Dave's Capsules for April 2025

 

Archive of older reviews

At the moment, it looks like printed matter is slipping through the trade war random tariffs, but that is likely to last only until someone brings it to the attention of the President.  I've been seeing comics and gaming store owners interviewed on national nightly news about the impending doom.

Anyway, since this is a light month, I decided to try harder to check out new titles, both via LibraryPass and looking around for ideas.  One thing I tried was looking for lists of well-regarded superhero manga.  In addition to usual suspects like My Hero Academia and One-Punch Man, there were a few that looked good but the translations either got cut off mid-story (Ratman) or that don't seem to be available in print at all (Heroic Complex).  In general, I'd rather not start a manga with too much backlog, if only because it can be a real hassle trying to FIND all the older volumes (Spy x Family was a real hunt, and I started at vol 7!), so the farther along it is the less inclined I am to give it a shot.  Still, I did try out Shy below, despite my reluctance regarding its backlog.

Items of Note (Strongly Recommended or otherwise worthy): Nothing this month.

In this installment: What If...Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker were Siblings?, Stardust the Super Wizard archive, I Picked Up This World's Strategy Guide vol 1-2, Octo-Girl vol 1, Magilumiere Magical Girls vol 7, Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear vol 12, Mecha-Ude: Mechanical Arms vol 1, Shy vol 1.

"Other Media" Capsules:

Things that are comics-related but not necessarily comics (i.e. comics-based movies like Iron Man or Hulk), or that aren't going to be available via comic shops (like comic pack-ins with DVDs) will go in this section when I have any to mention.  They may not be as timely as comic reviews, especially if I decide to review novels that take me a week or two (or ten) to get around to.

What If...Wanda Maximoff and Peter Parker were Siblings?: Marvel/Random House Worlds - I got this a few months ago, but it finally made it to the top of my virtual TBR stack.  I haven't gotten the other books in the series, and don't plan to, I picked this up in part because Seanan McGuire wrote it (and did not write the others).  There's an arc connecting the three novels, involving America Chavez's role in things, but the actual story of Wanda and Peter does wrap up in just this volume.  Lots of third person semi-omniscient, getting inside Wanda's head, but at the same time things unfurl in a dramatic enough fashion (unlike the traditionally under-emotional Watchers narrating a What If, America gets invested in the story).  There's a certain amount of "It's Marvel, so these things must happen in every timeline," along with the standard "any alternate timeline will necessarily be at least a little worse than the main timeline" element long established for What Ifs, but the story is not a complete bummer, and McGuire really put a lot of thought into all the ways things would change despite the things that could not.  Recommended.  Price depends on format, currently $13.99 for the Kindle edition, but I got it when it was on sale for $2.99.

I started two "based on the comics" shows this month, Doom Patrol S4 and Iyanu Child of Wonder S1.  While I plan to eventually finish Doom Patrol (got about halfway through this month), after watching the first three episodes of Iyanu I didn't really feel like watching more.  I think part of it is that Iyanu is a more faithful adaptation, while Doom Patrol is riffing on storylines and character elements while also telling new stories.  I think that's kind of a thing for me lately, where I really like a comic or manga but don't really get into the anime that tells fundamentally the same story.  I did get through the first half season of Spy X Family, but the second half has been sitting on my To Be Watched pile unwatched.  I got one episode into Delicious in Dungeon.  I have watched all of the motion-comic of Way of the Househusband so far, but that's vignettes and easier to do in bite-sized chunks.  All in all, I prefer to consume media at my own pace, if you want me to go at your pace you need to bring something I can't get in other formats (different story, REALLY good animation or voice work/acting or music), or at least not demand too much of my time.  Conversely, once I've seen enough of an anime or cartoon, I'm less interested in reading the manga/comic if it's substantially the same story, part of why I don't just pick up the My Hero Academia manga at some point post-volume-1.

Oh, and I saw Ninja Batman's sequel (Ninja Batman vs. the Yakuza League) on the shelves, but left it there.  The original was a "cool art, no story" mess, there really wasn't anything there I wanted to see more of.

