Tag: manga

March 11, 2022 · 1 comment

By Jeannette Ng. One of the most arresting things about Hico Yamanaka’s manga The Prince in His Dark Daysis how profoundly wrong its protagonist, Atsuko, looks in a schoolgirl uniform in the opening chapter. It is what made the rather familiar prince-and-the-pauper identity-swap setup hypnotically compelling to me. Atsuko Okawa is a struggling teenager who […]

November 27, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jeannette Ng. Much as the Motion Picture Academy loves films about film-making and writers love nothing more than a protagonist who is also a writer, manga about making manga has become its own little subgenre. There is an art to balancing the indulgent navel-gazing and insider-jokes with the bluntly realist looks behind the proverbial […]

November 2, 2021 · 0 comments

By Jeannette Ng. Interviews with Monster Girls by PETOS starts off more or less as its title promises. Tetsuo Takahashi is a biology teacher who has long been fascinated by the existence of demihumans. Some combination of narrative contrivance and fate has resulted in him sharing a school with four of them — Hikari Takanashi […]

October 26, 2021 · 0 comments

When asked by an interviewer why he became a manga creator, the late Sanpei Shirato answered bluntly: “I needed to eat.” This seemingly simple reply encapsulated much of his own gritty, materialist attitude towards storytelling. He was always aware of the big picture, of the great weight of history as it marched along, but focussed […]

October 12, 2021 · 1 comment

By Jeannette Ng. I was running out of To Your Eternity (also by Yoshitoki Oima), which I was also absolutely loving, so I thought I’d read about the adventures of Shoya Ishida, repentant class bully. My interest in redemption arcs tends towards the melodramatic and fantastical – grand, blood-drenched villains who discover their heart of […]