Youkoso, Youkoso!! Break out the new system it's time for some anime! Lindsay covers Tokyo 24th Ward and Tomodachi Game. While Dustin covers The Greatest Demon Lord Is Reborn as a Typical Nobody after pivoting from another show and Love After World Domination. Then they both cover Love and War season 3! Let's Anime 158!
Read MoreReview: 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.”
Read MoreReview: Blood Stained Teeth #1
By Dustin Cabeal
There’s a lot of vampire books coming out from Image Comics lately. Maybe I’ll like one of them in the future, but Blood Stained Teeth which is a grammar error that I cannot unsee or correct, is not the vampire book for me.
The entire first issue is used to create a situation for the main character to be forced to go through with the plot of the comic. Which does not make it a particularly strong first issue. Especially since it reveals its emotional lynch pin within its pages. You might be wondering to what I’m referring. It’s the plot device that’s been set up with a timer waiting to go off and emotionally manipulated the audience. It’s vampire Pixar moment and it could very well work. Emotional bombs are successful based on the amount of fuse given to them, so if Christian Ward writes a slow burn, it may be successful regardless of the rest of the story.
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Review: The Ballad of Ronan #1
By Dustin Cabeal
I’ve never been an orphan, but I cannot imagine that 16 in the age in which you wash out of any orphanage program. If so, we really need to come together with our city leaders and correct this wrong. How do we expect 16-year-olds to go out into the world and support themselves when they’re not even legal adults? And yet our main character has turned 16 and is taking what little money she has to visit her dead mother’s grave and stay at a B&B… after getting a tattoo that she’s not of legal age to get.
Read MoreReview: Not All Robots #1
By Dustin Cabeal
This is my first comic from AWA. I have little interest in where the company came from and all the backstory. I just know that more comic book companies are a good thing especially as legacy companies continue to be bought by corporate entities. Though I’m fairly certain that AWA is likely owned by a corporation. At any rate, this issue does not make me want to further explore their line of books. That’s fucked up right? Well, that’s how it goes. Every book has the potential to be someone’s first or first book with your company and when you’re a new company every issue potentially decides a reader’s interest in your entire line. That said, I’m not an asshole and will give them further chances, but Not All Robots is a book that I would like to never think about again.
Read MoreReview: 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.
Read MoreReview: The White Lady
By Dustin Cabeal
Death! It’s coming for us all. Of if it was that easy to sum up The White Lady with just that statement. Instead, we find a complex look at how we care for our elderly. Is there kindness we can provide at the end of one’s life be it a simple gesture of pretending to be someone’s granddaughter after they begin pulling back from them. Quite frankly, I do not think anyone has the answer and there are all sorts of legal gray areas when it comes to end of someone’s life.
Read MoreReview: The Joneses #1
By Dustin Cabeal
Unfortunately, we’re going to spend a lot of time talking about this cover. What, the holy fuck is going on here? Who thought this photoshopped monstrosity was a good idea and that people would see it on the shelves and want to pick it up and buy it? For starters, the heads don’t match the bodies. The hair for the women are so poorly lasso’d around that it looks tragically bad. What is the dad looking at? What are the children looking at? Why is the mom so goddamn happy to be squatting awkwardly to put those leaves in the bag? I’m not done. Why do they have a wheelbarrow and garbage bags and why do none of the proportions exist on the same planet? Is scale not a thing we can do in photoshop? That wheelbarrow is fucking floating on that grass because it’s sure as shit not interacting with it. Here’s the biggest question, where did all these leaves come from? There’s not a goddamn tree in the yard to produce even a fraction of these leaves. Last one, who buys two different sizes of trash bags? The cover is enough for you to walk away from this issue. It’s front runner for the worst cover I’ve ever seen in my life. I wish that it got better from here, but it doesn’t really.
Read MoreReview: Ghost Cage #2
By Dustin Cabeal
I wanted to start off with a joke about my interest in this comic being used up like natural resources, but I’m afraid the quality hits too close to home for this comic. Nick Dragotta is a talented artist. I could stare at the pages of this comic all day as they are wonderful. The visuals of the mecha/monster versions of energy resources are still a wonderful idea on paper, but the story execution has delved into predictable and erratic.
Predictable you say? Yes, it was not even remotely a surprise that it was crazy old guy’s daughter. Less surprising was the fact that crazy old guy is alive and looks shittier than his hologram self. I saw Prometheus as well, this isn’t new. It doesn’t have to be new, but the story does very little to make it relevant. We’ve had a handful of panels with the daughter, but I’m supposed to care about her reveal? Why? I don’t. I barely like Doyle and she won’t stop talking so would I care about a daughter character?
