Category: comic reviews

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Creature! vol. 1 manga review–A bloody, horrific giant monster smash-fest

Note that I originally wrote this review for Kaiju and Henshin Manga, a manga Facebook group covering one of my favorite genres. I lightly edited it for publishing here, but the content is almost the same.

Usually giant monsters in Japan tend to be pretty kid-friendly, and while Ultraman has his occasional very bloody moments ripping and cutting kaiju apart, and Gamera might douse the camera with brightly colored blood on occasion, nevertheless the mood is usually kept light and airy without much real fear. Shingo Honda’s manga Creature! changes all that with a heavy dose of gross-out freaky horror and massive, wicked-looking Lovecraftian monstrosities.

The story: Highschooler Akira Takashiro is trying to up his game in basketball and overcome his rival for love interest Miku, who goes to a different school. But just as he gets drafted into playing in the next basketball match, what seems a massive earthquake shakes up the school, and suddenly hideous tentacled monsters are ripping and slicing his classmates to pieces. He manages to escape with the class president in tow, then teams up with a nerd and a punk, but the outside world is no safer than inside, as the city teems with a menagerie of toothy, massive creatures with a thirst for human flesh. Can Akira survive and reunite with his lost love at the station? Will the earth remain under the dominance of humankind? Where did these monsters come from?

We don’t get all the answers in the first volume, but we do get a fast-paced and deliriously gory story. The Japanese title is “Hakaijuu,” which I have heard combines the Japanese word for “monster” with the verb for “to vomit,” so it isn’t surprising that we get a lot of guts and gore—one of the most shocking moments being a scene in which we peek into a giant monster’s mouth to see Akira’s classmates melting in digestive juices. The monster designs themselves are varied and sport endless tentacles, teeth, and eyes in all the wrong places, but for a monster buff like myself, I really enjoyed seeing their insane countenances and abilities, and especially the destruction left in their wake as they preyed upon the kid protagonists and battled each other for supremacy. Character motivations are somewhat basic, which doesn’t mean bad, but still… Akira and his friends sometimes feel like archetypes more than individuals. They still are at least sharply delineated from each other, and I know from reading the first 17 or so volumes that some of them will eventually go through major character arcs, but they aren’t really allowed to piece together much of a personality or backstory before they are up and running away from the monsters.

A note on the translation, since I have read both the original Japanese and the English version of the first volume: The dialogue can be a bit wooden in the English sometimes, but it wasn’t enough to detract so much from my enjoyment. Also, I was disappointed that the English version didn’t include Shingo’s little notes to readers that appear at the beginning of each volume. He talks in one of them about how disappointed his father was that he was doing THAT kind of manga!

For me, despite some flaws, the sometimes pedestrian plot is enough of a justification for mad monster mayhem, at least for starters, and Honda’s artwork is fantastically detailed. When the big monsters appear, too. the creatures an impressive sense of scale and sheer awesomeness. While the first book kind of feels like a zombie apocalypse with the zombies replaced by toothy giant monsters, nevertheless I think the story fills an important niche in giant monster fiction that had gone relatively untouched before Attack on Titan came along—and Creature! is much more extreme in violence compared to its hairy younger monster sibling. If you have the tolerance for the blood and gore, Honda’s manga is stupid entertainment worthy at least of a nibble and a bite.

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Monster Tamer Girls Volume 1–review

Originally written in 2021 for the Facebook group, Kaiju and Henshin Manga. I lightly revised a few things for this reprint, but the text is mostly the same.

Monster Tamer Girls vol. 1

In 2021 young actress Kaylee Hottie charmed many viewers with her depiction of Jia, a deaf Iwi girl from Skull Island who could communicate with King Kong via sign language. The character of Jia takes a longstanding kaiju trope—the woman who connects/communicates/saves the monster—and adds a slightly new twist. Usually the female who connects with the monster is older, and may even be a romantic interest to the beast (the original Ann Darrow from King Kong (1933) being an obvious reference), but Jia is neither of those; she is more like a tiny friend to our favorite giant ape. However, whatever the role, women have been communicating with, befriending, tempting, and controlling giant monsters from the start of mega-monster fiction—whether as priestesses, twin fairies, jungle women, or just naïve ladies in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This trope was made the center of a two-volume manga series back in 2014-2016, released in English in 2018 via Yen Press, and written plus illustrated by Mujirushi Shimazaki (that HAS to be a pen name—“mujirushi” just means “off-brand”). She took the classic girls-and-monsters bit and made it into a tale of cute girls doing cute things with giant monsters with Monster Tamer Girls—and it’s a lot of fun.

