Back to the land of the living! It has been a crazy four weeks! Details soon on that but for today, a couple reviews...

If you haven't picked up the March Yuuyake Shimbun, be sure to do so. There are reviews of To Terra, E'S, The Two Faces of Tomorrow and TRAIN+TRAIN, in what I called the "Those Darn Humans" edition. (Each book has humans looking like idiots compared to some superior race or robot).

Two terrific new manga have crossed my path in recent weeks, and I will be reviewing them in the April issue of the Yuuyake Shimbun.

Sometimes hot titles by hot writers don't live up to the hype, but the anticipation for Hiroki Endo's Tanpenshu was well projected. Fans of the Dark Horse Eden series should enjoy this first of two volumes, a collection of short stories. Volume One has three tales, and in another forum site I described them as the manga I had always dreamed of. This stuff is dark, dense, mature, violent and heart-wrenching. Endo's style (which might remind one of Katushiro Otomo's Akira) is stark and warm at the same time. I think it's how he draws faces, usually trying to hide secret feelings, so skillfully that make this a work that is really worth looking into. Volume One is available now, and Volume Two is out in May.

Another title that I read on the advice of a colleague, and didn't expect to like (I seem to have a lot of those) is Vampire Night. In my book, it has everything going against it... I am not a big vampire genre reader, and traditionally shojo is not my bag (though I also really liked Penguin Revolutions a few months back, much to my own shock. I must be getting young in my old age).

More than the story itself, Vampire Knight is carried more than a bit by it's incredibly dynamic drawing and layout. The story and style grow throughout this first volume, and what starts out as a simple premise (School has humans students by day and vampire students by night, our heroes need to keep them separated) evolves into something quite unique and engaging.

I can't say enough about Matsuri Hino's style. I am not a huge fan of the sidebar notes every chapter about what the writer went through in making the story, and what she had for breakfast the day she drew a certain page, but that is really my only complaint about this dazzling first volume. The fashion of the characters, not something I generally put too much thought into, is very goth-cool (especially compared to the last vampire book I read, Until the Full Moon, in which everyone looked like they just walked out of an A-HA video shoot c. 1983).

The sexuality and shojo crushes take a different air when half the characters are vampires trying to quell their own blood lust, and this title already is making its share of worthy buzz. Volume One is out now, and Volume Two is out in the beginning of May.