 | | ▪ | RELEASED BY: | | DEL REY | | | ▪ | AUTHOR / ART: | | KEN ALAMATSU | | | ▪ | FORMAT: | | JAPANESE / B&W | | | ▪ | PAGES: | | 192 | | | ▪ | RATING: | | OT | | | ▪ | RELEASE DATE: | | 06/09/2008 | | | ▪ | REVIEW DATE: | | 08/12/2008 | | | ▪ | REVIEWED BY: | | SCOTT CAMPBELL |
Negi Springfield isn’t your typical magician – he’s the kind of magician that gets himself surrounded with more girls than he can count on his fingers and toes combined. If you think there’s need to add anything else to that combo to make these series crazy, you’d likely be wrong – but just to tip it off the deep end, there’s a plethora of other magic users, robot girls, and whatever else your brain could fathom to make this manga the wildest read you’ll have had in a while! Volume eighteen almost lets us believe that the antics are going to die down for a little while to let us get caught up with the plot. Now that the Mahora Festival is finally over, everyone’s ready for some peace and quiet. But the school is in an uproar after Misora impersonates a priest and convinces her fellow students to spill their deepest secrets in the confessional. It seems like everyone has a secret – and all of them involve Negi! The visuals in Negima! are beyond awesome – this is manga art at a higher level, let me tell you. Each and every page is a work of art – an insane amount of detail, and action, and explosions, and text, and everything else that could possible required to give you a pleasant little manga-induced seizure as it were. Even when things are slightly settled in relation to the goings on of the plot and action, the visuals don’t let up in their detail! Trying to explain to anyone in words as to just how cool Negima! is when it comes to the proficiency of the art is almost impossible. It really is like nothing else out there and it is no wonder that it is so popular. Other artists just aren’t willing or able to make their manga look this good – Negima! bursts with “cool factor,” no doubt about it. Just pick it up and give it a once over – I’m done trying to explain this! The back of the book has one of the most extensive extras sections that most of us will have ever seen. Everything from translation notes to explanations of particular spells used in the story are here for the reader to look over. There is also a large section of reader fan art and even some preliminary design work by the artist himself. When it comes to extras and gaining a better understanding of the manga we are reading, Negima! is the tops. It seems as though with each new volume the extras don’t let up – Negima! As a whole never really seems to let up, so there’s something great about it that you can come to rely on! Negima! is only Ken Akamatsu’s third manga, although he started working in the field in 1994 with Ai Ga Tomaranai (released in the United States with the title A.I. Love You). Like all of Akamatsu’s work to date, it was published in Kodansha’s Shonen Magazine. Ai Ga Tomaranai ran for five years before concluding in 1999. In 1998, however, Akamatsu began the work that would make him one of the most popular manga artists in Japan: Love Hina. Love Hina ran for four years, and before its conclusion in 2002, it would cause Akamatsu to be granted the prestigious Manga of the Year award from Kodansha, as well as going on to become one of the best-selling manga in the United States.
IN SUMMARY:
Negima! deserves that exclamation mark, and it earns it with each amazing page of this book series. It’s really no wonder that Negima! is so popular with the fans – this is some of Ken Akamatsu’s best work, and it just keeps getting better! |
