Yen Plus: The Four-Issue Follow-Up

A while back, I posted a review of the first issue of the new manhwa/manga/Amerimanga anthology Yen Plus. Now, thanks to some help from the innernets, I’ve caught up with all four issues which have been published so far, and issue 5 is due to hit stores within a week - surpassing my expectations of how long this puppy would last, but hey, I’m not complaining. So after four telephone directories of comix, how has Yen Plus held up? tl;dr: A couple of the series are looking pretty mediocre, and there’s one flat-out dud in the form of Jack Frost, but as a whole, it’s a fun read and still a great value given the cost/pagecount ratio. Get started on it now if you haven’t already.

Jack Frost: The female lead, Noh-a, spent much of issue 1 decapitated. She spends much of issue 3 and 4 that way as well. Apparently she’s now at some shadowy alternate universe school in a place called Amityville which is entrenched in mortal combat with three other schools in the city, and she’s highly sought after because her blood has restorative abilities. But that plot line is shoved in the corner while the creator brings us panel after panel of apparent violence for violence’s sake and fanservice of the trying-too-hard variety. Jack Frost is a chore to read, and I’m convinced Yen Plus would be better off without it - even if another series wasn’t brought in to take its place.

Nightschool: The story is getting more interesting as it’s unfolding, though it’s not entirely original; it features good vampires, bad vampires, vampire hunters, and peripheral supernaturalness. My college roomie Cricket, who was quite possibly the biggest Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanboy on the west coast, would probably feel at home. The author sometimes uses internet acronyms like OMG and emoticons like u_u in word balloons; not often, but enough to be annoying. Then there’s also the artwork, which, while not necessarily bad, comes off flat-ish when compared with other series in the book, and displays an occasional overreliance on manga-ish standards like characters going into super-deformed mode - in the fourth issue, one character, upset at another, pulls her eyelid down with her finger and sticks out her tongue. Oy. I do enjoy the look and antics of the smoke-like astral characters, though. All that being said, the story could save this, if it picked up the pace and found its own direction a little.

Maximum Ride: This has really picked up and turned into a very enjoyable story. Max and the rest of the “flock” are attempting to rescue little Angel, who has been recaptured from the “School,” some sort of laboratory they had previously escaped from. The art is pretty enjoyable, and the plot, sensationalist as it might be, is sincerely fun.

One Fine Day: Still cute, silly and plotless. The character art often seems to err on the side of sketchiness, and fully-rendered backgrounds are a rarity, but since it’s all for laughs, it gets away with it somehow. I wonder if the creator of this was inspired by the duality of Hobbes’ existence in Calvin and Hobbes.

Pig Bride: It’s still a fun story, but as the series around it have fleshed themselves out, I find myself wondering where they’re going with this one. What started silly is becoming kind of weird.

Sarasah: As expected, this one didn’t actually end with the main character falling down stairs and dying. She wakes up in the world beyond, where a goddess takes pity on her unrequited love story and sends her back to the past to undo the chain of events which have caused her modern plight. She doesn’t quite fit in in medieval Korea, though. This is definitely the Korean equivalent of a shoujo manga, so it’s not entirely holding my interest. It’s not terrible, though.

Soul Eater: Supernatural Monster-of-the-Week fare. Fun but mostly shallow. It’s heavy on the fanservice, but unlike Jack Frost, the violence is more cartoony than sadistic, so it works.

Nabari no Ou: So the stoic kid who really has no interest in becoming a ninja actually has some super power somethingorother in him which would make him the world’s strongest ninja, and evil ninja are after him to kill him and take his power, so he must become the world’s strongest ninja or die trying. Okay. This is all very, very familiar aminoo territory that’s not being rehashed in an outstanding way, but otherwise Nabari no Ou is mostly harmless.

Sumomomo, Momomo: Looks like there’s people after Koushi’s life, too (the lead boy). But this series plays it for laughs. It’s odd how Momoko (the girl) seems to be drawn as if she’s seven years old, but nobody bats an eye that she’s attending high school. It’s fluff.

Bamboo Blade: Ishida-sensei wants talented swordstress Kawazoe to join his kendo club so that he can win a bet with another teacher, but she’s less than willing - until she discovers that kendo is a great way to fight bullies, her biggest bane in life. With fun, well-drawn characters and no shameless fanservice, Bamboo Blade is doing all kinds of things right, even if the storyline is less than totally original.

Higurashi: When They Cry: …Wow. This is what would happen if Dr Frankenstein melded together a harem anime and a particularly worrisome X-Files episode. Keiichi tries to learn more about the mythological murders in his new home town which seem to take place every year, but the more he learns, the more dire the warnings from his new friends (?) at school. Perhaps he should give up trying to unravel this mystery now that both his life and his sanity are on the line… The latter issues of this I can’t really recommend reading before bedtime. Good stuff.

The magazine as a whole: It occasionally includes nice bonuses such as sizable samples of other series which are published by the magazine’s parent publisher Yen Press - it’s always fun to see a new story sometimes, even if it’s just the start of it. Each comic starts off with a summary of what happened in previous issues, which is also nice for refreshing your memory on characters and plotlines. Both the Korean and Japanese comics will occasionally have a page at the end explaining historical references, untranslatable puns, and other things that might have gone over our heads. The end of the left-to-right part of the magazine includes some commentary by staff members as well as some behind-the-scenesy gag comic strips drawn by an intern. The front of the magazine is always in color, and features a letter from the senior editor, a table of contents illustrated with artwork from each series (though, since so few of the pages are numbered for fear of breaking up the artwork, apparently, the table of contents is kind of useless), a run-down of titles that are being put out by Yen Press that month, and, occasionally, the first few pages of a comic on the left-to-right side will be in color. The color part also contains the highest ratio of ads to content in the book… They’re there in the black-and-white part too, but less frequent. All in all, it’s a pretty nice presentation.