Tag: Manga

Posted on in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: RURI DRAGON

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a newly-available-in-English manga.

Yes, we’re doing this now. In addition to my first impressions articles about new anime, I will also be occasionally dropping articles about new manga serials, since keeping up with brand-new manga is actually a thing one can reasonably do nowadays. (This was not so when I was younger, but that’s a conversation for another day.)

Ruri Dragon, the proper serial debut from the mangaka Shindou Masaoki, marks the first of these. It’s a manga with a dead-simple premise that I’m more than a little shocked I haven’t seen done before; high school girl is a dragon. Specifically, she’s a dragon-person. Think Tohru from Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid minus the tail (so far) and you’ve got a decent broad idea of where we’re going here.

In addition to that manga, the series opens with a sequence that actually reminds me a little of The Demon Girl Next Door (Machikado Mazoku to most of its readers). Previously-ordinary high school girl wakes up one morning to find out that she’s sprouted horns from her head. A surprisingly snarky sense of humor ensues, which immediately endeared me to Ruri, and which I think will serve it well over the long run. (And it makes the titular Ruri herself feel authentically “teenager-y.”)

Almost immediately, we get a good sense of both the titular Ruri’s personality and that of her mother. The latter in particular has an interesting devil-may-care attitude that could easily be mined for comedy, drama, or both. The woman didn’t even tell her own daughter that her father’s a ryu! That’s a pretty wild thing to just not tell your kid! To her credit, though, Ruri demonstrates an admirable ability to roll with it all, and mostly seems to find the subject awkward, at least initially.

She even insists on going to school, despite her mother offering to let her stay home. (Direct quote from the English translation; “They’re just horns. Not a huge deal.”)

Over the course of her day, we meet her friend Yuka and see how Ruri tries to adapt her daily routine to this unexpected intrusion. Right away, people—starting with Yuka herself—don’t entirely buy the whole “half-dragon on her dad’s side” story. The reactions of those around Ruri, which range from skepticism to finding her horns freaky-cool to her teacher initially assuming they were some kind of fashion statement, certainly seem like the groundwork for some kind of subtext, but it’s too early to make hard calls on this sort of thing. (Although there’s almost certainly a puberty metaphor running through here, as we’ll get to momentarily.)

In particular, the class boys take an immediate interest in her newfound noggin-knobs. Which is enough to make me ponder a similarity between the horns and a certain other part of the body that grows in pairs and gets AFAB girls unwanted reactions in high school, but perhaps I’m leaning too Freudian here. (Also; a serious shout out to translator Caleb Cook for the page on the right here, where he decided to translate something as “gurl.” Love it.)

Even the girls want a piece of Ruri.

And on that day, Background Student A discovered something new about herself.

This all culminates in a scene where basically Ruri’s entire class is congregating around her to take a picture. It’s pretty cute, though in her position I’d be extremely uncomfortable, myself. (And she doesn’t entirely seem comfortable either, to be honest, given that she mentions to Yuka a few pages later that she’s not really “into chatting.”)

“Hey girl, you a demihuman?” may go down as one of the all-time great pieces of translation work for Shonen Jump.

She eventually mentions surprise that she only has horns, and not any other “dragon-y” features. Ruri, it would seem, has a talent for jinxing herself, because barely a page later, she sneezes in class and lets out a truly impressive gout of fire, singing the hair off of one of the boys who was harassing her earlier. (That’s called karma, children.)

But things are not all fun and games. In a surprising turn of pseudo-realism, Ruri being able to breathe fire doesn’t automatically mean that her throat insulates her from her own flames, so the immediate fallout of that sneeze is a sudden and shocking amount of blood loss, which promptly causes her to conk out on the classroom floor.

Thankfully, her injuries aren’t life-threatening, and when her mother arrives to the school nurse’s office a few pages later she sees Ruri swapping usernames with the nurse in some mobage, in a sweet and humanizing minor detail.

It’s her conversation with her mom after she leaves that’s the most revealing though, and it’s here where I feel Ruri Dragon displays most of its potential.

Ruri is pretty obviously confused and at least a little hurt that her mom never told her about any of this. She directly says as much.

And it’s worth noting how her mother seems to unintentionally reinforce that loneliness, talking primarily about her own feelings, how “freaked out” she was, making excuses for herself while also trying to reassure Ruri that she’s an expert on dragons now, having apparently met up with Ruri’s father while Ruri was at school. (This raises even more questions; you’ve had contact with this guy the whole time and you still didn’t tell her about any of this? Maybe dragons do things differently, but in a vacuum, Ruri’s mother comes off pretty bad here.)

But if any of this is followed up on in a serious way remains to be seen. Perhaps more important than any of this is Yuka, who sends Ruri a group selfie that Ruri was squeezed into sometime during the school day. Upon receiving it, Ruri laughs, remarking that the picture has nothing to do with her horns at all. So, while the final shots of this first chapter are Ruri and her mother preparing to have a talk about her draconic heritage, it is the image of the photo that sticks with me most strongly as the chapter closes. After all, at her core and horns or not, Ruri is just a girl.

