Blossom Book House is now selling first-hand Del Rey editions of manga titles for 250 Rs each, which compared to the Landmark price of 400-450 Rs is really cheap, AND they are stocking series. As in, not scattered volumes of a title, but complete runs. That is why I picked up five volumes of Ken Akamatsu’s Negima<\/i> on Sunday. <\/p>\n
Now let me be frank, my experience with manga has been with the well-known, occidentalised ones. Like Blame<\/i>, Lone Wolf and Cub<\/i>, Kamui<\/i>, Blade of the Immortal<\/i> and Katsuhiro Otomo’s works like Domu<\/i> and Akira<\/i>. These titles were brought out by American companies like Dark Horse, Marvel, First and Eclipse in the late eighties and early nineties, and were read, like other American comics, from left to right. Any manga buff worth his salt will tell you that the correct way to read manga is from right to left, which is the way they are generally created in Japanese. Fans therefore look down on “flopped” manga, the Americanization of the artwork so as to enable readers accustomed to reading comicbooks to carry on reading manga the same way(i.e lazy buggers like myself). So when publishers like Tokyopop, Viz and Del Rey got into the manga reprint business, they tried to stay as close to the source material as possible, and published titles with artwork that run right to left, and have the cover image at the back, and the book description (which is traditionally on the back cover) on the front. If you open one of these manga as you would a book, the first thing you see is a warning saying: “This is the end of the book, please turn to the other side to begin reading.” – or something like that.<\/p>\n
Initially I found that reading right to left was really difficult. My eyes were just not conditioned to read that way, and the panel ordering on the first manga of that format that I read, Fumiko Soryo’s Mars<\/i> was just too much for me. Then I downloaded fan scanlations of manga like GTO<\/i> and Ichi The Killer<\/i>, and got even more confused, because trying to figure out which manga has been flipped and which is not is a herculean task because they occasionally make sense both ways. But I kind of accustomed to the right-to-left reading, and so, Negima<\/i> was a very good read for me. I have finished the first three volumes.<\/p>\n
Negima<\/i> is short for ‘Magister Negi Magi’. Negi Springfield is a 10-year old Welsh kid who happens to be a wizard. Now hold on, before you begin harrying me with the obvious comparisons, Negima is not about prophecies and Dark Ones and magic spells. The premise is that this ten year old prodigy is given a rather unusual career option when he passes out of Wizarding school. The charge that he is entrusted with, the one that will lead him to becoming a Magus is – teaching English. At a girls’ School. At a girls’ High School. Now how cool is that?<\/p>\n
Needless to say, the levels of acceptance he gets from his students vary from brotherly affection to major crushes to out-and-out hatred. The first problem Negi encounters is a student named Asuna Kagurazaka, with whom he has to (gulp) share rooms. (Because, very conveniently, the school authorities have run out of beds in the teacher’s quarter, and….you get the drift.) Asuna has an unrequited crush for the previous English teacher, and therefore has a very low tolerance level for the new guy, who is something of a runt in her eyes, and also has some very strange things happening around him. Like the odd way in which everyone’s skirts fly up whenever Negi sneezes. (or in Asuna’s case, how she manages to lose her clothes once when Negi sneezes right in front of her, and everyone discovers she wears bear panties) Or how fast he is, for a small boy. Or why he carries around a long staff with him wherever he goes.<\/p>\n
The storyline develops quite well, with Negi getting to know all of his students slowly, and discovers quirky things about all of them. He takes under his wing the Mighty Morphin Baka Rangers, a group of students who score really<\/i> low on studies, and have to receive tuitions in English from the new teacher. At the same time, he comes to terms with the difference between using magic to solve his problems ( and some of his spells do<\/i> backfire, like the time he develops a love potion for Asuna to woo the old English teacher, and drinks it himself), as opposed to good ol’ common sense and honesty. Things start getting a bit more magical by the time volume 2 ends, but that was to be expected, I guess. <\/p>\n
I read the first three books with a smile on my face throughout. There are times when the stories get sentimental, but the humour shines through every panel. Ken Akamatsu excels at details, and the translation appears to be excellent, as even the minutest of sound effects ( and there are a TON of them throughout!) are given their English equivalents. The books do not fall into the “Hey y’all” trap, you know, making all the characters sound All-American – the Japanese antecedents of the school, and the students, are all left intact. The cuteness factor is really<\/i> high. <\/p>\n
A real fun read, and you know what, I think I’ll go and pick up a couple of titles more today evening, probably Genshiken<\/i><\/a> and The Wallflower<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Blossom Book House is now selling first-hand Del Rey editions of manga titles for 250 Rs each, which compared to the Landmark price of 400-450 Rs is really cheap, AND they are stocking series. As in, not scattered volumes of a title, but complete runs. That is why I picked up five volumes of Ken […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}