If your perception of manga is based solely on the types of titles you find on the shelves of your local chain bookstore you’re missing the whole picture. Contrary to the abundance of yaoi, shojo and shonen comics on the shelves, there’s actually a large subset of manga that tells stories of a darker, more ominous nature.

Sho Fumimura’s and Ryoichi Ikegami’s Sanctuary is just such a comic. This isn’t something for the Strawberry Marshmallow or Naruto crowd. Sanctuary is a manga made strictly for adults. Don’t expect a hentai but don’t expect Fumimura-san or Ikegami-san to pull any punches either.

The story follows the lives of a young yakuza named Akira Hojo and a young politician named Chiaki Asami. After surviving the killing fields of Cambodia the two escaped to Thailand and eventually to Japan. Their plan is to transform Japan from the ground up on two different sides of the law. Hojo works to change society through the underworld life of a mobster while Asami works his change through the established channels of the Diet. Continue reading “Review: Sanctuary, Vol 1”

I found out recently that I wasn’t the only 12 year old girl obsessed with what some poor mother called “the vampire books”… Seeing as I’m not 12 anymore and I still have a thing for vamps, I think that some girls don’t just “grow out of it.”

For example, a couple of weeks ago, I devoured all of Vampire Knight by Matsuri Hino—at least all of it that I could find in English.

VK is about an interesting boarding high school called Cross Academy that caters to “Day Class” students (regular humans) and “Night Class” students (vampires), complete with Sun Dorm and Moon Dorm. (Can you guess which class stays in which dorm?) Day and Night students aren’t really supposed to interact, since the school is an experiment in human/vamp co-habitation, and they don’t except when classes change at around 4 PM every day.

Continue reading “Vampire Knight”

This was one of the first manga I ever purchased when I was beginning to explore the genre. I told myself I would carry on with the other volumes of the series but, sadly, I never picked up another volume.

The story centers on Ido Daisuke and an essentially dormant (but living) brain encased in the cybernetic refuse of a head and upper torso that Daisuke finds in the giant scrapyard beneath the enormous floating city of Tiphares (named Salem in the original Japanese series). She is soon awake but has lost all of her memories, so Daisuke christens her Alita (Gally) after his recently deceased cat. Continue reading “Battle Angel Alita”

The Good

This week, I take you into the world of Deathnote. Here in our Western culture, we have our personification of death in the “Grim Reaper,” that famous guy dressed in black and with a scythe.

For those of you unfamiliar with traditional Japanese culture, their icons for death are gods (plural) of death, called Shinigami. Just as there are many different vampire legends in the West, so too are there different views of Shinigami in the East. In Deathnote, the Shinigami live in a world separate from ours, on a different plane of existence, watching our actions and—every once in a while—coming to our world … to collect. Continue reading “Deathnote: The Good and The Bad”

By Ed Kidhardt

Imagine if you will, dear reader, you are a high school senior living in a tiny town in Japan. You’ve just started dating a clumsy (yet cute) girl who apologizes for everything she does, like walking slow or reading comics. You truly have feelings for her, but every time you try to tell her you end up yelling at her, eventually making her cry.

After three awkward weeks of this, your town is attacked by an unknown air force. During the strike you run outside and who should appear from the sky but your girlfriend – her arm transformed into an automatic rifle and metal wings sprouting from her back.

You slowly embrace your destroying angel, and she starts to cry. Continue reading “Saikano”