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krpalmerDropping in to the area bookstore not that long ago, I had definite thoughts of looking for a single new volume of manga by an artist I’d read some works from before. The consciousness I haven’t been grabbed by all that many new titles of late, bringing me pretty close to confronting those stacked-up volumes “waiting until I’ve seen their anime adaptation first,” did get me at least passing by a display table. One title I’d been aware of caught my eye again, and this time I picked up a first volume of Destroy All Humans. They Can’t Be Regenerated, then looked around a little more and saw the second volume in the series was also available. The small wrinkle that this was a manga about Magic: The Gathering, which I’ve never played, was still in effect. Now, though, I was at least wondering if this might be a marshmallow-light example of “even if a story isn’t ‘meant for you,’ you still might come to understand another small part of humanity a little better from it.”
There’s a perverse sort of grandstanding in the claim “I was so pathetic in my youth that I had multiple RPG volumes but didn’t know anyone well enough to ask them to play with me.” Magic: The Gathering showed up a bit later, when I might have got to the point of just not letting it register that much on me. (Perhaps not being all that interested in “fantasy” in general could have been a factor, too.) The main reason I decided to take a chance on this manga could have been a recent series on The Digital Antiquarian that walked through some stages of the game. Once I’d committed to buying the manga, I did get to contemplating how it’s a period piece set near the end of the 1990s. That makes it the second manga series looking at “being a fan” back then I’ve seen of late; I keep wondering whether they’re altogether aimed at people desperate to recall their youth (and whether the mix between that and readers closer in age now to the main characters then might even alter a bit depending on what side of the Pacific the manga’s being read on).
In any case a first glance at Takuma Yokota’s art for Katsura Ise’s story gave impressions of a certain simplicity, but it was a somehow appealing simplicity. Magic-specific terms were footnoted in between the panels, although I did still wonder if I was depending more on The Digital Antiquarian’s walkthrough to understand the basics; in any case, the gameplay was presented as speedy and engaging for its participants. (I did wonder about whether games might turn out as “missing details and then arguing about them,” and then if that might have happened had I tried playing the game.) Beyond those mechanics, though, I did bump into how the main character Hajime, who plays with an “all-black” deck (it’s mentioned twice early on that the word chunibyo hadn’t yet been applied to “delusional junior high students), heads off to a new game store and there discovers his attractive fellow student Emi just happens to also play Magic despite looking down on the game in school. The familiar thought “too good to be true” came to mind; I did wonder a little bit whether My Dress-Up Darling might have held my own attention, at least, because while its main female character Marin is into the sleazy properties that would seem to appeal more to teenaged boys, its main male character starts off so straight-laced as to be unfamiliar with the titles in question.
On looking back at things I did get to thinking the situation might be a little more subtle than “wouldn’t it be great if your one skill at being good at games would land you a hot girlfriend who’s into the exact same things as you”; it was established starting off that Hajime had been competing academically with Emi before they started doing the same thing with cards. I had wondered a little bit about the manga being sold shrink-wrapped, with even the way Emi dresses outside of school not seeming sleazy enough to justify that; then, I discovered there were little envelopes bound inside the back cover said to contain Magic cards, although I didn’t open them for examination. The very end of the second volume (which briefly brought up the Magic computer game that had appeared the point of The Digital Antiquarian’s series) seemed to suggest a “time-jump” in the chronology, which did bring that other period piece to mind; a brief glance at the cover for the still-upcoming next volume then had me wondering if we’d just start flashing back.
There’s a perverse sort of grandstanding in the claim “I was so pathetic in my youth that I had multiple RPG volumes but didn’t know anyone well enough to ask them to play with me.” Magic: The Gathering showed up a bit later, when I might have got to the point of just not letting it register that much on me. (Perhaps not being all that interested in “fantasy” in general could have been a factor, too.) The main reason I decided to take a chance on this manga could have been a recent series on The Digital Antiquarian that walked through some stages of the game. Once I’d committed to buying the manga, I did get to contemplating how it’s a period piece set near the end of the 1990s. That makes it the second manga series looking at “being a fan” back then I’ve seen of late; I keep wondering whether they’re altogether aimed at people desperate to recall their youth (and whether the mix between that and readers closer in age now to the main characters then might even alter a bit depending on what side of the Pacific the manga’s being read on).
In any case a first glance at Takuma Yokota’s art for Katsura Ise’s story gave impressions of a certain simplicity, but it was a somehow appealing simplicity. Magic-specific terms were footnoted in between the panels, although I did still wonder if I was depending more on The Digital Antiquarian’s walkthrough to understand the basics; in any case, the gameplay was presented as speedy and engaging for its participants. (I did wonder about whether games might turn out as “missing details and then arguing about them,” and then if that might have happened had I tried playing the game.) Beyond those mechanics, though, I did bump into how the main character Hajime, who plays with an “all-black” deck (it’s mentioned twice early on that the word chunibyo hadn’t yet been applied to “delusional junior high students), heads off to a new game store and there discovers his attractive fellow student Emi just happens to also play Magic despite looking down on the game in school. The familiar thought “too good to be true” came to mind; I did wonder a little bit whether My Dress-Up Darling might have held my own attention, at least, because while its main female character Marin is into the sleazy properties that would seem to appeal more to teenaged boys, its main male character starts off so straight-laced as to be unfamiliar with the titles in question.
On looking back at things I did get to thinking the situation might be a little more subtle than “wouldn’t it be great if your one skill at being good at games would land you a hot girlfriend who’s into the exact same things as you”; it was established starting off that Hajime had been competing academically with Emi before they started doing the same thing with cards. I had wondered a little bit about the manga being sold shrink-wrapped, with even the way Emi dresses outside of school not seeming sleazy enough to justify that; then, I discovered there were little envelopes bound inside the back cover said to contain Magic cards, although I didn’t open them for examination. The very end of the second volume (which briefly brought up the Magic computer game that had appeared the point of The Digital Antiquarian’s series) seemed to suggest a “time-jump” in the chronology, which did bring that other period piece to mind; a brief glance at the cover for the still-upcoming next volume then had me wondering if we’d just start flashing back.