The Takeaway: With its future direction a total question mark, down to basic facts like even its genre still up in the air, Ruri Dragon is a total wildcard. But! The first chapter is roaring with potential; excellent art and writing abound, and the series has a fun, droll sense of humor. For these reasons, it’s worth keeping an eye on. The second chapter serializes on June 19th, 2022. If you’d like to keep up to date with the manga, I recommend doing so via MangaPlus, where it is available legally, for free, in English.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 8

One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

We open today on a familiar scene; Luffy and a single companion aimlessly adrift at sea. Zolo complains that they really need to get a navigator. He’s got a point, I’d say.

It’s not long before shenanigans ensue; Luffy tries to turn a passing giant bird into dinner. Instead, it ends up carrying him away, separating him from Zolo. Not that the former pirate-hunter has much time to ruminate on loneliness or anything of the sort. As he’s trying to catch up to Luffy, he runs into a trio of pirates adrift at sea. He rescues them. Or maybe it’s more correct to say that he….doesn’t stop them from rescuing themselves?

Of course, the rescued pirates are far from grateful, and we hear for the first time a name that I suspect we’re going to become pretty familiar with.

Of course, Zolo is not one to just roll over because he’s outnumbered.

Subdued, the pirates explain how they got stranded in the middle of the ocean in the first place. Their story, told here through a few flashback pages, introduces us to a new character. This one I know we’ll be seeing a lot of. And if you’re vaguely familiar with One Piece at all, you probably recognize her.

Yes, that’s Nami, one of the handful of other One Piece characters I knew by name before starting this project. I didn’t really know anything about her, though. I certainly didn’t know she was introduced to the comic by swindling a trio of pirates out of their ship with a fake treasure chest.

I think I have a favorite character.

Back in the present, Zolo muses that being able to predict the weather that well would make her one hell of a navigator. I suspect we’ll be circling back around on that notion before too long.

The pirate trio say they work for one Buggy the Clown, who apparently “ate the fruit of the devil” and is the fiercest pirate in the area. (The mention of devil fruit all but confirms my thoughts from a few columns ago. Although, like I said there, it’s kind of obvious when one thinks about it.) They need to get back the map of the Grand Line that Nami stole, or their vicious captain will have their heads. We don’t meet Buggy himself, here, but (small spoiler for the next column, here), the volume that begins with the chapter after this one is named after him. So I’m quite sure we’ll meet him soon.

We do see his ship here, in a bit of very blunt foreshadowing.

Sometimes as a critic you see things that induce a loss for words. “Pirate ship that’s also a circus tent” is one of those things.

Naturally, we link back up with Nami basically immediately.

Her escape from, presumably, more of Buggy’s crew is interrupted when Luffy falls out of the sky, causing a huge commotion.

Nami, in her second defining character moment in the span of 20 pages, immediately takes advantage of the situation by pretending Luffy is her “boss” who’s come to rescue her. (Sidenote: I really love how Oda’s panels tumble in to a jumble of diagonals on this page, it really emphasizes the frantic pace of the scene.)

Fans of 18th century German folk theater may recognize the term “Hanswurst.”

They don’t actually “have” Luffy “right there”, of course. One of them makes the mistake of swatting his hat, and gets laid flat for his troubles.

Nami, perhaps sensing opportunity, introduces herself shortly after, in the chapter’s last page. Although she can’t know it, she may have not picked the best opening line.

Does that make her some kind of meta-pirate? A double pirate? A pirate pirate? A piratesite? A buccane’er-do-well? A thief of the thieves of the sea?

All in all, I really quite like Nami’s first chapter! Roguish characters who live and die by their wits are always great fun in a story like this, and it gives her a nice contrast with Luffy, whose main approach to problem solving is “punch first, ask questions later.” I wonder how long it’ll take before she joins the main crew?

Regardless, this actually marks the end of the first volume! I was a little surprised by that to be honest, since it seems a bit brief to me, but with 8 chapters each, one of them double length, under our belt, we are already over 200 pages into this story. There are many more to go, of course, many of which will also involve Nami. Personally, I can’t wait.

But what about you? I’m particularly interested in asking my other first-timers here. What do you think of Nami’s introduction?

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 7

One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

Hello once again, pirates! Let’s start with a bit of meta talk today. This is the first column written after I started actually publishing these, and I’d like to take a moment to sincerely thank each and every one of you who’s supported this project so far. Reading One Piece every day is a hell of an undertaking even with you guys also on-board. Without you, it would be nearly impossible. So yes, sincere thanks all around and I do mean it from the bottom of my heart.

Some points of contention have arisen, though! I’m eventually going to put up a small Frequently Asked Questions page that I can direct folks to for stuff like this, but just to very quickly explain the two things I’ve gotten the most question marks over:

  • “What are you calling him Zolo and not Zoro?” – The official translation uses “Zolo.” It’s worth noting that both are rendered the same in Japanese (and I do tag the articles with both names), but Viz says it’s Zolo, so “Zolo” is what I’ll be using, in much the same way that the guy from Spy x Family is “Loid” instead of “Lloyd.”
  • “Why are you reading the black and white version? There are full-color versions that cover most of the manga.” – I prefer to read the manga as close to originally written and inked as I can, and the black and white is better for that.

And that’s the reasoning behind both of those decisions.

But hey, you may well not care about any of that and just want me to get on with it already. Fair enough! Let’s get back to the story. (Though, if you do have any other questions, feel free to sound off in the comments below.)

