Various creators
Publisher: Viz
I picked this up on a whim while waiting in the queue in Blockbusters, and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. Seeing the dreaded Yu-Gi-Oh! on the cover made me a little hesitant, but even that turned out to be an enjoyable read.
Clearly, the main attraction of this book is its price. At $5 for about 400 pages, you can’t go far wrong, especially as a 22-page comic from Marvel or DC will set you back almost as much. Yes, it’s in black and white, and yes the Japanese invented decompressed storytelling, but nonetheless this is a good buy. One of my main problems with translated manga is that the translations are often rather lifeless and simplistic. Sadly, the same is true here. Blanking out the original speech bubbles leaves a lot of space for dialogue, but the English dialogue seems often to have been simplified or overly-literally translated. What you’re left with is rather stilted and simplistic dialogue. Obviously this is aimed at a younger audience, but I’ve never felt that a young audience necessitates talking down to them, which this book often does. Characters far too often describe what they’re doing, or repeat information, and other such redundancies. Trust me, if you can get an eight year old to read a book backwards (the strips are printed right-to-left to save on production costs and to be more authentic), then you can trust them to pick up what’s going on in the pictures without spelling it out to them.
And that’s really the only flaw. Normally anthologies tend to be of mixed quality, and while that is true here, there’s nothing really awful in here. Too many of the strips are based around the main characters fighting a series of opponents one after another, which gets a bit stale after you’ve seen it eight times in one book, but are otherwise pretty good. Sadly, the strips I liked most, including a strangely compelling series about a high school Go team (yes really), are not given as much space as the more popular, but less enjoyable strips like Yu-Gi-Oh! That said, even that strip proved to be far more enjoyable that the atrocity that is its television incarnation.
All in all, this is quite a good anthology. The base level of quality is average, and most strips are better than that. There are no clunkers here. I doubt I’ll be picking up another issue of Shonen Jump any time soon, but this issue was a refreshing change from my usual comics reading and was a pleasant surprise.
And it’s got fan art pages. If DC and Marvel want kids to read their comics again, they should have fan art pages. Kids love to draw, and fan art will save the US industry!
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