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Author Archive for Shannon Fay

13 Days of Halloween: Kurosagi Delivery Service

By Shannon Fay on Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Shannon, here – Halloween is my favourite holiday and to honour it I’m counting down 13 manga throughout the month that I think best capture the Halloween spirit. They aren’t all horror manga, as to me Halloween is about more than scares: it’s about a sense of fun and wonder. It’s about discovering that there may be more to this world than meets the eye. So with that in mind, there’s everything on this list from action-packed shounen to romantic-comedy to children’s manga to some lock-the-doors-and-leave-the-lights-on horror. (See all 13 Days of Halloween so far…)

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5. Kurosagi Delivery Service

Everyone has their own personal squick buttons. Kurosagi Delivery Service manages to push all of mine. If there’s one kind of horror that gets under my skin more than any other, it’s body horror. Body horror is known for being gross as much as it is for being scary. Bodily fluid and functions are often at the forefront of the scares, earning EWW!s as well as AHHH!s from the audience. But once you get past the disgusting surface, body horror is about something much deeper than humans’ gut reaction to grossness. Body horror forces us to confront the fact that, for all our dazzling intellect and capabilities to reason, we are still stuck in these hulking, often gross physical forms, which will eventually perish and rot away.

Aside from the works of David Cronenberg, Kurosagi Delivery Service is the best example of body horror out there. The series follows a group of students at a Buddhist university. All of them have different talents (embalming, dowsing, communicating with the dead, etc) but quickly realize it’s hard to find work using these skills. The most ambitious among them, a computer-savy woman named Sasaki, decides that what they need to do is start a company of their own. And so the Kurosagi Delivery Service is born. The way it works is that the group finds a corpse and promises the dead spirit they will carry out its last wish in return for payment. While it sounds like a straight forward premise, practically every case becomes a lot more complicated very fast, becoming more and more twisted (in every sense of the word) with each horrifying revelation.

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is not only unnerving, it’s also very smart, with constant of commentary on society and its customs for both the living and the dead. Despite how dark and gory the stories can get, the cast manages to keep things light with their bickering and banter. Dark Horse is doing an amazing job with the series, including a ton of adaptation notes in the back which help highlight some of the manga’s themes and references.

Lissa has reviewed quite a few volumes of the manga right here.

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Categories: Misc
Tags: 13 Days of Halloween, Dark Horse, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Manga

13 Days of Halloween: Petshop of Horrors

By Shannon Fay on Sunday, October 24, 2010

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6. Petshop of Horrors
… + XXXHolic

I was torn about which manga to spotlight here. I knew I wanted to showcase some kind of horror story anthology, but up until the last minute I couldn’t decide between Pet Shop of Horrors or CLAMP’s xxxHolic. Even now as I type this I have to resist the urge to switch back yet again.

What makes it hard is that the two are both extremely similar and at the same time very different. Both share a basic central plot: a mysterious store owner (Count D in Pet Shop of Horrors, Yuko in xxxHolic) gives customers magical items/creatures, often with a cryptic ‘be careful what you wish for’ kind of warning. But do the customers listen? Is a mecha a mecha if it doesn’t have a human pilot controlling it from within? No, of course not.

The stories in both series are basically morality plays. While there are often monsters and ghosts in the stories, the danger to the characters isn’t from some outer force but from within: it’s their own bad habits that lead to their downfall. The characters who survive are the ones who manage to finally become self-aware and see the flaws in their character (though even that isn’t always enough if it comes to late). In xxxHolic especially a lot of customers never even make the connection between their own bad behaviour and all the things wrong in their life, and suffer all the more for it.

Both series have their strong points: I love the art in xxxHolic and think that it’s one of CLAMP’s most striking series style-wise, but Pet shop of Horrors’ old-fashioned shojo art style has its own charms. In the end I’m going with Pet Shop of Horrors, though like I said before xxxHolic could also easily fit into this slot.

