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*Joker voice from The Dark Knight*
"Yeah"
"Table for two?"
A school full of 17+ year olds.
Marshal arts clubs.
The stakes were never higher.
Intimidation, love, intrigue, jealousy, pain.
Tenjou Tenge is a manga series of epic length (I have literally 50 cm of it stacked). Beautifully drawn, well-told, cool marshal arts fights are a constant factor in this series. The characters are very interesting; there's comedy and there's drama. The whole thing reads like a train, hard to put down, a page-turner. Every time you think a problem is solved, another one rises. Every time a baddie is defeated, a bigger baddie shows up. In this powerful multi-layered story, nothing is ever what it seems.
But before I recommend our manga fans to dig into Tenjou Tenge, I must say this: it's quite a commitment! It took me eleven days to finish the series, with between 1.5 and 2 hours of intensive reading every day. Good thing it's such a good read. ;-)
And the nightmare of feminists everywhere.
Who am I kidding??? Artists draw what they want to see in person. They're all perves. God bless 'em!
It's a comic book series, which is heavily inspired by James Bond, Charlie's Angels and Indiana Jones. It's not t&a and nothing else. There's action, humour and drama in the comics as well. Fans of the more lavish Bond films, who would be open to reading a comic, should give them a try.
Superman Earth One, Vol 3
I've really been digging this series (Batman too) but I don't know, I fell like this one lost a bit of steam.
The whole point of the Earth One series, at least the way I looked at it, was to show a brand new take, modernizing a classic character for this generation, not bogged down by years and years of continuity and baggage.
Vol 1 delivered. Superman is now a young man just starting out- he may even be as young as 21, though I'm not sure they outright say it; it just feels like he's way young. Vol 2 delivered more of the same, in a good way. (even though it did venture dangerously close to Twilight territory with that sparkly exo suit of his)
With Vol 3 though, it feels like they lost what made it different from any other Superman book. With all the time it takes between releases I was really looking forward to Vol 3 and I was left a bit underwhelmed. Superman's hooker BFF from Vol 2 returns, so I guess she's gonna be a recurring character now. Not a huge fan of her.
Superman fights Zod- who's actually pretty bland, in both appearance and character. In Man of Steel, he was certainly the villain, but you could at least understand why he was doing what he was doing, but here he's just a bully.
I kind of like what they did with Lex, who was teased in Vol 2. It's not one guy like we're used to, but rather a husband and wife with the same goals! And Lex is actually the nicer one of the two, which I thought was funny. This made it a bit fresh because in the end
SO. Now we have a female Luthor, and Clark's best friend is his hot neighbor who hangs around his apartment with her boobs and midriff on full display. Everything else is all standard issue Superman.
And another thing about the neighbor: I HATE the way she's written. It seems like whoever wrote her dialogue was a sad man who never had a girlfriend in high school. She's always lounging in Clark's apartment, and everything she says is all, 'Oh Clark you get me- that's so hot. YOU'RE hot. Hey you don't mind if I take my shirt off do you?' There's just no way that this girl would have anything to do with Clark- especially the way he's depicted in these books (the shyness is cranked to the max compared to the usual Clark Kent, and he barely says a word, ever)
When it all boils down, there are really TWO things I like about Vol 3.
1: I like what they did with the Lex Luthor character and
2: I like the artist, and for this go around, he draws Superman with a little more BULK. In volume 1 & 2, Superman was thin- more like Spider-Man in a Supes costume.
So I guess we'll see where we go from here. At $25 a pop, I'll probably read Vol 4 before buying it, rather than the day one blind buy this one was.
Help me out, sir. :)
Well definitely get 1 & 2; you can't go wrong there. And hell, still get 3 if you like Superman- it's just not the 'event' that the first one was, so much as just run of the mill.
You see, Vol 1 was released in 2010. Vol 2 was released in 2012. This gives the impression that they release these things so far apart because they have all the best guys working on it and they want to take their time and make them perfect. Now with Vol 3 released this month in 2015, one would expect the same quality but it's not there. Too long a wait for a 'meh' delivery. Vol 3 is the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull of the Earth One books, lol
One thing that can't be argued: the artwork is top notch in all 3 books.
