This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about Komi Can’t Communicate here at SWO Productions, but along the way, I just fell off reading the series. I’ve continued BUYING the books, but I haven’t been reading them. I’ve been letting them accrue space on my manga shelves as I waited for… the right time, I guess? Most of 2022 was NOT the right time. I … Continue reading Stew’s [Series] Reviews: Komi Can’t Communicate Volume 1
A bit predictable, but maybe that’s from seeing a lot of Anime in my life. Beautifully (and frightfully) animated from top notch studio Project I. G. (They do most of the Ghost in the Shell stuff), “Housing Complex C” tells the tale of an apartment complex where several seniors and a few families reside. There’s a girl named Kimi, who lives with her mother. All … Continue reading Housing Complex C (from Adult Swim)
The truth is out there. And in comic books, you don’t even have to look that hard; there are aliens EVERYWHERE. Some are heroes. Some are villains. But there is absolutely no lack of interstellar life in Marvel, DC, or the independent comic book arena. So Fox Mulder would be like a pig in… wait, would he be? Or would the ubiquitous nature of extra … Continue reading Top Ten: Comic Alien Races
Boy, it’s a manga issue again already? It feels like I just did one of these, like, 9 volumes ago. TITLE: Black Cat Writer and Artist: Kentaro Yabuki Publisher: Shonen Jump Protagonists: Train Heartnet, Sven Vollfied, Eve Antagonists: Creed Diskenth, The Apostles of the Stars There are a lot of Shonen Jump series from over the years, but they are all over the map in … Continue reading Stew’s Reviews: Black Cat
Last month, I did a list of my ten favorite indie comic books of all time, and I really wrestled with something as I made the list… “Should I include manga series in this?” Ultimately, I decided against it. For me–and this is weird–for me, manga and comics are different. It’s hard to say exactly why. As immature or whatever as it may be, COMIC … Continue reading Top Ten: Favorite Anime/Manga Series
Netflix released a live action version of Death Note not too long ago. It was… not ideal. It was one of those “Any resemblance to the actual source material is purely coincidental” situations, and while I know they had to change a fair amount to turn a manga of several volumes into a two-hour-or-so movie… man. They changed characters’ entire beings. It’s just real bad. If you … Continue reading Stew’s Reviews: Death Note
It’s M8nga Week, edition three! I haven’t forgotten yet, which is mildly surprising to me. I usually have the attention span of… something that wouldn’t remember to do something three times in a row, that’s for sure. That said, I really need to get more manga if I’m going to keep this up! I have several more weeks available to me in books I own … Continue reading Stew’s Reviews: Love Hina
My wife wants us to paint our bathroom. I sometimes worry that she has forgotten who she married. There is nothing in the world I would rather do than nothing. Every so often she has grand designs on some project or another. She’ll ask “Do you want to [do a thing I don’t want to do] today?” as if she doesn’t know the answer. (The … Continue reading Entertainment Rex: June 2021 part 2
Hey, it’s a volume of Stew’s Reviews that ends in the number eight, so it must be time to review a manga series! It’s Manga Week! Ma… me… M8nga Week! No? No, I don’t think that works either. Actually, I think is just a happy accident. It was volume eight when I covered Dragon Ball, and I noticed after already picking this series for this … Continue reading Stew’s Reviews: Azumanga Daoih
I take no pride in being something of a harsh grader when it comes to comic books. I am not really sure why it is–I tend to grade out movies much more generously than I do comics for whatever reason–but if you look at my grading history, it is easy to see I am typically likely to score books relatively lower than others might. The … Continue reading Tough Grading, The Elusive A+, And My Top 15 Stories EVER
This week is a little out of left field, perhaps, but is it really any more so than, say, The Life And Times of Scrooge McDuck, which was also initially printed in a foreign language and whose characters are a bit more famous as cartoons than comics? So I hope you hang with me here and haven’t already made your way down to the comments to … Continue reading Stew’s Reviews: Dragon Ball
Previously, I had discussed the recent disdain I have found for both Marvel and DC; a disdain which led to my culling all of the titles from each publisher from my current pull list at my comic shop. I went on and into what I see as the inevitable future of the industry–an online-only model that replaces expensive and less profitable printed books with subscription … Continue reading Heroes Of Manga
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