Honey & Clover II 03: Of Confessions and Unicorn Hallucinations

  

The Episode begins with Yamada showing Hagu her snowglobe collection and remarking how beautiful snow on the beach is.Meanwhile Nomiya is with Yamazaki looking at a similiar snowglobe. Luigi has taken on a wierd project of building a german restaurant next to a souvenir shop in Tottori right next to sand dunes. Yamizaki wants to show Miwako the dunes, but Nomiya just thinks she would be interested in sake and crab.

    
Yamizaki ask Nomiya if he wants to show Yamada the dunes. Nomiya doesn’t know. He can’t call her because she doesn’t have a cellphone and is guarded at home by her dad. Yamizaki asks if he thinks about her. He does but it’s a pain, as he can’t stand the thought of hurting a child, talking about Yamada’s mindset. Yamizaki reminds him that she’s an adult but see’s what he means. He asks why Nomiya thinks being with someone hurts them. Yamizaki says that when he finds the right person he would treasure them. The sand blows in and some get in Nomiya’s eye, causing him to remarks how it feels like his eye’s are open.

    
Nomiya calls Miwako and finds out Yamada is working with Rika. They both thinks it’s stupid how she’s hurting herself being that near to Mayama. Miwako tells Nomiya to give her a call. At Harada, Yamada finds Mayama spying on Rika’s computer, which he lies about saying he’s checking the weather. hijinks ensue. Meanwhile a fax comes in saying Rika won a contest and has to go to Spain. Mayama asks her if it is true. She says yes, that it was a project she started with Harada and Mayama’s coming with her. Before then they’ll have a lot of work so she excuses herself to get some rest. Mayama asks Yamada about a weather cam on Otaru, Hokkaido, Rika’s hometown, and how she looks at it a lot. However she hasn’t been home in a long time. Rika is looking at blueprints and remarks how this is her last project with Harada.

    
Nomiya calls Yamada  at Harada and they both ask how the other is doing. Nomiya remarks how Yamizaki is bothering him every night and keeping him up. Nomiya says he is surprised she works there and Yamada says she was invited by Rika. Mayama’s still the same and she’s working hard to make a portfolio and other pottery to sell. They both say goodbye to eachother. We can see Yamada crying and nomiya deciding to drive to tokyo, knowing Yamada was lying ( awesome song here ).

    
Nomiya arrives only to find out that Miwako sent Yamada to Tottori because she was depressed. They think of calling her but remember she doesn’t have a cellphone.
Nomiya tells Miwako to send a message to Yamizaki to not let her leave and heads back to Tottori. Miwako thinks of how manly Nomiya is since he chose to drive instead of waiting for a flight. Yamada arrives super depressed in Tottori, where Yamizaki does a crazy tour around town, showing how bad he is with girls because he went to an all boy school. He’s at the breaking point when Nomiya finally arrives asking Yamada not to leave and falls asleep on the couch still holding Yamada’s hand. Yamizaki quickly gets a futon and tells her to take care of him.

    
Nomiya wakes up to see Yamada’s super hot legs and pretends she’s guarded by yakuza unicorns. He wakes her up with breakfast and they go to see the sand dunes. Yamada asks where he was and he says tokyo. He says he went to see Yamada. She believes this is a lie and he  tells her he knows she was crying. She asks why. He silently tells himself because he’s been watching her while she’s been watching Mayama whom she can’t have,
and that he’ll be there after she cries to help her. But she’ll probably cry where he can’t help her. Nomiya see’s her off at the train and tells her to call him when she’s down and asks why. He says because he loves her and the train pulls out. Yamizaki heard this a takes Nomiya to party while yamada nervously eats a lot on the train, with the pack of yakuza unicorns following her to tokyo.

