Del Rey Round-Up: Aventura, Heavenly Hockey Club, and Mamotte

The last week of November 2007 saw a lot of Del Rey titles come out all at once: the last volume of Genshiken, Mamotte! Lollipop volume 4, Aventura vol. 1 and My Heavenly Hockey Club volume 3. I thought I’d take the opportunity to do an all-Del Rey column and make good on my promise to review My Heavenly Hockey Club volume 2 as well. I’d read a sample chapter of Mamotte! Lollipop volume 1 and was intrigued; I foolishly decided to catch up on volumes 1-4. Unfortunately, the Lollipop beat me into the ground spiritually and mentally and I only just now made it to the end of volume two.

Admittedly this column is over a month late. During the month of December when Mamotte! Lollipop wasn’t kicking my ass, I covered NYAF in three different capacities, made buttons dedicated to Jason Thompson, wrote a review for Otaku USA magazine, reviewed other stuff for PW, participated in three year-end-critc’s polls, and hosted my parents the week of Christmas. I also worked on my podcast and found a new apartment. I’m just saying… it’s not like I’ve been playing Rock Band this whole time.

Aventura, Vol. 1

By Shin Midorikawa
Del Rey, 192 pp.
Rating: 16+ (Older Teen)

Lewin Randit is an infamous redhead at the Gaius School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Gaius has only two majors to choose from: Wizardry or Swordsmanship, and Lewin is a Swordsmanship major. Exactly like Naruto and Harry Potter, Lewin is extremely clutzy and unskilled - but he just might grow up to be the greatest wizard/ninja of all time. It’s the shonen plot we’ve seen a thousand times before, but instead of crippling the story, there’s a comforting familiarity to these clichés balanced out with terrific art.

The art of Aventura is amazing, with it’s detailed linework and Ah! My Goddess-style antenna-like bangs on Record of the Lodoss War-style elves that I kind of want to own posters by the artist. Unfortunately at times the hyper-detailed backgrounds clutter up the panels and make the action hard to follow. At least for volume one, I would prefer pin-ups by Shin Midorikawa instead of sequential art. I had to re-read several pages to understand the flow of the action.

Lewin makes friends with Chris Cottenburg, a high elf Wizarding major, and his “teammate” the token girl Soela Evenport. Soela takes on the Misty-from-Pokemon role in Adventura, as she’s raising a monster egg, similar to Togepi from Pokemon. Two of the teachers take on important roles in the story, favorably reminiscent of Hogwarts staffers, but they are totally hot elves instead of Professor McGonagle or Hagrid.

The characters all wear Kingdom Hearts-style shoes, which will hit home with the teenage Kingdom Hearts cosplayers for whom this book is intended. Periodically the text is broken up to give one omniscient information like a videogame walk-through. To introduce a living Beauty and the Beast-style candelabra the book offers this pop-up text box:

“Shokuoki: One of the few fire attribute dolls capable of summoning magic. It powers all the lights in school.”

Thanks! Now I feel like I’m playing a videogame. Fortunately, the text boxes calm down a bit after the first few chapters.

Volume one culminates in a battle against some skeletons Lewin and his friends spawned accidentally in a lab accident. “Lewin! Don’t touch the claws!!” Soela yells, “Undead claws are coated in septic poison!!” And again, I feel like I’m playing the walk-through.

Aventura isn’t for me specifically, but I still found it appealing (high elves!). I want to read doujinshi about the teachers and try drawing the characters myself. Perhaps Aventura’s resemblance to Harry Potter goes much deeper than surface level - like Harry Potter, Aventura strikes me as a work that could be improved upon by some amusing works of fan fiction.

Volume 1 of Aventura is available now, volume two will be released in April of 2008.

My Heavenly Hockey Club, Vol. 2

By Ai Morinaga
Del Rey, 208 pp.
Rating: 13+ (Teen)

Had I reviewed My Heavenly Hockey Club volume 1 instead of Katherine, I would’ve given it an A- instead of a B. I took Hockey Club to be a male-harem parody title like Ouran High School Host Club but with better visual gags (the bear! I was laughing out loud on the subway) and a sillier premise (I’ve got a soft spot for obscure sports. Curling, anyone?). The paper-thin characterizations, predictable romance and bishonen all take a back seat to the comedy and the all-consuming Japanese pastime of traveling to onsen and eating local food specialties. I terrifically enjoyed going to onsen and acting like an intra-Japanese tourist when I was in Japan. I also strongly identify with Hana, who’s character motivation is primarily to sleep in as long as possible, and secondarily, to eat delicious things.

