Ranma ½ Volume 10

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded. This time, a review of Ranma ½ volume 10 (Viz, 2004)



After its first four or five books, there's not a great deal that's different about any given volume of Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma ½. In each edition, you get two or three serialized stories in which either Ranma or Akane is beset by a clueless suitor, and you get some martial arts mayhem, and somebody's going to get kicked through a building. It's a low-expectation gag strip, and if you weren't enjoying the present serial when it was running in Shonen Sunday in the late 1980s, then a better one would be starting within a few weeks.

By the tenth collection, Takahashi had started her third year on the strip, and wasn't showing any signs of boredom yet. This compiles two stories, one in which the lovable amazon Shampoo - well, I like her, anyway - concoct a noodle soup which gives people super strength, and one in which Furinkan High School's long-lost principal shows up after an extended vacation in Hawaii, and he has a cunning plan to force all his students to get new haircuts, unless they can find a special coconut that he's hidden somewhere.

Honestly, it's really fun the way Takahashi keeps a story going which doesn't make any sense by outsider standards, but maintains a strong internal logic. The new revelations about the lunkheaded upperclassman Kuno come from somewhere on the other side of the blue, but they still make sense by the rules of the plot. It's all done with great charm and lots of wit and a style that can be equally lighthearted and mean-spirited. Even if this isn't a series which demands I pay full price for the next edition as soon as I finish one, it's something that the kids and I enjoy reading, and I don't mind picking up five or six volumes a year. Hardly essential, but fun enough to be recommended.

Love and Rockets and Ranma

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Love & Rockets: New Stories volume one (Fantagraphics, 2008) and Ranma ½ volume two (Viz, 2003).




Though it pains me to say it, this is a little bit nonessential. Jaime Hernandez's fifty-page tale (broken in half, and with a cliffhanger ending) of bizarre superpowered tomfoolery among his world's supporting cast is pretty fun. Basically, Penny Century finally gets her odd wish to become superhuman, and wacky hijinks involving a pair of all-female superteams follow. It's not at all bad, especially when compared to what passes for this sort of action among contemporary comics. His linework and storytelling are clear and easy to follow, and it probably only fails for not providing what I narrowmindedly was hoping to see. But it's incredibly difficult to connect with characters whom you'll likely never meet again, and who have been drawn in such broad strokes, as these characters tend to be.

Gilbert's stories are even harder to love. No longer working within his extended Palomar narrative, he's apparently turned to illustrating his own nightmares. His fifty pages include some genuinely freaky little tales, including one about some zombifying worms that get into packed lunches out in that nebulous, rural Central American somewhere that he draws so well, and another which reimagines Martin & Lewis as unkillable oddballs punching their way across an alien landscape. They're both great storytellers, and there's nothing here that's not worth reading, but these are creators who have each moved me to tears in the past, and there was no chance of that happening here. Recommended for devotees.



Well, at AWA last month, I picked up the next five volumes of Ranma ½, after confirming that my kids liked the first, each for less than the cost of a current newsstand comic. I'll be spacing these out a little myself, although my daughter is impatiently stamping her foot for a seventh volume, which, sorry for her, I don't intend to buy anytime soon.

Anyway, once upon a long, long ago, I picked up the original first collected Japanese edition of Ranma ½ only to conclude this wasn't for me. Not only have I been proven wrong, but had I picked up the second book, I'd have never made that conclusion, because it's incredibly funny. The high point may come towards the end, when Ranma, wearing his female body, gets a gigantic, drama-stopping smooch from some fancypants ice skating dude and returns wearing his male body roaring with anger like somebody out of Kirby's Asgard. This is great stuff; I'm not certain how many of these damn books are going to warrant individual reviews (Ranma ½ vol. 30 is recommended for anybody who read Ranma ½ 1-29...), but I think the series as a whole deserves looking into. Although, I must point out that the greyscale scanning of the sporadic eight-page color sections is pretty poor, even by Viz's standards, and I'd like to see another edition one day which includes the color as it originally appears.

(Originally posted October 30, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

A Contract With God and Ranma ½

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. Today: reviews of A Contract With God (Baronet, 1978) and Ranma ½ vol. 1(Viz, 2003).



It isn't the first graphic novel, nor is it really even a novel - it's a collection of four short stories. I don't know nearly enough about the late, great Will Eisner, but figured I should know more, so I hinted that something from him would make a good Father's Day present. It made a great Father's Day present. Set in and around tenement housing in the Bronx in the 1930s, these are remarkably well-told stories of struggle and unfairness. The first story's certainly the best, concerning an immigrant's plan to become important enough to force the Lord into a new contract after he feels that He broke their initial one. It's a very different and very moving experience, and recommended for older readers.



With teeth clenched, I opened the first of three dozen editions of Ranma ½, a series that Rumiko Takahashi drew for Shonen Sunday weekly from 1987-96. I remember thinking this was kind of cute for about a month in high school, and after that, its astronomical popularity among people younger and louder, so very much louder than me, made it an unwelcome prospect. But as readers of this blog know, I've spent the last couple of years finding there's a hell of a lot more to like about Ms. Takahashi than I ever knew, and so, twenty years later, I gave this another try...

And I really liked it. This was funny as hell, a completely goofy, straight-faced take on pretentious martial arts melodrama, stuck in a high school with a cast of about ten of what will surely grow to about a hundred nutball characters. I don't know that I like it enough to get on board for all three dozen editions, but I can certainly see myself picking up a few more of these when the sales are good. There's some innocuous nudity included for comedy, and if you can handle that without freaking out, then it's recommended for all readers.

(Originally posted July 02, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)