Manga Chapter of the Week: Natsu no Zenjitsu Chapter 16 (Being Touched)

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Yoshida Motoi is an irregular manga artist who makes up for his bi-quarterly release pace with the best aesthetic concepts this side of Yusuke Murata and a detail-fixated, thorough art style.* It’s fitting, then, that the manga he’s currently drawing, Natsu no Zenjitsu, deals with art itself.

As the title suggests, this particular chapter focuses on the male lead’s sense of touch, and aims to convey how it factors into both his life and his paintings to the readers. Part of that goal is accomplished in conventional means via the script, but the chapter also provides a clinic of how to incorporate the sense of touch into seemingly flat pages of manga. Nor does it just run an art clinic; these depictions are intimately related to a growing and somewhat contradictory set of emotions in the manga’s male lead.

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Anime Movie Slaparound: Dirty Pair: Project Eden

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Dirty Pair was a wildly popular 1980s sci-fi franchise centered around a pair of destructive bounty hunters. In this “whatever-we-just-watched” segment, we’ll be talking about the Lovely Angels’ pulpy, funny franchise movie, Dirty Pair: Project Eden.

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Don’t let the looks fool you, they’ve blown up more planets than you’ve lived on

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Final Review: Dusk Maiden of Amnesia (9/10)

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Dusk Maiden of Amensia is a fusion romance/mystery show about a guy and a ghost girl trying to solve the mystery of her murder, with really awesome backgrounds. Am I the only one who thinks romance series and pretty background art go well together? If I’m not the only one, read on to find out why I liked this show as much as I did.

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Exhibit A

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Introducing Unnecessary Terminology: Pacing and Energy Level

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Arata Kangatari’s 7th episode was delayed this week thanks to a pan-Asian Table Tennis tournament, so I was going to write a post celebrating rapid-fire tennis comedy Teekyu. But a certain phrase kept popping up in that post, so I thought I’d address that first. And really, I’ve tossed around the terms “fast pacing” and “high energy” a whole awful lot over the past couple of months. I think it’s only fair I define both terms, since I’ll be using them a lot in the months to come.

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First Reactions: Muromi-san Episode 7

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It stands to reason that immortal beings have explored every known way in the universe to have fun, legal or not. I’m really enjoying both the scenes of the myths and legends in their own world and the scenes where Takuro gets a glimpse into it, both of which were prominently on display this week.

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First Reactions: Space Brothers Episode 58

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This week’s episode yielded a number of enlightening gems regarding Vincent Bold’s worldview. The most amusing of which is that he’s anti-Webb, but his animosity towards other groups which work on different aspects of space exploration is something not at all uncommon in the astronomical community. Fortunately, Mutta was there to remind him that we’re all really on the same team. And keep the entire episode from being just a (great) October Sky homage.

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Fun With Numbers: Recency Bias and Boom-Bust Cycles in Anime Fandom

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In a previous post made approximately forever ago, I tackled the idea of “churn”; that anime fandom was constantly gaining new fans and losing old ones, at a rate high enough to cause significant institutional memory loss. Long story short, it turned out there was a distinct, cliff-like loss of popularity corresponding pretty closely with the introduction of Blu-Ray to the market in 2007-08, but not a constant one over time.

Here’s another angle on the idea, though: there may not be a constant change in popularity, but what about rating? Are people giving newer anime higher scores in general? That’s what I’m going to examine here.

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First Reactions: Devil Survivor 2 Episode 7

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This week’s episode of Devil Survivor 2 was the blandest one of the show, and will probably end up skippable even if the later episodes end up being good (something I’m beginning to seriously doubt).

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Manga Chapter of the Week: Ace of the Diamond Chapter 103 (Head-to-Head Match)

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There are few things I treasure more in manga than the ability to surprise me on a page-by-page basis. I love Yuuji Terajima’s Ace of the Diamond, and this chapter did a pretty good job reminding me why, building tension around a straightforward confrontation using clever Eyeshield 21-style visual feints.

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Final Review: Demon Prince Enma OVA (10/10)

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With the obvious exception of Ozamu Tezuka, no single person has created more classic anime characters than Go Nagai, the father of super robots (Mazinger Z) and perverted comedy (Harenchi Gakuen). So it makes sense that his characters get the reboot treatment a lot. Demon Prince Enma is the most ambitious interpretation of his work I’ve seen to date, taking characters from a comedy featuring demons with butts for heads, aging them 10 years, and thrusting them smack in the middle of a dark, shrimp and grits horror story.

Point of order before I begin, there is a certain flavor of story arc that only the best of creators can play. I call it the “dice in a cup” arc. It’s the term I use to describe what happens when characters in a scenario feel like dice spinning around in a heavily-shaken cup, slamming against each other and changing trajectories in way that feel at the same time natural and totally unpredictable. This is one of those things that’s very eye-testy; it’s very hard to quantify, but you know it when you see it. Demon Prince Enma has one such arc, a testimony to its general excellence.

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