Gosho Aoyama: Case Closed 2 & 3

The first book was cool, but Aoyama's really starting to hit his stride in these books as the plots become more concentrated and the blend of genres sometimes leans more toward mystery than comedy.

Having previously been transformed into a first-grader, our hero Jimmy Kudo/Conan Edogawa is now faced with an almost Chandleresque tangle involving a billion-yen heist and a seemingly unrelated missing person, a haunted house mystery and a classic plot combo – a locked room murder on a liner ship!

This time out Conan's got some more cool gadgets to help him out (including electroschockin' sneakers and super-elasto-braces!) and in one case he goes adventuring with his new friends from grade school, but it's his deductive powers which really get the workout this time. I also like the fact that the people around him are starting to get suspicious now rather than five volumes down the line, and the fact that the case-by-case structure works rather well with the soap-operatic aspects of the manga and the continuing storyline of Conan wanting to be Jimmy again.

Aoyama's art is as cool and funny as ever, and the plots are light and fun but still satisfying mini-mysteries way above and beyond anything you'll find on Murder She Wrote... basically, I can't wait for the next book!

Takeshi Konomi: Prince of Tennis #11

This was a curiosity buy which only served to further pique my curiosity, but it's certainly more involving and entertaining than I expected from a manga about a bunch of youth playing tennis... rather squeaky-clean youth, too, although apparently some (gasp!) underage cigarette smoking was airbrushed out to protect America's young from the evils of... um... well, pseudo-reality, because it looks like only the nasty kid smoked anyway! Oh well.

The art is bold and dramatic, the characters well-designed and obviously strong enough to carry the series between tension-fraught tournaments... although this book's all tension-fraught tournament, so there wasn't a lot of character stuff going on.

Overall, I liked it, but I'd probably only pick up more if it landed in the bargain bin again – although I'm curious, is it the dramatic tennis or the character drama which made this so popular in Japan?

A storyless paragraph...

It surprised me when it appeared silently, unannounced, one spring morning, and it annoyed me when, by noon the next day, I realized it wasn't going anywhere. It was purple, approximately star-shaped, made of translucent stuff through which bright indigo veins and a pulsing crimson heart were indistinctly visible, and in the centre on each side, one huge eye, the size of my head, just a big white and a perfect ink-black pupil, smooth as oil, forever dilating and contracting to stimuli unseen by such weak eyes as mine. It made no sound but I could hear it singing in my head, always. It moved around me at will, moved by its whims. If I was in a small room or traversing a narrow way, it hung back two feet above my right shoulder like my conscience. If I was walking a hill or settling to sleep or in a crowded place, it would rise some ten feet into the air and hover directly above me. Then again, when I was alone with it, it would often float before my face, and I would gaze into its eye, for hours on end sometimes, numbed by its overwhelming presence, its painful inscrutability. I had thought, before it came, that I knew what it was to be alone. I now find myself an unwilling student, learning day by day that there is no limit that can bound loneliness.