Manga

A portion of my web surfing last night illustrated how my thought process sometimes progresses through loose connections.

First, a bit of prefacing: Tuesday night, I bought from Play-Asia the Japanese version of Lux-Pain for $15 (previously wrote about the US version) as well as pre-owned copies of two Detective Conan Game Boy Color games for $10 each: Kigantou Hihou Densetsu and Karakuri Jiin Satsujin Jiken. That same night, I came across someone on Nico Douga who is currently playing through the 1998 Playstation game Meitantei Conan: 3-Jin no Meitantei, specifically Haibara’s case. I later found play videos of Conan’s and Heiji’s cases, both of which I just begun to watch. (That group has also played Haibara’s case, albeit with muddled audio from the game.)

While browsing through Play-Asia’s listings last night, I came across a Soul Eater Wii game called Monotone Princess. I searched for a gameplay video on Nico and found one of each lead technician (Maka, Black Star, and Death the Kid) going through a basic tutorial. I then did a Google search for “maka”, I guess looking for who was that character’s voice actress, and the second result was OGT’s post about gender representation in the series. After reading the post, I scrolled down to the comments and someone (Inuhanyou) had brought up the Chrono Crusade manga as another example of a balance between female and male partners rather than the female just playing the support role.

Even though I saw the anime some years ago, I had never read the manga it was “adapted” from. ADV Manga released the manga in the United States and since that division has been effectively dead for the past few years, the volumes have fallen out-of-print. Luckily, most of the eight volumes are available on Amazon so I might gradually make my way through it one volume at a time.

Related: earlier this week, I looked at TRSI’s list of weekly releases and saw that volume 19 of the Excel Saga manga had come out. My first thought was “It’s been going that long?” To my surprise, Rikdo Koshi is still writing it and it’s currently being serialized in Young King Ours, a monthly seinen manga magazine. This is another manga that had an divergent anime adaptation (e.g., Hyatt was a simple applicant to ACROSS in the manga, whereas she was cast as a princess from space in the anime) and another I had not started reading. Unlike ADV Manga, Viz is still going strong so back volumes should be easier to find. Both manga series are now on my back burner but Chrono Crusade has a slighter higher priority than Excel Saga at the moment.