Introduction screenshot (from SnesOrama):

Game screenshot (from SnesOrama):

Game artwork:

- Derivative work: Xenosaga
- Type: manga & anime

CHOKOCAT’s Anime Video Games

1st Step

Having made the big decision to leave drugs behind and made it through detox, your next move can make all the difference between successfully staying sober and relapsing into old behavior patterns that can lead you straight back to addiction. Withdrawal and detox are painful and unpleasant. You will not want to put yourself through all that again.

Stay Way From The Past

Returning to your old living arrangements, your old haunts, habits and friends is a recipe for disaster. The temptation will be too strong. Moving into a residential care home for recovering addicts places you among others who have just been through a similar experience. They will have the same aims as you, independence and sobriety. You act as each other’s support systems.

Change In Scenery

These programs isolate you from the social and environmental cues that led you into addiction and if you don’t lift yourself right out of that situation, familiar, comfortable influences will have you back into the addicted life. A change of scenery completely immersed in new people and new activities in a safe environment make it easier to turn over a new leaf.

Community

A drug treatment home can offer a supportive network of counselors and help you monitor your progress through alcohol and drug testing. They offer classes in music, art or sports and many other types of hobbies that do not involve taking drugs or abusing alcohol. There are fully equipped gyms, swimming pools and whirlpools.

Residential Advantages

Residential facilities are staffed by professionals trained in medical detox, counseling and dealing with all the new physical and emotional changes that occur when you get clean and start a new life. You also gain practice and confidence in forming solid relationships with people who aren’t on drugs and who have no vested interest in your taking them again. There are people around to catch you if you fall.

Residential Advantages

The living space in a drug treatment center is geared to make you feel good about yourself. They are furnished and decorated to a very high standard, just what you deserve after what you’ve just come through! Life here is regimented. This is not to restrict you, but to take some of the mundane aspects of daily life off your hands so that you can concentrate on planning your new life.

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So, now that I’ve read volume five, the fight between Shuri and Kohaku makes sense! As of this volume, the characters are still working their way furiously towards Sakura for an attempted rescue. Last volume, we were waylaid by a flashback and fight for Shuri. This volume: Ukyo, with a lengthy flashback about Asagiri!

I had wondered about Asagiri more than the others. She’s a tiny mononoke sprite, after all, and while she seems quite affectionate towards Sakura, she’s fairly grumpy otherwise. Plus, I was sure she was concealing all sorts of secrets. Her backstory is very good, and I don’t want to spoil it. She does come from a village of female snow spirits, and Tanemura does a good job of bringing their culture and lives to life in the flashback. There’s lots of tragic stuff afoot, obviously, and I liked both Asagiri and Ukyo’s role in it. It does finish up with one of my pet peeve plot developments, the “I’ve done something horrible that I’ll regret the rest of my life except nobody would ever blame me for it so I’m not really a bad person”-flashback. But even so, it’s pretty evil stuff, and the story suited Asagiri.

There’s a couple cute short stories in the back. One’s a fairly simple children’s story about an angel named Maple Rose that visits the world of humans to escape from an angel party, and another is a silly gag chapter about the mascots from the various Arina Tanemura series. I missed Finn and Jonathan. And I say that Asagiri should be the mascot from Sakura Hime. And what about the cat from Time Stranger Kyoko? Maybe cute small people don’t count? But Fin does!

Obviously I’m still having a blast reading this. I loved Asagiri’s flashback, and I’m looking forward to where the story is going to go from here now that all the backstory is out of the way. Hopefully it’ll lighten up a little bit between serious story arcs, because I love seeing the characters having fun with one another.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

Slightly Biased Manga

Game artwork:

- Original work: Fist of the North Star
- Type: Japanese manga
- Status: 27 volumes
- Author: Buronson & Tetsuo Hara

CHOKOCAT’s Anime Video Games

Usamaru Furuya is an infinitely interesting artist. I like what I’ve read of his stories, too, but his art gets me in every single book that I’ve read by him. Be it the surreal pencil sketches that Picasso enters in Genkaku Picasso, the occasional random but elaborate 2-page nonsequitor illustrations in Short Cuts, or the amazing throwback work unlike his usual style in Lychee Light Club, every single one of his books is interesting to look at. He’s constantly using unusual imagery and a plethora of styles to convey the story visually, and there’s nobody quite like him when it comes to this. It’s fine art in manga form, and I wish like nobody’s business that more of his work would be licensed.

