 | | ▪ | RELEASED BY: | | DEL REY | | | ▪ | AUTHOR / ART: | | KEN ALAMATSU | | | ▪ | FORMAT: | | JAPANESE / B&W | | | ▪ | PAGES: | | 192 | | | ▪ | RATING: | | OT | | | ▪ | RELEASE DATE: | | 09/09/2008 | | | ▪ | REVIEW DATE: | | 11/19/2008 | | | ▪ | REVIEWED BY: | | SCOTT CAMPBELL |
From the same mastermind behind Love Hina, comes the excellent ongoing series: Negima! 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 nineteen is a pinnacle volume for the very awesome Asuna, as she contemplates making a big change in Negi’s life. It’s summer break - a time when most kids are getting ready for a vacation full of fun and friends. But not Asuna - she’s actually prepping for the challenge of her life. She’s started a new school club that’s devoted to helping Negi find his father, but before Asuna can embark on this adventure she has to prove her mettle. The test: a dangerous mission on a snow-covered mountain. Does Asuna have what it takes to survive? You have to love all the detail and thought put into the visuals of this manga. Each and every page is an accomplishment in its own right – 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 is right there waiting for you, and volume nineteen is no exception to the rule. It matters not whether it is a moment of high action, or just a conversation in any part of the school grounds – Negima! gives you plenty to look at, and more detail than many other manga artists could fathom having to include in their works. Other artists just aren’t willing or able to make their manga look this good – Negima! bursts with “cool factor,” no doubt about it. Ken Akamatsu is obviously really good at what he does, so it is no wonder that he is one of the top favorite artists/authors of manga in Japan. 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. This particular volume also includes some very detailed architectural drawings and notes – try and find that kind of explanation of things in any other manga being created today! When it comes to extras and gaining a better understanding of the manga we are reading, Negima! is the tops – no question. 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 that’s certainly 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! is a total hoot – it has an amazing amount of depth in both its characters and their surrounds, not to mention the story itself. The sheer amount of detail and movement injected into the visuals will make most reader’s heads spin – don’t pass this one up without a look-see! |