In some fashion familiar to me, including how I can’t think back to a resonant moment of discovery but have to resort to saying “one way or another,” I became aware of a manga now available called Red River. The thick “three-in-one” omnibus volumes might have been obvious enough in the bookstore with their red spines. At a certain point I happened on a brief explanation of it as a “thrown into the past” shojo manga that had begun in the mid-1990s. While some past concerns that I’d been running low on manga to read with new titles not catching my attention have faded, perhaps the sense of an older manga that wasn’t “long familiar” amused me and had me thinking this was a chance to broaden my outlook, if only by a tiny bit. I went and bought the first collection.
( Plunging back )

With the continued impression manga releases from Denpa keep missing release date after release date before they’re available for purchase at last, there was some element of “trying to help the company” in my mind when I ordered a copy of They Were 11! When that manga arrived, though, I was a bit impressed by its oversized pages and production values, including not just colour plates at the front but “semi-coloured” pages within.
( At the eleventh hour )

One weekend before I left on my vacation I took a shorter trip, going back to my old university for homecoming. I must not have paid close enough attention to the schedule, because in arriving around noon after a lengthy trip by train and bus I found the homecoming events had closed down and displays for visitors were being packed away. Managing to shrug that off, I wandered around campus by myself and dropped in on the arts library, my thoughts turning to a particular article I’d read a certain number of years ago.
( Past mechanics )

Dropping 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.”
( It’s in the cards )

When I set about watching through “sample episodes” from six decades of anime two years ago, I had only one series starting in 1970 available with subtitles. Unlike a few other early cases of that, I was uncertain about sampling it. My post about Tomorrow’s Joe began by lamenting how, for all that I knew the original manga had been a very big deal, the accumulating injuries of boxing unsettle me. I do wonder, though, if I’d protested too much; I can at least understand how the “repelled” versus “compelling” balance has varied over time and for different people even if some of the results of being punched repeatedly start to hint at “body horror,” something in general I really don’t do well with at all. (For that matter, clothing getting ripped in “staged fights” doesn’t appeal to me either. By the time this leads to admitting that bits of an outfit being lost over the course of a story might not appeal as well, maybe I’ve given enough away to be psychoanalysed.) All of that does lead into how, when I learned the original manga was being translated and released over here, I wound up buying a copy even if a “three-in-one hardcover” was awfully expensive, especially given the paper didn’t seem that different from the stuff that yellows over time in ordinary manga.
( A bone-white ring under the red-hot sun )

Not all that long, or so it seemed, after I‘d read Gou Tanabe‘s manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft‘s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Dark Horse announced another adaptation was going to be translated and released over here. This time it would be “The Call of Cthulhu,” significant enough for providing the name for the whole “Mythos.” I got around to buying and reading a copy.
( Conceivably a survival )

To be brief, I’ve pared time spent with a web browser open well back. To fill that gap, I decided to return to some manga and read it again. Picking up The Promised Neverland, I pushed through twenty volumes and a special follow-up of one-shots also from author Kaiu Shirai and artist Posuka Demizu in four days. This was a considerable acceleration from my usual pace of courteous chapter-sized nibbles.
( The reason for my choice )

Not that long after reading the first two volumes of Nico Nicholson’s My Lovesick Life as a ’90s Otaku in rapid succession and commenting on both of them, I picked up the third instalment of the manga. Very little time passed between that and ordering the fourth volume, and I started thinking about making another double comment. By the time that fourth volume showed up, though, I’d realised it would be the conclusion of the series. Having started reading the manga in part through the thought I ought to “begin new titles,” having it wrap up so soon was a little hard to take for a few moments. After that, I did start wondering if a longer series would have changed from “ha-ha, I got that reference” to “arrgh, why don’t they settle things?”
( From then to now )

After building a Gundam model I found myself tempted to go back to Kio Shimoku’s Genshiken manga and find the chapter of it involving the same hobby project. Whether or not that contributed to reading through twelve volumes of Witch Hat Atelier again, once I’d reached the current end of that story in print my thoughts did turn back to the older manga. This might, I suppose, betray that right now I’m making some efforts not to just fritter away all my spare time using web browsers.
( Dropping back in )

Noticing some unfortunate, yet still somehow understandable, suspicions of how long the upcoming Witch Hat Atelier anime would “hold together” did get me thinking back to those just as unfortunate cracks that “the trailer’s always the best part of the movie” and the days of OVAs (although I can now think of a few OVAs that didn’t “hold together,” or indeed even reach their concluding instalment). At a certain point, a sort of premature bargaining had me wondering whether there might be an early point in the manga where, should the anime be fortunate enough to “hold together” even that far, you could “cut off there” with some measure of satisfaction. I took the first volume of the manga off my shelves and thought that getting to the moment where Coco is given her witch hat would work for me. Then, I kept reading through the other eleven volumes of manga I have.
( Putting the pieces together again )