Manga: One Piece March 1, 2010
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Quite possibly the most addicting manga I’ve read to date. I originally was not that big a fan of this series. I blame most of it on the 4Kids dubbing and editing of the original animated series, combined with some “filler” concepts that made absolutely no sense, even by One Piece standards
Sometime before the beginning of the series, the Pirate King, Gold Roger, is sentenced to a live execution. His final words were a challenge to all pirates to find his fabled treasure, One Piece. And thus the Golden Age of Pirates began.
The main character, Monkey D. Luffy, lives the life of a pirate and dreams of being the next Pirate King. However, he starts off with no crew and no ship, armed only with the superhuman powers granted to him by the Gum-Gum Fruit, which allows him to stretch his body and renders bullets or just about any projectile useless. His travels eventually acquire him a ship and a crew to set sail for the Grand Line, the most chaotic place in the world and the most likely hiding place for Gold Roger’s treasure.
His crewmates consist of :
Roronoa Zoro, a man who fights with his own three-sword style in the hopes of becoming the world’s greatest swordsman.
Nami, the red-head navigator with an irresistable attraction to treasure and riches, whose dream is to chart a map of the entire world.
Usopp, a long-nosed cowardly but amazingly accurate sniper, who dreams of being a great warrior of the sea
Sanji, the blonde-haired chef with an iron…leg(?) who dreams of finding the All Blue: a place said to reside in the Grand Line where every type of fish in the world gathers.
Chopper: a reindeer who ate the Human-Human Fruit, allowing him access to human intelligence and form, as well as his natural animal form and a hybrid form. He is the crew doctor and dreams of one day being able to cure every disease in the world.
Robin: an archeologist who ate the Flower-Flower Fruit allowing her to “bloom” out extra limbs from anywhere within range of her eye sight, who dreams of discovering the history from before the World Government was founded.
Franky: a blue-haired cyborg who dreams of being the shipwright of a ship that will sail all over the world.
Brooke: a skeleton musician (with a deep-rooted afro, of all things) who ate the Revive-Revive fruit that allowed his soul to cheat death and return to his body, albeit after many years when his body fully decayed. He dreams of meeting a friend he and his crew left behind 50 years ago and play a recording of a song they sang shortly before they died.
It’s hard to accurately describe what about it makes it so much fun to read, and is probably better if you experience it yourself. This series has been going on for at least 13 years, and is one of the most read mangas out on the market. It is a title definitely worth reading.
Manga: Soul Eater February 22, 2010
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The manga that set me on the path of “reading” a title versus watching it.
Sometime before the introductory chapters, an evil being known as the kishin arose and brought humanity to the brink of madness, until it was sealed away by Shinigami (the God of Death). In an effort to prevent the rise of another kishin, Shinigami founded a school for weapons and meisters, their ultimate goal to collect 99 kishin egg souls and a witch soul, which will transform the weapon into a deathscythe, a weapon for Shinigami’s use.
The first three chapters deal with the primary protagonists. The first weapon-meister pair is Maka Albarn and Soul Eater Evans (Soul to his friends) as they collect their 99th kishin egg soul and track down a witch to turn Soul Eater into the next Deathscythe. Soul desires to be the “coolest” and Maka wants to make Soul a better deathscythe than her father (who is referred to as the deathscythe). However, by the end of the chapter, they realise the witch they’ve been targeting isn’t a witch, but a cat with magic powers and as a result of consuming one of her 9 souls, all the kishin egg souls the pair have gathered have been forfeit, and they must now start over from scratch.
The next team introduced is Black Star, a loudmouth show-off whose ego defeats the purpose of his ninja training, and his unfortunate partner, Tsubaki, who is capable of transforming into a wide variety of ninja tools, such as a chain scythe and giant shuriken. Black Star fails another assassination mission when he jumps right out in the open to proclaim his greatness, much to the distress of his partner. Shinigami tells Black Star that he needs to get his act together, as his failure has given his target the opportunity to locate a witches soul. Black Star, looking to make Tsubaki into a deathscythe in one mission, heads out eagerly, only to find his target and all his henchmen defeated by a bodyguard who uses a large number of swords in combat. Although the battle goes against Black Star’s favor at first, he is able to pull out a victory with his Black Star: Big Wave attack, when a small girl starts calling him a meanie and tells him to leave her bodyguard alone. Black Star, using his opponents previous statement, says he can’t in good conscious kill a little kid and leaves, taking all the kishin egg souls directly to Shinigami, saying he can earn them himself.
