Review: Ghost Reaper Girl vol. 1
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Review: Ghost Reaper Girl vol. 1

By Dustin Cabeal

Someone turns off the power to the containment chamber and now there’s a bunch of ghosts loose in Japan! I wish, but instead we just have a bunch of demon’s that have escaped the bowels of hell and need to be collected and returned to hell. Enter our demon hunter looking for a human host to make himself a better tool for fighting demons!

Then we immediately go to a woman trying to get casted in a leading role by meeting with a creepy producer. Chloe Love introduces herself as TV star with one late night horror show under wings… Ghost Reaper Girl! A high school girl that murders monsters in a swimsuit. Thus begins the running gag of Chloe looking incredibly young and being nearly 30 years old. The producer begins to force himself upon Chloe and I can hear you reader going, “Oh no” and you’d be right but for the wrong reason. A demon pops out of the producer and says, “let me inside your body.” That’s when you should say “Oh no.”

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Review: Kaiju No. 8 vol. 2
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Review: Kaiju No. 8 vol. 2

By Dustin Cabeal

I’m happy to say that the second volume of Kaiju no. 8 continued the entertainment from the first volume. The instantly charming thing about the story is the balance between embarrassing situations that Kafka creates for himself and the bad ass action.

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Review: Kaiju No. 8 vol. 1
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Review: Kaiju No. 8 vol. 1

By Dustin Cabeal

The quick and straightforward way to describe this is a Kaiju take on Marvel’s Damage Control. Damage Control asked the question of “who fixes the city after a superhero battle” and has varying degrees of seriousness and success of the years. Kaiju no. 8 begins by asking the question, who cleans up after a giant Kaiju is defeated? Certainly not the people that put the monster down, that is for damn sure.

The story follows Kafka Hibino who works for a cleanup crew that hacks up and gets rid of defeated Kaiju. He is assigned a new part-timer to train, and they share an awkward exchange when it comes out that Kafka wanted to join the defense corps before setting into his role as a cleaner. The new kid, Reno Ichikawa, is interested in why Kafka gave up and at first, they do not particularly like each other. Eventually, they find themselves a ground zero for a new Kaiju appearance and Kafka saves Reno and vice versa. The two men end up in a hospital and talk about joining the Defense Corps together as Reno and reignited Kafka’s interest. Which is all great until a bug looking Kaiju flies into Kafka’s gaping mouth and turns him into a Kaiju.

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Review: Astra: Lost in Space vol. 3
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Review: Astra: Lost in Space vol. 3

By Dustin Cabeal

My oh, my, is there a lot of character development in this volume of Astra. We also finally go back to their home planet and see how the folks are holding up with the kids being gone. I was wondering when the story would flip back to earth, but Kenta Shinohara surprised me in that the scene with the parents didn’t play out like I thought it would at all.

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Review: Black Torch vol. 1
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Review: Black Torch vol. 1

By Dustin Cabeal

The cover grabbed me instantly for Black Torch. The smokey cat sitting on the shoulder of our main character who looks geared up for battle. My mind instantly went aflutter with ideas of what was going on with the cat how cool it would be to have a familiar that was a part of you. I wasn’t too far off as I read the story and was Tsuyoshi Takaki came up with was very cool.

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Review: Ultraman vol. 10
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Review: Ultraman vol. 10

By Dustin Cabeal

Ultraman has become one of those series that you either enjoy or simply aren’t reading yet. The downside to becoming that way also means that there merely isn’t a lot to say about it from review to review. The story is steady, not slow, but steady. With all the development, battles and conversations it can easily be mistaken as being “shonen slow,” but it’s not. The level of detail that goes into the plotting and art is unlike the vast majority of manga out there.

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Review: Mobile Suit Gundam: Thunderbolt vol. 7
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Review: Mobile Suit Gundam: Thunderbolt vol. 7

By Dustin Cabeal

I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about how great the cover feels for this book, but I’m going to take a moment and talk about it. The Viz Signature books are always bigger in size than the mangas they release. I don’t know why they don’t offer a choice between both for each title they print because there are numerous titles that I would like to read in the larger format. Anyway, the Signature series is the premiere format. The paper is a bit better, the cover is about the same, but it’s just nicer in the hands. Thunderbolts cover is the nicest cover of the Signature line. It has a better cover that has a nice texture. You want to hold it. You want to run your fingers up and down it because of how it feels. It almost tricks the mind into thinking that the interior pages feel the same which is crazy, but that’s what it does to me. It is hands down, the best feeling cover of any manga I have read. I have stopped to touch the cover at least three times while writing about it, it’s just that nice to touch, and usually, I don’t excessively touch covers, but with Thunderbolt, I always do.

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Review: After Hours vol. 2
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Review: After Hours vol. 2

By Thea Srinivasan

While love can be filled with new experiences and adventures, there are learning cycles everyone has to go through. Whether it’s trying to fix ourselves or learning how to deal with the flaws of our lover, we have to take everything openly. Not only that, communication is a key point into understanding our perspectives and someone else’s perspectives. The following review is the second volume of a series. If you have not read the first volume, this is your only spoiler warning.

