Circus Wonder - Natsu no Himei

March 6, 2008 on 1:25 am | In Manga | No Comments

Natsu no Himei is by far my favorite story of the volume. It’s also the shortest and a straight up horror story, which allows the plot to seem much less contrived than that of the first two.

The summary behind the cut contains spoilers, of course, so don’t read more than the first real paragraph if you care about such things.

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Circus Wonder - Akuma ni Please

March 2, 2008 on 9:25 pm | In Manga | No Comments

It’s been a while since I posted an entry on Circus Wonder, but now I’ve finally gotten around to the second story in the volume. (It’s Spring Break, by the way, so I can actually take a few days off from school work completely for once.)

Also, my poor old scanner is slowly dying. Please excuse it; it’s still trying its best.

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Circus Wonder - Circus Wonder

August 5, 2007 on 2:49 pm | In Manga | 1 Comment

Circus Wonder is a collection of three short stories by Kusunoki Kei, two horror and one comedy. This entry is obviously about the title story, which takes up about half of the tankouban. Of course it may have been wiser to pick up one of the other, shorter ones to meticulously look up all of the kanji for, but I guess it’s better than one of the longer series I have.

Circus Wonder focuses on a high school girl who ends up going to a circus which is really run by fairies and so on from a different world. They end up using her in the show and taking her away with them; their leader, a creep wearing a clown mask most of the time, tells her that she’s his sister and not a human at all! Her classmate and romantic interest, who is also the only person that hasn’t forgotten her, sets out to save her.

Detailed summary behind the cut. Pictures coming if I ever get my scanner to work.

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Mangaka Profile - Kusunoki Kei

August 2, 2007 on 5:53 pm | In Mangaka | 1 Comment

Kusunoki Kei is a bit of a curiousity because a majority of her works is shoujo, yet she has always had shounen titles thrown in there, too, and doesn’t seem to be doing shoujo at all any more. Even when she did, her art style is very, very much not your usual shoujo fare; it looks more like what’s you’d find in a shounen manga instead. Indeed, for the longest time I thought that she was actually a man who was doing shoujo for some reason. Most notable is probably the fact that she uses pretty thick lines, at least for outlines, and the result is certainly not the whimsy, big-sparkly-eyed shoujo that you’d expect to find in Ribon in the early 90s.

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