The final main team introduced is Death the Kidd: son of the Shinigami and his dual pistol partners, Liz and Patti Thompson. Death the Kidd fails to stop his intended target after his team’s showy display is thrown off by Patti, which Kidd scolds her for, saying he wants it to be perfect every time. While he and Liz persist in their arguing, the target flees, with Patti laughing about it. Kidd’s “condition” is revealed, how he believes perfection lies in perfect symmetrical balance, which is why he likes having them both in pistol form since they make him “balanced”, but their human forms and styles are different enough to cause him great agitation, until Liz brings up the three asymmetrical horizontal stripes on his hair, causing him to weep and cry, calling himself all different manners of trash. When he reports that he has failed his mission to his father, Shinigami tells him that it isnt necessary for him to make a deathscythe, and that by having two partners, he’ll have to earn twice as many souls, Kidd adamantly tells his father he wants to make his own weapons and sets off on another mission, where his “condition” get the better of him at nearly every corner.
This is an incredibly unique and interesting story that had been going on monthly for quite some time now. This is a manga that I cannot get enough of and eagerly await each month for the next chapter. It had gained enough popularity for a 51 episode animated series (by which the manga was already surpassing 55 chapters) which started to deviate from the manga by episode 37. Anyone who choses to read this series and then compare it to the animated series would probably agree that, despite an understanding of why the animation deviated as much as it did, it doesn’t live up to the amazing standards still in practice by the manga.
It is definitely worth the time spent reading and rereading it. The wide variety of characters also help to keep this a spectacular series, as each character behaves in such a dynamic, three-dimensional manner that leaves out virtually nothing in believability, including Dr Franken Stein, Sid the Zombie, Medusa, Asura, Arachne the Witch, and many other characters too numberous to simply name off.
Manga: Fullmetal Alchemist February 10, 2010
Posted by xthmodekite in Manga.1 comment so far
Well, it’s been close to a week now, and I’ve caught up with the latest chapter of Fullmetal Alchemist. This makes me veeery happy.
This manga is one of the most read titles on the market, and it’s anime counterparts are fairly widespread and popular themselves (I’ve actually seen a commercial for Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood here on campus when my roomie was flipping through channels). When this manga was still relatively new to the scene, I was typically more of a “watcher” than a “reader” and so I watched the animated adaptation that I would later learn take on a completely different direction than the ongoing manga.
It wasn’t until later that after much frustration with “loose endings” on anime that I started seeing some interesting pages from a manga and, after some helpful directions, found a site to start reading it and was hooked, but I digress.
Fullmetal Alchemist is set in a world many years behind us in terms of technology. However, in this world, the dominant science is alchemy, the process of identifying an objects composition, breaking it down, and then reconstructing it as something else. One point given out early says that it’s possible, but illegal, for an alchemist to turn lead into gold. But among alchemic practice, the greatest taboo is human transmutation: attempting to bring the dead back to life.
The Elric brothers, Alphonse and Edward, are young alchemists who ignore the ban on human transmutation and attempt to bring their mother back to life, their father having abandoned them long ago. The transmutation goes horribly wrong, and Edward loses his left leg while his younger brother loses his entire body. Edward then uses his blood to draw a seal inside a suit of armor and binds his brothers soul to it, at the cost of his right arm. From there, Ed is fitted with artificial limbs and becomes a dog of the military known as a State Alchemist, widely known as the Fullmetal Alchemist. From there, Edward and Alphonse use their connection to the military to begin their search for a way the legendary Philosopher’s Stone, in order to return their bodies back to normal. Unknowingly, they become part of a secret plan carried out by people claiming to be Homunculus: artificial humans, with unnatural abilities.
Now it’s not my place spoil things for people interested, so if you want to read it, then it’s posted below and updated monthly, although I’m suppose to encourage the official release.
