I’m also excited to announce that I found a copy of the first volume of Enomoto: New Elements that Shake the World, so I’ll be translating it for you lovely people. Get ready to vomit, the first chapter has a brute of a woman beating the main character with her new born baby still attached by the umbilical cord. Yeah… pretty awesome.

So, I wanted to get this out here, cause it’s awesome, and the magazine is soooooo out of print, I don’t think anyone could ever find it. Regardless, here it is.

Straight Girl is a static, user-prompted flash manga. The art is all CG, and often uses blur effects to give the impression of movement. This is a gag manga, and sometimes the CG distracts from the comedy. But other times the CG makes things funnier than they could’ve been drawn. Even the usage of CG is a joke in itself. It’s really just a new type of art that the reader and the author will take time to adapt to. Other artists have tried to use CG before and have totally failed, but Straight Girl seems to be doing a fine job of it.

Straight-Girl Blog here.

Kokusai Youkai Keisatsu Okei (or International Yokai Police Okei) is a hand-drawn, bu heavily computer processed, flash manga with lots of animation and sound effects (like the creepy laughter of Okei-sensei). The animation is genuinely entertaining, and it’s surprising how fun it is to read, even when I can’t understand everything. The story follows a young lady who gets drafted into the International Yokai Police against her will. There is a weird grandma looking character named Okei-sensei. And there’s lots of senior-citizen-looking ghosts. Quite entertaining and eccentric for an action manga.

More from the artist here.

Sora kara Furatarou (Futarou from the sky) has really thick lines and lots of animation. It only requires a next-click when there is text. Otherwise it’s fully animated, and looks good. This is a light-hearted comedy with thick lines and cute characters. It’s a self-contained story without chapters, unlike the other manga on the site.

Marurabo Raifu is the most interactive of the four titles. The title screen lets you select between 1st or 2nd year of school or summer break. Once you click one of these, it takes you to an interactive screen with several characters in a location. Mousing over each will activate a character animation, and clicking on them will open a word balloon with a link to a chapter or chapters of the manga. Once you select a chapter, you’ll see lots of animation with the word balloons and frames moving in and out of the screen, but no actual character animation. The story is a school comedy, and the art is nice and bubbly with thick lines.

Overall, the standouts are definitely Straight Girl and Kokusai Youkai Keisatsu Okei. They are fun to watch and give the reader something more than can be accomplished on paper. We’ll see how much more support Shueisha gives the site. They haven’t expanded past four titles, but they have been adding new chapters of the titles regularly.

Also, this Flash manga really sets itself apart from most Flash animations I’ve seen. The quality is extremely high, and I’m sure there was a group of people working on these rather than one person. It’s almost a half-way point between manga and anime, while still keeping what makes manga great.

Thanks to Kotonoha (fine scanlating group with an almost 100% awesomeness rating), I’m finally getting more Iwaaki, in the form of Historie. The series is currently running in Afternoon, one of Kodansha’s seinen manga magazines. The plot is Iwaaki’s take on a historical narrative, similar to his previous series Heureka (although, I’m not sure if that was based on actual historical events).

We follow Eumenes, a smart young man, who is returning to his home, Cardia. Aristotle makes a quick appearance as Eumenes ferries him to Europe from Asia. When Eumenes returns home, Cardia is under seige by the Macedonians. He makes it into the city, and while he sits in the ruins of his former library, we begin the first flashback of his life. This flashback takes up the rest of the volume and describes his life as a son of an affluent household.

As usual, Iwaaki is on his game artistically and otherwise.

Iwaaki’s character designs have been called “stiff” before. I can understand that, but I don’t think it detracts from the story at all. His characters, similar to Naoki Urasawa’s, are all visually distinct. One face never looks like another, and it’s no problem to tell characters apart.

It’s also nice to see that Iwaaki hasn’t given up some of his trademark visuals. I always loved the scenes in Parasyte where the page was split horizontally between two frames. The uppermost showing a person (this is an example) and the bottom frame showing the person cut in half. The composition has an almost strobe effect. He uses this approach for almost all of his action sequences, and in every one it works. There’s a certain bluntness to these moments that make them feel even realer than anything with speedlines and sound-effects.

Ouch.

Also, he throws in some gory horror moments, which give a more modern feel to this historical tale. I’m used to historical novels/movies/etc. glossing over the brutality of those early days of humanity. Iwaaki seems to indulge himself instead. (Note: the following image is a composite of frames from two different pages)

Like I said, Iwaaki is on his game. The volume reads fast, even during non-action parts. The characters are intriguing and unconventional. Everything about this feels like a more adult Parasyte. And by that, I don’t mean that people’s heads will start splitting into knives. No, this story seems to have the same epic feel to it, while focusing on the personal. An all around good manga for almost anybody