Currently Running Manga Discussion

[Spark Of Spirit]

MHA staff revealed.

Yousuke Kuroda is the lead writer.

Sold.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Kenji Nagasaki as the director to boot. He did some fine work on Gundam Build Fighters, so I'm expecting quite a strong showing to come out of this team. 

In very loosely related news, apparently Twin Star Exorcists has an announcement coming next month. So, it's probably getting an anime next year too. Reminds me I've been meaning to look into more of that series, since I found the first chapter surprisingly engaging despite my weariness of ghost/demon/monster-fighting battle shonen.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Anyhoo, here are the rankings for the November 9th issue of Weekly Shonen Jump:

Hinomaru Sumo (Cover, Lead CP, Crossover with Kuroko's Basketball)
1- One Piece
2- Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma
3- Assassination Classroom
Straighten Up! Welcome to Shika High's Competitive Dance Club (Center Color)
4- My Hero Academia
5- Haikyu!!
Toriko (Center Color)
6- Nisekoi
7- Gintama
Mononofu (Center Color)
8- The Mishaps of Kusuo Saiki
9- Black Clover
10- World Trigger
11- Samon the Summoner (First ranking)
12- Bleach
13- Kochikame
14- Best Blue
15- Kagamigami
Chronicle of Isobe -Life is Hard-

I got caught up with Straighten Up! last weekend, and man, I'm really, really enjoying it. It's blend of well-placed humor, strong characters, potent dramatic writing, and an underlying vibe of cuteness just makes it irresistible to me. It's a crying shame that Viz seems to have passed on it, especially since we good use a sports manga like it in the english Jump.

Though, maybe we still might get one, since Kaito, the creator of the short-lived but fondly remembered Cross Manage, is debuting a new series called Buddy Strike the week after next, and I'm sure it'll be run as a Jump Start. Admittedly, I don't know if it's actually going to be a sports manga, since the only thing known about it right now is it's name, but it sounds like one. Either way, I really enjoyed Cross Manage, and am really looking forward to seeing another one of Kaito's works in Jump. Hopefully this one will prove more successful for him.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I kinda wish they would just make a Jump SQ magazine for NA and just put the monthly series in it. Charge an extra subscription or whatever, but it would be worth it. It would also be a better deal than a dollar per chapter of Platinum End, which I have yet to read because of that stupidity. Of course they can't add things like BBB, but that's understandable. I just don't want to pay a stupid price for ONE series.

Anyway, Mononofu seems to have had a better start than Samon, which I can't say surprises me. I didn't like chapter 3 of Mononofu as much as the first two, but it was definitely the better series of the pair. Looks like Kagamigami and Best Blue are the next on the chopping block, which is a shame since what I read of them were pretty decent. Jump is pretty ruthless with cutting series these days, though.

[LumRanmaYasha]

They really should do that. When the digital Jump started, it only had six launch titles, and they really only need about that many for a lengthy monthly service anyway. And they have that many. I mean, they've got...

Blue Exorcist
Twin Star Exorcists
D. Gray Man
7th Garden
Seraph of the End
Platinum End

...and they can license and put in JoJolion and maybe something else for good measure, and you have a lineup for a monthly imprint that would easily attract quite a few subscribers. If I'd be interested in reading at least half of those series, I'd definitely subscribe to it. Certainly would be more bang for my buck than literally one buck for one chapter.

I did recently check out the first chapter of Platinum End via scans, however, and while there were aspects to the drama in the MC's background that felt a little forced to me, it seems like a promising premise with a very Death Note feel, so I'm interested in seeing where it goes.

[VLordGTZ]

Though, maybe we still might get one, since Kaito, the creator of the short-lived but fondly remembered Cross Manage, is debuting a new series called Buddy Strike the week after next, and I'm sure it'll be run as a Jump Start. Admittedly, I don't know if it's actually going to be a sports manga, since the only thing known about it right now is it's name, but it sounds like one. Either way, I really enjoyed Cross Manage, and am really looking forward to seeing another one of Kaito's works in Jump. Hopefully this one will prove more successful for him.

Buddy Strike is a baseball manga.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Thought so! I'm looking forward to it! 

[Spark Of Spirit]

Here's an interesting one from ANN:

Whatever happened to Bleach?

I do think Bleach will be a case study in a few years of how NOT to create a shonen manga. It's broken every rule and continues to find new rules nobody ever knew existed that it broke in the process.

It does raise the question of what Kubo will do when it's all over. I'm not so sure anyone will trust him with another battle manga again but then what else will he do? Battle manga aside, the man has proven he can't be trusted with plot, characters, fight scenes, drama, or writing. He's going to have one heck of an uphill battle to prove to anyone why they should ever read anything by him again.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Oh, there was this really good comment in the discussion thread of the article:

Bleach has been in the trash can for a very long time, and this arc is particularly bad - there are just so MANY of these quincy dicks, and each of them gets a full-blown fight scene at least! Sure, there were a lot of Arrancar, but you weren't expected to pay attention to any of them for more than one, maybe two chapters at the most. Every single one of these quincy dudes takes a 4-6 chapter fight scene to take down, at the very least. And there's one for every single letter of the alphabet! Arrrrgh!