So! Captain Morgan is dead! We see his damn body slumped on his back on the ground, so that’s pretty final, and I suppose I was wrong yesterday, because his son seems to be out of commission, too. This chapter, then, deals with the fallout of his death. Mostly, people are pretty grateful.

Koby is relieved to learn that Morgan ruled by fear and that the navy isn’t really like that. (Hmm.) Luffy, Zolo, and Koby are rewarded with a hearty meal from the mother of that little girl Zolo befriended. Luffy also impressively manages to scarf down more food than Zolo despite the fact that a bit earlier in the chapter the latter literally passes out from starvation. As they eat, Luffy boldly lays out his plan to travel to the Grand Line to find the One Piece. (A treasure whose name I constantly have to remember not to italicize, despite every bone in my body screaming at me to do so.)

Koby will not be accompanying them, given that he’s still determined to join the navy. But, as Luffy puts it, even if they go their separate ways, they’ll always be friends. That’s a nice thought; that even if the people we meet in life eventually leave us, the real value is that we met at all. And he thanks Luffy and Zolo for teaching him how to stick up for himself.

All this makes for a cute interstitial, but it doesn’t last. The navy boys inform Luffy that, despite his and Zolo’s heroics, they’re pirates, so they can’t be allowed to just lounge about in a navy town. To their limited credit; they do at least let Luffy and Zolo go without reporting them, but this is still a pretty rough thing to do, and it’s called out as such by a few background characters.

Koby, meanwhile, has his future employment with the navy put into jeopardy by this whole event, since the officer he pleads to let him join up thinks he might be a pirate spy. Luffy has a solution to this, of course; violence. Or rather, provoking someone else to violence. He pretends that he’s going to tell the officer about Koby’s past with Alvida, threatening Koby’s career with the navy. This spurs the former cabin boy to fight back (although, obviously, he’s not a match for Luffy, despite getting a solid hit in).

“Disturbing the peace” in this fashion gives Luffy and Zolo plenty of reason to leave, and they make their way to do so.

But it doesn’t take Koby long to figure out that Luffy was deliberately trying to push him away for his own benefit. Accordingly, he runs out to say goodbye to them as they leave anyway, and the sailors prove themselves good sports in their own way by doing this.

With their friend behind them, Luffy and Zolo set out toward the Grand Line, departing with Koby on amicable terms. But, the seas ahead aren’t quite crystal clear.

A single post-chapter page informs us that this is the Great Age of Piracy! An age where “pirates beyond number raise their flags to battle for fame and fortune.” Perhaps it could be said, then, that the true start of Luffy’s journey—and ours—is here.

That’s the first week of One Piece down, friends. Many more lie ahead of us.

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 6

One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

Today we come to a problem I was pretty sure we’d face eventually.

So; this chapter is really good. The issue is that it’s almost entirely a single action scene. This is something you can do in the serial manga format. If your average chapter is 20 pages, and you’re reasonably confident that you’ll get enough chapters to tell the, you know, story parts of your story, you can stretch your legs a bit. Some chapters are entirely or almost entirely the “blood” part of the ancient “love, blood, and rhetoric” triangle. This is one such chapter. It’s just always a bit of a challenge to write about something so kinetic.

I can give you the actual events of things in a single sentence; Luffy and Zolo fight Axe-Hand Morgan, and Morgan loses. We learn a few more things in here, admittedly. Morgan seems to have some weird sway over his men, as at one point he orders them to shoot themselves for “cowardice” and they almost do it. Mind control? Something Else? Who’s to say? It’s early days. (For me, at least. I’m sure at least some of you have read One Piece before and are smirking right now.)

Although, on the note of supernatural abilities, this chapter does make mention of the “Devil Fruit” first alluded to back in Chapter 1. My guess then is that these devil fruits are the manga’s plot tokens; Luffy became a rubber band man upon eating one. I’m quite sure that other varieties of fruits could grant different powers. (Honestly, now that I type it out, it just seems obvious. Is this what the vending machine coins in Gleipnir were riffing on?)

Sir, I would like to venture that you—a man named “Axe-Hand Morgan” who, in fact, does have a hand that is an axe—are not a good judge of what is ordinary or not ordinary.

The only other things of note that occur are that Zolo and Koby both get little moments of solidarity with Luffy. The former’s is depicted in the column banner, and Luffy replies to it in a very Luffyish way.

And Koby is brave in the face of what may well be death as Morgan’s son takes him hostage. He needn’t be scared, of course, since Luffy rescues him as part of the battle that unfolds here.

Beyond that, I’m honestly at a bit of a loss. I will say that Oda’s panel composition and command of visual storytelling are really spot-on even in this early stage of the manga. You could remove the dialogue and still have a solid idea of what’s happening, and all of this stuff is just a genuine treat to look at. But aside from that, there’s only so many ways to rephrase “this is all really badass.” Still, if we’re truly in for the long haul I suppose I should be okay with repeating myself at times. So let me say; this is all really badass.