The story goes that in 1999 giant monsters appeared around the world, and, while destructive at first, people soon discovered that the giant beasts were not inherently violent and could be tamed via the singing voices of prepubescent girls (who knows why). Thus schools were opened up specifically for training young women in the ways of kaiju calming and handling, and Monster Tamer Girls follows Ion Hidaka and Sora Misumaru as they start out their monster schooling careers. When they arrive, they are given the task of looking after the local grumpy giant monster in the woods to break them in as kaiju freshies. This monster is notorious for being recalcitrant and tough to handle, but it takes a shine to shy Hidaka, who shows great talent in connecting with monsters through her powerful voice. Thus the adventures begin, as various strange beings continually emerge into the tale and cause trouble, and friendships between both monster and human form as a consequence.

The girls are a big focus, with their foibles and charms, each new recruit trying to fit in, struggling to figure out their place, how to connect with monsters, and dealing with their dreams. The girls are treated with a light touch—they have problems and faults, but they aren’t tragic and dark characters, and their lives seem a bit like marshmallow pudding: saccharine and sweet and light, perfect if you’re in the mood, bad for those who dislike the fluff. The monsters are cute, too, and have their own issues—often relational—that the girls must confront and help solve.

For me, I really enjoyed the airy, amusing misadventures of Hidaka and Misumaru. They are far-removed from the punched-up action and explosions in most monster-fare, and folks with a taste for the silly and calm storytelling of something like Flying Witch will probably find something to enjoy here.

The art is clean and easy to follow, and the girls are not sexualized (beyond short skirts). They are charming, if a bit empty, but since the girls are drawn in a similar fashion without many distinguishing features, sometimes I found myself getting confused as to who was who. Monsters, meanwhile, are illustrated in the same low-detail, high-adorability frame. The designs are not that memorable, and come across as fairly generic, but they suit the purpose of pushing the story forward.

I would totally recommend this series for kaiju fans looking for something fun that takes a familiar trope and twists it in a new and fun way. References to the greater kaiju fandom can also be found, and it’s just nice to relax with an undemanding piece of entertainment that makes you smile—especially in these stressful times.

Three stars

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Shogakukan English Comics Doraemon: A Selection of Fantastic Stories–Review

Today I was stressing myself looking over various creative writings I have done in the past and trying to find one that was perfect to share, and I finally came to the conclusion, nah. I am going to write up a review of a book I read recently, and leave it at that. This blog is kind of a conglomeration of my thoughts and readings and watchings of many stripes, and so today I want to share something of my language learning journey in a freeform review of this bilingual comic.

Part of learning any language involves lots of input–reading and listening. One of the most famous linguistic scholars on second language acquisition, Krashen, is well known for his writings on the importance of input, and increasingly I agree with him–in order to really understand and use a language, you need to input, input, input, input tons and tons of language. But it’s hard, especially at the beginning, because reading anything or listening to anything that was made for native speakers especially can be immediately overwhelming because there is just SO MUCH new and strange and confusing when you’re learning a language.