But as bad as that is, I really think that the series has a much more fundamental issue. A major hole in Kubo's fight scene chops, which is a huge problem as the story revolves around swordfighting. His persistent refusal to ever have the setting play a major role in a fight.

Now, by this, I don't just mean that his never draws backgrounds. Backgrounds can add to mood, but that's not what I mean. I mean that where the fight takes place never influences the outcome of the fight. Here are some fight scenes where this is very much not a problem, for comparison:

Kill Bill

Berserk

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure

World Trigger

You can see what I mean, I hope. None of those fight scenes could have taken place in the same way if you changed the environment. They would play out radically different if you transplanted them to a different location.

By comparison, the setting never affects anything in Bleach. Like, really when was the last time where a fight scene takes place really mattered to how it played out? Kyouraku using the quincy city for cover kind of counts, but it's pretty weak tea. And before that, I think you have to go all the way back to Ichigo getting his sword stuck in the ceiling while fighting the winged hollow with Don Kanonji. Bleach characters just hover in a featureless void while fighting.

This matter because the use of setting is one way for an author to create dramatic tension; even if one character is stronger than another, the weaker character can still win through other factors, whether it's a clever strategy, a unique ability interaction, or one character using the environment to their advantage. Just look at that Berserk fight scene. In a straight up fight on open ground, Guts would destroy Serpico in seconds. But on the cliff edge, using the environment to his advantage, Serpico is able to very seriously threaten Guts - and, crucially, delay him.

Now, that's not to say that setting should be a crucial part of EVERY fight scene. Like any writing technique, it's not appropriate every time. But to almost entirely eschew it, as Kubo does, means that he has one fewer knob to turn in making his fights memorable and tense. There are fewer ways for him to resolve fights without resorting to simple power levels, so it comes down to powerlevels a lot more than it should. There are also fewer ways for him to make fight scenes stand out from one another, so they start to feel pretty samey.

It might seem like a small thing, but it really is a drag on the whole series, and a problem that's been building up for a long time.

Reminds me of what we were taking about in the other thread in regards to battle manga and adventure manga. One is thinking of the bigger picture: how the encounter and fight has to do with the bigger problem at hand, and the other is thinking of how this one fight is going to look cool and nothing beyond it.

Nothing in Bleach right now links back to whatever the story is supposed to be. It's all encapsulated in its little world and in response when a fight is over you never think about it again because you're already on to the next one.

Of course it's not Bleach's only problem (not by a LONG shot) but it was interesting to see there are others out there who see there are fundamental problems with it than us.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Bleach has had, and still has, far too many problems to count. However, this passage in particular is very telling of one of its biggest problems by far:

The arc's final stretch consisted of even more ceaseless fighting, but this time it was mostly between characters who had only rarely appeared in the series before. Over fifty characters got involved in the final confrontation with Aizen. Some of these characters were just now appearing for the first time, simply written in to provide the tenth- through fifteenth-most important Soul Reapers with individual opponents. Kubo's efforts to make the battle a grand spectacle backfired by favoring quantity over quality. By the end of things, I was feeling very sore about Bleach, because it seemed to be putting off the final Ichigo vs. Aizen fight for as long as possible while offering nothing decent in the meantime. On top of that, after being built up for years as tremendous threats, the three highest-ranking members of Aizen's army were defeated in a remarkably anticlimactic way. Aizen even dispatched one himself just to pull off the cliché evil overlord stunt of showing how ruthless he was.

First off, if you've presented a main goal for you heroes to achieve (in this case, defeating an ultimate villain), then the focus of your story should involve the characters undertaking the steps to reach that goal. The drama comes from how their journey and experiences up to that point affect and change them, and there should be some connecting theme conveyed by each of their personal struggles to meet that goal. This isn't rocket science. It's story-telling 101, but apparently Kubo didn't get the memo.

When you start dragging out the story and keep moving the goal further away like a person dangling a carrot from a string and yanking it away at the last minute to move a Jackass along, all of the essential elements that make up a good story and characters get lost in the mix, and your audience will lose their investment. Not long after that their patience to keep sticking with your story will be gone as well.

But of all the ways to mess up your series, shoehorning in tons of characters to make your conflict seem bigger and prolong the duration of your story is by far the worst offender. Not only does it take away focus from the characters that your audience really cared about in the first place, but it also takes your audience out of the story in general by cheapening the experience. Nobody cares about whether a character that they barely know (or never even met before) lives or dies or wins a fight against some other character that nobody knows or cares about. It just tests the patience of people who were genuinely interested in the progression of the main characters' story, until they lose that interest altogether.

