Some manga

[avram]

New comics day, but nothing that engaged my shopping gland. Over the past week or two I’ve found a few manga titles I like:

Planetes
by Makoto Yukimura, published by Tokyopop
I have no idea how to pronounce this one. “Plah-neets”? “Plah-nah-tayz”? Whatever, it’s a great SF comic about astronaut-garbagemen working to clear debris out of Earth’s local orbital pathways. Nice, mature writing style, by which I don’t mean that there’s sex, but that the characters don’t all act like hysterical highschoolers.

Gunslinger Girl
by Yu Aida, published by ADV Manga
Italy’s “Social Welfare Agency” has a black ops division that builds cyborg assassins. The cyborg treatment works best on children, so that’s what they use. The kids are lethal, but still have the emotions and vulnerabilities of children, so each is paired off with an adult trainer who acts as a parent/older sibling figure as well as a supervisor. Melodramatic, but nicely dark.

PhD: Phantasy Degree
by Son Hee-Joon, published by Tokyopop
Yet another highschool manga, I shouldn’t like this, yet somehow I do. Maybe it’s because it’s about a human girl trying to gain admission to a monster school, so not all the characters are annoying manga Japanese schoolkids. Maybe it’s because the author’s doing a good job of parcelling out mysteries little by little while moving the story along. Maybe I just like the ruthless protagonist, who starts the comic attempting to eat a werewolf. (And no relation to the webcomic.)

Comments

Re: Planetes

[bugsybanana.livejournal.com]

And to think, just this afternoon I was wondering when Quark was coming out on DVD...

As for the title, it might be plah-NETT (French pronunciation), but I'd expect an accent mark on the first E in that case. It's definitely not Spanish -- that would be "Planetas" -- nor German -- "Planeten."

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

Howsabout in Russian? Isn't that second E reversed?