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Categories: Misc
Tags: 13 Days of Halloween, Manga, Tokyopop

13 Days of Halloween: Arkham Woods

By Shannon Fay on Thursday, October 21, 2010

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7. Arkham Woods

Seven Seas has a lot of titles that would fit on this list, but one that stands out is the lovecraftian OEL manga Arkham Woods. Kirsti’s mom recently found out that she is losing her sight. In order to pay for the operation, they need to sell Kirsti’s great-uncle’s creepy home. However, that may be hard to do since the house sits on a portal to an ancient and unspeakable evil, a feature likely to scare away potential buyers.

Arkham Woods is a nicely paced horror story. The tension and the weirdness just keep mounting until the climax, where the cast must stop Cthulu himself from taking over our world. The series plays pretty fast and lose with the Cthulu mythos, but it still manages to share its atmosphere of weird, otherworldly horror. If you’re not familiar with H.P. Lovecraft’s works, don’t worry, the manga tells you everything you need to know.

If you want to check out Arkham Woods yourself, Seven Seas has put the entire thing online here.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I want to note that I’ve worked for Seven Seas as a freelance editor. In the interest of self-promotion, I want to note that anyone who likes dark and twisted manga should buy Amnesia Labyrinth as soon as it comes out.)

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Tags: 13 Days of Halloween, Global Manga, Seven Seas

Review: Octopus Girl (Vol. 01)

By Shannon Fay on Monday, October 18, 2010

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Reviewer: Shannon Fay

Manga-ka: Toru Yamazaki
Publisher: Dark Horse
Rating: Mature (18+)
Release Date: April 2006

Synopsis: “Teenage monsters lose their hearts and heads in a relentlessly gory collection of dark humor and horror! Carving a comical niche in modern horror manga, Toru Yamazaki’s Octopus Girl serves up the most disgusting dishes of heartbreak and revenge found on land or at sea. Have a side order of nervous laughter with your main course of bloodcurdling fear, some gore with your teen angst, and some killer instincts with your kawaii!”

Octopus Girl is a horror-comedy with a sense of humour as black as a smoker’s lung. It is gross, disgusting, and morbid – the manga equivalent of a thousand dead baby jokes. But it is also alternately hilarious and horrifying, playing the different elements against each other in a way that enhances it all.

13 Days of Halloween: Kindaichi Case Files

By Shannon Fay on Saturday, October 16, 2010

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8. Kindaichi Case Files

Kindaichi Case Files is one of two manga on this list that has no supernatural elements to it whatsoever. In fact, one of the major points of the manga is that there is a logical explanation for everything. Sure, it might seem like some supernatural creature (like a snow demon, or a ghost, or Michael Jackson) is running around causing trouble, but by the end of the volume the main character lays out the clues and explains how a human culprit was able to pull the whole thing off.

The manga is a mystery series that follows Hajime Kindaichi, a high school slacker who is actually a genius when it comes to solving crimes. It’s a good thing too, because the people around him tend to drop like fruit flies. Where ever Kindaichi goes, be it a fancy hotel, a secluded island, or an elite prep school, people die by the boatload. It’s amazing this kid gets invited anywhere.

Because it’s so firmly grounded in the real world, Kindaichi Case Files may not seem like an obvious Halloween manga. But the series is great at creating a creepy atmosphere and tense moments. Also, each case is basically the manga version of a slasher film, where victims are picked off one by one by a seemingly omnipotent killer. Slasher films have been a staple of Halloween since, well, ‘Halloween‘, so it seems fitting that the manga equivalent of the genre should make the list.

A good overview of the series can be found here at Manga Worth Reading.

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Tags: 13 Days of Halloween, Manga, Tokyopop

13 Days of Halloween: Cowa

By Shannon Fay on Thursday, October 14, 2010

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9. Cowa!

Cowa! is simply adorable. Set in a town where monsters and humans coexist peacefully, it follows Paifu, a kid who’s half-vampire, half-werekoala (that’s right, werekoala). He spends his nights playing with Jose the ghost and fighting his rival, a demon named Arpon. When the monster population starts getting sick from monster flu, Paifu takes it upon himself to find a cure. Paifu and his friends enlist the help of a human named Maruyama, a scary dude who even frightens monsters, and set out into the big bad human world.

