This weekend’s Nor’easter provided me a swell opportunity to finish my long-gestating Best and Worst Manga list for 2023, a list I’d hoped to publish in December. One of the things that tripped me up was the sheer volume of new work published last year; when I first started reviewing manga in 2006, it was hard to imagine a market that offered a title for every conceivable reader, from the Chainsaw Man enthusiast to the the romantic, the oenophile, the foodie, the soccer fan, the gore hound, the isekai buff, and even the middle-aged manga critic. Though I made a concerted effort to be as thorou ..read more

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 started doing home improvement projects we’d been putting off, making it harder to find the bandwidth for reviewing. The reviews I did publish, however, seemed to have found an audience, so I’m setting the same goal for myself in 2024 with the aim of writing more in-depth essays about older titles like Furari and BL Metamorphosis, as well as more reviews of classic, indie, and overlooked series. My other major goal for 2024 is ..read more

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 lurid portrayal of a young man’s corruption, filled with over-the-top scenes of torture and debauchery that recall Justine, or The Misfortune of Virtue. The tonal mismatch between its historical aspirations and its treatment of the principal character never gel into a coherent story, however, resulting in a handsome but repellant mess that isn’t serious enough to move the reader or ridiculous enoug ..read more

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 Tokyopop thought there was an audience for Mihara’s work, as she played an important role in defining the Gothic Lolita aesthetic. Tokyopop licensed five series—Doll, Haunted House, IC in a Sunflower, Requiem in Phonybrian, and The Embalmer—but they didn’t really catch on with North American readers. That’s a pity, as titles such as The Embalmer were anything but cookie cutter, tackling difficul ..read more

Have you seen The Law According to Lidia Poët? It’s a sumptuous, giddy procedural inspired by a real-life woman who fought a lonely, decades-long battle to be recognized as a member of the Order of Advocates in Turin. Though the series addresses the many hurdles Poët faced as a trailblazing figure in a male-dominated field, the show also makes plenty of room for romance and adventure: Poët is portrayed as a free spirit who has a lover and a handsome male frenemy with whom she trades barbs and nabs suspects. Oh, and she has a wardrobe to die for, even though she doesn’t have any paying clients ..read more

A quick glance at the calendar reminded me that this is my seventeenth year of blogging about comics—a figure that I find hard to contemplate. When I posted my first review at PopCultureShock, I was living in New York City and slogging through a graduate program in musicology. I was also new to manga; I hadn’t been a childhood comics fan, and my few early encounters with anime didn’t turn me into a convert. My ex-husband was a fan, however, and insisted on buying me me volumes of X/1999, InuYasha, Sandman, and Fables, and bringing me to my first ComicCon. Things snowballed from there ..read more

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 original author. Though the artist and scriptwriters have created new characters and plot lines for the sequel, YashaHime feels more like the product of a focus group than an organic continuation of the story. What makes YashaHime even more frustrating is that it squanders its potential. The authors put Sesshomaru and InuYasha’s daughters at the center of the action—a decision in keeping with ..read more

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, and marched us around until we were exhausted. She nipped our ankles when we left for work—we weren’t supposed to leave the farm, I guess—and had strong preferences about everything, from which routes we walked to which brand of kibble we bought. When she wasn’t trying to bend us to her will, she applied her formidable intelligence to foraging for snacks; she had a black bear’s talent for opening j ..read more

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 not through sorcery or super powers, but through curiosity and perseverance, as they find a forgotten space and bring it back to life. Burnett’s characters are prickly and complicated in the early stages of the book. As they begin excavating the garden, however, they become more resilient and assertive, forging a strong emotional bond with each other and their surroundings. While the story is very much a product of th ..read more

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 cute boy who’s smart, athletic, and insufferable, making a difficult situation even worse. Over the course of six or ten volumes, however, the heroine gradually moves from indignation to infatuation, finally admitting to herself what everyone else could plainly see: she likes her stepbrother. There are a usually a few complications on the way to a blissful relationship—say, a crazy ex-girlfriend ..read more