flemmings | Entries tagged with manga

A look at the ads in back of Kaze no Umi etc suggest that the Answers *aren't* in Kaze no Umi etc. but in three or four other volumes.

shiny_monkey will be given a wad of yen and a list of obscure titles to be looking for when she goes back to Japan.

And I shall interlard my kirin reading with more Konron no Tama, just because. Mh well, just because to date the 12K novels have added nothing to the anime.

There's an article waiting to be written about how anime is to manga & shousetsu as dramatizations are to novels ie people don't *really* start writing a work until they hear it speak and see it move. Then suddenly anyone can do it- and does. The characters in text get a visible body; the characters in manga acquire colour and voices. Half the writer's work is done for you. Is why it's a lot easier to write LotR stories after the films and FMA yaoi after the anime. In fact some day I shall natter at

tanbi about how manga-based FMA yaoi barely seems possible. (Ed and Roy *don't* look cute together there and the women are too interesting to be ignored as prospective partners.)

Friday night I wandered into the last half hour of The Whale Rider on TVOntario. Not sure why it left the sort of psychic hangover it did, but I was vaguely fantodded all weekend because of it. Whales. Cuddling whales. Aghhh... This was followed by Crouching Tiger, Houshin Engi the anime, a volume of Houshin Engi the manga in French, a Teletubbies tape, and the last five minutes of Temptress Moon wandered into *last* night on TVO. (Even from five minutes I can tell that this last is a classic slow-as-molasses must-avoid. Even though I normally like slow and arty, the colours and lighting look as though it was all shot during a Shanghai smog alert. Possibly it was.)

The result is complete mental soup, disconnected and unpleasant imagery bobbing about in my brain like the flotsam of a seawreck.
( And the cure? )

Current Mood: complicated

Happiness is...

a four-day weekend (yes, it was supposed to be a whole week off but I'm an adult who doesn't believe in the Holiday Fairy, at least not in August) and seven volumes of Papuwa Redivivus and eleven volumes of FMA/ Hagaren and...

the first Hagaren DVD, come across by accident at the rental place. See, I read Hagaren 1 a while ago and found rereading it an exercise in both squint and futility (I've read this and I know what happens only there's stuff I probably missed so I suppose I should read it again only it takes time mumble grumble.) But here's a fast refresher, with subtitles and nice colours and nice music. I can see why people'd fall for the series from the anime: I probably would too.
( Cut for arrant elitism )

Have finished the beast. Better than OotP, certainly, but that's damning with faint praise. Better than anything but Philosopher's Stone and PoA, I think, though I've never reread any of the books and my memory is vague.

And now I shall go back to ignoring the net again because people I would never have expected to be unintelligent on the subject are being so. Starting with the woman who (rightly, I then thought) threatened to defriend anyone who spoilered her and then put an uncut spoiler into her post-read post. People still don't know what a spoiler is and clearly will never learn.

But a vote of thanks goes to (possible spoiler here) the person in a certain community who, when some twit said 'X and Y happen-- at least that's what I heard somewhere, don't know if it's true or not,' answered with utter assurance 'It's not.' It was. Go them.

Meanwhile I did not win my horse race. Sadness. But Akino Matsuri is still a fun mangaka and perfect summer reading, so I return to Masked Detective Suzuki Tarou.

The heat began on Sunday, but more than three hot days in a row registers with me as 'always.' It's always been hot. But even though everyone's saying they've never known a year as hot as this, I can't agree. It's 33 and 34 every day and the humidex is unspeakable; but I distinctly recall late-80s summers of day after day of 37 and 38 with unspeakable humidexes, and the bodily reaction of Red Alert! Red Alert! get into AC now. This weather is still on the bearable side during the day. The nights... well, the nights suck. But this is still the first night I may keep the AC on straight through, cause I've been turning it off once the bedroom cools. (Then there was the summer of '94 in Tokyo which set a record for number of 'tropical nights', which is something hideous like nights that don't go below 28C/ 82F. I had my dorai kiipu and never went anywhere in the evening after work for nearly two months because bicycling was simply out of the question.)
( Nonetheless brainmelt currently exists, with interesting results )

Have been wrestling with the intricacies of Word, which refused for the longest time to display bolding or underling in my documents. Help was no help. Change is vexatious to the soul, yes.
( natter )