Volume two finds Hana mysteriously attracted to a chubby kid (for all the wrong reasons). No one will face off against the club after they used a bear as a goalie - except for a school in Yamagata. The team travels to Japanese cherry country, primarily to eat a lot of cherries, but also to face off against a desperately under-funded field hockey club. All the kids use cardboard shin guards! I’m certain that the shaved heads of the rival team are a parody of sometime specific, but the translator’s notes imply they might just look like ascetic monks.

The volume briefly becomes My Heavenly Judo Club when Izumi reads the famous Judo Dreams manga and forces everyone to practice judo. In the final chapter, the team heads to the Izumi family vacation house in Okinawa for a summer training camp. Hana doesn’t want to go, but caves in when she find out she’ll be able to fulfill her lifelong dream of napping in a hammock.

The end of the book was derivative of early volumes of Host Club; Instead of Tamaki and Haruhi, it’s Izumi and Hana who are trapped alone together during a power outage. The storm in Host Club reveals that Haruhi is afraid of lightning, but in Hockey Club the typhoon is just another funny episode.

It’s really incredible to me how little time manga characters spend alone with members of the opposite sex. The storm is a paper-thin excuse for Hana and Izumi to be alone together, which normally would make a shojo protagonist blush, but Hana is too pragmatic for that kind of nonsense.

My Heavenly Hockey Club, Vol. 3

By Ai Morinaga
Del Rey, 192 pp.
Rating: 13+ (Teen)

My Heavenly Hockey Club volume 3 kicks off with the cliché of getting-lost-with-a-boy-alone-on-a-school-trip (Marmalade Boy, Sand Chronicles, and more) as Hana and Takashi end up lost in the jungles of a private island in Okinawa looking for the legendary iriomot wildcat (read Azumanga Daioh for more details). Any romance Hana might have had with Takashi is overshadowed by encounters with poisonous snake, falling off of cliffs, and gags about nearsightedness.

Cut to the next chapter where the hockey club takes a trip to a rustic hot springs (a vacation from the precious vacation), which turns out to be much, much more rustic than advertised. The club is quickly forced into host-club-type indentured servitude. In case you had any doubt this was shojo, check out the totally unwanted nudity on page 62. It’s the opposite of fanservice!

The first half of the book is pretty funny, although still not as hilarious as the second half of volume one. In the weak penultimate chapter, Hana competes for Izumi with his second cousin, an obnoxious blond half-Japanese girl named Tamako. It’s a total shojo cliché (even Fall in Love Like a Comic has the competing cousin character) and it’s not terribly entertaining, although there are one or two good gags about Hana’s lack of ladylike elegance. Hana explains her lack of cooking ability: “I specialize in eating.”

There are two brilliant things in this volume: First, Izumi’s father has only one hair on his bald head, and this figures into the plot in a hysterically funny way in the final chapter. Second, one of the translator’s notes (Del Rey does such great translator’s notes!) actually changed the way I think of the world forever! Page 171 explains a line from page 18 where Hana screams “Whose dad are you!!?” The translator explains:

Fathers the world over love to make bad puns, and in Japan, such puns are referred to as “dad gags.”

I had no idea old men telling bad jokes is universal to all cultures! This blew my mind. I even started thinking of my 30-something male friends telling bad jokes as future dads, practicing their horrible puns in advance.

Volumes 1-3 My Heavenly Hockey Club are available now, volume four will be released in March of 2008. The series appears to be six volumes long in total.

Mamotte! Lollipop, Vol. 1

By Michiyo Kikuta
Del Rey, 224 pp.
Rating: 13+ (Teen)

Mamotte! Lollipop drew me in by having the most awesome first 20 pages of practically any title I can think of:

12-year-old Nina is describing her ideal boyfriend to a friend while eating cake, “He should be strong, kind, good-looking, and someone who’d protect me.” She eats a mysterious piece of candy on the cake AND SUDDENLY A CAR BURST THROUGH THE WALL OF THE CAFE! INSIDE THE CAR ARE TWO HOT TEENAGE WIAZARDS! Sorry, but it’s really an all-caps moment.

