Review Redux: Apollo’s Song, Vols. 1-2

Apollo’s Song may be one of the strangest sex ed manuals ever written.

It begins with a textbook Tezuka scene, at once lyrical and goofy: millions of anthropomorphic sperm race towards a comely egg. After one lucky soul pants and claws his way to the front of the scrum, the sperm and egg dissolve into a passionate embrace. In the following panel, we see the result of their union, an embryo, presiding over a veritable sperm graveyard. This juxtaposition of life and death — or, perhaps more accurately, sex and death — foreshadows the dialectic that will play out in the following chapters.

We are then introduced to Shogo, a young man who has just arrived at a psychiatric hospital. Shogo is a sociopath: unemotional, cruel to animals, scornful of society, and deeply misogynist. While undergoing electroshock therapy, Shogo has a vivid hallucination in which a stern goddess chastises him for renouncing all forms of love. As punishment for his cruelty, she condemns him to a fate straight out of Dante’s Inferno: Shogo will love and lose the same woman over and over again for eternity. Thus begins a series of romantic and sexual encounters between Shogo and various incarnations of his ill-fated partner.

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The Qwaser of Stigmata, Vol. 1

Though I frequently grouse about fanservice , I have a grudging respect for those artists who make costume failures, panty shots, and general shirtlessness play essential roles in advancing their plots. Consider Pretty Face, the story of a teenage jock who undergoes reconstructive surgery after a bus accident, only to end up looking like the girl he has a crush on (at least from the waist up). You don’t need to be a pervert to imagine how Yasuhiro Kano exploits the set-up for maximum T&A potential — even the hero gets groped and ogled, though Rando isn’t above leering at and lusting after girls himself. I loathe Pretty Face, yet I have to admit that Kano obviates the need for gusts of wind and breast-level collisions by making gender confusion such a fundamental part of his story; the fanservice may be gross and stupid, but it isn’t gratuitous.

Then there’s The Qwaser of Stigmata.

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Short Takes: Manga Hall of Shame Edition

I have a special fascination with bad manga. And when I say “bad manga,” I’m not talking about stories that are merely cliche or derivative of other, better series — for better or worse, manga is a popular medium, and popular media survive, in part, by giving audiences what they want, even if that means more of the same — I’m talking about stories so ineptly drawn, so spectacularly dumb, or so offensive that they make Happy Cafe look like Phoenix by comparison. To judge from the coverage of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, I’m not alone in my connoisseurship of wretched books; among the most widely reported panels was The Best and Worst Manga of 2010, in which a group of seasoned reviewers singled out titles for praise and punishment. To kick off my Bad Manga Week, therefore, I thought it would be a fun exercise to look at three of the titles that made the worst-of list to see if they were truly suited for inclusion in The Manga Hall of Shame. The candidates: Orange Planet (Del Rey), a shojo farce starring one clueless girl and three hot guys; Red Hot Chili Samurai (Tokyopop), a comedy about a hero who favors spicy peppers over PowerBars whenever he needs an energy boost; and Togainu no Chi (Tokyopop), an action-thriller that proudly boasts its origins as a “ground-breaking bishonen game.”

ORANGE PLANET, VOL. 1

BY HARUKA FUKUSHIMA • DEL REY • 200 pp. • TEEN (13+)

Haruka Fukushima specializes in what I call “chastely dirty” manga for tween girls — that is, manga that places the heroine in compromising situations, teasing the audience with the prospect of a kiss or a grope that never quite materializes because the heroine is a good girl, thank you very much. In Orange Planet, Fukushima’s sex-phobic lead is Rui, a junior high student who lives by herself — she’s been an orphan since childhood — and pays for her apartment with a paper route. (That must be some paper route, considering she lives in a modern high-rise apartment and not, say, a cardboard box.) Rui is one corner of a highly contrived love square; the other three points are all standard shojo types, from the boy next door and the hot young teacher to the mystery man from the heroine’s past.

