What have I been reading? (Patreon)

Hey guys! Drawing has been a little scarce around here but I wanted to use this time to talk about stuff I've been reading. I'm not sure if people get much out of this type of post from me but I've always felt like I was the type of manga reader to go digging in the trenches to find the gold to share with others. Not to say that everything I have for you here was all equally hard to come across, but I just felt like talking about them!

First up is a manga I just caught up on called Girl Crush by Tayama Midori. It's a manga about becoming a k-pop idol! I was immediately grabbed by the artwork and I realized I had been following the artist on twitter for a while.

The story revolves around Tenka Momose, a girl who we first see in elementary school as an outcast, as we learn that she shut herself out of talking to the other kids when they found out her parents got divorced because her mom was caught with another man. Only a single boy named Harumi continually attempts to push past her emotional barrier and she falls in love with him, trying to turn herself into someone that is great at everything in order to meet her self imposed standards in order to be worthy of his love.

She becomes more or less the most popular girl in her class by the time she's in high school by being friendly with everyone and skilled at both academics and athletics (she's a standout member on the first year dance team) but she's basically coasting by aimlessly, just fitting the role she imagines she needs to fit. She meets a girl named Erian Sato while walking through the school and sees her practicing a dance routine on the stairs while singing a k-pop song.

This sets off a chain of events where she learns that Harumi and Erian work together at a part time job and he has a crush on her, and Tenka feels like she needs to compete against Erian directly as to prove to herself who is more deserving of Harumi's love. Tenka and Erian are not really seeing eye to eye on the situation though, as Erian feels a genuine bond with Tenka and feels like they're becoming close friends. 

Tenka's motivations are so complex and interesting! You can see her brain churning with her jealousy fighting against the personality she constructed for her social life of being the perfect, charming girl. We see her pushing Erian to succeed at becoming an idol by helping her learn to do makeup and to try for an agency that will work best for her looks and talents, all with the ulterior motive that if Erian succeeds, she won't get to go out with Harumi. At the same time, she's slowly getting swept up in it all from her competitive nature and feels like she needs to try out to be an idol too or she'll feel like she lost.

The two have some encounters with scouts and meet another girl, but ultimately what happens is they both "fail" only for Erian to be contacted later that she actually passed because one of the representatives for the agency liked her enough. Tenka returns home to Japan feeling like she lost against Erian and in a final act of defiance, she confesses to Harumi who turns her down. Tenka is desperate to understand what she could have done better to make him love her and she sees her mother's personality in herself.

Harumi has to explain to her that he's just not someone that can understand all the pain she's carried from her mother and be what she wants him to be in a relationship but he does genuinely care about her as a friend and wants to help. This is more or less where Tenka's story really begins as she finally puts to words that she just wants a place to feel safe being herself. He convinces her that pursuing a career as a k-pop idol for all it's extensive training is a good fit for her and she should continue trying. Tenka has her cathartic cry as she lets go of her crush on Harumi and focuses on a new goal entirely for her own sake and attempts to be more open and vulnerable with her real personality as she gives it another go to become an idol.

The rest of the story is her learning that she is great at studying and picks up things quickly, but really doesn't have a defining trait about herself that can be marketed as an idol. This introductory arc is a good handful of the 32 chapters currently online, but I think it sets up Tenka as a really interesting character with some baggage but a serious desire to improve herself that makes me root for her. Her years of trying to act in specific ways based on her perception of what others want makes her a quick thinker and maybe manipulative in some ways, but it's never at the cost of anyone around her. She's not a BAD person, she just cares a bit too much about what others might think to a fault and it feels VERY believable for someone with a childhood trauma caused by parents splitting up.

Again, the art is really what pulled me in to check this story out and it's the type of story that really is sold on solid drawing fundamentals to let us follow the dance moves and poses that are such a big part of what k-pop is about. Tayama Midori is also flexing a bit at times with her perspective and chooses some very challenging angles in her compositions just because she can. Like this spread below, she's done spread before that are straight on to keep things flat but to put everything into perspective here is an extra effort that not everyone would make. Small details like this are found all over in every size of panel so it feels very grounded. You would expect an anime adaptation of this to get assigned to some really talented animators, kind of like Bocchi the Rock.

--------------------

Speaking of Bocchi the Rock, that's been an anime that I've gotten really into this season (besides the obvious Chainsaw Man and Mob season 3). I personally have a nostalgia for K-On even thought I think it's a little too moe to feel great about loving openly (I feel like I'd still love the teacher Sawako though), but something about people trying to play music together works for me in both K-On and Bocchi. Like K-On, Bocchi is a 4koma that got an anime adaptation by a really well known studio (Cloverworks in this case) that I think elevates the work beyond its source material.