My absolute favorite pages in this chapter are actually the last two, where we see Morgan attacking, and then the aftermath of his being struck down by Zolo on the following page, but not the strike itself, a lovely little visual trick that gives you a brief “wait, what happened?” jolt before what exactly occurred dawns on you. It’s a neat way of making Zolo’s attack somehow seem even cooler by not depicting it at all. I imagine some kid reading that on their way home from school in ’97 and thinking it was the raddest thing they’d ever seen, and that just puts a smile on my face.

Now, it’s not clear if Morgan is actually dead. Generally, in work like this, if you don’t see someone literally get a head chopped off or something similarly definitively fatal, their return is always a possibility. (And either way they still have Morgan’s annoying son to deal with.) Is more stylish violence to come? I suppose we’ll see.

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 5

One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

Please keep in mind that many other readers are also first-timers. Do NOT spoil anything beyond this point in the comments!

An odd thing about covering anime and manga, at least for me, is that over the years I’ve run into a lot of things that I really love certain parts of but really dislike certain other parts of. It’s way too early to tell if One Piece will eventually enter that particular box, but it’s certainly true of this chapter, which is probably both the best of these first few we’ve read so far and the first one I’ve had any serious qualms with.

Both of these stem from a flashback that takes up the bulk of the chapter. This, basically, is Zolo’s backstory. These kind of one-chapter “here’s this guy’s Whole Deal” narrative shotgun blasts have been common in anime and manga for a long time, but this is a pretty solid one, and I do like what it does for Zolo’s character.

The gist here is simple; Zolo was, as a child, a sword-fighting student at a dojo, and was constantly beaten in training exercises by his rival, Kuina. He gets so frustrated by his constant losses that he challenges said rival to a real duel with real swords, only to lose that too and walk away unscathed only because Kuina spares him any actual harm. The two talk; Kuina and Zolo both have their frustrations, and the two eventually vow that one day, one of the two will become the world’s greatest swordsman. But, not long after they make that solemn oath, Kuina dies in a freak accident. Zolo must now keep the promise himself, and become the world’s greatest swordsman on his own. He even learns how to fight with three swords, solely so he can use Kuina’s as well.

As a piece of stylistic work and economical storytelling, this is great stuff. Stories like this have very old roots, so it’s not exactly innovative, but there’s a lot to be said for technique. The trick of widening the blackspace between manga panels to indicate a flashback is utilized really well here, and it adds a palpable weight to the reminiscence. The drawings within the panels themselves are stylish, too. I’m particularly fond of this one, where Zolo and Kuina clash against a full moon.

But here’s what bothers me, okay? Kuina, Zolo’s late childhood rival, was a girl. A girl who laments that she’s a girl, because AFAB people1 tend to lose muscle mass and get a bit weaker as they get older, and she thinks it’ll stop her from reaching her true potential. To both the character of Zolo’s credit and that of the manga on the whole; this idea is pretty sternly rebuked as unimportant by Zolo himself. In fact, that refutation is what leads to their promise to begin with.

But, of course, Kuina dies. Off-panel, even. By falling down the stairs, even. Now, there’s only so much I can hold all this against One Piece, considering that it was still finding its footing this early on, and that it is hardly the first or last piece of literature to do something like this, but it’s not exactly a terrific sign when the first female character in the whole thing with some actual motive and characterization gets killed off almost immediately, is it?

So, that’s not a storytelling decision I’m fond of, certainly. But the flashback in general is at least a strong foundation on which Zolo’s character can be built. Zolo is one of just a couple One Piece characters I was at all aware of before starting this project (it’s hard to miss a guy with a sword between his teeth), and it’s cool to know the Watsonian explanation for that iconic design element. (I think the Doylistic one probably boils down to Oda asking himself “wouldn’t it be badass if a guy had a sword between his teeth?” Feel free to correct me in the comments if I’m wrong and he’s actually explained this in an interview or something.)

Meanwhile, back in the present, a bunch of navy boys line their guns up to execute Zolo. (In fact, the whole flashback happens because he despairs about how he can’t die yet because he’s still got a promise to fulfill. You know how it goes.) Not to worry, though; our favorite stretchy pirate boy comes to his rescue.

It’s a classic bit of shonen badassery, and Zolo is so impressed—or perhaps just grateful that he can still fulfill his promise—that he pledges to join Luffy’s crew right then and there. And just like that, Straw Hat Luffy gains his first crewman. And hey, a guy with three swords isn’t a bad place to start!

1: Obviously the manga does not put it quite in those terms, being a comic for young boys written in the late 90s, but you get what I mean.

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 3

One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

In today’s chapter, Koby successfully navigates Luffy’s ship to a navy town, a feat that astonishes the young pirate. The fact that Luffy apparently expected to become King of the Pirates by just aimlessly drifting from place to place is pretty great.

More importantly, we meet a couple people here. Chiefly there’s Roronoa Zolo, the tough-as-nails bounty hunter mentioned who was mentioned in the last issue and is currently taking up the banner image for the first but probably not last time. Luffy ponders trying to get him to join his crew, while Koby reveals that he has extremely simplistic views on rehabilitative justice.

Like everyone else we’ve met in One Piece so far, he’s a classic archetype; the bounty hunter with a heart of gold. Everyone in town is terrified of him, to the point that Luffy just mentioning him causes a ruckus at a local tavern. (The same happens when he mentions the “Captain Morgan” who apparently runs the whole place, but we don’t meet him yet here.)