In my review from last year I called Cowa! Yotsuba&! with monsters. Both series are sweet and funny and share a childish sense of wonder. As I wrote in my review, “If Halloween is your favourite holiday (or at least in your top three) then this is worth checking out. Cowa! is a cute and funny all ages manga that is all treat, no trick.”

I don’t think I really need to spell out why Cowa! is a Halloween manga, but since that is kind of the point of this list I will do it anyway. Aside from the obvious point that most of the cast is made up of classic monsters, Cowa! really captures how it feels not only to be a kid, but to be a kid on Halloween. The monster kids set out into the world with a sense of excitement and apprehension that is similar to what every kid feels when they set out trick-or-treating for the first time.

To read my full review of Cowa!, go here.

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Tags: 13 Days of Halloween, Manga, Viz Media

13 Days of Halloween: Sugar Sugar Rune

By Shannon Fay on Monday, October 11, 2010

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10. Sugar Sugar Rune

Sugar Sugar Rune is a children’s fantasy series from Moyoco Anno, a manga-ka more known for her explicit josei manga like Happy Mania and Flowers and Bees. It’s about two young witches, Chocolat Meilleure and Vanilla Mieux, who are sent to the human world to compete in a contest to collect human hearts. Whoever collects the most wins and becomes queen of the magical world. The heart collecting is more symbolic than literal, so if you were expecting a manga where two little girls hunt down humans and rip the still beating hearts from their victim’s chest, well, it’s probably out their but this isn’t it.

What Sugar Sugar Rune is is a cute fantasy series that manages to be smart as well. There are lots of shoujo manga featuring witches as the protagonists, but Anno has really put a lot of thought into the magical system and the way magic works. Just like in her adult series there are some very interesting observations about gender and how men and women (or, considering the ages of the characters in Sugar Sugar Rune, boys and girls) relate to each other.

But much like D.Gray-man, it’s the art that makes this series rise above other manga featuring similar themes. Anno abandons her usual sparse style to go in the opposite direction here. There’s a ton of occult imagery packed into practically every page of the manga, all of it rendered in a sparkly, screen-tone drenched shojo style. It’s a weird mash-up, but it works. If you want a sparkly shojo this Halloween season, then Sugar Sugar Rune is what you’re looking for.

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Tags: 13 Days of Halloween, Del Rey, Manga, Moyoco Anno

13 Days of Halloween: D.Gray-Man

By Shannon Fay on Thursday, October 7, 2010

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11. D.Gray-Man

So many shounen series deal with monsters in one form or another, from Bleach’s hollows to the ghosts and demons in Yu Yu Hakusho. So what makes D.Gray-Man more Halloween-y than any other shonen action series featuring the supernatural? In the end it comes down to aesthetics. D.Gray-Man is partly set in an alternate version of Victorian England, a setting already ripe for gothic horror which the manga then amps up to eleven. The buildings are all crumbling and the perspectives skewered. Even inanimate objects have a sinister, childish look, like they might come alive and attack at any moment.

As for the characters themselves, the akuma (the monsters the main characters must fight) are all uniformly creepy. However, there is one character in particular that stands out.

That would be the Millennium Earl.

Only Naoki Urasawa’s Johan has a creepier smile. Giving a sinister character like the Earl with such a fantastical, weird look only makes him scarier. The little flourishes like the hearts that litter his dialogue make him seem even more heinous as talks people into doing horrible things, like resurrecting their dead loved ones so they can be living weapons.

The series is basically a fairy tale set to a shounen action series formula, and everyone knows that not all fairy tales have happy endings. D.Gray-Man embraces the darker, bloodier aspect of classic fables and runs with it. It’s this aspect and the Tim Burton like art that makes D.Gray-Man a worthwhile Halloween manga.