Starting off a little late here so I skipped episodes 01 and 02. 01 was all recap of last season and since I’m blogging this, you can assume I watched the first season and enjoyed it immensely. 02 shows Yamada working at Harada and how close Mayama and Rika have become, along with jokes about the remedies of hiccups. Now 03 is a milestone episode. Here we see Nomiya realizing and confessing his love to Yamada. Now I never really like Nomiya, figuring him as a playboy type character, however him confessing his love so fast endered him to me. Mayama’s been pining for the whole series and hasn’t gotten anywhere yet. I don’t really like Mayama. His whole going after a women a decade older than him with a dead husband, along with his flippant dismissal of Yamada, doesn’t sit well with me. Yamizaki and Miwako provide the usual comedy, along the awesome edition and the yakuza unicorn brigade. And Yamada, get a damn cellphone.

 

You say Mushishi, I say Musashi

4chan has given me a link to this blog that apparently says Del Rey has licenced Mushishi.

…1…2…3 FUCK YEAH! god I love you Del Rey. Now if you would just speed up your Genshiken releases…

Sorry for the lack of Musashi in this post, it just sounded cool in my head.

 

Interview With A Publisher

While perusing the megatokyo forums I came across this interesting interview by The Comics Journal with Dallas Middaugh, a long time member of the manga publishing community and current Associate Publisher at Del Rey.

I love these ” state of the industry ” type reviews and thought I would talk about some of the things Mr. Middaugh had to say.

“ I’m impressed with the relatively conservative approach that Del Rey took in entering the market. It seems like other publishers, Tokyopop in particular, seemed to approach the field by throwing as many books against the wall as they can get their hands on to see what sticks. “

I would say this analysis of Tokyopop is very accurate. It seems for every one good series Tokyopop gets it has five bad ones backing it up. I could see this as a viable strategy in the early days of anime in America, but those days have long past and even the common buyer can tell what is good and bad. I also believe this every series under the sun mentality drastically hurts Tokyopop’s translation quality, but I’ll save my criticisms of Tokyopop for another time.

” DEPPEY: I suppose I’m using the term “correction” to mean that there’s presumably an upper limit to how much the current manga readership is willing to buy, and given the rush among publishers to fill shelf space, eventually there will come a point when there will be more books than cash, and publishers will find themselves to have printed in excess of demand.

MIDDAUGH: That makes sense, but the thing is, I think that’s already occurred. “

I was actually surprised there was a manga ” correction ” (bust isn’t really accurate as manga is still selling like hotcakes). It is common knowledge of the anime/DVD collapse of a couple years ago, but you can easily see the signs of that just by watching licencing announcements. Mr. Middaugh goes on to say manga sells have drastically slowed down yet
still enjoy double digit growth.

” DEPPEY: Yeah, Monster’s good. Of course, people familiar with Urasawa’s other work seem to be looking forward to his later work: 20th Century Boys and Pluto. I don’t know about Pluto, but 20th Century Boys was reportedly being held back because Urasawa wanted his work reprinted in order of publication…

MIDDAUGH: I heard that, yeah, though I seem to recall also hearing that Viz is nonetheless going to be releasing the first volume later this year. “

Nice. I’d be very interested in seeing more of Urasawa’s work as I’m loving Monster right now.

” DEPPEY: Do you see any indication that Western comics publishers are learning from manga’s success?

MIDDAUGH: Not really, no. If anything, they’re getting worse. I tried to follow that recent miniseries that DC did, Infinite Crisis, and it was just impossible to read without having a Ph.D in superhero trivia, you know? I’ve been reading comics all my life, and I still couldn’t make heads or tails of it. You’ve got Superman, Earth-II Superman, Earth-Prime Superboy, a Superboy clone, and all of these obscure references to past storylines piled on top of one another. Unless you’re already deeply into that sort of thing, it just doesn’t make any sense at all. You can’t build a market that way. It’s odd that these people keep hoping for a manga bust, when it’s the American model that’s more likely to come tumbling down. “

The differences between western comics and manga is very interesting. To me the main problem with western comics is that you don’t have a self-contained serial format. Having long series is fine, however carrying those titles through ten different series and retconning every twenty years is no way to tell a story. This is why I think DC’s Vertigo line does so good. Works like Sandman are not meant to be told for decades but have a definite weakness. This is the main fault of western comics where it’s hard to write anything when you have ten different writers over ten different series with no end in site. That won’t draw even the most curious common Joe off the street.