But when we actually meet him a bit later, it becomes obvious that he has a soft center. He has an old school “tough guy / cute little kid” friendship with a local girl, who comes to bring him food and talk to him while he’s serving his sentence of being tied to a post in the prison yard. That friendship arouses the displeasure of one of the local bigshots; the other character we meet in this chapter.

Honestly, “mean, privileged rich guy” is almost cheating when it comes to creating antagonistic characters. Doubly so when their privilege is inherited and they threaten to “tell daddy” when something goes wrong, both of which are true of Helmeppo. Triply so when they’re also such a vile motherfucker that they’re mean to kids, which Helmeppo also is. (Not content with making a guard escort the little girl out of the prison, he smashes her rice balls into the ground! What a dick!)

It very briefly looks like Helmeppo might at least have a sense of fair play; he’s been telling Zolo that if he can survive for a month tied to that post, he’ll be free to go. But, shocker, at the end of the chapter we learn that that’s not actually true, and he’s planning to have the bounty hunter executed in three days. Upon learning this, Luffy delivers on his apparently once-per-chapter obligation to sock a bad guy directly in the face.

Helmeppo’s bloody-mouthed quip about “making an enemy of the navy” is where the chapter ends, setting us up with a thrilling cliffhanger for next time.

I haven’t really been mentioning the after-chapter bonus pages up ’til now, because I’m not terribly clear on if they were part of the original print run or were added at a later date in a rerelease. (Allusion to “Luffy’s Flag”, which hasn’t shown up yet, makes me think the latter.) I’m mentioning this one, though, because it’s a cute little drawing exercise—the sort of thing that really drives home just exactly how young One Piece‘s target audience is, or at least initially was—and I thought y’all might potentially be interested.

I gave it a quick go myself. I admit; I’m not much of a visual artist. But I think for doodling it in Paint.NET with my mouse it certainly could’ve come out worse.

Now available on your local NFT marketplace.

If you deign to partake in this particular game and can doodle a more convincing jolly roger, do feel free to drop a link in the comments or to show me on Twitter. I’d be delighted to see such a thing.

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 2

One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

“I’ve set myself to become King of the Pirates…and if I die trying…then at least I tried!”

The very first person Luffy D. Monkey tells about his ambition to become King of the Pirates is a dejected, down-on-his-luck cabin boy named Koby. I don’t know what it is, but that’s just absolutely hilarious to me for some reason. He’s the Jimmy Olsen to Luffy’s Superman, except I think if you put Koby and Olsen in a fight, Olsen would probably win.

I said when I began this project that I wouldn’t sugarcoat my opinion if I felt One Piece did something problematic or just straight up bad. We don’t cross into the latter at all here, but the former….eh, yeah, kind of. There’s just something a little weird about this chapter’s villain, a beauty-obsessed overweight woman with a huge mace named Lady Alvida. That said; I’ve definitely seen a lot worse, so I’ll not harp on it too hard, here.

Mostly, she serves as a decent starter villain for Luffy. Her modus operandi seems to be very simple; she asks her crew, under her wood-deck tyranny, who is the fairest of them all. If they don’t say her, she hits them with a giant mace.

When Luffy confronts her, he has an obvious opening; since his body is made of weird magic rubber stuff, he can’t be hurt by the mace, which Alvida doesn’t see coming because, well, why in the living thunder would she? Luffy takes advantage of her confusion, and promptly decks her across the face. I really hope he keeps doing this to every villain, it’s funny as hell.

More important is that we get a little bit of exposition here! Koby balks at the very notion that Luffy could ever be King of the Pirates, which eventually leads him to reply with this article’s lead quote. He incredulously mentions that Luffy will have to go to the Grand Line if he wants to accomplish such a thing. What’s the Grand Line? Who knows! A “graveyard for pirates”, apparently, which sounds suitably dangerous for our hero. Also, I had no idea that One Piece was named after an actual thing within its universe, but apparently Gold Roger’s treasure is called the “One Piece.”

In general this chapter does a lot to establish that, yeah, even ten years after the prologue, Luffy is still kind of amusingly dumb. It’s a likable sort of dumb; he doesn’t really sugarcoat anything and speaks his mind in an extremely straightforward way, even when he maybe shouldn’t.

The beginning of the chapter reestablishes that he can’t swim (who am I to judge? Neither can I), and he almost dies by being sucked into a whirlpool. Only to emerge like this a few pages later.

Luffy is an odd one, and he ends this chapter with a new boat (still just a small dinghy, but hey, it’s a new small dinghy), and a new companion; the aforementioned cabin boy, who wants to eventually join the navy.

A pirates’ graveyard and a mysterious bounty hunter. I wonder what sort of adventure our boys are about to sail themselves into? I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow.

Until then.

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Chapter 1

One Piece Every Day is a column where I read a chapter of One Piece every single day—more or less—and discuss my thoughts on it. Each entry will have spoilers up to the chapter covered in that day’s column.

The temptation when starting a project like this is always to make grand statements of intent and purpose. I’ve already explained my reasoning at length in the intro article, though, so all that’s really left to do is aweigh the proverbial anchors and set sail. As I mentioned there, some back of the envelope math tells me that even if I keep up the rate of one chapter per day, every single day, with no breaks, and even if no new material came out at all, it will take me somewhere on the order of three years to catch up to the current chapter. Lots of things can happen in three years, but the great cliché goes that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We take that step today, together. I do hope you’re reading along.