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Tags: 13 Days of Halloween, Manga, Viz Media

13 Days of Halloween: After School Nightmare

By Shannon Fay on Tuesday, October 5, 2010

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12. After School Nightmare

After School Nightmare may not seem like an obvious Halloween-time manga. There are no ghosts or goblins, no monsters lurking in the shadows. In After School Nightmare the boogeyman isn’t in your closet, but in your mind, right under your skin: The boogeyman is you. In this gender-bending shoujo horror (which is quite possibly the best sub-genre of anything ever) the characters have to deal with their worst nightmares, literally.

Mashiro Ichijo is a normal high-school boy…almost. While Mashiro has the build and upper body of a young man, down below he’s actually female. One day Mashiro is enrolled in a strange class by the school nurse. In this class Mashiro and other students dream and meet up in a shared nightmare. In the dreams the students take on forms that reflect their inner struggles. Mashiro wears a girl’s uniform in the dreams which is pretty mild compared to some forms the other kids take, like a girl who has huge holes through her head and torso. In the dreams the students must compete and even fight each other in order to ‘graduate.’

A big appeal of Halloween is that it gives you a chance to dress however you want and be something completely different from usual. October 31^st is the one day of the year when you can dress like a Mexican wrestler, or a bearded lady from the circus, or a two-headed monster, and not be the weird one at a party. The shared dreams in After School Nightmare have a similar atmosphere. It’s the one place where the students get to show an aspect of themselves that they otherwise keep hidden. The forms they take on in the dreams (a little girl, a shining knight, a paper giraffe, a gaggle of grabbing, clinging hands) are who they really are. It’s their school uniforms that are the costumes.

Of course, the main difference between a Halloween party and a session in the dream world is that a Halloween party is generally a good time for all while the dream classes are traumatic, full of blood, and end in tears (if that’s the way your parties usually go, then perhaps hosting parties is not for you). But there’s still enough of a link in my mind to make After School Nightmare good Halloween reading.

You can read Lissa’s reviews of After School Nightmare volumes five, seven, eight and nine here. Also worth checking out is September’s Manga Moveable Feast, which collects various blog posts concerning After School Nightmare.

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Tags: 13 Days of Halloween, GoComi, Manga

13 Days of Halloween: Chibi-Vampire

By Shannon Fay on Friday, October 1, 2010

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13. Chibi-Vampire

It’s easy to assume that Chibi-Vampire is just another shoujo vampire series like Millenium Snow or Vampire Knight. But Chibi-Vampire has something that other vamp manga lack: it’s fun. The characters go through some rough patches, but they never spend pages angsting about their lot in life. The manga manages to take something as tired as vampires and be both respectful to tradition and while still crafting its own mythology.

Karin is the middle-child in a family full of vampires. Even in a strange family like that she still manages to be the odd one out. Instead of drinking blood, Karin’s body is a hemoglobin-making machine, pumping out so much blood that Karin bites people in order to inject them with it and get it out of her system. If she doesn’t find someone to donate blood too, she ends with the mother of all nosebleeds. When her classmate Kenta witnesses one of them, Karin and Kenta get drawn into a strange friendship that slowly grows over the course of the manga.

What makes this a ‘Halloween’ manga in my mind is Karin’s family. They embody all the traditional vampire tropes: they sleep in coffins, can’t bear sunlight, use bats as familiars, and need to drink blood to survive. They even dress the part, wearing gothic-lolita outfits and capes. Ironically, the fact that they adhere so much to tradition makes them stand out against the wave of sparkly, sun-happy vampires that are in fashion (sure, Karin is fine in the sun, but she’s got drawbacks of her own to balance things out). But that’s only a minor part of their appeal. A much bigger factor is the fact that they like being vampires. Sure, there are some moments in the series where being what they are makes things hard for them, but they never stoop to angst and bemoan their existence.

The series is labelled as comedy horror, but as I said in my review of volume two it’s much more of a comedy with horror trappings. There’s enough respect and affection for the vampire mythos that a horror fan can read the manga and enjoy the comedy. It also works just as a romantic-comedy, as the characters are strong and the relationships well-written.

To find out more about Chibi-Vampire, you can read Lissa’s review of volume one here as well as my review of volume two.

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Categories: Misc, Reviews
Tags: 13 Days of Halloween, Manga, Tokyopop, Vampire Knight