Palepoli is his first published volume of manga, and the best showcase for his visual vernacular. He also has a knack for elaborate visual puns and gags, and breaks the fourth wall constantly. Not with dialogue, but with image. It’s something one rarely sees.

You can read a handful of these in the compilations Secret Comics Japan and Japan Edge, but even with no knowledge of Japanese, Palepoli is worth owning. It’s just so much fun to look at. Still, I would dearly love to see a full English translation of it.

I’ve always really liked the cover to this book. It has as much to do with the inside content as anything, really, but the attention to visual detail starts here. The subject matter, and painting technique in particular, is meant to imitate a fresco. Even the title is webbed with cracks, like the plaster underneath is cracking.

There is a nice hardcover of this available, but I didn’t know that when I bought my paperback copy. Mine’s in bad shape, and will fall apart if I scan it, so I’m going to take photos of this one. Click on them to make the images larger, they’re worth looking at.

Palepoli is a collection of unconnected 4-panel strips. Normally, I hate 4-panel compilations, but Palepoli is the exception, largely for the reasons I mentioned in the introduction. Though there’s no ongoing narrative, there are several different “types” of strips scattered throughout the book. I’ll talk about some of the series below. They usually don’t run in a row, and there’s no pattern to them, but it’s always nice when you turn the page and see another surreal face strip, or yet another classroom bonding scene. The one above is… hmm. They are all night scenes that contain nostalgic-type dialogue longing for the mysteries of childhood, but there’s usually something slightly off about it. In one, a boy reflects on what his mother says about getting older, then looks up and decides he won’t be able to see ghosts anymore. In this one, it’s rabbit children that want to join their mother on the moon by jumping up to see her.

One of the more lengthy series of strips in the book is this one, which is about a man that witnesses a murder through his peephole, and the culprits that try to convince him to come out. Frequently the culprits will get run over by other murderers, and the methods for getting the man to come out are increasingly elaborate. Some strips includes angels, bands, threats about throwing out the wrong type of trash (a gag I’ll talk about later), and a variety of other methods of persuasion, but we never break from the first person fisheye perspective through the peephole. The jokes are funny, but it’s even more interesting that the unique perspective never wavers.

I can’t believe I forgot to take pictures of the Ghost of Rejection strips, another one of the more lengthy series in the book. They are all Furuya drawing a strip, interrupted by a specter that destroys the drawing somehow. The damage is reflected on the page that the strip itself appears on in the book, the implication being that the ghost is destroying that very strip (the strip is also clearly the same one that is being drawn in the strip itself). If the ghost crumples the page, the comic page itself is crumpled. If he lays a hand on it, the handprint appears over the fourth panel. sometimes the ghost’s finger will be shown pointing at the strip, hovering over and blocking out the art. He frequently draws graffiti on them, and one of my favorite instances is where several strips in a row appear with arbitrary numbers in their titles, then you get to the Ghost of Rejection strip where it’s revealed that the ghost is grading the strips. At the end, the ghost reveals itself to be Tezuka. I guess he would know.

This is a series where a young boy often stumbles upon life’s mysteries, unbeknownst to others. Here, it’s ants parting a puddle like the red sea. Sometimes he gets sucked into elaborate mandalas. In one, he can see every cell in his hand, which is of course lavishly illustrated, and in complete contrast to the weird and cartoony style he uses for children. He often meets gods from hindu and other faiths, and is eventually granted the power to destroy the world. If anyone can coax the peephole man out of his house, it’s Takashi!

Kuma-chan is also a popular strip subject. Kuma-chan is a cute but murderous bear that wields a butcher knife. Usually he appears in strips that are parodies of police shows (for whatever reason, I think the detective is frequently Colombo), but he pops up in all sorts of murder scenes and other places he shouldn’t, usually creeping out from behind something in the background. Here, the joke is that Kuma-chan only kills beautiful high school girls, and this girl gets a little over-excited when she realizes she suits Kuma’s taste.

I believe the record will show that I love any manga that deals directly with art history (see also: In the Walnut). Furuya also has a few strips where he uses famous Renaissance paintings directly… in various ways. One of my favorites is one that uses a portion of Primavera by Botticelli, giving the goddesses teenage girl dialogue that eventually spirals into an ill-mannered fight. Another one of the goddesses from Primavera appears frequently to offer troubled souls a tough choice in various strips. I suspect the choice she offers might be a reference to similar dialogue found in video games like Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past or Harvest Moon, or whatever inspired similar moral choices (though the axe choice is almost directly from Harvest Moon, perhaps by coincidence). This one is Dead Christ, by Andrea Mantegna. The grief is interrupted by Hiroshi from Dokonjo Gaerou, a Shounen Jump manga from the early 70s. The plot of the manga is that Hiroshi trips and falls on a frog, who gets crushed into his shirt and offers advice. Here, he trips and falls on the head of Christ instead.