Digital Content:

Unless I find a really compelling reason to do so (such as a lack of regular comics), I won't be turning this into a webcomic review column.  Rather, stuff in this section will generally be full books available for reading online or for download, usually for pay.  I will also occasionally include things I read on Library Pass (check to see if your public library gives access to it), although the interface can be laggy and freeze sometimes.

He has a hyper-hyperbole ray!

Stardust the Super Wizard: Zoop, more or less - Last month I mentioned the crowdfunded collection of entirely new Stardust stories, but what they did deliver in time for me to read this month was a PDF of all the original Fletcher Hanks stories (1939-1941).  If you've been online long enough, you've probably seen a few panels of this public domain series, and really it's all as crazy as the snippets suggest.  The fairly short and unevenly drawn stories read like they were based on 5 year old kids playing superhero, with one of the kids always having to win and making up whatever new powers he needed in order to do so.  Got a problem?  Stardust has a ray for it.  And on the rare occasions where his opponents were ray-proof, he was also superhumanly strong, fast, and durable.  Despite Spectre-level powers, he mostly fights gangsters, spies, gangster-spies, racketeers, and The Fifth Column (without whom invasion is "impossible," and no matter how many of them he kills there's always thousands more next issue), although once in a while he fights menaces from other planets.  Despite his impressive surveillance equipment and impossible speed, he is also like the Spectre in that he mostly punishes criminals for their deeds rather than stopping those deeds entirely.  So, everyone on Mars dies.  Thousands die as a massive wave smashes ships on its way to shore.  That sort of thing.  He is totally winging it.  The whole thing really does feel like Hanks was taking dictation from some kids and just drawing what they said in the final minutes before a deadline.  There is a whimsy and energy to it, of course.  But if you look at a McCloud-style spectrum with Jack Kirby at one end and soulless technical perfection at the other, these comics took a running leap off the Kirby end and are still going outwards on super-excited light.  I don't think there's really a recommendation I can make here one way or the other, but it's public domain and you should be able to find copies floating about if you wish to experience it.  Note, there's surprisingly little racism for a 1939-41 comic, a few mentions of criminals framing "Japs" for an attack early on before Hanks settles on just pointing at vague "invader nations" without naming any of them.  All the villains are grotesque, but Stardust can drift off-model in some pretty horrifying ways too.  The worst racist caricature I noticed was in the gang leader Slant-Eyes, whose eyes were literally diagonally tilted, but otherwise didn't seem to be an Asian caricature (everyone has about the same speech patterns, with varying levels of gangster slang, but Hanks doesn't really have much variation in dialogue).  Mind you, there's probably still some coded racism in there just because of The Way Things Were, but there's no buck-toothed monkey guys mixing up R and L, or obvious German or Italian slope-brow brutes that were so common in propaganda of the time.  And that counts for something (unfortunately) when talking about early Golden Age comics. 

I Picked Up This World's Strategy Guide vol 1: Yen Press - I was browsing the recent releases on LibraryPass (Empowered vol 12 is on it, BTW) and decided to give this a read.  It's a full-color manga by Atchi Ai, and a sort of "isekai themes but with a native" story.  Sana is an NPC in a fantasy JRPG world when she stumbles across a copy of the strategy guide to her world, Eternal Story III (yeah, I suspect there's more than a little Final Fantasy in the flavoring of this homage).  So, rather than a character being brought into the game world, it's a thing, but in the process it changes the world in ways that a human visitor would.  Because the story hasn't started yet, the book has an oracular nature to Sana (who mistakes the copyright notice as a badge of being a Forbidden Book), and she manages to save her brother from a bit of tragic backstory happening to him, then tries to prevent another bit of bad backstory...the hero's side quests are often about correcting an injustice or dealing with the fallout of injustice, and Sana wants to stop them from happening entirely.  This, of course, leads to the usual change-the-future issue of making things different but not necessarily better along the way, but by the end of the volume she stumbles into the start of the main story questline, oops.  I guess she's a victim of the narrative now.  I did end up finding this in hardcopy form (along with volume 2, see below) before the end of the month...I found volume 2 first because it was properly alphabetized under I-space-P, while volume 1 was two whole shelves away under IP no space in between, oops.  (Rather a lot of manga start with the personal pronoun!) Recommended.  $15.00/$19.50Cn, rated Teen LV.  Not a lot of either L or V in this volume, but it might get rougher later.