I wonder what it was like, on that hot July day in ’97, to read the first chapter of One Piece. Did people read this and just know that they had something special on their hands? I certainly didn’t, I was a mere three years old at the time and even if I could’ve read comic books of any kind, I don’t believe One Piece was translated into English for some time until after it debuted.

I suspect that most people took away from the first chapter back then basically what I took away from it today; it’s got some really great action scenes and some nice cartoony art. For the first step of a thousand-mile journey, that’s probably more than enough.

Another thing that strikes me right out of the gate is a strong—albeit, simple—theme. There’s some solid thoughts had about the true nature of strength itself here. We’re introduced to Monkey D. Luffy as a kid, and he has a kid’s idea of what it means to be strong. His role model / eventual hat donor Captain Redhair Shanks just taking it in stride when “mountain bandits” intimidate him and his crew in a bar confuses Luffy. (And because Luffy is a young boy in a shonen manga, he expresses that confusion loudly and angrily.)

But when they go after Luffy himself later in the chapter, Redhair’s crew dispatch most of them with minimal fuss, proving that they could have fought off the bandits all along. There’s having strength, and there’s knowing what to do with it, and over this chapter, Luffy learns the difference. (Or at least, gets the first of however many lessons.) I think the key is here, fairly early on, where Redhair pretty much lays it out plain.

I’m particularly fond of the scene where the bandit leader kidnaps Luffy. He’s eaten by a sea serpent—a properly cartoony-monstrous thing, all crocodile teeth and fish fins—and it’s up to Redhair to fight the thing off and save Luffy. The fact that he loses an arm in the process barely seems to faze him. He saved his little buddy, that’s the important thing, right?

So the prologue ends, and years later when Luffy sets out on his own journey, he avenges his mentor by clocking that “local sea monster” right across the face as he paddles out to sea in nothing more than a wooden rowboat. The two-page spread of Luffy womping the monster is nice and dynamic, incidentally, it’s probably the best art in the whole chapter.

If you’re not reading along you’re probably puzzled as to why he has Mr. Fantastic-esque stretchy powers. The answer is that he ate a magic fruit. Manga truly is a medium without parallel.

An image that strikes me even more though, is the final page of the chapter. Luffy, despite being alone on a little rickety-rack ship in the middle of the ocean, loudly declares to no one in particular that he’s going to become king of the pirates! To surpass Redhair Shanks (and eventually return the older captain’s straw hat!), presumably find Gold Roger’s buried treasure which we learned about in the chapter’s intro. All that good stuff! Adventure, hoy!

As in the ocean, so on land, and as he goes, so too do we.

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, One Piece Every Day

ONE PIECE Every Day – Announcement & Overview

One Piece, Eiichiro Oda‘s magnum opus, is, by some metrics, the most popular manga ever written. It’s a defining work of the modern shonen landscape, and in a broader sense, massively influential to a whole generation of creative talents both within Japan and abroad. The adventures of Monkey D. Luffy and his crew, the Straw Hat Pirates, have been captivating audiences for 25 years; a quarter of a century as of next month. But, if you know enough about anime and manga to even be aware of this blog, let alone be reading it, you know all of that. So why am I telling you something you already know?

Well, to be frank, despite its massive popularity and a reputation that precedes it by a nautical mile, I’ve never read a single page or watched a single minute of One Piece. For whatever reason, until recently, I’d just never felt compelled to. This is, in its own way, strange for me personally. I’ve been a fan of anime and manga since I was pretty young, and I was a child of the Toonami era of American anime distribution. On top of that, I really like pirate stories! Around that very same time, the Pirates of the Caribbean films were some of my favorites (and I still kind of like them today, despite their poor critical reception and any thoughts I may have about a certain actor who was in them).

But I was a dumb preteen, and then a dumb teen, and when I was that age I had a vague snobbery to my taste in anime. I don’t remember, exactly, but I think, knowing myself at the time, I probably just assumed that anything that was that popular couldn’t possibly be worth my time. In hindsight, this was very stupid for a lot of reasons, but there’s not much sense in dwelling on it. Still, even as I’ve gotten older the time just hasn’t felt right.

It occurred to me a few weeks ago that this was also a very dumb attitude to have. A few things put it in perspective for me; the keen awareness that while I’m not old yet I’m certainly not getting any younger, the recent popularity of tumblr phenomenon Dracula Daily, and my own aforementioned thoughts on a certain actor in a trilogy of pirate movies that I used to like.

And then, about a week ago, I learned—spoiler for a recent One Piece manga chapter, I think, coming literally right after this interjection, you’ve been warned—that there is a trans woman in the series as of a recent chapter of the story. And that scrap of representation was, I think, what the last of my weird, completely irrational, totally pointless defenses against this shonen series needed to fall. “Fuck it” I thought. “What is there to lose?”

Hence; this project. The premise is extremely simple. I will read the One Piece manga. Every single day, you will have a new article to read—usually on the shorter side—about a chapter of said manga. Starting from the beginning. In order. One day at a time.

