ANB’s reviews of Phantom Dream, and new MangaLife review links
A couple of weeks ago, AstroNerdBoy reviewed vol. 1 and vol. 2 of Phantom Dream, which, coincidentally, I just finished adapting a few days ago. (It’s a five-volume series, and the second one I’ve adapted in its entirety; the first was White Night Melody, although only one volume was released.) When he reviewed vol. 1 and wasn’t terribly impressed, I commented and said that vol. 2 is stronger than vol. 1, and happily he agreed.
I think I want to write a real post about Dream sometime soon, but today is not that day.
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Quick roundup of my recent MangaLife reviews:
High School Debut vol. 10 (A-)
The Lapis Lazuli Crown vol. 1 (B) [CMX]
Tail of the Moon Prequel: The Other Hanzo(u) (B+)
I also wrote up a batch of short “what I’m reading” reviews, including vol. 6 of Monkey High!, vol. 13 of Love*Com, vol. 4 of Haruka – Beyond the Stream of Time, vol. 7 of Wild Ones, vol. 2 of The Magic Touch, vol. 13 of Inubaka: Crazy For Dogs, and vol. 3 of St. Dragon Girl.
DMC: to collect or not?, work update, and some review links
I don’t often waffle on whether or not to check out a new manga title, but I’m seriously unsure about whether or not to try Detroit Metal City. Since the review copies that get sent my way are almost exclusively shoujo, this one isn’t likely to fall into my hands if I don’t seek it out. I hear really good things, and I certainly read and work on a fairly wide variety of titles/genres, but I can’t decide if DMC sounds like something I’d enjoy. (It doesn’t help that I avoid reviews of things I haven’t read, since most other reviewers tend to talk about more plot details than I usually want to know in advance.)
I already collect a fair number of series, so I’m trying to avoid adding too many new titles to my list for the next little while. But several titles I collect are ending in just a volume or two, which makes it hard to keep from just trying everything that catches my eye. And the DMC waffling continues.
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On the work front, TOKYOPOP now has a preview of ZONE-00 vol. 1 up on their site. That may just be the single most challenging volume I’ve ever worked on, and I say that in full awareness of having done three full-length fanbooks and multiple volumes of Sgt. Frog. ^_^ (Volume 2 was much, much easier than volume 1, for a few reasons.) I’ll be very interested to see what people think of vol. 1 when review copies start going out.
Meanwhile, I’m currently at work on the final volume of Natsuki Takaya’s Phantom Dream, and I’ll be very sorry to see it go. It’s interesting as an early work, as I’ve said to many people, and it also improves noticeably from volume to volume. The artwork in vol. 5 is much, much different from vol. 1 (it looks fairly similar to her style in early volumes of Fruits Basket), and while her plotting isn’t as masterful as it is in Fruits Basket (which I think is structurally brilliant), I really like the characters and the story comes together quite well. I have a long history of really enjoying various series right up until the end and then being disappointed by the way they wrap up, and that didn’t happen here.
And while I’m mentioning Dream: Lillian (Diaz-Przybyl, the current series editor) has given me the go-ahead to tell readers that vol. 3+ will include a glossary and character guide, which should come as a relief to the people who find the plethora of Japanese mystical terms a little, er, overwhelming.
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And as always, a small batch of MangaLife reviews (including some CMX books):
Genghis Khan: To the Ends of the Earth and Sea (B-) [CMX]
Sand Chronicles vol. 5 (A+)
Venus Capriccio vol. 1 (B-) [CMX]
Attempting some regular blogging, and joining the Twitter crowd
I only have one review in this week’s MangaLife update, but since I’m trying to get in the habit of updating more regularly*, I’ll be revolutionary and post it:
We Were There vol. 4 (A)
Also in this week’s update, Alethea and Athena talk about individual translation styles in their column. The Twins and I talk to each other fairly regularly, and our conversations often have to do with work and our respective working styles. I enjoy those discussions very much, and it makes me happy when they sometimes use elements of those conversations as springboards for part of their column. ^_^
*A bit of a challenge, since I usually don’t feel comfortable discussing work in detail and my reviewing for MangaLife tends to take up most of that corner of brain real estate.
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This week I finally gave in and signed up for Twitter; Melinda kept making it sound like fun, and then at AN Sean Gaffney finished the job of talking me into it. So far, I think of it as sharing the one [1] feature of Facebook I actually enjoy, with none of Facebook’s attendant hideousness, so that’s a plus.
I’m primarily planning on using the account to interact with other manga industry folks/bloggers, so it’s had a fairly tight focus in its short life. Given that, it probably won’t be of much interest to non-manga fans, but there it is.
As May draws to a close…
My stack of review copies is starting to get a little precarious, so while I’m in between rewrites I’ll have to put a dent in it. It’ll be nice to sit down and read for a while; I haven’t been reading much of anything lately, having just been on vacation for a week and a half (and being stuck in an interesting-but-slow nonfiction book).