Expected next month: The next Adventure Finders epilogue has been pushed back, but should come out in May.

Manga Collections:

Most of these are "tankobon" or collections of work serialized in a weekly or monthly publication, although some were written directly for the collection.  All of them have been translated from Japanese (or maybe Korean, although I don't think I'm reading any manhwa) into English.  Things with a manga aesthetic but done in English originally will go in one of the sections below as appropriate.

Seriously, who greenlit this cover?

Octo-Girl vol 1: Marvel/Viz - This came out a few months ago, but while browsing upcoming releases I saw volume 2, and my immediate reaction was, "Who the Hell(TM) greenlit a manga combining a Japanese schoolgirl with mechanical tentacles?"  I mean, this is NOT an adult manga, not that I'd expect Marvel to officially publish anything that did more than wink at the whole tentacles-and-schoolgirls trope, but I read through a bit of this volume in the store and decided to pick it up.  And it's actually kinda sweet.  In terms of continuity, it's got a loose tie to the Deadpool Samurai manga (which I have not read) and it relies on the whole Superior Spider-Man arc without actually being tied down to whatever the heck is happening in the main Spider-books at the moment.  The premise is that, some time along after Superior Spider-Man, Doc Ock has gotten used to pulling the "death train" method of escaping capture.  He just suicides and his mind is uploaded into a fresh clone body at one of his many secret bases.  He even has his own bootleg copy of Mig O'Hara's Lyla (redone as Anna Maria 2.0) helping him run the process.  This time, however, there's an oops.  Due to some older brain-scanning tech of his being in use at the time of transfer in an attempt to bring a Japanese schoolgirl (Otoha) out of a coma, his mind gets downloaded into her brain instead.  Cue the weird buddy comedy in which the two have to share a body as Otto tries to find a way to get back into one of his own bodies.  How old is Otoha?  No clue.  She looks like a grade school kid, but her former best friend from childhood looks to be 16 or so, and other classmates are somewhere in between.  This takes place in Tokyo, it's not like she goes to a tiny one-room school with kids of all ages, so I guess she's just 15-17 years old but destined to look more like Anna Maria 1.0.  (For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, during the Superior Spider-Man era, Otto's brain was in Peter Parker's body, and he ended up dating a coworker who is very short, I forget if it was a specific medical condition or just Some People Be Short.  That's Anna Maria.)  There is just enough backstory to figure out most of the clone-resurrection trick stuff given in this volume, but Anna Maria 2.0 isn't really explained and doesn't even come up after the opening scenes.  Mainly, this is another try at a redemption arc for Otto, as being forced to get along with others and not just sneer at them (despite his best efforts, Otoha can sometimes interfere with control over their shared body and stop Otto from just killing the fools who get in his way) may require that this forking of Doc Ock finally develop some emotional intelligence to go along with the scientific.  Recommended.  $11.99/$15.99Cn/#8.99UK

Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc vol 7: Viz - This volume focuses on new employees, because the previous main protagonist is now a seasoned veteran.  Okay, none of the new employees (or prospective hires) is actually as "true newbie" as Kana, but they're behind the curve on learning how their sector is changing, while Kana has basically been New Format from the word go...she has no prior assumptions to unlearn.  Pretty much the entire volume takes place in Kyoto, while the boss is giving a presentation the others decide to check out a potential engineer hire and we get to see how the history of magical girls developed in this world, and confirmation that it goes back centuries.  So, naturally, it started with Mikos, or shrine maidens, and the inheritor of the oldest magical girl lineage is the Miko of the shrine that marks the first Kaii containment.  Of course, a relaxing day at a celebration turns into a Kaii crisis, and we get the first indication that the looming Big Crisis is more than just a metaphor for the wealthy refusing to do anything to stop environmental havoc...someone's accelerating things on purpose.  Recommended.  $14.99/$19.99Cn/#10.99UK

Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear vol 12: Seven Seas Entertainment - Yuna gets sucked into a side quest chain, basically.  She just wants a mithril knife for her assitant, so Fina can harvest from the increasingly tough monsters Yuna slays.  But the only source for mithril is currently shut down because of Problems.  So Yuna has to go see what's up there and see if she can speed up the restoration of services, which of course leads to her getting sucked into helping clear the mines...but she STILL doesn't want to draw too much attention to herself or upset the existing adventurer hierarchy and piss people off, so she has to sandbag just enough to not cause problems, but not so much they fail.  When you've got god-granted OP skills, threading a needle of just the right amount of power can be a real challenge.  Telling compelling stories with really powerful characters can be difficult, especially if you don't want to Dragonball it and just keep introducing stronger foes.  You can introduce deliberate weaknesses, like Kryptonite, but then you risk getting gimmick stories.  Kumanano takes a route that might not work well for Superman, but works pretty well here...it really is "Man vs. Self" to use the literary term, with Yuna always having to fight her own shortcomings and flaws.  A secondary struggle in this volume involves Yuna not valuing herself and her assets highly enough and having to be lectured about it by Fina, and neither is completely in the right on the matter.  Anyway, as tends to happen, succeeding in one quest dropped another, in the form of a Quest Item that Yuna now needs to take to another community to get evaluated because no one in the Capital can figure it out.  Recommended.  $13.99/$17.99Cn rated Teen 13+

 

Arms and the Kid

Mecha-Ude: Mechanical Arms vol 1: Scholastic - This one is in full color, as is the norm for Scholastic products.  The colorist is Jason Caffoe, so the colors may have been added for the Scholastic edition, which is also not terribly unusual for Scholastic products.  The story in outline is a really bog-standard "regular schlub high school student stumbles on a Plot Device, befriends the Plot Device, gets sucked into a secret war between powerful factions and needs to Git Gud or he'll Git Ded," sort of thing.  In this case, the plot devices are mechanical arms that latch onto human hosts and can do various nifty things, with one faction enslaving the arms and the other trying to liberate the arms.  The only thing that makes this interesting enough for me to give it another volume is the mostly-generic tsundere minder the main character gets from the good guy faction.  Aki does visually fit the role, physically imposing, pretty in a scary way, doesn't think highly of the main character.  But she's also, like, feral or something?  Was she raised in an underground secret base with zero contact with anyone not in the secret organization?  (That seems likely.)  Her utter inability to be Normal is the source of about half the humor in the book (the total naivete of the plot device mecha-arms covers most of the rest).  On the art side, it's good that it's in color, because the line work is hard to follow at times...which is to say, in most of the action sequences.  I wonder if this is a mostly humor artist who is trying to break into action, because the comedy beats work quite well visually.  Mildly recommended.  $11.99/$15.99Cn/#10.99UK rated Middle Grade (ages 9-12)

I Picked Up This World's Strategy Guide vol 2: Yen Press - This one wasn't on LibraryPass yet, but it had come out in hardcopy, so I got it too, as noted above.  The bulk of this volume takes place in the game's tutorial zone, where the protagonist gets into his first fight, loses, and the player discovers his uncontrollable super power before meeting a mentor who can train him in the use of it.  Sana really tries to avoid messing up the story, but only succeeds in pushing it further and further off-track, oops.  She does seem destined to become the protagonist while the player character gets to live a relatively quiet life or something.  As a sign of her protagonist-ness, she picks up her own antagonist (a seller of cheap and shoddy potions), something that didn't happen in the strategy guide (possibly because she averted the fate the guide had in store for her shop back in the previous volume).  When you really do live in a story, you can be doomed by the narrative, and sometimes becoming the main character is the worst possible fate.  This continues to be an interesting spin on one of the isekai standard tropes.  Recommended.  $15.00/$19.50Cn, rated Teen LV.