It will take me, provided I take no breaks, and not accounting for any chapters that have yet to be released, about three years to catch up to where the manga is at the time of this writing, June 6th, 2022. I am setting myself a fundamentally absurd task, to not just read a very long story but to write about it, to write about every single part of it.

I have a lot of reasons for wanting to do this, but the biggest is simply to see if I can. I’m not quite brave enough to leave myself no escape hatches here; if the columns are pulling little interest by the time I’ve finished the first collected volume I’ll probably pull the plug and just continue reading the series by myself. Likewise, if I burn out on the project I will allow myself to take hiatuses. But still, I’m optimistic. The real honest core of this whole project is that I just Want To Do This. It’s a Mt. Everest for a lifelong couch potato.

Also! I want you, yes you, the girl, boy, enby, or whatever else you may be reading this, to read One Piece along with me. A chapter a day is not much; while One Piece on the whole is very long, the individual chapters are only a brisk 20 or so pages each. It will be entirely viable for you, dear reader, to settle in with a chapter of the story and one of my columns at night before you turn in for bed, or in the morning before you go to work. Is assuming that you want to arrogant of me? Maybe, but I think it’ll be fun, and I place a lot of value in fun.

As for how I’m doing this, here are the basics.

I will be reading the chapters myself in chunks, usually a few at a time, because I want to keep a nice buffer for myself so that way there will be—ideally!—a new One Piece Every Day, you know, every day.

I fully intend to give my honest thoughts on each chapter. Those may be very brief or very lengthy, and they may skew positive or negative. (I have already been informed by some well-meaning friends that there are some things in this manga that have Not Aged Well, but I have never shied away from earnestly evaluating art, even if it is problematic at times.)

These columns will have their own archive on the main page, as well as their own “recent posts” section. (They technically already do, that was the reason behind that unexplained change a few days ago, for those of you who noticed.)

And that’s basically it! Conceptually, this is all very simple. It is just a matter of effort. And there’s good news on that front; if you’re reading this, I’ve already read the first week’s worth of chapters, and already have the columns written. So, I’m already getting this ship ready to sail, you just need to decide if you’re on board or not.

I hope to see you tomorrow, for the proper casting off.

Until then.

One Piece Every Day relies on reader support even more than most of my columns do. Please consider sharing this article around if you liked it!

Also consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: The Exuberant Lesbian Wizard Science of THE MAGICAL REVOLUTION OF THE REINCARNATED PRINCESS AND THE GENIUS YOUNG LADY

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before; totally average person from our world dies and gets reincarnated as someone of note in a stock JRPG-style fantasy universe. This is, fundamentally, the rock that the modern iteration of the isekai genre is built on. There are many, many variations of it, but the central premise remains familiar to anyone who has even a slight familiarity with modern anime.

The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and The Genius Young Lady, monstrously long title and all, is really only different in one key way. Our protagonist—and her obligatory love interest—are both girls.

Yes, it’s true, a yuri fantasy isekai. There are a couple of these. I’m in Love with the Villainess is well-liked, and The Executioner and Her Way of Life has an anime airing right now. Revolution Princess is a bit simpler than either of those, though. It is, at least going by the nineteen chapters currently available in English, a more straightforward heroic fantasy. (That’s nineteen chapters of the manga, for the record. It’s based on a light novel, presumably much farther along, by Piero Karasu.) It also draws a bit on the “tech boost” subgenre, a style wherein the hero uses their modern knowledge to fast-track technological development in their new world. It’s a fraught, and frankly, very silly, style, but that doesn’t much matter here. We haven’t really seen many fruits of this pursuit of better living through magitek yet, and indeed some part of the series’ point seems to be in illustrating how difficult doing such a thing would actually be. But I risk getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with the basics.

Anisphia (“Anis” for short) is the princess of a roughly medieval European-ish kingdom somewhere in a fantasy world. She used to be someone else, in another life. We don’t learn much about that “someone else,” but we do learn, crucially, that she was obsessed with the idea of magic. Now living in a world where it’s a reality, she’s hellbent on learning as much about it as she can. (Credit here, the scene of young Anis’ personality being “built” puzzle piece by puzzle piece, and finally completing as her past life memories come rushing back to her, is an intriguingly poetic visual.)

Because of a condition, she can’t actually use magic herself, directly. But over the course of her young life, she studies it extensively, becoming something of a magical mad scientist, creating useful gadgets for herself and inventing an entire field of study; a sort of “applied science of magic” called magicology. If that all seems a little dry to you, early parts of the manga are indeed a bit so. Things get more interesting when we’re introduced to Anis’ co-protagonist.

The daughter of a duke, one Euphyllia (“Euphy”), is renounced by the man she was betrothed to. That man? Anis’ older brother, the kingdom’s prince. It’s not totally clear why he’s dumping Euphy—he claims she was talking badly to a lady-friend of his who he seems to have far stronger feelings for, but the situation seems more complicated than that and we don’t learn all the details—but he’s doing it very publicly, destroying her reputation in the process.

Cue Anis, flying in on a magic broomstick of her own design. In an absurd—even in-universe—turn of events, Anis sees this as an opportunity. She reasons that if her older brother doesn’t need Euphy anymore, maybe Euphy should come with her instead. None of the nobles present are particularly okay with this, but Anis does manage to (eventually) convince the only person whose opinion on the subject really matters; Euphy herself.

