Thursday, January 23, 2020

#2 Douman Seiman

For several years now I've been collecting manga (Japanese comics) and at this point it's getting pretty chunky (around 550 books mostly in English and Japanese, with some in Spanish, German, and Chinese). One of my friends is on coop this semester, so he asked me to let him borrow some series now that he actually has some free time. It's pretty easy to just find manga scans online, but reading the physical copy just feels better. One that I ended up giving him is one of my favorites, Voynich Hotel, by one of my favorite manga authors, Douman Seiman.

       Image result for voynich hotel manga vol 1"    Image result for voynich hotel manga vol 1"

Serialized in Young Champion magazine and compiled into 3 volumes, Voynich was published in English by Seven Seas Entertainment. Seven Seas has been around since 2004 but I really only noticed them a few years back when they started translating a ton of manga I like. They handle a lot of more niche publications, which is cool and because of that I'm hoping I can work for them someday.

Voynich is centered around, as one would expect, the Voynich Hotel and its inhabitants. This manga features a real smattering of characters, and the story follows the lives of all these different characters and how all of them link together in various ways. And when I say "real smattering of characters," I mean we've got witches, yakuza, ghosts, bounty hunters, assassins, demons, a serial killer, government agents, drug dealers, a robot detective, a sentient cat, an ex-luchador, and a Goonies style crew of kids. It might sound a bit chaotic (and it is), but it's handled really well and is quite the wild and enjoyable ride.

A key aspect of the author's writing that I like is how he doesn't shy away from showing what he wants to show. He's nonchalant with his portrayals of things such as character death, nudity, sex, gore, etc. Like if a character dies, it just kinda happens. There isn't much fanfare, it's usually an abrupt and shocking event, and more focus is put on the aftermath of their death rather than the death itself. The lack-of-fanfare method of portraying things gives it a feeling of reality, even if the story is far from it.

While Douman Sieman isn't as insane as Nisio Isin, he still does publish a lot of different manga. Voynich is the only one of his series to be published in English however, which is pretty sad (come on Seven Seas, get on that).

On the topic of his other series, the other major one I think is high tier is Oddman 11. It's still being serialized, and its releases are sparse, but it's a fun and wacky time. It's heavily inspired by the comic series/movie Scott Pilgrim vs the World (using the idea of defeating someone's league of exes to be able to date them), even directly referencing it in one of the early chapters.

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The main gimmick of the series is that there are 11 people with special powers called Oddman. The only male Oddman, Itami, has dated all of the other Oddman (minus his sister who is also an Oddman). The main character, Setsu, sets out on a quest to defeat all of the Oddman in order to date Itami.

The best part about all of these powers is that they kinda suck, or are pretty useless. One of the girl's power is simply that she can't bathe. Another's power is that no one likes her. They're more so quirks than powers, but they're still pretty trash. A couple have useful powers but spoilers.

Thus concludes part 2 of me talking about Japanese authors no one here's heard of. Probably gonna make a series of this out of my posts.

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