OTOH, I met my monthly quota of geek! time by spending the past weekend at Anime North in Toronto. AN is a large con, with over 15,000 attendees this year, and it’s very fan-driven. This year’s pleasant discovery was that we had some (last minute?) industry presence: Lance Heiskell from FUNimation was in attendance, which was fun. I didn’t get to see all of his panels, but he seemed very accessible and entertained a lot of questions, although he couldn’t address several subjects which were being covered the next day at Anime Boston. Good stuff, though, and AFAIK he was the first major industry rep. to come up since ADV made a one-time appearance a few years ago. I hope we get a repeat performance next year!
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Five MangaLife reviews to wrap up May:
Dogs Prelude (vol. 0) (A-)
High School Debut vol. 9 (A)
Kaze Hikaru vol. 13 (B+)
NANA vol. 15-16 (A+)
Rosario + Vampire vol. 7 (B-)
New releases and unrelated review links
Two of my rewrites are out or coming out this month: Sgt. Frog vol. 17 and Animal Academy: Hakobune Hakusho vol. 1. The Frog is the Frog; if you’ve read it, you know what it’s like. This volume had a few particularly difficult adaptation challenges (the puns often don’t translate well), but I think it came through okay. ^_^
Animal Academy is just starting out, and it’s adorable. I’ve only read two volumes, so I don’t really know where it’s heading; there’ve been a few hints in those volumes that things might not be as fluffy as they seem from the premise, but since I haven’t read anything else by the author I don’t know yet how far those things might be taken. In the meantime, it’s cute and endearing, and there’s nothing wrong with that. (I haven’t seen a hard copy yet, but the reviews I’ve seen suggest it’s being marketed for younger readers.)
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I’ve had three new reviews go up at MangaLife in the last few weeks (which isn’t as many as usual, but things have been a little insane lately).
Beauty Pop vol. 9-10 (B)
B.O.D.Y. vol. 5 (C)
Love*Com vol. 12 (B+)
Linking to…other people’s reviews!
I actively seek out reviews of manga that I’ve worked on (although “actively” mostly involves reading MangaBlog every day, which I would do anyway), but I don’t usually link to them. Usually they’re not as relevant to my work as you might think, since very few reviewers mention the translation or adaptation. But there are exceptions, and they’re usually very nice to read.* ^_^
Anyway, this comes up because this week AnimeNewsNetwork reviewed the Genshiken Official Book, and I particularly appreciated the review–not only because Carlo Santos said good things about the readability of the book, but because he really got what fanbooks are for. I’ve worked on several fanbook-type projects now, and quite often reviews boil down to “but it’s just a collection of facts about the characters and interviews and statistics and…”, which is not, in fact, a flaw. It’s the point. Sure, some of them offer a more interesting collection of odds and ends than others, but that’s how it goes.
Here’s the most relevant-to-me passage, since I’m already blogging about it:
As a quasi-reference book that covers all the angles of modern visual culture, this is definitely a translator’s challenge when it comes to Japanese slang and otaku jargon. The American edition is sure to have its share of nitpickers, with word choices like “fanzine” for “doujinshi” (then again, it’s not like “self-published work” rolls any easier off the tongue), or “girly games” for “bishoujo games” (there is a difference between something being “girly” and something having pretty girls in it). But looking at the big picture, this translation does a remarkable job of making almost any style of writing understandable—character summaries, nonfiction articles and short-story dialogue all flow easily.
(As it happens, I read another review a while back which criticized the inconsistency of using both “fanzine” and “doujinshi” in the book. I read the series and worked on the book so long ago that I can’t absolutely swear to this without digging around, which I haven’t done, but I think that’s a holdover from the English version of the actual series using both terms at different times. There’s always a certain amount of “well, I want to do something my way, but internal consistency with the overall series is more important”, at least to my mind. We want to create the illusion that a given body of work is still coming straight from the individual author, rather than being filtered through translators and adapters.)
*Since I’m saying that much, I’ll add that Michelle Smith’s review of Shinobi Life vol. 1 included such a positive comment about my work on the book that I was a bit giddy for days. I’m totally okay with the fact that the English scripts rarely get commented on, because–as I indicated above–I believe that part of our job is to draw as little attention as possible to our existence. But it’s still a good feeling when it happens.
Catching up on a series, and a few reviews
Whenever I get sent a review copy of a manga volume that picks up well into a series I’ve never read, there’s a certain period of debating whether to just read it cold or try to dig up earlier volumes in order to give a more educated review. Sometimes I luck out and my local library has older volumes readily available, which is particularly nice when it’s a series I’d been meaning to check out anyway (Love*Com and Skip Beat! both come to mind).
