This Week in Manga – Cutting The Knot

I’ve thought about it, and decided to make the multi-chapter posts from before into a recurring type of update. The way I see it, there are certain series not many people who visit this site read, and some others where the chapter may not contain enough information for a full post. For instance, Law’s current plan from One Piece or the subject of Food Honour in Toriko could easily receive their own posts, but the most recent chapters don’t have quite enough information to write about yet. At the same time, there were other topics in those chapters and many others which I can analyze, but not at great length. Plus there’s the occasional time where I’ll miss a chapter just because I’m like that sometimes.

So my solution is “This Week in Manga”, a series I hope to come out each week where I quickly go over several chapters I couldn’t write a full post about. The ideal number is seven in one update, but it’ll most likely change depending on what comes out. For this week, we have Toriko, One Piece, Fairy Tail, Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, Kimi ni Todoke, Natsume Yuujinchou and Nisekoi.

Toriko – All’s Fair In Friendship And Cooking

Chefs in the Toriko-verse can be dicks sometimes.

The relationship between Komatsu and Take seems to have gone down a direction I didn’t expect. Even though I understood how he was being portrayed as a corrupt chef, I still thought he was going to end up a victim of the Bishokukai. With all the criminal acts they have committed so far, slavery doesn’t seem all that out of character for them. But in the case of Take, and most likely the other kidnapped chefs as well, it appears that they had some sort of brainwashing applied to them as well.

From this chapter, I think I can make a prediction or two. First is that Komatsu will get healed, most likely by Chin Chinchin and/or the Bubble Fruit. Nobody is expecting him to die right now, so it’s just a question of how he’ll get better. The second prediction, and the one far less likely to happen, is that Take will become a recurring enemy for Komatsu. He isn’t strong enough to just get beaten by Toriko, especially with this new powerup, and an act like stabbing Komatsu can’t just be forgiven in a few chapters, so turning him back into a good guy now is unlikely. With those two out of the way, the most likely option is for him to leave and return in a later arc, at which point it’s hard to say what he’ll be like. I hope that’s the case, because Komatsu could use a good enemy that is only his and not Toriko’s.

Current Manga Rankings – 2011 – Part 1

I started reading manga a few years ago, and in that length of time I’ve acquired a surprising number of ongoing series. They have quite a bit of variety to them, from shonen to josei, weekly to whenever-the-hell-it-feels-like. I’ve had the chance to talk about quite a few of these series, and even reviewed some of them already. Since it’s the end of the year, though, I thought I would take the opportunity to rank all of my ongoing manga. This way I can discuss some series I couldn’t before, and I can state which manga I like the most and why.

30. Bleach

Here’s the thing about Bleach: it’s the one series on this list that I never read the old chapters for. It’s not something I would do by choice, but then again, I never really intended to start reading Bleach at all. One day I heard that the manga would be showing Gin’s bankai, so I read that chapter to see it and just didn’t stop. That’s a big part of why I find it so hard to get mad at this series. It takes a good deal of effort to feel anything towards it, really. I’ve been told that not caring about something is one of the cruelest things you can do to it, and that’s why it gets the lowest spot on this list.

Yerocha’s 2011 Anime Awards – Part 1

I’m sure some of you know that in addition to running a blog about manga, I’m also an anime fan. There are so many anime blogs out there that I usually leave it to the other bloggers and focus on manga. However, now that the year is almost up and I missed my chance to do the 12 Days of Christmas, I thought it would be a good idea to say a few things about the shows I saw this year.

Now I could do a Top 10 of 2011, but there’s a little problem with that. For various reasons, I wasn’t able to watch all of the really popular shows from this year. To give you an idea of the shows that aren’t included in these posts:

• Deadman Wonderland, Blue Exorcist, Toriko, Bakuman II and Usagi Drop were series I read instead of watched. The first three will be on the upcoming Manga Countdown, but it didn’t feel right to include them here when I obviously haven’t watched them.
• Tiger and Bunny and Fate/Zero are shows I just haven’t watched. I actually saw the first episode of Tiger and Bunny, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to watch the next episode. Fate/Zero just plain doesn’t appeal to me, though I may take a look after it ends.
• Mirai Nikki, Mawaru Penguindrum, Usagi Drop and Steins;Gate are shows I haven’t watched yet. I eventually plan to, and I considered holding off on this until then, but I wanted this to be out at the end of the year.

In spite of all that, there are still quite a few shows I watched this year that I wanted to discuss. And so I put together my 2011 Anime Awards. For each series I saw this year, I’ll give it an award and explain what I thought overall.