Sleep Is For the Weak

Slim pickings this week, but I have a Mini Review of Pearl Pink and an update to the Mini Review of Let Dai for you. I also updated the out-of-date Reviews and Mini Reviews archive lists. Against all reason, I’m back in school this semester, so the hellish existence known as “grad student” has sucked me in once more. Expect at least a few slim update weeks while I get my shit together. Bad Jew and I should both have our Masters this May, so maybe we’ll update more then!…or get better jobs. I think he plans to go after a PhD, though, which means he won’t get a job until he can get his grubby mitts off school. I expect he’ll be living in my basement soon. I may instate a system where he writes for this site in order to get fed.

Anyway, long story short - I’ll be back next Tuesday with something. After that, we’ll see. Also, physical organic chemistry at the graduate level is like walking through fire.

I’m having a busy week, so right now I offer you two things: a mini review of the Gin Tama manga by NotHayama, and the promise that I’ll try and update again before next Tuesday. I need to update the review and mini review list archives at the very least. But if I can’t find the time, see you next Tuesday. (And your review is coming, Bad Jew…the Sailor Moon one predated yours.)

Responsibilities suck! That is all.

I guess I’ll do a review or essay or something on Death Note now; I’ve practically written one in the comments section of last post already, but that’s lame - I need something more organized. Time to replace my mouth with money, or however the expression goes.

I’ve also read a lot more of Let Dai this week, and I think I can now say that the comic is strangely brilliant. Volume 8 pushed me over the edge of “I like it”/”it’s actually good” that some comics keep me straddling for a while (like INVU). That’s not to say Let Dai isn’t interesting from the beginning - I was pretty intrigued by Volume 2, really. But I think Volume 8 proves that the manhwaka knows exactly what she’s doing, and that the craziness that proceeded it was entirely intentional. Yes, Let Dai is batshit insane. But it’s batshit in a good way, and it goes down these roads that most shoujo are too scared to. For example, rape is handled realistically. Pushover characters actually suffer because they can’t stand up for themselves - and I don’t mean in the cliche way of some girl getting picked on in class for no reason and her love interest saving her, I mean a pushover character not standing up for the right thing and then being hated by the people who once admired him. Also, the beautiful anti-hero Dai IS OUT OF HIS MIND. He’s uncompromisingly, unapologetically, and unashamedly out of his mind. And I really like that. Like Carno from The Young Magician, I admire characters who are thoroughly insane, and not just insane when the plot dictates that that would be cool. If you’re nuts, you’ve gotta stay nuts. And Dai is so, so nuts. Another sign that the manwha is good - the manhwaka keeps telling the audience that Dai changes whatever world he steps into, that people either love him with everything they have or hate him with the fire of a thousand hot Latin suns. That sort of character is almost impossible to write realistically. But…I really do think I believe in Dai. He bothers me deeply in a way that very few other fictional characters can. He’s actually made me stay up at night and stare at the ceiling while I wondered about him.

God, I love good comics.

Anyway, so Death Note and Let Dai updates will be coming soon, and NotHayama’s got some stuff coming as well. See you Tuesday.

Wow…our readership is growing, as are the number of people who think I’m metaphorically loud-mouthed. That’s okay. I’m literally pretty loud-mouthed, too.

I’m a bit late, but there’s an actual, honest-to-God new full review from our contributor Orange Skirt up now. It’s for Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, the fabulously weird (and surprisingly entertaining) live-action version of our favorite gateway anime. This is her third full review for the site, which means she’s a recurring contributor now, which further means I need to update the Staff page so I can put her on it. That thing is due for an update…I’m no longer the idealistic age of 20, and NotHayama has partaken in far worse crimes against humanity since last we spoke. Also, it reminded me that Sleep is for the Weak is over 5 years old. THAT’S JUST CRAZY. If you put all our updates back to back with a week between them like a responsible site would have done, though, our website is about 4.5 months old. Being lazy has made us look established. Remember that when writing your resume, kids.

I need to go to bed. See you next Tuesday. Also - I still think Death Note is great. It ran alongside Yu-Gi-Oh, for God’s sake. But I’ll stop ragging on this now, because I don’t want to talk about Death Note here. Plenty of people have already analyzed Death Note. I want to spend my time ranting about obscure shit like The Young Magician. Oh, wait - TOO LATE.

We’ve never talked about it on this site–I meant to ages ago, but now it’s so popular that my opinion will probably just be redundant–but I think Death Note is great. The manga is great, the movies both had fantastic original endings (totally didn’t see them coming), and the anime, although definitely flawed in a few unique ways, has its own fair share of great. Death Note has its problems, but overall it’s super smart and miles ahead of most Shounen Jump stuff. And yes, you should read it until the end, because although the second half is weaker, it’s still full of great.

