A Couple of Manga to Read in June

Usually, I have more manga than this to recommend.  However, good manga is hard to find.  This will be a very short article indeed, but I hope that you’re willing to try out one of the following two recommendations.  For a change, I’ve given ratings for content after each review.

No! I promise that I really did find only two manga worthy of recommending!

 

1) Ichiro Heian by Jin Kobayashi

Jin Kobayashi stands as a familiar name to many of you.  He’s famous for School Rumble and Natsu no Arashi, both anime which I have enjoyed.  Natsu no Arashi did succeed in annoying me when it showed an American fighter plane strafing a lone civilian in WWII.  But, I eventually forgave the show on the grounds that the Japanese can’t help but think that the Allies did things to them that they did to everyone else.

 

But, I digress.  (I did say that I forgave Natsu no Arashi, didn’t I?)  Ichiro Heian has the same great humor which made School Rumble so much fun to watch.  This one concerns an otaku who meets a beautiful Chinese woman named Miao Fu who’s attempting to bike from Tokyo to Kyoto for some unknown reason.  Unwilling to leave this hapless foreigner in her own hands and wishing for an adventure, our hero, Koumei, agrees to be her guide.

 

The comedy mostly revolves around slapstick and the communication or the miscommunication between the two protagonists.  Miao Fu whacks Koumei upside the head for the slightest fault, and–despite Miao Fu having a certain grasp of Japanese–Koumei often needs to communicate with her in Chinese–the Chinese he learned from watching Kung Fu films.  Anyway, I highly recommend this manga for some good laughs.

Rated: Teen for comic violence and cursing.

2) Mx0 by Yasuhiro Kano

Conversely, I have no experience with this author’s works.  Pretty Face seems to have been the most popular of Kano’s works, and he wrote it just prior to Mxo.  This particular work is pretty basic.  We have our likable jerk hero who falls for a girl who happens to study at a magic high school.  He infiltrates the school’s grounds, discovers that they teach magic, and demands to stay rather than have his memory of the girl he falls for erased along with knowledge of the school.

What makes this comic enjoyable for me is the high level of action and the humor.  It falls a far cry short of my enthusiastic recommendation for Ichiro Heian, but, if you like action and comedy, you might just warm up to these characters.

Rated: Teen for violence and occasional fanservice.