Even this early on, Anis’ spur-of-the-moment decision to pick up this random disgraced woman as her (we soon learn) lab assistant is strange, but Anis is a beaming ray of pure personality, and it’s hard both for the other characters and for us the audience to not be charmed by her. Her sudden absconding with the Duke’s daughter somehow manages to scan as romantic.

Anis is, in general, an endearing protagonist, although not a flawless one. She’s charming when taken with the magic of her world, which she’s singlehandedly wrought into a science mostly by herself. She has an enthusiasm for admiring her own handiwork (sometimes to a positively Dexter’s Laboratory-ish degree).

But she also has a cool side. She was born without the ability to use magic naturally, and so Sciences her way around problems that would ordinarily be solvable with “regular” spellcasting. It’s easy to be cynical about this kind of thing nowadays, but Revolution Princess sells this characterization very well, partly by making it clear how into her Euphy is, and partly by cutting it with her general immaturity to not make her too perfect. She can occasionally come across as remote and, when pursuing her interests, reckless.

(There’s also the matter that her disregard for the spirits that are responsible for the world’s magic system, and the stones they leave behind that she uses to power her devices, does feel kind of Reddit Atheist-y at points. Thankfully it doesn’t come up enough to be a real problem.)

Euphy, meanwhile, is so dazed by the sudden shakeup in her life that it takes a while for her to know what to do with herself. She knows she likes Anis, at least in some way. She knows that all the training she did to become the future queen—remember, Anis’ brother is a crown prince—was for naught. She feels directionless and adrift. Anis doesn’t entirely get this, and the two come into conflict a few times over it. Anis, you see, is more than content to let Euphy do what she likes, but since she doesn’t know what “what she likes” even is, it just makes her feel restless.

They come to an understanding during of the manga’s first—and currently only—big, dramatic arc, wherein Anis decides to try stopping a rampaging dragon. Why? Well, aside from the fact that if left unchecked it might kill a lot of people, she wants the magical stone it carries within it to make more magitek gadgets. Fair enough. There’s a whole other slate of stampeding monsters to take care of, too, and Anis gets to really show off her action heroine chops here. (For those of you who, like me, just enjoy watching anime girls go full stone-cold killer, this is probably enough to sell the manga alone.)

The fight with the dragon is a visual treat, artist Harutsugu Nadaka‘s compositional skill is really something to behold in general, and he knocks the climactic battle scene here out of the park. I could easily fill this whole article with examples, and the dragon itself is worth highlighting; all shadowy wings beating the air, teeth and claws.

But I have to say my personal favorite is this absolutely bonkers page where Anis uses one of her gadgets, a magic dagger, to split the dragon’s breath in two.

These would be the obvious highlights of any hypothetical anime adaption as well, but don’t consider Nadaka a one-trick pony who’s only good at fight scenes. He can also excellently portray say, warm intimacy or imposing projection equally well, and it is this that gives the manga most of its visual strength. It’s immersive in a way that’s all too easy to take for granted.

When Euphy saves Anis from her first, botched run at the dragon, the princess is undeterred, and the panel makes her look positively majestic. You can practically see her cape flapping in the wind, feel the breeze blowing, and smell the sulfur and burnt fabric. It’s only natural that this eventually leads to that page of Anis splitting the dragon’s breath above. How could someone this confident not be able to do the impossible?

This is the difference between a relationship that feels convenient and one that feels real, and it’s here where Anis and Euphy seem to finally “click” with each other for good. The general sentiments here are old—far older than the manga format itself—but they’re expressed very well. Reading Revolution Princess, I get why Euphy and Anis are into each other, and the visuals play a huge part in selling that. At a ball, some weeks later and held in celebration of Anis’ victory, Euphy straight-up confesses. I’ve seen a lot of confession scenes over the course of my time reading manga, and I have to say that this is one of the sweetest. I absolutely love how we get to see a rare shot of Anis being totally, sincerely flummoxed by someone else’s actions, the brave isekai heroine reverts to a blushing schoolgirl in the face of such strong feelings. (Note also how this scene and the one immediately above mirror each other. I like that, it’s a nice visual touch.)

I’d tell you more—because goodness dear readers, do I ever want more people to pick this up—but in truth, there isn’t much more, at least not yet. Revolution Princess is still a fairly young serialization, and as good as it’s been so far, I feel as though its best chapters are ahead of it. I can only hope it picks up the following it deserves. In addition to its obvious appeal to the WLWs of the world (or just anyone who likes a good romance), there are other, intriguing plots forming in the background; dragon prophecies, jealous older siblings, and and an eccentric girl who “collects curses.” A world is being built here, and while Anis and Euphy are at the center of it, they aren’t the only interesting parts of it.

I often lament that so much yuri focuses solely on the romantic aspect. I like romance (I’m covering two romance anime this very season!), but having some other plot as well definitely helps things feel more fleshed-out and lived in. In general, I’m fond of this current wave of yuri isekai manga, and I hope that Executioner is not the last to get an anime adaption. Stories like this are built on old foundations, but Revolution Princess is a breath of exhilarating, magical fresh air.

Update: If you liked this article, be sure to check out my writeup on the anime!

Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.