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Hyde & Closer, Vol. 1

Move over, Chucky — there’s a new doll in town.

His name is Hyde, and he’s a stuffed bear who wears a fedora, chomps cigars, and wields a chainsaw. (More on that in a minute.) Hyde belongs to thirteen-year-old Shunpei Closer, a timid junior high school student whose biggest talent is avoiding conflict. Watching Shunpei dodge bullies at school, it’s difficult to believe that he is, in fact, the grandson of Alysd Closer, a powerful, globe-trotting sorcerer with enemies on every continent. Keenly aware that his rivals might seek revenge against his family, Alysd created Hyde, a plush fighting machine capable of fending off attacks with a magical chainsaw. Hyde remained dormant for almost six years before the delivery of a mysterious package containing a murderous, knife-throwing sock monkey activated his abilities. (I can’t believe I just typed the phrase, “knife-throwing sock money,” but there it is.) Thus begins a kind of magical tournament manga that pits Hyde and Shunpei against an array of powerful sorcerers and their toy henchmen.

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Short Takes: Afterschool Charisma, Bamboo Blade, and Higurashi When They Cry

To mark the official beginning of summer, I’m dedicating this week’s Short Takes column to three series with serious beach-reading potential: the first volume of sci-fi conspiracy thriller Afterschool Charisma (VIZ), the fifth volume of sports comedy Bamboo Blade (Yen Press), and the first volume of Higurashi When They Cry: Time Killing Arc (Yen Press). Which are duds and which are winners? Read on for the scoop.

AFTERSCHOOL CHARISMA, VOL. 1

BY KUMIKO SUEKANE • VIZ • 208 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

If you cloned, say, Napoleon Bonaparte, would the 2.0 version be inclined to invade Russia and pick a fight with the world’s greatest naval power, or would he chart his own course as a diplomat, an artist, or a business executive? That’s the basic premise of Afterschool Charisma, a sci-fi thriller about a high school comprised of famous people’s clones; Joan of Arc, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Marie Curie are just a few of the students enrolled at St. Kleio Academy, where the only ordinary human is Shiro Kamiya, the headmaster’s son. When one of the school’s most prominent alumni is assassinated, the whole purpose of St. Kleio is called into question, inspiring a wave of panic among the clones whose originals met nasty ends.

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Short Takes: Flower in a Storm and Rin-ne

This week’s Short Takes column looks at two recent VIZ releases. The first, Flower in a Storm, is a rom-com about a high school student with superpowers and the billionaire playboy who loves her; the second, Rin-ne, is Rumiko Takahashi’s follow-up to the award-winning, best-selling InuYasha. I admit that I didn’t have high expectations for either manga, but both turned out to be pleasant surprises, the first for its goofy, over-the-top premise, and the second for its playful skewering of the “I see demons!” genre. Read on for the scoop.

FLOWER IN A STORM, VOL. 1

BY SHIGEYOSHI TAKAGI • VIZ • 200 pp. • RATING: OLDER TEEN (16+)

Flower in a Storm begins with a bang: seventeen-year-old Ran Tachibana storms a classroom where self-proclaimed “everyday, ordinary high school student” Riko Kunimi is making plans with friends. Brandishing a gun, Ran declares that Riko is his bride-to-be, a pronouncement that doesn’t sit well with Riko, who tells him off, then jumps out a third-floor window, landing gracefully on the pavement below. That death-defying leap is our first clue that Riko is anything but an ordinary teen; as we soon learn, Riko possesses a variety of superpowers — strength, speed, agility — that would make her a solid addition to the Justice League. Riko, however, just wants to fit in with her peers, a desire fueled by the memory of a boy rejecting her because she “wasn’t normal.” What she doesn’t grasp — at least in the early going — is that Ran likes her precisely because she isn’t ordinary; he finds her strength and grit irresistible, even if he doesn’t express his feelings in the most constructive, socially responsible fashion.

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