That’s why I really like bilingual comics. I like reading them even now, even after reading many manga straight in Japanese, and even after reading several novels in Japanese. The Shogakukan English Comics Doraemon bilingual series was one of the first Japanese-English bilingual works that I stumbled upon early in my Japanese language-learning life. Doraemon is a phenomenon in Japan, extremely popular–the kind of property wherein practically every schoolkid can doodle his face in their homework, and new episodes of his anime are ever on the air and new movies based on his comic adventures are released in theaters practically every year. The idea is basically that this dopey kid named Nobita is visited by Doraemon from the future (I think his future self sends him, but I am forgetting some of the details) at a crisis point (maybe Nobita forgot his homework or something). So Nobita regularly gets into some relatable and always idiotic snafu, Doraemon then produces some future technology that can magically fix Nobita’s problem, Nobita inevitably misuses the technology to Doraemon’s chagrin, and in the end usually things are messier or crazier than when they began. (Note that if you ever ask Japanese students to think of an invention they would like to see in the future, inevitably many of them will choose Doraemon inventions.) In reference to language learning, these comics use mostly easy Japanese in the first place, so reading them is not too hard–though it should be stressed that the Japanese text has been replaced with English in the word bubbles, and the Japanese is set in smaller text outside the panels of the comic. That means that all the kanji in the words have no glosses–no hiragana. Now, again, the vocabulary is usually low level, but if you are using these books to learn Japanese (they are actually made for Japanese learners of English), the reading can be a little frustrating if you don’t know the particular kanji.

This book has 15 stories in its scant 170 pages, so you can tell that usually the tales take around ten pages or so to finish, providing bite-size chunks for swallowable learning times. These are “fantastic stories,” which generally means that the tales tend to be related to fairy tales and fantasy tropes–sometimes a riff on a Japanese fairy tale like Issun Boshi, sometimes Nobita might step into a Western fantasy like Cinderella. You might have fairies making appearances, or a story about Santa, or a tale around a sort of superhero. Some of the stories only seem tangentially related to fairy tales, and just have wild magic-like future tech… which almost all Doraemon stories tend to have. So, in the end, the book starts to feel arbitrary. It’s still fun, though, and Doraemon comics are almost universally episodic (though occasionally reference may be made to tech from a previous story); basically you can jump in and immediately enjoy the ridiculous misadventures without reading any of the other selections.

Part of the selling point for this book was apparently teaching fantasy-related vocabulary and expressions… and the stories don’t feature much sword-and-sorcery-type vocab. Thus the publisher added several pages in the end that function like a vocabulary list for fantasy–things like “devil” and “resurrect” and “legend” and “treasure,” plus an explanation of how the planets in the solar system are named after gods, and a page of terms that come from Greek myths in the end (like “Achilles Heel”). This section has the Japanese equivalents for the words and phrases, too, so it works as a Japanese-learning tool, too–albeit it’s probably better for higher-level learners.

Of course just reading the book one time probably won’t help so much with retaining the language you learn. I personally made a list of new or forgotten words that I came across in my Japanese-English dictionary app, Midori. It’s easy to make vocabulary lists for any books or movies or whatever in the app, and then you can scroll through them to check them again, or use the app to produce a set of flashcards based on the list you created. I don’t review the lists enough to deeply learn the language usually, but the act of making the lists is a step in the right direction. Basically, if you want to learn the language, reading is great, but it’s better if you try to interact with the language more afterwards–whether by revisiting the vocabulary, or using the words in conversation or in a journal entry, etc.
Of course just reading the book one time probably won’t help so much with retaining the language you learn. I personally made a list of new or forgotten words that I came across in my Japanese-English dictionary app, Midori. It’s easy to make vocabulary lists for any books or movies or whatever in the app, and then you can scroll through them to check them again, or use the app to produce a set of flashcards based on the list you created. I don’t review the lists enough to deeply learn the language usually, but the act of making the lists is a step in the right direction. Basically, if you want to learn the language, reading is great, but it’s better if you try to interact with the language more afterwards–whether by revisiting the vocabulary, or using the words in conversation or in a journal entry, etc.

Looking at my list, I have things like “mimizuku” (horned owl), “kingyobachi” (goldfish bowl), “otamajyakushi” (tadpole, ladle), and “zehitomo” (by all means), among many others. I wrote a bunch from the final section of the book with the legendary terms, too–stuff like “meifu” (realm of the dead) and “meikyuu” (labyrinth).

For those who are interested in reading more, there are six books in this series, which tries to sort Doraemon tales under specific varieties–love stories, funny stories, touching stories, scary stories. I have read several of the other collections, and they are of a similar quality as this one. Again, reading books like these are great way to practice Japanese and just get started, so if you are looking for something along those lines, there are worse places to start! Why not give it a try? Just don’t give up, and keep getting more input to keep growing!