Some manga reviews that have apparently been in my drafts for 3-4 years now:

Akuma no Riddle: Riddle Story of Devil Vol. 1-2 (Seven Seas Entertainment; 2015): There's a special class of 13 girls at Myojo Academy, almost all of them transfer students from elsewhere. What's so special about the class, Class Black? Of those 13 girls, 12 of them are assassins, and they are all there to kill the 13th.

There are some peculiar, particular rules that don't get clearly laid out until fairly late in the story as it appears in these first two volumes. The girls' motivations are mostly pretty clear: Whoever successfully eliminates the target is essentially granted a wish as a form of payment; they can make any request and it will be granted. Each assassin has to declare in advance that she's going to make her attempt, and from the point of declaration she gets 48 hours. If she fails to kill the target during that time frame, she is expelled.

There are a couple of complicating factors to that otherwise straightforward set-up. One is our protagonist, Tokaku Azuma. A skilled, misanthopic, remote assassin proficient in knives, she's apparently a "virgin" who has yet to actually take anyone's life. For precise reasons not yet articulated, she decides to serve as the target's bodyguard, defending her from the other 11.

The other is that the target, Haru Ichinose, is aware of the situation, but wants to try to enjoy the boarding school experience as much as possible, which means constantly putting herself in danger as the girls try to befriend her in order to get within striking distance. While Haru seems completely guileless and child-like, referring to herself in the third person like The Hulk or Cookie Monster, she actually knows the score, is capable of defending herself (of the three attempts on her life in these issues, it's not entirely clear that she wouldn't have survived without Akuma's interference) and has some incredibly mysterious past she won't discuss with anyone (the clues, however, include horrible scars all over her body and a passing reference to a spell that keeps her from dying, even though others are often giving their lives to defend hers).

The story takes a while to get get going, as a lot of the pages of the initial volume are devoted to Akuma's own weird school and her strange relationship with a bizarre teacher figure there--he sends her impossibly subjective fill-in-the-blank questions on her cellphone, which may be where the title comes from--but once it gets going, there's a reassuring, almost arcade-like episodic quest-structure, one that will likely be interrupted as the volumes progress, given the various motivations of the assassins, and the attention spent on some of them more than others.

Aside from the girls school dramedy (much of it presented as rather straightforward, if tinged with the sinister), the fight-scenes and melodramatic origin stories of the teenage girl assassins, there's still enough kept mysterious that there's a lot of motivation to keep going once you start. It's compelling, even if one wants to read for answers as much as for the pleasures of the story itself.

The Ancient Magus' Bride Vol. 1 (Seven Seas Entertainment; 2015) The set-up of Kore Yamazaki's fantasy manga is a bit on the icky side. Fifteen-year-old Japanese girl Chise Hatori is sold in a modern day slave auction, wherein the bidders are all monsters of various types. For five-million dollars she's purchased by the ancient mage of the title, Elias Ainsworth. And, as the title suggests, he purchased her to be his bride.

That's the icky part. In reality, whatever his marital or sexual intentions, they are never mentioned beyond Ainsworth's occasional references to the pair of them one day marrying. In reality, he's training her to be his apprentice, and he pursued her in part because she is something called a "Sleigh Beggy;" I've no idea where Yamazaki found the term, but basically Chise is a rare human with the sort of second sight that allows her to see supernatural entities. There's a flashback that shows her in a school yard, teased by other kids while her attention is seized by a yokai.

Later, when she arrives in Ainsworth's home somewhere in the United Kingdom, she can see and converse with somewhat traditional fairies (although designed in a rather peculiar way by Yamazaki to make them at once both cuter and more horrifying than traditional British fairies). The business regarding their marriage and their relationship, including what they know and what they gradually learn of one another's past, is more premise than the focus of the series...at least as I can judge from this first volume.

After Ainsworth gets Chise somewhat settled in her new home and introduces her to the world of mages, alchemists and the supernatural, he begins taking her on a series of missions, apparently embarked upon as favors to the Catholic church (which has back channel communication with the mage through his friend, a local priest).

These include a visit to Iceland to investigate recent, restless dragon activity, and then a trip to Ulthar, a city of cats where there is some particularly potent evil magic going down. That second mission ends with a cliffhanger, with our protagonists discovering the source and coming face-to-face with the dangerous entities behind it, but not resolving their conflict with them.

Yamazaki's world-building is pretty top-notch, and is perhaps particularly impressive in that it requires her to come up with a sort of unified theory of the occult world, and designing and re-creating everything so that it fits together visually, despite the various traditions separated by continents here.

Ainsworth himself is a particularly great design. While he appears like a perfectly normal human being from the neck down, his head is that of some sort of animal skull, with long, twisting horns, and little lights in the back of his eye-sockets to indicate a flicker of consciousness. He sometimes wears a veil of sorts over his face, which has the interesting effect of only making him look more disturbing, as he clearly has a long, pointed snout and a pair of animal horns, even when the specific details are hidden, and someone seeing him would then have to imagine what inhuman form his face is in (As has so often been noted, it's what you can't see that's always scarier than what you can).

