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Blood on the Tracks, Vols. 1-5
One part Mommie Dearest, one part Kids, Blood on the Tracks is an unsettling depiction of the toxic parent-child relationship between Seiko, an overbearing mother, and Seiichi, her thirteen-year-old...
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Marmalade Boy: Collector’s Edition, Vol. 1
One of shojo manga’s most time-honored plot lines goes something like this: a young girl’s life is turned upside down when her mother or father remarries someone with a teenager of their own, usually a...
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Insomniacs After School, Vol. 1
First published in 1911, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden has beguiled millions of readers with its portrait of Mary and Colin, two sickly children who heal themselves by finding a forgotten...
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Lovely Muco!, Vol. 1
For thirteen years, I lived with Grendel, a smart, stubborn Australian shepherd who treated me and my husband like a pair of unruly sheep. She woke us up at 5:45 am every day, herded us to the park,...
View ArticleYashaHime: Princess Half-Demon, Vols. 1-2
YashaHime: Princess Half-Demon epitomizes what I dislike most about IP-driven entertainment. It’s a manga adaptation of an anime sequel to a popular series, made with little involvement from the...
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My Dear Detective: Mitsuko’s Case Files, Vol. 1
Have you seen The Law According to Lidia Poët? It’s a period drama that’s loosely based on a real-life woman who was the first in Italy to pass the bar exam. Though the series explores the real-life...
View ArticleFrom the Vault: Mitsukazu Mihara’s The Embalmer
This month, I’m reaching into the PopCultureShock vault for a review of Mitsukazu Mihara’s The Embalmer, one of those offbeat titles that Tokyopop published back in the aughts. It’s not hard to see why...
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Innocent, Vol. 1
Innocent is hard to pin down. On the one hand, it’s a meticulously researched period drama starring real-life figures such as Casanova, Robert-François Damiens, and Jeanne Bécu; on the other, it’s a...
View ArticleThe Manga Critic’s Year in Review: 2023
At the beginning of 2023, I vowed to post one review or essay per month, a goal I met for the first half of the year. Then work got busy, and my husband and I did some home improvement projects we’d...
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The Best and Worst Manga of 2023
This weekend’s Nor’easter provided me a swell opportunity to finish my long-gestating Best and Worst Manga list for 2023. One of the things that tripped me up was the sheer volume of new work published...
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