[As a side note, while it got brushed off with a pass in the article, Naruto had a very similar problem of introducing new characters or utilizing ones that we barely saw in a series of seemingly endless fights to make the whole Shinobi War seem like a much bigger conflict. Though, the ultimate goal was actually the opposite problem from what Bleach had. Rather than having a central antagonist, Naruto as a series couldn't seem to make up its mind on who its ultimate villain was, and seemingly kept changing its mind every 50 chapters or so. My point being that it may have been better than Bleach, but it was still absolute garbage during its final arc, all the same, and shouldn't be allowed to get away with that so easily.]

To have an audience tentatively follow a huge cast of characters and stay interested in all of their individual story-lines takes a great deal of skill as a writer, and involves tons of planning, build-up, and coordination in order to make it work without massive pacing problems. Naoki Urasawa and George R. R. Martin are among the very few names (in all of fiction) that come to mind when I think of writers who can successfully make a legitimately interesting and relatively easy to follow story which features a huge ensemble cast. And in both cases they tend to write more story and character-driven series in the first place.

With long-running battle shonen manga, I tend to feel that writers like Akira Toriyama, Yoshihiro Togashi, and Echiro Oda have a better grasp on how to handle a large cast for stories of that nature. In all three cases, they will (usually) only use the characters necessary to the story that they want to tell, write-off the ones who aren't necessary, and only bring back recurring characters when it actually serves a purpose to the overall progression of the story. New characters were mostly introduced at the beginning of a new arc, after other characters were killed or written-off, or if they served the plot in some way. And while you could argue that Toriyama in particular tended to write-off characters that people actually wanted to see in action, that was really only post-Namek, and even then, you have to agree that he at least kept his stories focused by putting a limit on his roster of battle-ready characters.

By contrast, Kubo seemed to think that just throwing in more characters would distract his audience from a lack of real story to begin with, and assumed that it would instead make the dilemma of his story and the inevitable defeat of his ultimate villain (the goal for the main characters to achieve) seem all the grander. Yet, all he managed to do was to aggravate his own fan-base and kill any sort of momentum that his story had going for it in the first place.

But after all of this, I must say that I consider Bleach to be an incredibly important  manga. I am honest-to-god fascinated by just how shockingly bad it is in how much it managed to (and still manages to) consistently get wrong for well over a decade's worth of material. I truly believe that this could and should be used as a teaching tool for future writers of serialized written stories to see, learn, and understand just exactly how NOT to write a long-running story.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Bleach is important. I can even go as far to say I think it deserved the initial success it had even though it wasn't perfect. But the longer it went on the more it proved that Kubo's writing skills are not up there with the genre greats. If the Fullbring arc's wannabe Chapter Black attempt that went nowhere didn't prove it, this current arc of meaningless fight after meaningless fight is proving it.


My rankings for this week:

World Trigger
Food Wars!
My Hero Academia
Nisekoi

[Spark Of Spirit]

And to the surprise of no one.

Dang. I hope he is able to create a hit next time.

[LumRanmaYasha]

I'm certainly not surprised considering how the most recently scanlated chapter ended. I can't say I'm crushed about it since the series didn't really come into it's own and was able to endear me as strongly as Gakkyu Hotei managed to do, but it is a shame that the series didn't have the breathing room it need to really reach it's potential, since there were quite a few good ideas and characters in it. This was Iwashiro's third series for Jump, but I hope he still gets another go, because he has a great art style and some really good ideas, but he just can't seem to hit a sweet spot with japanese readers, it seems.

Anyways, here are the rankings for the November 16th issue of Weekly Shonen Jump:

Buddy Strike (Cover, Lead CP, New Series, 54p.)
1- Assassination Classroom
2- My Hero Academia
Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma (Center Color)
3- Toriko
4- Hinomaru Sumo
5- The Mishaps of Kusuo Saiki
6- Haikyu!!
Straighten Up! Welcome to Shika High's Competitive Dance Club (Center Color)
7- Black Clover
8- Gintama
9- Mononofu
10- Kochikame
11- Samon the Summoner
World Trigger (Not ranked. Was absent in issue #44)
12- Nisekoi
13- Bleach
Chronicle of Isobe -Life is Hard- (Center Color)
14- Best Blue
15- Kagamigami (END)

Surprised Toriko ranked so high this week, but the chapter being ranked was a pretty strong one. Very disappointed to see that ranking for Nisekoi, since I loved that chapter myself. But wow, SU! getting color pages two weeks in a row really speaks to how well it's been doing and how much faith Jump has for it going forward. Been loving the series myself, so I share the enthusiasm. I just wish Viz's Jump would pick it up! 

[LumRanmaYasha]

First teaser for the My Hero Academia anime is out.

I think the voices fit well! Hope to see more of the animation in future trailers.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I really liked everything about it. The voice acting, music, animation, and art direction all look really good. Given that I already know the talent of the director and writer, as well as the source material, I'm definitely sold on this.

I'm thinking a 25 episode season that starts this spring is very possible, and I would highly welcome it. Especially with the staff it has. I actually hope Yousuke Kuroda is able to make some filler of his own at some point because there's a lot he could do.