incompetent comic or it didn’t align with my taste. On the contrary, it aligned with my tastes genre-wise so well that it read as… unremarkable.
What Still You has is potential. Potential to become a touching coming-of-age tale, similar to Blue Flag or My Love Mix-Up! It’s clear that the artist didn’t plan it to be a single-chapter story. As it is now, there are only the main beats of a larger structure. It was, in a way, unfortunate that I’ve read so many Boys’ Love works that are more or less, if not exactly, the same as Still You. Two male friends crushing on each other, one starts dating a female friend despite lingering feelings. He hopes to find his place in what the world considers “normal.” But of course, denying your feelings, desires, and yourself will be impossible sooner or later.
Stories with similar beats always used women as a plot tool, to be discarded when the male leads get together. Earlier BL works were “guilty” of this, for lack of a better word. Women were never characters of their own but a tool to cause discord, jealousy, or misunderstanding between the leads. Reo’s girlfriend Momo is in a similar position now. Her name is articulated only twice, when Reo and Momo are alone, and the rest of the time she’s referred to as “girlfriend”. But seeing the author’s “If you wanna see what’s in store for these three, vote to find out,” note at the end, I’m holding out hope that she’ll be a substantial part of the narrative.
This is a story worth telling over and over, until the time comes when the need to do so is no more. While Still You didn’t bring something new to the table to a 30-something BL veteran like myself who’s ambivalent about the childhood-friends-to-lovers trope, I still voted for it I believe in its potential. It could be the perfect gateway to queer manga and BL, especially for younger people. So I hope you don’t take this as a negative review and give Still You a chance! — Merve Giray
Kikikaikai
Writer/Artist: Kyuri Yamada
A new yokai battle story has landed in Young Magazine and it’s called Kikikaikai. Why is it called Kikikaikai? We don’t know…yet.
The story follows a delinquent high schooler named Ryuya who lives alone with his mother. When Ryuya’s mother reveals to him that his father was a yokai, he barely has time to process that information before the two of them are hit by everybody’s favorite…Truck-kun. Ryuya wakes up next to two strangers who tell him that he has a ball inside of him that houses the ability to do magic. He can save his mom if he finds the yokai that cursed her…and takes their ball as well.
Kikikaikai reminds me of other popular manga series like Dandadan and Chainsaw Man. The humor was reminiscent of Dandadan which is also obsessed with balls. Kikikaikai doesn’t go balls to the walls with its innuendos, though, which makes me wonder if the artist Kyuri Yamada was restraining themselves for the sake of Young Magazine. Ryuya’s shaggy hairstyle also reminds me of Denji. As a result, Kikikaikai has a difficult time distinguishing itself from other supernatural action manga.
One thing that stood out for me were the shifting expressions of the characters, which added to the humor. That said, I was also disappointed that the creator didn’t utilize double-page spreads more often. The only one featured Ryuya striking at the yokai’s butt, and it wasn’t particularly dynamic either.
That being said, Kikikaikai ends on a sort-of cliffhanger where it’s hinted Ryuya has potential, and that the two strangers he met might be part of a larger organization. I might be interested in learning more about the world of this series. Otherwise, those who enjoy Dandadan may enjoy Kikikaikai. — Hilary Leung
Godmother
Writer/Artist: Rin Shimokawa
Ryu was busy with her graduation project when her dad signed her up to study in Yokohama, Japan. She’s to stay with her Grandmother Ko, who she has never met, in the city’s famous Chinatown. But what she finds there, at the back of a mahjong parlor, is not her grandmother but her great-grandmother: seemingly a young girl in a wheelchair haunted by spirits. She’s fated to die in a year, and when she does, all those spirits will be Ryu’s problem. Uh oh!
Godmother is my favorite of the horror comics in Young Magazine USA in competition for potential serialization. Sure, other series have their charms; Into the Dark has incredible creature designs, Pregnant has shock value, and The Graveyard Shift has a funny premise that could go any number of ways. But no other horror comic in the collection has Godmother’s range.
Artist Rin Shimokawa doesn’t just do one kind of scare. There are four or five unique images in this first chapter that will frighten you in different ways. Shadowy deities emerging from statues; a melting upside-down man riddled with bullets; Ko licking Ryu’s forehead and planting an earring in her ear while she is unconscious. No matter your inclinations, I reckon that at least one of these scenes will hit you where it hurts. There is even a long-haired ghost woman for those who respect the classics.
While other comics in Young Magazine USA embrace a clean digital style, Godmother’s environments and characters are meticulously shaded by countless thin lines. The shadows have real volume, which is such a boon for the horror sequences. The various objects and rooms in Ko’s mahjong parlor have distinct textures as well. I don’t know how practical it’ll be for serialization purposes, but this first chapter at least was a luxuriant read with a strong sense of place.
The tradeoff is that Godmother doesn’t have much of a plot right now. It’s more an excuse for Shimokawa to subject his heroine to a succession of upsetting scenarios. But what is horror but subjecting the characters to a succession of upsetting scenarios? I’d love to see just how many more weird and cool ideas the artist can come up with in order to populate their seedy Yokohama Chinatown. Plus, Shimokawa is a fan of Mushishi, and it’s hard to find a better model for a supernatural procedural than that. — Adam Wescott
Is My Love Strange?
Writer/Artist: Hikari Azuma
Moko wants a boyfriend, but she doesn’t like boys. She hates their hair, she hates their teeth. What she does love are plushies, like her old teddy bear Kuma. Then one day her classmate Takahashi comes to school dressed as a stuffed rabbit. “I don’t like being a human boy,” he writes on the blackboard. Moka falls head over heels for him. But even when her heart is beating fast, is love really so simple?
Is My Love Strange? is different from just about every other story collected in Young Magazine USA. It’s not science fiction, fantasy or horror. It’s not quite a straightforward gay romance story like Still You, either. Sure, you could read Moko’s physical repulsion towards guys as a metaphor for homosexuality or even asexuality. You could read Takahashi’s statement that “I’m not sure yet whether I dislike being human or being a boy” as a trans metaphor. But right now, at its core, this is first and foremost an earnest love story about a girl who is attracted to stuffed animals.
Hikari Azuma’s art is similarly distinct from her peers. The characters are drawn as simple shapes reminiscent of indie manga and online music videos. Backgrounds are similarly abstract, more often screentone than real environments. At times this achieves a surreal beauty, like a sequence where we see Takahashi’s bedroom windows as bright rectangles surrounded by total darkness. Elsewhere it comes off as a time-saving trick. Of course, making efficient use of time-saving tricks is the manga way…
I don’t know exactly what a continuation of Is My Love Strange? might look like. Its central metaphor is squirrely enough that adding too much detail, or the wrong details, or not enough details, might break it. I think the way the comic looks, with its child-like characters navigating the contradictions of human sexuality, will turn people away.
Still, this is one of the stories that I admire most in the collection, precisely because it doesn’t look like anything else here. I would not have expected Young Magazine would find a place for a series that to me has more in common with Fumiko Fumi’s manga than Akira or Ghost in the Shell. But here it is! The artist also points towards Naoki Yamamoto as an influence as well, which has me very curious about her other work, and excited to see where she might go next. — Adam Wescott
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