Manga Pages: Soul Eater Not! chapter 1

I’m not dead! I’ll be slowing down, though; I was on a manga binge when I started this blog, doing a post every three days, so I’ll be cutting back significantly with two posts a month—still better than dead, right?

Ookubo Atsushi‘s Soul Eater is one of my favorite manga, but it’s no secret that it’s gone downhill since entering the third major arc. Anime Kritik theorized that Ookubo had generally stopped caring about his story, and before he could take another breath, Soul Eater Not! had been announced.

Way of the Reader: Magazines vs. Tankouban in the West

Like most American manga fans, I was introduced to the medium through tankouban; and also like most of them, the only other way I can read manga is through scanslations. Reading manga this way, one usually goes unaware of the magazines that series come from. This leads to an interesting difference in the way that manga is consumed as a whole, and it’s a difference I’m becoming familiar with as I progress in manga fandom.

 

Jump SQ!

 

Art-chitecture: Taboo-Tattoo chapter one

These past 4 days, I’ve been searching unsuccessfully for new manga to read. I like action series with cute girls, so I looked for works in that vein, but time and again I was confronted by failures in illustrating action. Finally, I stumbled across Taboo-Tattoo by Shinjirou, an exciting new series that works to show exactly where all of the others failed.

 

I'll be using this fight from the first chapter as my sample.

Details and Symbols: Soul Eater’s Sun and Moon

Soul Eater is Ookubo Atsushi‘s labor of love, and he’s packed it full of fun little details, references, and symbols. Among those details are the stylized, demonic sun and moon that can be seen almost constantly throughout the manga.

 

First panel on page 1, and most common appearance of the moon.