Manga Notes: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou 1
Oct. 21st, 2022 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAnother manga long discussed by English-speaking fans moved into the realm of “available for sale over here (without making the point of importing Japanese-language copies, anyway)” when Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou was licensed, its title left untranslated just as fans had made a point of before. Once again, I considered myself obligated to buy a copy after having managed to go through “scanlations” some years ago. It did take just a bit of extra effort to track down a print copy, though: not having made the point of preordering it, I found it didn’t seem to be available from the usual handful of online stores I patronize. It was only when a bit more looking reported one copy in the big bookstore a few city borders away that I drove over and managed to buy it.
The manga is one of the coziest catastrophes around, as sea levels gradually rise and the green-haired robot young woman Alpha serves a handful of occasional customers at her quiet cafe and pokes around her world, which goes so far as to have a trace of magic to it. Many warnings warnings, fictional and otherwise, have been made about catastrophes turning out much worse than that, and yet there’s something to just contemplating out-there possibilities too. While I can find myself remembering a “signature graphic” putting down the manga while jibing at its art from a message board I used to read some time ago, going back to that art now did offer a flavour hard for me to define yet distinctive. It was only in wondering if another volume has been scheduled yet that I ran into some current reviews criticizing the print quality; reading it I’d just noticed certain colour pages right in the middle. Getting to the end of the volume and noticing certain speech patterns had been modeled on those of the Canadian Maratimes did get my attention, too, for all that I had to remember not having got out there myself last month because of an actual “too much water” situation.
The manga is one of the coziest catastrophes around, as sea levels gradually rise and the green-haired robot young woman Alpha serves a handful of occasional customers at her quiet cafe and pokes around her world, which goes so far as to have a trace of magic to it. Many warnings warnings, fictional and otherwise, have been made about catastrophes turning out much worse than that, and yet there’s something to just contemplating out-there possibilities too. While I can find myself remembering a “signature graphic” putting down the manga while jibing at its art from a message board I used to read some time ago, going back to that art now did offer a flavour hard for me to define yet distinctive. It was only in wondering if another volume has been scheduled yet that I ran into some current reviews criticizing the print quality; reading it I’d just noticed certain colour pages right in the middle. Getting to the end of the volume and noticing certain speech patterns had been modeled on those of the Canadian Maratimes did get my attention, too, for all that I had to remember not having got out there myself last month because of an actual “too much water” situation.