This review contains a few spoilers for later volumes of Happiness, and discusses one character's efforts to cope with PTSD after a violent attack. Proceed with caution. The first three volumes of Shuzo Oshimi's Happiness explore familiar terrain, using vampirism as a … [Read more...]
Vertical Rescues Voices of a Distant Star
Big news from Vertical Comics: the publisher just announced that it will be issuing a new edition of The Voices of a Distant Star, a single-volume adaptation of Makoto Shinkai's 2002 OVA. First released by Tokyopop in 2006, Voices focuses on a pair of lovers who are separated by … [Read more...]
The Flowers of Evil, Vol. 2
Do you remember the first time you tried to impress someone on a date? I do: I was fifteen, and thrilled that an older boy had invited me to dinner. (He drove a Mazda two-seater and quoted lines from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, which, in 1988, made him a god.) My strategy for … [Read more...]
Drifting Net Cafe, Vol. 1
It takes nerve — nay, stones — to update Kazuo Umezu's bat-shit classic The Drifting Classroom. That's exactly what Shuzo Oshimi (The Flowers of Evil) has done in Drifting Net Cafe, however, substituting a nebbishy salaryman for Sho, the original series' twelve-year-old … [Read more...]
The Flowers of Evil, Vol. 1
If you grew up in a small town, you probably knew someone like Takao Kasuga, the nebbish-hero of The Flowers of Evil. Kasuga is a precocious middle-schooler who copes with provincial life by burying his nose in a book. His peers tolerate him, but find him a little too smug and … [Read more...]