It's a cool design, but what's even cooler is that Yamazaki is able to wring so much emotion out of what is essentially a frozen fossil.

Citrus Vol. 1 (Seven Seas Entertainent; 2014): The back cover of NTR: Netsuzou Trap Vol. 1 reads, "For fans of Citrus, comes an all new yuri series!" So I took the back cover's advice, and tried Citrus; there were already five volumes in print, so it seemed like a good thing to read while waiting for future volumes of NTR.

It too is an erotic-but-not-exploitative love story involving two high school girls, but its premise is so much more labored than the straightforward set-up of NTR. In fact, it's so weird, yet played completely straight (er, maybe not the best choice of word) rather than as some sort of comedy, that it can be somewhat comic.

Fun-loving Aihara Yuzu is transferring to a very strict, all-girls school as a result of her mother's re-marriage, to the son of the man who owns and runs the school. Conveniently, he has gone on a mysterious trip to the other side of the world as soon as she and her mom are set to move in, so he's written out of the narrative immediately. Yuzu doesn't fit in at her new school at all, and racks up myriad violations as soon as she walks through the door, as her hair color, make-up, skirt-length and so on don't adhere to the uniform policies. She tries to argue against them, but is immediately put in her place by the cool, cold student council president Mei.

Yuzu comes home from her stressful first day at school, where her mother introduces her to her step-father's daughter, her new little sister. Who just so happens to be...Mei!

So the two girls, who are so different and have such conflicting personas at school, are now forced into even closer proximity--even sharing a bed--after school. Complicating things even further is their apparent, if equivocal, attraction to one another. Their first kisses are all acts of surprise and aggression. The first time Mei kisses Yuzu, it's because Yuzu asks her if a teacher she is seemingly having an affair with is a good kisser, and she angrily forces a kiss on her to show her what it felt like. The next time they kiss, it's when they are in the bath together, and Mei sees Yuzu looking at her, and when asked why she kissed her that time, Mei simply responds that it Yuzu looked like she wanted Mei to kiss her.

Yuzu is clearly curious about her new little sister sexually, but whatever is going through Mei's head is kept from the readers in the first volume. She is mysterious, and acts with a whiplash spontaneity whenever she temporarily switches from proper and business-like to passionate. For Yuzu's part, not only does she have to struggle with her sudden and upsetting sexual attraction to Mei, but with her desire to actually be a good big sister to her, two mutually exclusive forms of relationship that cause her a degree of angst--and should help keep a will they, won't they narrative in place.

Despite the overheated premise and the clear promise of sexuality offered by the covers, it's interesting the way magna-ka Saburouta navigates the labored premise, focusing on plot and emotion over scenes of the girls fooling around. The actual sexual content of this first volume is no more than one nude scene in the bath, which is basically "TV nude," meaning their nipples and genitals are always covered by hair or limbs or water or whatever. Additionally, they each throw the other down and kiss them once, but that's the extent of it.

Shigeru Mizuki's Kitaro: Kitaro Meets Nurarihyon (Drawn & Quarterly; 2016): The second volume of Drawn & Quarterly's new series collecting and reprinting Shigeru Mizuki's Kitaro comics takes its title from the first of the seven stories. It's not necessarily the biggest or most important of these, all of which are from 1967 or 1968 issues of Shonen Weekly (save for a somewhat random seeming story from a 1978 issue of Shuken Jitsuwa), it's simply the first to appear in the collection.

Nurarihyon, according to the "Yokai Files" feature that appears in the back, is "an urban yokai with a mysterious air of authority." He "comes into your house and orders you around, acting like an important guest...Only after he is gone and the spell is broken do you realize you have been a victim of Nurarihyon." As Mizuki draws him, he looks a somewhat squishy-headed old man, his design a mix of cartoon and traditional Japanese art, leaning more heavily toward the former than some of the other yokai in the book (particularly Odoro Odoro, who looks like he could have come right off a painting or scroll).

Here Nurarihyon doesn't "attack" in the method described, but does decide to do away with the smug yokai Kitaro, who hunts bad yokai himself. He ingratiates himself with Kitaro's greedy sidekick Netzumi Otoko, and lays a trap for them both. Only Kitaro's hand manages to escape, but that is enough to deal with Nuarihyon and save Kitaro and Netzumi.

As with the previous volume, all of the stories contained within are fairly simple, stand alone ones in which Kitaro and his allies, which include his detachable eyeball which is also his reincarnated father, become embroiled in conflict with a bad guy yokai of some kind, and ultimately triumph...generally through Kitaro's weird powers. Each story is a lesson in Japanese folklore and ghost stories, punctuated with Mizuki's extremely detailed artwork and sketchy cartoon characters, the tone shifting from somber to silly just as the visuals shift from hyper-detailed to highly abstracted. Everyone who likes comics should check out at least one volume of Kitaro.

