shonen manga, for a change

D.Gray-man rabu! Thanks to thanatoseve, I managed to get the raws of more recent chapters…though the stupid arc isn’t over, at least I got past the killer ending of volume 6. XD The nice thing is that the site, Timcanpi, has scanlations of quite a bit of the manga as well as raws. So you can pick either to read the English or the Japanese. No clue if the translation is any good, though.

I downloaded the first three episodes of the Black Cat anime and watched them. I had kind of read part of the series back when I was buying JUMP, but I’d forgotten almost everything about the story. I’m not sure if the storytelling is compelling enough to keep my interest…but I do like Train and Sven’s voices. And I’ll probably keep watching (for now) because the fight scenes are pretty cool (kind of reminds me of how I used to watch Noir mainly for the kick-ass fight sequences—and the music—though I was amused by the lesbian shit, as well as the overwhelming melodrama of it all…). I randomly picked a subber, Bakakazoku, at animesuki and was happy to find good video and audio quality, as well as good translation (at least, the couple of lines that I did happen to read were fine).

And since this is a JUMP post, I will add some extremely superficial comments about Bleach, some of which may be spoilerish. I spent about an hour the other day with my Bleach obsessed friend where she spoiled me for a good deal of the manga. I finally found out who Yorimichi was, and I must say I like her character design. VERY appealing. Rukia’s brother’s hair in those pins is just…stupid. He looked so much better when it was down at the end of his fight with Ichigo (I was flipping through volume 19). I was surprised at the really young looking, rather cute characters who turned out to be Captains or Vice-Captains. The biggest surprise for me is finding out that Ichigo’s father was a shinigami, and perhaps was even a Captain. Since I only saw the very beginning of the series, equating that dorky image with the I kick ass in black shinigami thing is very difficult. The color pages are a very nice touch. I wish they had done that for…say, Hikago. I did like the two page spread in volume 19 where a bunch of them are bank robbers or something.

Speaking of Hikago, I wish they had made a second art book, with art from the latter part of the series where the boys grow up and become bishounen art got so much nicer. It’s hard to settle for just that last manga calendar (though that was very lovely). *sighs*

Japanese Hikago Fanfic Sites

Lately, I've been seeing tons of Hikago doujinshi being posted on some comm or another, but to my eternal sorrow they are almost always HikaAki. Totally not my thing at all. Today I saw a couple more, and that was the last straw. I went digging through my piles of doujinshi only to discover that I didn't have much in the way of manga doujinshi. No instant gratification. So I figured I might as well post this list I've been slowly compiling, even though it's not done. Right now I think it's all AkiHika, but I do plan on adding some others that may feature other pairings.

( Hikago Fanfic Sites )

Most of these sites publish doujinshi, and I know for a fact that they do mail order overseas. You just have to be willing to pay the price (shipping can get a bit pricey), as well as communicate in Japanese.

I am sad to say that there are several very good sites that have shut down over the years. I should have the files saved, so if anyone's interested give me a holler and I can share them.