Comics and More

One-Punch Man (Volume 1) ONE and Yusuke Murata One-Punch Man is an action-packed manga from Viz, that turns the superhero genre on its head.  The story follows Saitama, a scrawny bald kid, who lives in a world where supervillains attack constantly.  He decided to fight back one day (just for fun) and practiced enough that with one punch, he can take out any villain he faces. This is quite a parody of superheroes.  It's a book with tons of violence and destruction, yet it's always resolved very quickly, with one punch from our hero.  It's always a sort of anti-climax, the story really being about the build-up.  The villains are over-the-top - stupid muscle guys who make absurd mistakes, or over-sexualized women in ridiculous outfits with magical powers - but the variety of villains keeps things interesting for the most part.  One of the problems with this title could have been its repetitiveness, but once we saw a few of...

Captain Ken (Volume 1) Osamu Tezuka The first of two volumes, Captain Ken was funded by a Kickstarter campaign that thankfully gets more Tezuka into the hands of American fans.  I honestly wasn't expecting much from this title.  I'm not sure why, when I've been blown away by the ground-breaking work that Tezuka has turned out - Princess Knight being one of my all-time favorite manga.  I think it just looked a little dated, but, again, Princess Knight proved how timeless Tezuka's work truly is. Captain Ken is a western that takes place on Mars.  Humans invaded Mars decades ago, killing and enslaving most of the martian population.  There are some rebel tribes of martians that cause trouble for locals, such as the Moro Tribe, whose treasure was stolen during the invasion as well.  Captain Ken appears on Mars at the same time as a young girl named Kenn, who stays with a local family, and there are suspicions that they could be one and the same p...

The Legend of Zelda: A Link To the Past Shotaro Ishinomori Shotaro Ishinomori is a legend in Japan.  After creating such beloved works as Cyborg 009 and Masked Rider , it's amazing that he took the time to form a story from a Super Nintendo game.  But I'm glad that he did! I was a subscriber to Nintendo Power growing up, and I distinctly remember reading the comics in the magazine, including  Star Fox  and Super Mario Brothers , but I was an RPG fan, so The Legend of Zelda sticks with me.  In fact, I played The Legend of Zelda: A Link To the Past , but even if Ishinomori had straight-up adapted the story of the game, it would still be a very different experience, merely because the mediums are so different.  Reading a book that was made into a movie is a different experience too.  But Ishinomori didn't just adapt the story from the video game - he made it his own.  He created characters for the story, and threw...

Spell of Desire (Volume 1) Tomu Ohmi From the creator of Midnight Secretary , Spell of Desire follows Kaoruko Mochizuki, whose mother left her when she still a baby.  Her grandmother raised her, but passed away two years earlier, leaving her an herb and tea shop.  A mysterious handsome man, Kaname, appears one day and claims that Kaoruko's mother is a powerful black witch, and that she stored her power within Kaoruko.  As her mother is the leader of witches, Kaname has been assigned by her to protect her magic within Kaoruko.  Kaoruko doesn't believe him at first, but when instances of her powers become apparent and get to be too much for her (especially her own emotions inflicting lust upon people), Kaoruko decides that there is truth to his words after all.  How does she get her powers temporarily under control?  Through a kiss from Kaname.  At first, he forces them upon her, but soon she rather comes to enjoy them, which really gets her e...

Maria the Virgin Witch (Volume 1) Masayuki Ishikawa Maria the witch uses her magical powers to stop war from brewing in France between various rulers.  She calls on monsters, uses succubi to seduce soldiers, and whatever else she needs to stop the pointless bloodshed.  Unfortunately, the archangel Michael is not amused with her efforts and tries to put an end to her meddling, so that no outside forces interfere with humanity's progress.  And so Michael puts a curse on Maria.  Maria, who, while obsessed with erotic literature, is still a virgin, can not lose her virginity, or she will lose her magical powers with it. It actually takes the whole first volume to set up the entire premise of the book, which is kind of nice.  I like that it doesn't feel rushed, and that the story slowly unfolds around Maria and her friends, building toward her confrontation with Michael.  Ishikawa is not just a great storyteller, but illustrator as well.  The...

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - Part One: Phantom Blood (Volume 1) Hirohiko Araki Bizarre is right.  Jonathan Joestar comes from a life of privilege, and is generally loved by everyone.  That is, until his new adopted brother moves in.  Dio's father has recently died, and Jonathan's father thinks that he owes the man, and so takes Dio in as his own son.  Dio has a grudge against Jonathan and derives sadistic pleasure from torturing him in any way he can, usually by implicating Jonathan as guilty of terrible things and making him look bad in front of his father. This book is twisted.  Everything is over-the-top, from the characters to the circumstances.  It's very fast-paced and frantically heightened, which gives it a weird vibe.  This manga is from the eighties, so it does have a retro art style, but it holds up well.  That being said, I can't quite put my finger on why this was such a wildly popular manga in its day.  It is aggress...

One of Comics-and-More 's most popular features is back!  On the first Monday of every month, look for a new manga to be reviewed on Manga Monday ! Meteor Prince (Volume 1) Meca Tanaka Hako Natsuno is a magnet for accidents.  Literally, bad things are always happening to her - things are falling on her, she's tripping on anything and everything, etc.  Her classmates call her the "Queen of Bad Luck," and mostly avoid her, although she has managed to surround herself with a couple of good friends.  Her luck changes one day (well, maybe) when a hot alien guy drops out of the sky and declares that he has come to Earth to mate with Hako. Hako may have bad luck, but she's not the only one.  Any reader with the misfortune of picking up this title has run smack-dab into some as well, because Meteor Prince is about as middle-of-the-road as you can get.  Aside from her bad luck and some generic qualities, there is no character to Hako, leaving only a couple...