” DEPPEY: In a fairly recent interview for ICv2.com, one of Viz’s senior vice-presidents for marketing surprised the hell out of me by mentioning Narutofan.com without using the words “cease and desist” in the same sentence. I couldn’t decide whether she was being extraordinarily canny or extraordinarily stupid. “

Most LOL worthy part of the interview. In the grey area of fansubs Narutofan is the most clear case of criminal acts present on the internet. I’m still surprised Viz hasn’t done anything.

 

What is meant by ” A Lifestyle Blog “

It should formost be said that this is an anime blog and thus will mostly be spent reviewing individual episodes and series. However I would also like to use this blog not just to interact with fellow fans across the infinite distances of the internet but also to understand thier worldview. I wish to understand why they like this curious little culture from japan and everything that comes with it. This means I will also employ analytical and observatory type post to further understand this ” lifestyle ” that has arisen around this peculiar product of popular culture. I hope will enjoy reading what I write in the future.

 

Coyote Ragtime Show – Ep 01 & 02 aka. Why I love ufotable

As a first post for this new anime blog what better place to start than one of the best new
shows of the summer season.

Coyote Ragtime Show is apparently the first anime fully produced by ufotable, whom anyone thats been in anime for awhile will remember for thier awesome
work on Futakoi Alternative aka. that badass action with the hot twins.

Now for this post I’ll just introduce the characters and setting. In deph reviews will begin with ep 03 (this is kind of a catch up and introduction for me to blogging for me.)

We begin by meeting our titillating herione Angelica, whom it turns out is not the protagonast but we’ll get back to that. She’s apparently come to the planet Sandvil to hunt for Mister, a galactic criminal called coyotes in the show.

She is met by young genki Chelsea of the local police and lead to a prison where it is believed Mister has been hiding for the last year. Shortly after arriving at the prison it is attacked by Madam Marciano’s 12 robotic gothloli sisters, who are hellbent on killing Mister. ( yes you heard me right. )

The gothloli sisters go one to shoot, stab, slice, murder, maim, and blow up everything in the prison. They are lead by the eternally pissed off April. ( yes all thier names our months. Awesome isn’t it? )

After Angelica shoots at one of the sisters to protect the prison warden, she is safed from being kung fu’d to death by Mister, who fights simultaneously with a rocket launcher and rifle.

Mister ingeniously shuts off the magnetic field protecting the prison from roaming sandworms that then rampage across the prison, killing all the sisters and letting Mister get away. ( not really as thier robots. )

Thus begins Ep 02, where we find a more clean shaven Mister off to ru kong to get his loli adopted daughter. Man that sounds wrong.

Enter Franca aka. hell under 4 feet. After single handedly stopping  a bar fight with a well time frying pan to the head, she meets the returned Mister with the almighty lolislap.

It turns out Franca’s now dead father was the king of pirates (hello one piece) and left the location of his treasure in a necklace Franca now has. And that treasure is on a planet that will be nuked out of existance in a week. Franca is classic tsundere, believing Mister should just take the necklace and leave her alone, not realizing Mister cares about her, not the necklace.

However cutting thier reunion short are the 12 sisters who also happen to want the necklace. Awesome gunfights ensue and Mister and Franca end up hanging off a building, Franca imploring Mister to let her drop. But Mister won’t have it and lets Franca know he loves her (as a daughter I’m sure) and they both drop off together. Luckily they are bothed saved by Mister’s henchmen in thier ship right under the sister’s robotic noses.

Thus ends Ep 02 with Franca joining Mister to find the treasure.

My review cannot do justice to how awesome this show is. If you love action, awesome characters, and some melodrama in between definatly check this out if you are able. If anything just check it for the awesome opening that has a nice retro feel to it (or at least that’s what I’m told.)

Now I leave you with SUPER SOUL!!!!!