477 – Triple Dip 78 – Innocent, Orb: On the Movements of the Earth, Under Ninja
All the hosts are back to talk about Ireland riots, collapsing stairs, The Boy and the Heron, and more! Then we rally ourselves for the final Triple Dip of the 2023! We review Innocent, Orb: On the Movements of the Earth, and Under Ninja!!!
Continue reading385 – Manga in Motion 52 – Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Dark Side of Dimensions
Your move! On this episode we prepare to duel by watching Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Dark Side of Dimensions! Also, Morgana reads the vampire BL Fangs, dakazu drops Gente but loves Bye-Bye Atashi no Oniichan and Zashiki Musume to Ryourinin, and Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction ended!!!
Continue reading343 – Triple Dip 50 – Tokyo Revengers, Oishinbo, Generation Witch
This week dakazu learns about the birth of the first weekly seinen manga magazine with Losers ~Nippon Hatsu no Seinen Mangashi no Tanjo~! He also decides to stop reading Meisou Senshi Nagata Kabi Gurume de GO!! For our main topic, we check out Tokyo Revengers, Oishinbo, and Generation Witch for a new Triple Dip!!!
Continue readingI am a Hero
A manga about a failing manga artist who must survive a zombie apocalypse with his hunting rifle.
I really have lots of mixed feelings about this manga. We covered the whole series for a Retrospective but looking back this had such an amazingly strong beginning that just fizzled out towards the end. The slow burn reveal of the ZQN is some of the best storytelling I’ve seen in the manga medium. Even as the story starts ramping up, Kengo Hanazawa does a stellar job with creative monster designs and weaving the narrative around an unreliable hero. Unfortunately things start to fall apart towards the last quarter of the story. I think the reused character artwork is really shameless and it’s sad to see.
I would still recommend this series but with the caveat that the ending is nowhere as strong as the beginning is. Available from Dark Horse Comics.
~dakazu
288 – Manga in Motion 42 – BEASTARS
It finally time for Manga Machinations to review the BEASTARS anime! We have A LOT to say about the choices made adapting Paru Itagaki’s phenomenal manga and we’re not pulling any punches when it comes to this beloved series!!!
Continue readingI am a Hero in Ibaraki
A spin-off series of I am a Hero that follows a boy and his dog surviving against the ZQN outbreak.
This was just OK. I thought Kazuya Fujisawa was able to capture the horror of the Kengo Hanazawa’s zombies pretty well but the story wasn’t really anything special. It follows the boy who’s become a target of bullying from his childhood friends. As the ZQN start to attack it’s revealed that the bullies were all being bullied themselves but that just seemed like a pretty rote outcome.
If you’re a fan of I am a Hero you should check out 8 Tales of the ZQN instead.
~dakazu
Takaga Tasogare
A manga about a world where men no longer exist.
Another new series by Kengo Hanazawa. Hanazawa is following his slow burn storytelling he perfected in I am a Hero here. Nothing much happens in this 1st volume until the end. I expect him to slowly get into the backstory of why all the men in this world have died out and it’s even illegal to write the word.
Currently running in Big Comic Superior.
I’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.
~dakazu
Under Ninja
A manga about a modern world where ninjas are the most elite covert operators but are not utilized or known to the public.
This is one of Kengo Hanazawa’s followups to his popular I am a Hero series. I seriously question allowing Hanazawa to draw two manga simultaneously right now given his notoriety for being late with manuscripts and the awful copy/paste job he did in the end of I am a Hero(which we covered in our retrospective).
Since this series just started, it’s hard to tell where Hanazawa is going with the story. So far we follow a ninja who hasn’t even begun his vague mission and we know that the majority of the 200,000 ninja aren’t deployed because of something called ‘under ninja’.
Hanazawa is taking his sweet time with this series so I expect things won’t be clear for a while. Fortunately he did the same for I am a Hero so I expect he’ll have the luxury of being allowed to lead us on for a while. I’ll keep reading and waiting myself.
~dakazu
215 – Ode to Kirihito part 2
This week we wrap up our Retrospective review of Ode to Kirihito by Osamu Tezuka!
Continue reading204 – One Shot 15 – Nijigahara Holograph
On this episode we review Inio Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph! Will dakazu, Darfox, and Seamus be able to decipher this strange story?
Continue reading