After a few episodes of the show, I felt compelled to read the manga and I really didn't like it much at all! The format honestly hurt it, the jokes zipped by and were hard to decipher who was speaking just by the limited nature of the amount of panels that could be used to get a setup and punchline out. The jokes themselves get ironed out a LOT by the slower pacing of the anime and the animation team going wild with the shots whenever it was Bocchi imagine something are always a surprise and keep things entertaining, even when the main content get start to get a little too cutesy and saccharine (Mostly from the Red haired girl or the Blonde girl, sorry I don't remember their names LOL).

--------------------

There's a few manga I started the first chapter of that I want to check out more of, the first being Black and White - Tough Love at the Office.

Essentially it's about two women who are new to their office and already have developed great reputations for themselves being teamed up on a project and they end up at each other's throats, which somehow turns into passionate hate-sex?? I'm not sure the degree with with they have sex, but they DEFINITELY hate each other. This one seems really fun, and I love a more mature concept like this.

--------------------

The other is a manga called Soara and the Monster's House. This one's about a girl who trained since childhood to fight orcs and goblins only to hit adulthood right as the war against monsters is called to an end by the king. Soara is relieved of her duties and is sent to wander and find a new purpose for herself in a new age of peace.

Soara wanders until she stumbles on a group of Dwarves that are going around building houses for monsters, who have decided that they wanted to live domestic lives but don't have the skills or knowledge to create proper homes for themselves. There's a really thoughtful amount of work put into building the world and the way different creatures needs would have to be met, and seeing the weird fantasy ways that the dwarves make homes for them is really interesting! In a way, it feels in line with the visdev parts of Eizoken, just an artist getting to have fun showing off their creativity of solving made up problems. The style is also pretty thick and chunky/blocky in a fun way that helps keep the environments enjoyable to look at.

--------------------

I also talked about this manga a bit on twitter, but Warera Contactee has really left a mark on me since revisiting it not too long ago. There's not a lot of chapters of what is a short story (that was completed a while ago I believe, just not scanned), but Warera Contactee is about a lazy girl who wants to get rich quick rekindling a friendship with a weird guy she knew in school who wants to create a rocket to fly into space in hopes of sharing a movie he likes with aliens. 

There's a lot about this to love, honestly. The characters are kind of all terrible and sooo funny. The art is really rough and simple, kind of like ONE's manga art, but Rui Morita here actually is making conscious style decisions because there's an actual understanding of perspective and form here that lies underneath the blobby heads and funny faces. I shared it before but this dropkick comes out of nowhere in one chapter that had me fucking DYING laughing.

The story that we can read as english speakers is still incomplete so I can't say much about how it all comes together, but there really is so much to absorb here beyond that. The general pace of the story feels very different from the dime a dozen shounen that everyone loves nowadays, and everything feels so unpredictable because of how weird these characters all are. Again, I don't have much to say about it other than I like it and I want to learn from it for my own work, especially from a drawing angle.

--------------------

Other than that, some things I've been reading that I'm still figuring out my feelings about are things like:

Marriagetoxin, which feels like it was made by someone that was an assistant for Demon Slayer, following that standard shounen structure. It's kind of fun and really nonsensical with its powers but the energy is silly and doesn't take itself too seriously so it's good light entertainment so far. I won't get too into the concept since I think it's going to get pretty popular, but I'm still deciding if I think it's GOOD or not.

Super no Ura de Yani Suu Hanashi, which is about a salaryman at a black company who has a crush on a convenience store employee, not knowing that he's actually taking smoke breaks with her after her shift because of how different she looks. It feels like it drags on a bit, but the concept is fun to see a character with these two dueling sides and her getting attached to him fully knowing that he has a crush on the cleaned up version of her.

A Galaxy Next Door, which is the new series by the author of Sweetness and Lightning, Amagakure Gido. Sweetness and Lightning is one of my all time fave manga so it feels weird feeling so lukewarm on this new work, which is about a romance between a mangaka who is raising his two younger siblings and a weird alien-adjacent princess from a remote island? I feel like its really going for a weird concept just as the attention grabber and keeping you interested by having a really sweet and loving relationship form between the two main characters, but honestly their relationship feels a little unearned for how strong and invested they are so early, even if it does feel tenderly written.

--------------------

I'll have to end it there, but maybe there are some things on this list that you haven't heard of that you might want to start reading! Let me know if you've been keeping up with any of these or know of any other interesting manga that feel up my alley, and thanks for reading!