Mari Fukami during a quiz club demonstration in Fastest Finger First
The quarterly rush of new anime premieres has come around again. I’ve watched the first episodes from a handful of new series: Fastest Finger First, A Centaur’s Life, Welcome to the Ballroom through a Twitch stream sponsored by Amazon’s Anime Strike channel, and Aho Girl.
Akko, Sucy, and Lotte in Little Witch Academia
It’s a new month and I’m starting a weekly column called “Monday Check-in”. Not the first person to do something like this (for example, Lauren does regular Monday posts on Otaku Journalist) but I’m hoping setting a day of the week to write a post will help me think more frequently about what I have been reading and watching. Continue reading
Mitsune’s shirt: “Don’t trust anyone over 30” (front cover of Love Hina manga volume 4)
Today is my 31st birthday and I’m in a contemplative mood.
Right now, I feel both connected to contemporary goings-on and disconnected from them: interacting with friends and other enthusiasts through Twitter and blogs but still not very familiar with video bloggers popular with younger groups of fans. In the past two years, I have lost interest in attending many convention events, given up on keeping pace with new anime simulcasts, and reminisced about bygone and still active anime bloggers. There are hundreds of things I want to watch and read but I often succumb to indecision about which things to start watching or reading next. I experience moments of self-doubt where I ask myself “why am I still doing this?” and “what do I have to offer?” Continue reading
Magazine covers for the second batch of “Jump Start” debuts in 2017
I wrote a post in February about the first three manga series in Weekly Shonen Jump‘s 2017 “Jump Start” program, which were We Never Learn, U19, and Demon Prince Poro’s Diaries. Since then, three more series have had their own three-chapter trial runs – Hungry Marie, Dr. Stone and Robot x Laserbeam. After Viz weighed the reader survey results for all six series, they added Dr. Stone, Robot x Laserbeam, and We Never Learn to the magazine’s regular lineup. The first three chapters from all the Jump Start series are available as free chapters on Viz’s website.
In this post, I discuss the following chapters: Hungry Marie chapters 1-3, Dr. Stone chapters 1-9, Robot x Laserbeam chapters 1-7, U19 chapter 3, Demon Prince Poro’s Diaries chapters 2 & 3, and We Never Learn chapters 4-9. I have enjoyed reading all six of those series up to now, some more than others, and would like to see them get digital volume releases in the future.
The English-language Weekly Shonen Jump digital magazine is in the middle of a six-series “Jump Start” event. Three series have already debuted – high-school comedy We Never Learn, shonen action/drama U19, and monster comedy Demon Prince Poro’s Diaries – while the other three new series coming soon are Hungry Marie (February 27th), Dr. Stone (March 6th), and Robot x Laserbeam (March 20th).
I recently bought a one-year subscription to Shonen Jump during a promotional sale, partly so I could easily check out the new manga debuts. Here are my short thoughts on the first three that have come out.
Sawako Machida in Miss Bernard Said
I had some ideas of other posts to write for the 12 Days blogging project but I’ve struggled to formulate those into individual posts so I am condensing the better ideas into this final 12 Days 2016 entry.
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