By Yû Watase
192 pages, black and white
Published by Viz
In the past half-decade or so, it’s been fascinating to watch the rise of Yû Watase in America. Her series Fushigi Yûgi: The Mysterious Play became a huge hit on both print and video, and the follow-up Ceres, Celestial Legend isn’t doing too shabbily either. Now a third series from Watase is hitting stores in the form of Alice 19th—and it just goes to show that Watase keeps getting better with age.
By Junji Ito
200 pages, black and white
Published by Viz
Junji Ito is Japan’s master of horror comics, but it’s only recently that his work has appeared in English in the forms of Tomie and Uzumaki. With each new work that’s translated, Ito’s powers of terror and suspense grow stronger. What’s surprising about his new work Gyo is not that it’s as scary as ever, but that as the next major work after Uzumaki, Gyo is almost a deliberate reversal of what he did in Uzumaki.
By Rikdo Koshi
200 pages, black and white
Published by Viz
For a while now I’ve been hearing about a Japanese anime series called Excel Saga. I was told it was wacky, it was bizarre, it was hysterically funny. So of course, I never got around to seeing it. However, when I heard that Viz was publishing the Excel Saga manga, I figured that was a good a way as any to see what all the fuss was about.
By Yoko Kamio
216 pages, black and white
Published by Viz
If there’s one thing that reading Japanese comics has taught me, it’s that their school system is set up very differently than ours. What school you go to carries a great amount of prestige, with parents often spending a great deal of money to get their children into a school that will look good when promotion time comes around. When reading Boys Over Flowers: Hana Yori Dango, I also got another very important lesson—that if Japanese schools are really like this, they’re very much not the place for me.
By Hitoshi Ariga
208 pages, black and white
Published by Viz
Sometimes all it takes is a catchy premise to score a new reader. Take The Big O: a book set in Paradigm City, where 40 years earlier everyone lost their memories. Now people use pieces of the forgotten past to forge the future. Sounds great, right? Well, just keep in mind that a good premise does not automatically equal a good final product. You’ve got to take advantage of that potential and really turn it into something special.
By Masashi Kishimoto
192 pages, black and white
Published by Viz
Naruto is a backwards series. I don’t mean that reversing the title reveals the secret word “Oturan”, and I’m not referring to the right-to-left progression of the page. No, Naruto is a backwards series because creator Masashi Kishimoto has cleverly reversed all the normal standards of a “young hero in training” comic into something uniquely different.
By Kazuki Takahashi
200 pages, black and white
Published by Viz
Sometimes you think you know what a book’s about before you even read it. I’ve had the extreme misfortune to both discover a Magic: The Gathering card game tournament on cable as well as an episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! and I’m not sure which was less exciting, watching people play card after card after card. So when I first encountered the original Yu-Gi-Oh! comics that spawned the hit cartoon and collectable card game, I figured I already had this book completely figured out.
Wrong.
By Rumiko Takahashi
312 pages, black and white
Published by Viz
If you had to pick Japanese comic book superstar Rumiko Takahashi’s greatest success, I think most would agree that it’s Ranma 1/2. With 34 collected volumes of comics, to say nothing of the 7-season/143-episode animated series, and multiple theatrical and direct-to-video stories, there’s a whole lot of Ranma 1/2 material out there. It’s best to start at the beginning, though, and with Viz’s new edition of Ranma 1/2 having just hit stores, there’s never been a better time to take a look at what started it all.
By Yû Watase
200 pages, black and white
Published by Viz
When is a book not a book? When it’s a living, breathing world in its own right. It’s rather apt that in Yû Watase’s series Fushigi Yûgi (aka The Mysterious Play) the characters have just that sort of object in the form of The Universe of the Four Gods, because one could make the case for Fushigi Yûgi itself being another such item.
By Junko Mizuno
144 pages, color
Published by Viz
If you think about it, the original story of “Hansel & Gretel” isn’t terribly logical. Parents, unable to feed their children, decide that abandoning them in the middle of the forest is the answer to all their problems. (And if at first they come trapsing home, abandon them even further into the forest.) Only once they’ve avoided near-death at a witch’s hands do they come home, and all is well with their family life because now they can eat the witch’s edible candy house and not have to try and write each other off. Either these are the most-trusting, or the stupidest children in the world. Possibly both. In any event, this probably explains why in Junko Mizuno’s Hansel & Gretel, Mizuno only took a couple of specific elements she liked from the original story and threw out the rest.