When I was 12 my fantasy was to have a cute blonde guy fight for my affection against a cute brunette. Nina’s new wizard friends are a cute blue-haired kid named Zero (close enough to blond), and a cute brunette named Ichi. The candy Nina ate is a jewel Ichi and Zero need to pass the wizarding exam. Suddenly two more wizards BUST THROUGH THE WALL RIDING A GIANT OWL. Our heroes escape in a flying car.

And after that you can just put the book down because it’s pretty disappointing from there on out. More (uninteresting) pairs of wizards are introduced: Forte and Sun, Go and Rokka (puns on the Japanese words for numbers). In a total manga cliché, Ichi and Zero start living at Nina’s house and attending her school. They’re not waiting for her to pass the jewel (Re: Hal Johnson), rather, they must protect Nina for six months.

Rokka is a five-year-old who casts a spell on herself to look like a (more) sexually mature teenager. It an innocent trope of magical girl anime to have a protagonist who can magically transform from prepubescent to post-pubescent, as in Creamy Mami, Fancy Lala, and Full Moon O Sagashite. However, there’s a darker side to this 5-going-on-15 transformation, as seen in Nanaka 6/17 and UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie. A teenager with the brain of a kindergartener can be considered sexy to the Japanese. Rokka is drawn in a Playboy bunny suit in the author’s notes the end of volume 2 by reader request - and that kind of creeped me out. Rokka’s proportions as a 5-year-old are also a bit off in volume one.

Forte is hilariously referred to as “For-chan,” which I snickered at, as it is one letter away from the infamous “fourchan” website here in the U.S. - Hopefually the 13-year-olds reading Mamotte are unfamiliar with the site.

Nina gets turned into a baby for one chapter, and a lackluster hot springs episode follows. Volume one closes with a gameshow/exam involving a lot of puns - Del Rey’s translation notes here are priceless.

During the test Nina loses her voice, is forced to wear a fancy dress, and is made into a princess to be rescued. I strongly prefer princesses like Nausicaa and Utena to the helpless kind who need protecting.

The final chapter is an unrelated short story called Medical Magic.

Mamotte! Lollipop, Vol. 2

By Michiyo Kikuta
Del Rey, 224 pp.
Rating: 13+ (Teen)

At the opening of volume 2 Mamotte! Lollipop is already crowded with characters when Zero, Ichi, Sun, Forte, Go, and Rokka are joined by another wizard pair: Nanase and Yakumo. All six of the original characters, despite being contenders for the magic jewel, have befriended each other hang out in a massive posse with Nina. This makes the panels feel cluttered. I can only imaginee that if I were a kid reading this, and my favorite character was Sun, I would appreciate that she appears so often, despite having no action or plot reasons to be present. As an adult reader I confused Go with Nanase and Forte as I stumbled through the crowded panels.

Yakumo’s kansai dialect is portrayed in a bolded font to set apart his speech from everyone else’s; it’s an interesting choice, although perhaps not aesthetically pleasing. I think it does accomplish what Del Rey hoped it would.

The book opens with a chapter about exploring the school at night in pairs; this is a common Japanese game and an anime/manga staple plot. The next chapter is the inevitable (and perhaps required by law?) beach episode. The book closes with a couple chapters about Zero and Ichi’s backstory and a short unrelated manga called “Kaito Papillion” about a phantom jewel thief/prince.

The backstory is darker than the rest of the series so far, and contains a step-sibling love story, which is one of my personal manga pet peeves. The tale of Zero and Ichi becoming friends is suspiciously reminiscent of yaoi: Young innocent light-haired Zero stalks and befriends Ichi, the brooding brunette with a dark past.

Kikuta reveals in the author’s notes that she named the series after a song called “Bizarre Lollipop” by the band Flipper’s Guitar. Mamotte means “to protect,” so the title is “Protect Lollipop”.

Interestingly enough, a 12 episode anime series of Mamotte! Lollipop was produced in 2006. Del Rey has an uncanny knack for picking up manga titles with anime counterparts, whether or not the anime is licensed in North America. In the case of some titles, like The Wallflower, the manga was being distribute by Del Rey prior to the anime’s air date in Japan.

Volumes 1-4 Mamotte! Lollipop are available now, volume five will be released in March of 2008. The series is seven volumes long in total.