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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

By Dustin Cabeal

I will be up front, the reason I wanted to read this book was the title. There is probably not a single circumstance in which if someone were to yell “catch these hands” that I wouldn’t laugh or show interest. What made it better were the two seemingly average women with scowls on their faces on the cover. I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew someone was going to catch these hands… and I needed to be there.

The story is about an aging delinquent that finds herself the only woman from her group of friends that is unmarried, without child and without a steady job. After yet another friend lost to marriage, she decides to get her life together and stop being a delinquent. The first step in her mind is to go clothes shopping. It’s sound logic, you need to stop looking like a delinquent to first stop being one. The clerk at the store pleads with her to stay after nearly chasing her away. She agrees to help her find whatever clothes she likes, but that’s when our main character Takebe notices the clerks name tag… Kirara Soramori. Suddenly the name is familiar. It turns out that Soramori is an old rival of Takebe’s from high school.

By Dustin Cabeal

Manga and anime as a result have popular themes that run through them. You cannot compare it to American television because there’s always genres that succeed. You can count on their being a place for dramas and half hour comedies because they are always successful. The same is true of manga and anime, but you can peak at generations of work and figure out exactly what was popular in any given time. Currently there is a rising wave of singularly focused romcoms. No longer do we have the love story infused harem comedies in which one obvious character is pursued by every beautiful woman in the school. Instead, we have two characters simply unfamiliar with each other developing a realistic relationship while facing whatever quirky adventure into which they are thrust.

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.

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.

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.