My Monster Secret Vol. 1 (Seven Seas Entertainment; 2016): Kuromine Asahi is a high schooler with a very specific problem: He can't keep a secret to save his life. He has the worst poker face of all time, and anyone who looks at him can generally tell exactly what it is he's thinking. That's why his friends have given him the nickname "The Holey Sieve," as he is apparently completely unable to hold anything back.

So when he develops a crush on his mysterious classmate Shiragami Youko, the cool, quiet, loner who no one ever sees arriving to or leaving from school, his friends encourage him to confess his love to her immediately before she sees through him and figures it out for herself (which is what usually happens; he gets pre-rejected by girls he likes before he can say anything because they can see what's coming from the guileless Asahi). "Don't be the Holey Sieve anymore," one of his friends encourages him. "Pour it all out before you spill."

But when he confronts Youko in an empty classroom after school, he discovers that she's hiding a secret much bigger than his: She's totally a vampire, as her outstretched bat-wings and visible fangs reveal.

And so suddenly the guy compulsively unable to keep a secret is saddled with the biggest secret of all: He can't tell or let on to anyone that one of their classmates is really an actual vampire or she will be forced to leave the school forever.

The plus side, of course, is that suddenly all of her strange behavior makes sense to Asahi, and now that he knows her secret, they become the best of friends. A little on the clueless side, Youko doesn't even pick up on the fact that Asahi is in love with her, and he manages to keep that secret from her as well (All the times she caught him staring at her in class, she thought it was because he might have suspected her true nature).

So that's the set up of manga-ka Eiji Masuda's school comedy manga, in which the two good-hearted but slightly dim kids strike up a platonic friendship based around the concealment of a fantastic secret, all while the boy continues to pine for the girl without either making explicit any feelings they might have for one another beyond friendship, meaning this is a narrative that could go on for a while.

Complicating matters further is Asahi's old friend Akemi Mikan, the completely unhinged editor of the school paper who will do anything for a juicy story and who hounds the new friends for proof that they are dating one another, unaware of the even bigger secret they are hiding. And then, near the end of the first volume, there's the appearance of the Class Rep, who has a monster secret of her own that Asahi and Youko accidentally discover: She's actually a human-sized robot that a tiny alien that looks just like her pilots (The give away? The huge fucking screw-shaped capsule sticking out of the back of her head).

This was actually pretty fun, I thought, although it is kind of bizarre that the most unbelievably over-the-top character isn't the vampire or alien, but the girl from the school paper.

School-Live! Vol. 1 (Yen Press; 2015): So here's a pretty interesting take on the zombie apocalypse scenario, which in and of itself is something of an accomplishment, given the hundreds of riffs on said scenario that have appeared in pop culture so far this millennium. The "School Living Club" is the sort of school club that is so prevalent in Japanese manga and anime (and, I would assume, Japan itself?), but their specific interest is a particularly unusual one: They literally live at school. Why they do so is teased out in the first chapter by artist Saroru Chiiba and writer Norimitsu Kaihou/"Nitroplus", although if you've read the first sentence of this review, or the back of the manga, then you've already figured out that the characters are trying to survive a zombie apoclaypse, and they are living at school because they can't go outside of the school, or they will be eaten by zombies.

The conceit isn't just for the sake of the comic, though. Three of the four members use it to keep their youngest, most innocent, most naive (and thus most cheerful) member from trying to leave the school and/or perhaps from breaking down. Yuki Takeya seems to have not entirely noticed that the world has ended and there are zombies eating people just beyond the school walls. When she's on the roof with the others, tending to their garden, she sees living corpses shambling around on the baseball field, and waves, saying that the baseball team seems to be practicing very hard. When a zombie gets into the school halls, she's told to be quiet and hide, as there's a bad kid there to cause trouble.

That first chapter is pretty devastatingly effective, and the rest of the first volume details how the members survive day-to-day and keep their elaborate ploy going, although it's pretty clear that Yuki may have already lost her mind, as through her eyes the school looks totally normal and is full of students, who she occasionally talks to as if they weren't just in her head. Perhaps then the others aren't just keeping the gag going to preserve her innocence or fragile state of mind, perhaps they are afraid of causing her some sort of dangerous psychotic breakdown.

These others include Kurumi, who never goes anywhere without her shovel, which seems a weird quirk to Yuki ("Heh heh! Don't you know? The weapon used to kill the most people in the trenches in World War One Was--" Kurumi tries to explain, but Yuki interrupts her by waving the shovel around, "You really like shovels, don't you?); Yuki's big sister-like friend Yuuri; and club adviser Megumi Sakura. They don't all make it to the end of the first volume--damn those bad kids!--but there's a pretty dramatic cliffhanger, in which the girls send out a message on helium balloons, and it's found by someone on the outside who appears to be a potential new club member.

Meanwhile, there are flashbacks to the characters' lives before they were forced to join the School Living Club, and hints of what happened to get them in their current predicament, providing one more source of ongoing drama to the series.