Sometimes the earlier books aren’t as easy to lay hands on and yet I find myself unwilling to just jump into a series. That’s what happened with Beauty Pop when I got a copy of volume 9–it sat around giving me the evil eye until vol. 10 arrived too, and between them they made me put in the effort to track down the rest of the series. But now I’ve read vol. 1-8, so those two patient books will finally have their day in the next week or so…
Three recent MangaLife reviews:
Captive Hearts vol. 4 (C+)
Otomen vol. 2 (B+)
St. Dragon Girl vol. 2 (C+)
Miscellany and review links
Copies of Phantom Dream vol. 2 have been turning up in the wild, although its release date isn’t until tomorrow. ^_^ And reading reviews of Shinobi Life is still an inordinate amount of fun. The premise really doesn’t sound brilliant, but Conami handles it so well that it’s a very entertaining read. (It’s not just me–the reviews back me up.) So one of the fun things is seeing how other people summarize the story when they’re writing it up.
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A lot of my reviews have gone up on MangaLife in the month since I last updated. Usually the list doesn’t grow quite this fast! It included another “what I’m reading” installment, which involved quick looks at vol. 8 of Fushigi Yûgi: Genbu Kaiden, vol. 10 of S.A., vol. 3 of Captive Hearts, vol. 10 of Crimson Hero, vol. 12 of Inubaka: Crazy For Dogs, and vol. 10 of La Corda d’Oro.
Regular reviews:
High School Debut vol. 8 (A)
Honey Hunt vol. 1 (B)
Love*Com vol. 11 (B+)
Monkey High! vol. 5 (B)
We Were There vol. 3 (A-)
Shinobi Life vol. 2 credits and a heap of backlogged reviews
I’m still entertaining grand notions about posting more this year (preferably posts with more actual content), but so far I’ve spent 2009 doing a fair bit of traveling, so other things have fallen a bit by the wayside. Writing about and reviewing manga is fun, but working on it gets a higher priority, what with it paying (some of) the bills and all.
Volume 2 of Shinobi Life, one of my favorite titles to work on, just came out in the last week or so. I hope it gets as many good reviews as volume 1 did! (Volume 1’s reviews almost all began with a variation on “I wasn’t expecting much when I read about the premise, but this is surprisingly good!”)
I should note that there was a mix-up in the credits in this volume, however. Despite what the book says, I did the adaptation, and I believe it was translated by Lori Riser, who translated vol. 1. Editorial is aware of the error, so it should be correct in later printings. (The first printing credits Jeremiah Bourque as the translator and Jamie S. Rich as the adapter.)
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I do have a backlog of reviews to link to, as usual. First, at the end of December my stack of review copies had gotten dauntingly large, so I contributed a “what I’m reading” article to MangaLife to talk quickly about some of the series I’d already reviewed earlier volumes of. That covered Time Stranger Kyoko vol. 3 (series finale), The Gentlemen’s Alliance † vol. 8, Tail of the Moon vol. 14, Haruka – Beyond the Stream of Time vol. 3, Wild Ones vol. 5, Kaze Hikaru vol. 12, and B.O.D.Y. vol. 4.
Regular-length reviews:
Captive Hearts vol. 2 (C)
Inubaka: Crazy For Dogs vol. 11 (B-)
Love*Com vol. 9-10 (B+)
The Magic Touch vol. 1 (B-)
NANA vol. 13-14 (A+)
Rosario + Vampire vol. 5 (B-)
S.A vol. 9 (C)
Sand Chronicles vol. 4 (A)
St. Dragon Girl vol. 1 (C+)
Tail of the Moon vol. 15 [series finale] (B+).
Probably the last post of the year.
Somehow it’s been a month since I updated, and WordPress seems to have changed its interface. (I really ought to explore the site’s options more carefully, since I know it has quite a lot of potential I haven’t tapped.)
This month I have a few adaptations coming out: Sgt. Frog 16 has already made its appearance, I believe, and Phantom Dream 1 should be out sometime in the next week or so (the schedule release date varies from retailer to retailer, so I’m not sure exactly when it’s due). And my first adaptation for Del Rey Manga, the Genshiken Official Book, is out right at the end of the month. I’ve already received my contributor’s copies, and as always I’m blown away by how closely layout people can make the English versions of fanbooks match the Japanese versions. In this case, the physical book is larger than the books in the actual series, which I wasn’t expecting. (I’ve never seen the Japanese editions of Genshiken, but the original Official Book is the same size as the other Japanese manga volumes on my bookshelf.)
Meanwhile, Animal Academy: Hakobune Hakusho has turned up on TOKYOPOP’s list of 2009 shipping dates, so I guess I can consider it well and truly announced. I’ve also been assigned to another title on that list, but I’m not including it in my own list here until after I’ve actually worked on it. ^_^
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I’m considering things to do with this blog in 2009, but for now this is just another quick list of review links. As is usually the case, these are all based on review copies from VIZ.
Fairy Cube vol. 3 (B+)
Gaba Kawa (C+)
Heaven’s Will (C+)
Honey and Clover vol. 4 (A-)
Skip Beat! vol. 15 (B+)
We Were There vol. 1 (A-)
We Were There vol. 2 (A-)