*EDIT
Oh yeah!!! I almost forgot the dumbest thing from Vol 3. Lois makes a Superman signal. It's just like it sounds. EXACTLY like Batman's, but with the 'S'
I have ordered the trade paperbacks. :-)
Brace yourself for nearly 4000 pages of marshal arts, comedy, romance, spiritualism and horror. Tenjou Tenge is one of the most epic manga I have ever read, twice as long as Akira and almost as large in scope. When a high school prepares for one of its biggest combat tournaments yet, the present and the past, the normal and the supernatural, the good and the evil all come together. This tournament will decide more than merely the fate of a few clubs; it will decide who wins a war that has been fought for ages.
Despite its high school setting, Tenjou Tenge is very much a manga for adults. There's a lot of swearing, blood, nudity and sex involved. That is unless you are unfortunate enough to have gotten your hands on the censored edition, which has suffered severe cuts and shows deliberate dark stains on almost every page, covering up violence or fully exposed female bodies. Please avoid that censored edition since it completely destroys the essence of Tenjou Tenge. Instead try to find the uncensored edition. It'll be a bumpy ride, possibly shocking here and there, but it'll be a powerful experience for sure.
The drawings are absolutely marvellous. While in order to keep the pace of the story up we sometimes have to flick through the pages, every single panel is essentially worth looking at for minutes or even hours. The level of detail is incredible. Not to mention how gorgeous many of the characters look, especially the female ones. True, this manga is not exactly 'PC'. Men will no doubt appreciate it more than women, if for no other reason then at least because the female characters are often without clothes, have unnaturally 'perfect' curves and look stunningly beautiful. But even if we disregard this particular element, not at all unusual in Japanese comics, there's also a lot of fighting going on and these fights are, to say the least, impressive and exciting. The best fights in The Matrix are matched in almost every one of the 136 chapters of this manga.
Tenjou Tenge was adapted into an anime series but that one stopped following the original story after a few episodes. I therefore recommend everyone who might be interested in reading this epic manga to fist explore what's on the page before turning to the anime. It might also be wise to plan this thing ahead since you'll need close to 20 hours of reading to get through it. That didn't keep me from enjoying this experience with high intensity though. I still think it's no match for Akira, but it comes close!
One of the few I have not read before, so this was great!
It has been years since I last read this. It deserves its status as a classic.
How do you feel about the movie?
I need to reread that one too, very soon. It's been over two years, which is just not right. College has really kept my mind off of the kinds of stuff I enjoy most.
It's why I don't read a lot of the Bond or Sherlock Holmes continuation novels, among others. Comics are one area where I will read beyond the original creator's/creators' work, not only because it affords a lot of interesting new interpretations of the characters, but also because most of the heroes I like were first created when WWII was still going on, and the stories and dialogue are painfully horrid.
Batman for example, is a character I'd have hated if I was born around the 1940s. Kane made him a psychopathic killer with no regard for human life, which I guess was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the war raging on at the time. It's one of my least favorite takes on the character, despite it being the original source. Thankfully writers like Frank Miller, Denny O'Neil and Jeph Loeb came along and breathed new life into Batman and made him true to his origins instead of the figure he was under Bob's tutelage. For that reason, comics are an area where I largely don't have an issue with other writes taking on characters.
The thing that bugged me about the Watchmen prequels was that it was a project that was about fifteen years too late, had no support from Moore and was likely just a cash-grab and chance for DC to make boatloads out of all the issues (37 in total!) that readers would have to buy to experience the "full package" of sorts. It wasn't a project that was started because DC wanted to tell interesting stories, basically. It's like with film rights to characters: studios keep pushing out films with stories about characters they have no interest in telling, and do it just to keep ahold of their rights. The Spiderman and Fantastic Four reboots, for instance.
Anyway, I agree with what Alan has already said about these prequels:
"What the comics industry has effectively said is, 'Yes, this was the only book that made us briefly special and that was because it wasn't like all the other books.' Watchmen was something that stood on its own and it had the integrity of a literary work. What they've decided now is, 'So, let's change it to a regular comic that can run indefinitely and have spin-offs.' and 'Let's make it as unexceptional as possible.' Like I say, they're doing this because they haven't got any other choices left, evidently."
@0BradyM0Bondfanatic7, some great news here, pal.
http://bit.ly/1OlBmpl
I'd be majorly worried if Azzarello wasn't on hand for this project. Frank has lost his touch in so many ways, as an artist and writer. Reading All Star Batman and Robin, you'd never believe that the guy behind that piece of trash wrote one of the greatest pieces of comic art ever. He went from being such a brilliant writer of Batman's deep and tortured psyche to an amateur that wouldn't know the character if he came up and knocked his teeth out with an uppercut. I honestly think he got a lobotomy at the end of the 90s. I have no other explanation for his later behavior and fall from grace.