Out of sorts for reasons unknown, possibly having to do with the Visiting Cat and his sudden desire to divest himself of all his fur. This may be the cause of the shortness of breath that makes me feel as if on the verge of a panic attack. OTOH it's no better out of the house, so maybe I *am* on the verge of a panic attack. However I find my equilibrium restored by reading Deimos no Hanayome, vol 9 of the collected edition. Classic shoujo. Fun, now we're well past Deimos' stalker's idiocy about the schoolgirl who's the reincarnation of his sister(!) Venus(!) and into the horror stories where he gently propels people into homicide and arson and stuff like that. (My mood is also helped by reading the inserted chirashi and its lists of Bonita titles. There is no end to the making of shoujo and all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.)

This may make it into my review of the latest Motoni Modoru (it's called Dog Style and I'm sure she knows what that means in English and doesn't care) and then again it may not, but I gotta say- the woman's dialogue shaves points off my IQ in units of ten. Not always- Tantei Aoneko and Rika are both straightforward enough- but when the manga deals with present-day /ordinary/ males, I flounder forever trying to get my bearings in her subject-less argot.

In evidence of which: I spent fifteen minutes last night reading and rereading the first three pages of DS trying to figure out just who was related to who, and coming up only with there being two people called Kashiwa who were brothers of the narrator, older and younger respectively, and the narrator has a thing for one of his brothers but I couldn't tell which, nor could I figure out why these guys would have the same first name. As I say, dumb. After a quarter hour of 'have you seen Kashiwa?' 'nope but if you mean my older brother he's up on the roof with his best friend' I finally twig: ani and otouto don't invariably mean *my* ani and otouto. So: there are two brothers whose last name is Kashiwa and this school distinguishes them rather as British schools do, Molesworth 1 and Molesworth 2, or Harrington Primus and Harrington Secundus, or Kashiwa ani and Kashiwa otouto. Just FYI.

So I finished Angel Sanctuary. Go me?

( Possible mild spoilers )

The colours are all different because lj erased my customizations once again. Intending to buy me some nice bath stuff I wound up instead paying three times as much for various arthritis creams. I got the Traditional Formula one because it had pug-nosed Chinese dragons on the box. Neither it nor the topical glucosamine one worked at all, of course. Then I bought a toaster oven, thinking I could once again have toast, not to mention fish sticks. The door is broken and I must take it back. Thus the small betrayals of the day.
( adventures in mangaland )

'You had the flu,' my doctor says about my cough and dark-night-of-the-soul last week. 'Good thing you got a flu shot so you didn't have the whole high fever and ache routine.' Yes, I had that when I got the flu shot itself, but oh well. 'You'll feel better next week.' In fact I feel better now, and prove it by staying two hours past closing to babysit for a co-ordinating cttee meeting, which for the first time in anyone's memory involves sitting babies. Two of them. I won't flaunt my specialist's knowledge by explaining in detail why one person sitting a pair of year-old not-quite-walkers (who are not her own) from 6 pm to 8 is a virtuoso feat, but it was a virtuoso feat, and I'm never doing it again thank you very much.

Yesterday's melt did indeed become oceans of glare ice covering the sidewalks inches thick. This winter has sucked so hard it probably strained its cheek muscles.
( Hellsing and the fully realized female )

When you're weary, feeling small, when tears are in your eyes etc etc...

read shounen. It helps though I'm damned if I know why. This week saw me galloping through much of Belne's oeuvre, and I like Belne, I do, even when she isn't drawing singing eggplants or indulging her thing about Salome. But Belne feels like eating egg whites or something. A little FMA (vol 6, when the only other bit I've read is vol 1) fills the stomach marvellously. Possibly just the change in diet. If I did a marathon read of Freeman Hero as I keep intending to I might feel different; equally if I went back to hacking through Onmyouji the manga. ('Something's happening here and you don't know what it is, DO YOU, Mr Jones?') But for the moment, FMA it is.

Otherwise my shoulders hurt and the story is being difficult and the universe continues to unfold as it should.

Off the Cliff

The rodents are running hurrah! hurrah!

Entries tagged with manga_05

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Mental soup, fever dreams

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Ouf

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Nonplussed

Take one shoujo manga and call me in the morning

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Chronicles of wasted time

Mundanities

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