Although everyone and his dog hailed Death Note as great when the manga was first coming out in English, recently I heard a lot more criticism of it. And I don’t mean detailed and intelligent criticism, I mean “Death Note is bad” type criticism from people who are supposedly informed comics reader/critics/etc. This baffled me. But…Death Note is great? And then Zac Bertschy, better known as Anime News Network’s Answerman, said this in one of ANN’s forums:

Death Note is a good manga and a decent TV series. The people who say it’s “ridiculous” or terrible or whatever are kneejerk backlashin’.

Not that it’s impossible to dislike, which I’m sure plenty of people do, but to say it’s totally awful and all the praise is unwarranted is pretty much wrong.

Ha ha ha! I like that.

And I agree. You don’t have to like it, but Death Note is great. Like how Monster is great, but I still don’t like it. What you like and what is objectively good do not always match up. Isn’t that supposed to be a critic’s creed? Sheesh.

Sorry, now I’m just being really negative. I don’t hate all comic reviewers, I swear.

I woke up at dawn and couldn’t fall back asleep, so I got up and wrote a very long Mini Review for Suppli. I can’t…I can’t shut up when it comes to talking about female characters in media. I just can’t. Forgive me.

I’ll be back on Tuesday, because now I plan to go back to bed. I promise to put up one of our backed-up full reviews then. (Sorry, Orange Skirt.)

Back by popular (?) demand, we now have more anime/manga awards. It’s still in the old format, so any comments people want to leave will have to go with this post. They’re a little dirtier than usual this time…sorry, that’s probably just because we’re all old enough to read/watch trashy stuff out of Japan these days. And since I work on Saiyuki, Tactics, and Hands Off for Tokyopop, I’ve also become an expert at zeroing in on homoerotic subtext, so most of the BL-related awards are my doing. I can’t NOT see it lurking behind everything now. Dammit!

The entire staff is going home for the holidays, so updates will have to wait until we’re back with our computers. I’d say…Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 is a safe bet for when we’ll next update. After that, we’ll move back to the Tuesday schedule. I don’t anticipate any problems unless my immune system decides to stop working again.

Happy holidays, new year, etc. AND READ THE YOUNG MAGICIAN. You will be quizzed.

Volume 10 of The Young Magician came out yesterday. It is SO AWESOME it made me scream. I then gave it to NotHayama; she read it and also screamed.

Everyone should be reading this comic. Well, okay, everyone of age (it’s rated M because guts fly everywhere and they like to use the F-bomb in later volumes). It’s so good. It is so good. Very few people on Earth write comics as good as Yuri Narushima does. She’s absolutely brilliant, but she’s really good at hiding it, hence she’s not super famous. But trust me–her comics are more mind-blowing and smart and insightful than almost anything else on the market. She’ll probably always have a stigma on her because she usually writes fantasy/horror shoujo and not seinen, though, which is stupid.

The Young Magician is still unfinished in Japan (Volume 14 came out a few months ago), and since she’s working on at least one other series right now, she only puts out a new volume every year or so. It’s been running since 1996, which means she’s been doing it for over 10 years. And I checked the Wings website recently, and sure enough, it’s still there (if you scroll down a bit; under the section that says “Line Up” in Katakana). That series has been running in Wings magazine of all places for over 10 years. And it’s still going. Sometimes I have nightmares that she won’t finish the series, leaving a gap in my heart from not knowing how it ends.

Also–ten volumes in and I still don’t know who “The Young Magician” refers to. The manga is crazy like that. And for any of you who say it’s Carno, I dare you to read Volume 10. DAMMIT, IT’S SO GOOD.

Dammit.

My cold is now a flu, and instead of stuffed-up I am now vomity. I spend half of my day in a drugged-up daze. I’m not sure when I can update next, but I hope it to be sometime this week. I’ll do my best.

The Cold From Hell knocked me flat for an unexpectedly long time, as it did to NotHayama, who was the one to give it to me. *shakes fist* I still apologize for being a week late. Here are three Mini Reviews that, if you print them out, can be used to dry your tears: Baku (by me), Super Gals!/Gals! (by me), and Translucent (by NotHayama). Her review is pretty furious and is only the most recent in a fairly long line of angry reviews, so she swears to me she’ll have a positive review of something next time so the world doesn’t think she hates everything. Either way, I’m laughing at her.

I now have two full reviews complete in the queue (one from a contributor and one from Bad Jew), and we have new Awards coming up for Christmas, so this is going to be a full few weeks. I’ve decided that Tuesday will be the official update day from now on, since Sunday was proving inconvenient. I imagine no one cares.

See you in a week.