Furuya also likes to pay homage to older manga styles and popular titles. I mentioned Dokonjo Gaerou before, but there are more elaborate visual examples as well. In the above example, a Golgo 13 joke is never not funny, and not only do I like the terrible pun of Golgo 31/Baskin Robbins, I also like that the cute girl is sniped for the sin of embarrassing him. This one was in Secret Comics Japan, thus the English translation.

There’s an entire series of “garbage day” strips, named after the days of the week, and each one covers a different topic. Sometimes the topics are more general, like “cute trash day” or “existential trash day,” but they are also sometimes parodies of particular manga genres. He nails the styles pretty well in all these, and the completely unimpressed businessman in the corner makes them that much more surreal. Of course, my girly shoujo heart prefers the Heart of Thomas parody above.

I’m also up for invisible garbage day, if you are. I love that this was something that he was allowed to turn in. The joke is still funny, too.

Here, Furuya is taking the dialogue and… uh, the gist of Red-Colored Elegy. The homage here is all in the dialogue, though, as Furuya’s cartoony children stand in for the regular characters. The cartoony children are a throwback style to 50s shounen manga, I believe. I’m not sure if he’s parodying a particular artist’s style or not (sometimes I think they lean heavily towards early Tezuka), but I think that general style was a very popular look in the late 50s. Here’s the best example I could come up with in five minutes, from a pre-horror Kazuo Umezu volume.

And here’s both Kuma-chan and a panel that appears to be lifted directly from a Kazuo Umezu manga, or Furuya did a perfect imitation of one. They compliment each other well! These “chapter break” pages appear infrequently, and usually just use a theme from one of the strip series. As far as I can tell, they don’t really divide anything up in the book itself.

Manga isn’t the only area of pop culture that appears in this book. I think I’m probably missing out on a lot of the Japanese pop culture jokes, but it’s hard not to recognize Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta in these creepily realistic portraits. They’ve tied a man up and are playing a word game with him. There are two strips to this one, and the second one is the man losing the shiratori game, but this one, for whatever reason, is more about the perspective from the cartoony man and the mirror behind the two actors.

My hands-down favorite series, visually, are these surreal portrait strips. I always associate these types of images with In Voluptas Mors, by Dali, but I wonder if there was a tradition of them before that. I think the Dali piece might be a direct influence here, because many of these are erotic. The one above isn’t, and is a rather contrary strip that forms the faces of Christ and Buddha using figures of death and destruction.

The erotic images are saved, of course, for the portraits of the characters from Doraemon. I love that they’re singing the theme song. But, I suppose, what else would they be doing? In this case, the lyrics to the Doraemon theme song… sort of compliment the erotic figures better than they do Nobita et al.

This one is a reference to Tensai Bakabon, although I have no idea whether or not the dialogue relates to the series. I suspect it doesn’t, I think the joke is some sort of pun on the name of the deity in the last panel. You can also see more Botticelli on the page opposite this one, because I didn’t bother to edit the image.

And if you can think of a better way to end things than John, Paul, George, and Ringo… well, then I don’t know what to tell you.

I am completely and thoroughly obsessed with this book. Not only is the humor the kind of surreal, spot-on variety I enjoy, I can’t get enough of the hugely varied drawing styles and visual puns, and I feel like every time I crack it open, I find more cultural references I missed the first time around. I would dearly love to see a version of this book that is as thoroughly footnoted as Short Cuts was. I always hold out hope for this to be translated into English, because it is so unique and wonderful, and because we’ve already seen part of it. Maybe Viz somehow had to license it for inclusion in Secret Comics Japan, so maybe they’re the ones that have to publish it? Vertigo would be a good choice too, though, and somewhat more likely.

Slightly Biased Manga

Watch Anime and TV Online

Watch Anime and TV Online

Introduction screenshot:

Game screenshot:

Game artwork:

- Original work: Bakuman
- Type: Japanese manga
- Status: 16 volumes (ongoing)
- Author: Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata

CHOKOCAT’s Anime Video Games

Game artwork:

- Original work: Doraemon
- Type: Japanese manga
- Status: 45 volumes
- Author: Fujiko F. Fujio

CHOKOCAT’s Anime Video Games