Shy vol 1: Yen Press - Okay, with volume 10 due in May, this was something of a marginal try-out for me, but it was the only viable and interesting-looking title I found while hunting for superhero manga.  The premise is that in the year 20XX world peace has been attained because of the emergence of superheroes.  Apparently each nation gets at most one, but there were somehow enough to shift the balance of world power...the story is kinda vague and wishcast-y on that matter.  They all have Power Ranger style transformations (which the author admits in a note were explicitly inspired by Dairanger), and the title heroine is the newest protector of Japan, who is otherwise a 14 year old high school girl.  Other than a version of the Flying Brick set, her powers are kind of undefined (and the Next Volume prompt indicates she'll be developing new ones), but her name defines her story hook: she's shy.  Like, painful levels of social anxiety and rejection avoidance.  She first shows up on stage at a poorly attended event for some other hero who we never see, who is either retired or is an actor in a fictional role, all we know is that he inspired Shy in some way.  But she runs away before he comes on stage, so we don't meet him.  The only other hero we do meet initially is Russia's heroine, Spirit, who is "perpetually sloshed" and thinks getting everyone drunk would probably lead to world peace...kinda going for the low-hanging national stereotypes there.  England's hero, the second Stardust I've read about this month, is clearly meant to be a David Bowie homage (as in Ziggy Stardust), rather than a Super Wizard reference.  Stardust comes on screen in the last chapter or so, and it's implied that there's enough other heroes out there to require a satellite base overwatch, but the author seems reluctant to define too much yet.  I do get a strong impression that there's a lot of "pantsing" going on in the writing here, with the unrevealed things also being undecided things.  This can bite a writer in the pants, but by the end of the volume I'm just interested enough to keep this on my list of "get the next volume if things are slow and the next volume is in stock" titles.  Mildly recommended.  $13.00/$17.00Cn, rated Teen LV.

(Toxic Super Beasts caught my interest reading the preorder, but I decided I'd only pick it up if I had a chance to look at it on the shelf first, and my B&N didn't stock it.)

Expected next month: Chainsaw Man vol 18, Octo-Girl vol 2, After God vol 4, Go Go Loser Ranger vol 13, I'm In Love With The Villainess vol 8.  Happy Kanako's Killer Life vol 8 is due to come out May 27, so I probably won't have it until early June since the local B&N hasn't been stocking it on the shelves and they don't ship online orders until release date (as opposed to shipping a few days before so they arrive on release date).  Looks like the month might be light as well, so I might see if the next few volumes of Shy are in stock.

Other Trades:

Trade paperbacks, collections, graphic novels, whatever. If it's bigger than a "floppy" but not Manga, it goes here.  

 

Nothing.

Expected next month: Nothing.  In fact, I'm not expecting any non-manga TPBs/GNs until late June, although it's always possible something I crowdfunded will ship.

Floppies:

No, I don't have any particular disdain for the monthlies, but they are floppy, yes? (And not all of them come out monthly, or on a regular schedule in general, so I can't just call this section "Monthlies" or even "Periodicals" as that implies a regular period.)

Yeah, this is a skip month for floppies.  Light month in general, but I decided I really didn't want to do another total skip.  As I've mentioned before, the inability to browse shelves has put a big damper on my impulse-buying new new floppies, if not as big a damper as my Big Two Event Fatigue.  Manga I can flip through on the shelf, or as seen this month, I can check it out on LibraryPass.

Expected next time: Fantastic Four #30, Moon Knight Fist of Khonshu #7, My Little Pony Cadence One-Shot, Star Trek Lower Decks #5-6, Vampirella #1, likely more.  My general threshold for getting my folder sent is about ten books.  With Diamond's bankrupcy getting even worse, it might be kinda random what week in a month any given book comes out for a while as my shop reorganizes its ordering. 

Dvandom, aka Dave Van Domelen, is an Associate Professor of Physical Science at Amarillo College, maintainer of one of the two longest-running Transformers fansites in existence (neither he nor Ben Yee is entirely sure who was first), has neither bombers nor a personal machine gun, is an occasional science advisor in fiction, and part of the development team for the upcoming City of Titans MMO.

 

"It's kinda like...if you and Spider-Man had a kid together?"  "SILENCE!  Such phrasing is unseemly!" - Otoha and Otto, Octo-Girl vol 1