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Review: My Hero Academia: Vigilantes vol. 1
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Review: My Hero Academia: Vigilantes vol. 1

By Dustin Cabeal

At one point My Hero Academia was the best new thing I had read. The world was like Marvel or DC but grounded more in how our society works. The pacing was fast, and it seemed to avoid all the shonen pitfalls that the genre is known to have. Unfortunately, for me anyway, with the rise in popularity My Hero Academia became more and more Shonen, which some people love. When it works, it works, and the creators produce a lot of long-running content which keeps them working and busy. At some point, the formula needs to change because not every plotline can sustain the long-running and filler feeling nature of the style and that’s exactly my problem with the core My Hero Academia series.

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Review: Black Clover vol. 11 & 12
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Review: Black Clover vol. 11 & 12

By Dustin Cabeal

Classic me, I waited too long to review both volumes apart from each other, and so here we are reviewing them together again. Really they deserve to be reviewed solo, but at this point just read the damn series. It’s one of my favorite current running manga, and while I refuse to watch the show due to the shitty direction the studio picked for it, I still enjoy this manga immensely. It’s the same schtick over and over, and yet it works every volume.

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Review: Fire Punch vol. 3
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Review: Fire Punch vol. 3

By Dustin Cabeal

Fire Punch has been a bit of a rollercoaster. I know that’s cliché as fuck, but that is the best way to describe the giant ups and downs of the series. The first volume was amazing in what it set up and how it was executed. A character with regenerative powers being lit on fire by a man whose flames will only extinguish with death.

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Review: One-Punch Man vol. 14

By Dustin Cabeal

One-Punch Man is a rare title. There will never be anything else like it because it is the perfect meeting of writing and art. While most people continue to be more familiar with the anime than the manga and really just falling in love with the gimmick and comedy, there is so much more going on in this series. To some, this will sound utterly crazy, but One-Punch Man is a brilliant representation of life.

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Review: Tokyo Ghoul: re vol. 5
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Review: Tokyo Ghoul: re vol. 5

By Dustin Cabeal

I’ve been a big fan of Tokyo Ghoul and re-added some interesting elements and has taken a lot of chances. Moreover, Sui Ishida grew and changed as a creator which is an incredibly rare thing in manga. That doesn’t mean it’s all worked out, but it’s made Tokyo Ghoul one of the more interesting franchises to follow.

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Review: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba vol. 1
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Review: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba vol. 1

By Dustin Cabeal

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is a standard monster hunter story. There is one and only one element of the story that stayed with me, and it’s likely that it wasn’t supposed to resonate with me the way it did. Demon Slayer is also a weird title considering it’s a vampire story. They just call them demons, but they’re sucking blood and stay away from the sun so… vampires.

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Review: Twin Star Exorcists vol. 12
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Review: Twin Star Exorcists vol. 12

By Dustin Cabeal

There is an unfortunate element of shonen manga that involves the good guys all fighting each other at some point. It’s always a harmless battle, and usually, there’s some magical protection or other dimension excuse so that the character can’t fight without consequences. While this is all well and fun and usually full of backstories and motivation reveals, it also feels lazy. Good guys shouldn’t fight good guys, and yet it’s something that plagues manga, American comics and anything involving fantasy stories with powers. Apparently, the people fighting for our safety can only do so after a pissing competition.

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Review: Queen's Quality vol. 1
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Review: Queen's Quality vol. 1

By Thea Srinivasan

I think controlling people’s will is a really cool power. Of course, there are side effects to having this ability. One thing is for sure, I would have a hunger for power, I would also get bored way too easily and I would destroy the lives of everyone around me. Mind control is something fun, but it shouldn’t be given to people unless they know how to use it correctly. Unfortunately, when someone has too much power, their body and mind may not be able to handle it.

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Review: Food Wars! vol. 24
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Review: Food Wars! vol. 24

By Dustin Cabeal

The last volume had a good setup for what will be the concluding arc of this segment of the series, which is a mouthful, but that’s the only way to put it. Soma and his dad have put everything on the line, with Daddy dearest agreeing to join the Evil Dean of the institute should his son/side lose in a group battle. It's drama at its finest.

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VIZ Media Expands Publishing Roster With MY HERO ACADEMIA: SCHOOL BRIEFS, URUSEI YATSURA, FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST Four-Panel Comics, And More
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VIZ Media Expands Publishing Roster With MY HERO ACADEMIA: SCHOOL BRIEFS, URUSEI YATSURA, FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST Four-Panel Comics, And More

Press Release

VIZ Media, LLC (VIZ Media), a premier company in the fields of publishing, animation distribution, and global entertainment licensing, expands its publishing catalog with a variety of new acquisitions announced during its official panel events held this past weekend at Comic-Con International 2018.

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