Read MoreReview: The Transcendent One-Sided Love of Yoshida the Catch vol. 1
By Dustin Cabeal
I love a long-titled manga as much as the next person, but just giving your manga a long title doesn’t make it good. There is a concept introduced in the first story segment of this volume that is interesting. The gist is that an extremely attractive and hard-working salaryman moonlights as an assistant to a mangaka author that is his childhood friend. Why? Well read that exceedingly long title and you will understand.
Read MoreLet's Movie - Choose or Die
Before 2020, I think this question would have been an easy answer. But how many of you picked die? Yeah, I feel you 2022 crowd. Shit is whack, but not as whacky as this movie gets. It's YA horror for the Netflix crowd. Don't worry, we don't care about stock prices so we're only going to spoil the entire movie.
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Let's Anime - Bubble
We're dedicating an entire episode to covering Netflix's latest animated movie, that's right it's Bubble time! Spoilers galore so if you wanted to watch the movie then you should turn the podcast off right away.
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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.
Read MoreLet's Movie - The Batman
Kevin and Dustin talk about 2022's The Batman... and a lot of other Batman related things.
Support the show(https://www.buymeacoffee.com/letsmovie)
Read MoreReview: The Clay People: Colossus (One-shot)
By Dustin Cabeal
I had no idea that this comic was based on a song. I didn’t know there was a band called The Clay People either. I learned both things at the end of the comic and while it didn’t change anything for me, it may be information that another reader could use before deciding to purchase this one-shot from Top Cow.
I have read this story in different forms, with different lead characters dozens of times. There is something to this story that is searching for an interesting outlet, and I can see the broad appeal to using it. Afterall a clay golem that Jewish people can use for justice/revenge and stems back to World War II feels like a treasure trove of potential stories. Yet, they all pretty much end up like this one-shot.
Read MoreReview: Yellow Cab
By Dustin Cabeal
Yellow Cab is an interesting read to say the least. I spent the entire story waiting for the other shoe to drop and it never did. Instead, it’s just a look at the complicated nature of driving a cab in New York and how basically it’s a money pit trap for immigrants looking at getting their start in the country.
What’s even more disappointing is that it’s not even a true story, but instead the author of the novel has written themselves into the story to give a fake sense of realism. At least if the concept was based on fact, it would have perhaps been a story to bring up for this one interesting aspect.
Read MoreReview: Little Monsters #1
By Dustin Cabeal
The concept of eternal children playing capture the flag and tag like the lost boys from Peter Pan is short-lived in this first issue of Little Monsters. It shouldn’t take more than the cover and a few lines of dialogue to figure out that our band of children are all vampires. And though some of them were growing bored of playing childish games, that concept of an empty city inhabited by children playing childish games for hours on end was more intriguing that the rest of the issue.
Read MoreLet's Anime - Studylumpkiss
By Dustin Cabeal and Linday Mallard
You know we're covering more new episodes! That's why you came back this week to hear Lindsay and Dustin talk about A Couple of Cuckoos, The Greatest Demon Lord is Reborn etc, Onipan!, Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie, Spy x Family and Don't Hurt Me, My Healer!
Support the show(https://www.buymeacoffee.com/letsanime)
Read MoreLet's Movie - Arrival
By Dustin Cabeal
We head back to a simpler time... 2016. Before we diverged on this hellish time line that we now find ourselves on. Don't worry, if Arrival teaches us anything, time isn't linear and we may be able to turn this ship around. Anyway, it's Arrival, a movie neither of us had watched until this week... how the hell does Sony keep the lights on?
Support the show(https://www.buymeacoffee.com/letsmovie)
Read MoreReview: Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister vol. 1
By Dustin Cabeal
I will never understand how three people from the same family can have three different hair colors and look different from each other, but that’s manga/anime in a nutshell. The story behind Amagami Sisters is easy to sum up. An orphan by the name of Uryu Kamihate has aged out of the orphanage he lives in. The caretaker of a shire has agreed to take him in, but when he gets there… there’s a catch. He must marry one of his granddaughters and take over running the shrine.
Now this wouldn’t be much of a story if all parties were onboard with the plan. Kamihate has turned his back on the gods due to his mother dying of an illness when he was a child. It’s alluded to that he did a lot of shrine visits, folded a lot of cranes and basically did all the things the “gods” said to do in order to save his mother. Now he only believes in medicine, especially since his surrogate mother is a doctor that raised him.
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