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EMMA VOL. 6 BY KAORU MORI
Summary/Review
Warning: My manga "reviews" often contain spoilers. I find it hard to adequately discuss a volume of manga without talking about it in more detail than some might like.
This volume shows the consequences of William's decision to pursue a relationship with Emma instead of Eleanor. It affects all of them in ways they could not imagine. The volume essentially begins with William breaking his engagement with Eleanor. I feel bad for Eleanor - she's a sweet girl, although thoughtless and vapid - she honestly cares for William and doesn't deserve to be strung about while he pines over Emma. Unfortunately for all of them, Eleanor's father, the Viscount, is evil. He is determined to see Eleanor married to William and will not accept the end of their engagement.
The Viscount is a cunning man. He's done enough investigation into William's life to understand why the engagement is being broken. He goes straight to Emma to exact his revenge. He arranges for a man to kidnap Emma. She is summoned out of the mansion where she works at 11 PM supposedly to meet with William. A man snatches her away and forces her to write William and end their relationship. I love the drawing of her at the start of Chapter 41. She is trapped at the back of a wagon and looks scared, but also fiercely determined to survive.
William, meanwhile knowing nothing about Emma's plight, is determined to stay away from Eleanor, even braving the disapproval of his father. They have a knock-down, drag-out fight at the end of the volume. In one picture, they are staring at each other like two dogs about to attack. Richard Jones is a hardened man, unwilling to accept his son's love for a lower class woman, in large part because he saw the consequences of what society did to his own wife. It's interesting to see the contrast of his screaming fights with William and his resigned, quiet manner with his wife a few pages later.
Mori does a great job of portraying anger graphically. The movement of the drawing and the large text really conveyed emotions well. I also love how she draw the kidnapping scene - lots of darkness and quick lines to emphasize the action. Overall, I think the kidnapping plot was pretty silly - like a bad soap opera - but it's interesting nonetheless. There is more nudity in this volume. We see Emma's mistress bathing. I don't know why she throws this in there. It's completely pointless. It's tastefully done, but I just don't see the need.
Reference: umad-dating-advices.blogspot.com
The summer season's top tier is already weighing in - now the sleepers start to make their case.
"I had fairly high hopes for Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun" heading into the season. There was some material reason to be optimistic - a very good cast, a decent staff, a pretty well thought-of source material that's a manga and not a LN. Above and beyond that, though, this one simply looked interesting. It's very rare to see a non-shoujo or josei school manga with a female lead - this one is published in the nominally shounen "Gangan Online", a veritable treasure trove of good manga that blur demographic lines in a most appealing way.
Based on the first episode, it seems as if that optimism was mostly warranted. While the premiere wasn't side-splittingly funny or anything, it was quite artfully done on every level. The art and animation from Dogakobo are sneaky good, that aforementioned cast (including a newbie as the lead) excellent, and the music from the under-appreciated Hashimoto Yukari is unusually effective. The comic timing is good as well. Even if there's nothing that I love here yet, there's a lot to like.
"The conceit of the story is that Sakura Chiyo (a winning performance by newcomer Ozawa Ari") is in-love with fellow student Nozaki Umetarou ("Nakamura Yuuichi") - the twist being that Nozaki-kun is also famous shouju mangaka Sakuko Yumeno. When she finally works up the nerve to confess Sakura - unaware of that fact - does so by saying "I've always been your fan!" (which sounds strange to my American ears as a confession, but apparently isn't an unusual way for schoolgirls to "pop the question" in Japan). The rather dense Nozaki-kun misunderstands and takes her literally, offering Sakura an autograph as a token. One thing leads to another and Art Club member Sakura ends up going to Nozaki's apartment to do beta (the manga equivalent of code monkey) work on his manga, "Let's Fall in Love".
That's one of those silly premises that isn't so silly that you can't buy it in a comedy, and it works well here. The deadpan Nozaki and the genki and neurotic Sakura make an excellent couple by nature of their utter contrast, and Nozaki himself is an interesting study in contrasts - he looks and sounds like an adult but his behavior drops many hints that his maturity level is very much that of a 16 year-old boy. Nozaki immediately sees the value in having a member of his target demographic - indeed, a reader of his own manga - as a sounding board, and much of the humor springs from that premise.
"Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun" is a 4-koma manga and that's evident in the humor, which plays more as a series of vignettes than a traditional full-length episode. There are very funny bits involving bikes (and their manga tropes) and cats, and regular cut-ins from "Let's Fall in Love", whose leads are voiced by Mamoru Miyano and Miyake Marie. We also meet another character destined to be Nozaki's assistant, Mikoshiba Mikoto ("Okamoto Nobuhiko"). There's a lot of potential humor to be mined from the crossover of school life and romance and a manga about school life and romance, and the overall quality of the production is a very good sign of things to come. This is a very solid start, and I see potential for even better things from this series going forward.
