In the west, we usually get our manga in the form of volumes of chapters released as a book, or from online fan scanlators who publish them as they appear in Japan. But for Japanese manga fans, the typical way to follow a series you like is in a weekly or monthly manga magazine that serializes it. In America, Viz Media publishes an English edition of Weekly Shonen Jump, but we for the most part don’t get to enjoy the serial manga magazine culture you can get at a Japanese convenience store for a few hundred yen. Committed otaku that I am, I nonetheless like to order monthlies that serialize mangas I enjoy to see what else runs alongside them. Now, dear readers, I’m going to share that little hobby with you.
This month we’re looking at the March 2019 issue of Ichijinsha’s Monthly Comic Rex. Seeing as it’s mid-February it may seem like I’m on the bleeding edge of manga here and scored an early copy, but manga magazines tend to post-date their issues by quite a bit. This issue came out on January 26th.
Number 1 Azur Lane Superfan that I am, I originally picked up Comic Rex to read Queen’s Orders, the official Azur Lane spinoff manga. We’ll get to that one. As you can see from the table of contents here, Queen Elizabeth is way down on page 293:
The contents page is actually at the very back of the thick tome, with the first pages reserved for whichever manga got top billing and full color glossy pages this month. You can tell by the cover and the first entry in the contents that this month we’re getting some extra Fate/Grand Order: Epic of Remnant pages.
That’s because this is the inaugural chapter of the new serialized manga. A new series always gets extrafull-colorr pages, and it helps when the new series is a spinoff of the most popular and profitable mobile game in the history of anime mobile games. The bubble there tells us that Fate/Grand Order has broken 15 million downloads. It also says this is the manga adaptation of Part 1.5 of the Salem story, but not being a Fate guy I have no idea what that means and I’m going to move on past it. Not before I stop to admire this manga portrayal of Apache leader Geronimo though:
The new Fate manga gets a solid 35 pages before we come to If I Can Encounter Koshiba Aoi Today, a rather new yuri manga written by Hazuki Takeoka, creator of Masamune-kun’s Revenge. I’m not the biggest fan of the yuri genre or Masamune-kun so I may pass on this one, but it’s drawn by Fly, the artist behind Iroduku: The World in Colors, which is an impressive pedigree. Unfortunately, this school story doesn’t seem to be putting Fly’s talents on display.
Up next is something a little more my speed. 28 pages of THE IDOLM@STER: Akiyake ha Koganeiro (no official English title, means something like “Golden Sunrise”). This one focuses on Kotori Otonashi, the secretary at the 765 idol agency from the video games, when she was still a high school student and met the president of 765, Junichiro Takagi.
It’s one of many IDOLM@STER mangas published under the Rex Comics imprint, and honestly not a story I’m very interested in. Who cares about Kotori? I’m here for the idols, not the secretary who gives me tutorial tooltips!
After a few ads for other Rex Comics, including the Yandere Girls Anthology Comic I already bought and the awesome sounding Hentai Elf and Serious Orc with its fantastic tagline that literally translates to “Definitely won’t rape orc vs. definitely wants to get raped elf”:
We come to Masamune-kun’s Revenge: After School, a spinoff manga by Tiv, while Hazuki Takeoka is busy with Kashiba Aoi back there. Reading this chapter, I feel like the writing is funnier than the original Masamune-kun, but the art is insufficiently ecchi and it’s just an IP I’d rather skip when I could be reading about an elf who wants to get raped by a serious orc who doesn’t want to do sex crimes.
After 37 pages of that, we get chapter seven of Eri Takenashi’s Niji & Kuro. Takenashi’s own tagline tells us it’s the story of a strange creature and a girl living together. I’ll tell you it’s the cute story of Kuroe caring for the weird pet she picked up and that I enjoyed reading it. In this month’s chapter, it seems she may have found other people on Twitter who have the same strange creature as a pet.
Up next we have Yatogame-chan Kansatsu Nikki (no official English title, but it’s “Yatogame’s Observation Diary”) by Masaki Ando. It’s a 4koma manga that’s worth talking about since it’s got an anime adaptation premiering on April 4th. The premise is student Kaito Jin moves from Tokyo to Aichi, where he meets the titular Monaka Yatogame, a local who teaches us all about the Nagoya dialect of Japanese and the local culture of Aichi Prefecture.
I’ve not read much of it, but with the anime coming up and my general interest in dialects and local curiosities, I think I’ll pick it up. I’m looking forward to seeing an anime full of Nagoya dialect too.
Turn the page and we find Do-Chokkyuu Kareshi X Kanojo (meaning “Extremely Direct Boyfriend and Girlfriend”) by Nagisa Fujita. The premise here is the exact opposite of a tsundere. You get a boyfriend who says precisely what’s on his mind, sharing his feelings straight up to his girlfriend for her to deal with. This chapter starts with him very directly saying: “Hey Mako, let’s have sex!!” It’s also fantastically well-drawn with gorgeous, striking art and fantastic action scenes that you wouldn’t expect in a school romantic comedy. I’ll spoil that the couple does have sex this month, and it’s illustrated with an epic dragon battle that I strongly recommend you check out.
I finally get to talk about one of my favorite manga series currently running: Hideki’s The Monster of 1st Grade Class A. A certain school’s class 1-A has a reputation for being full of “monsters,” which is to say extremely difficult problem children who inevitably lead whatever teacher assigned to them to resign, rather than a monster girl situation (sadly). What makes things different this time around is teacher Jimi Taro, our ordinary-looking, utterly unassuming hero, takes over the class and immediately pacifies the most dangerous of the problem girls’ attempts to seduce him. Jimi-sensei is an effective educator, apparently pathologically obsessed with his job as a teacher.
The series is mostly humorous, with the over-the-top portrayals of both the girls and Jimi-sensei’s “super teacher” shtick, but there’s a bit of suspense and mystery here as they hint at Jimi having a dark past that turned him into the psychopathically effective teacher we see in the manga.
After that, there’s Uru Gekka’s Shinozaki Himeno no Koigokoro Q&A, a rom-com 4koma I’m gonna breeze right by. Then an ad for yet another volume of Shomin Sample buffers us against the furriest manga I’ve seen in my life: Rei Yuuki’s Oinari JK Tamamo-chan!
The premise here is a kind of fish-out-of-water comedy manga where Tamamo is an inari, or fox-spirit, from the famous Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto. And while she appears as a normal human to most people, her classmates see her in all her furry glory.
Then I’ll move past Bishoujo Doujin Sakka to Wakahashira, whose title translates as “The Beautiful Girl Doujin Artist and the Yakuza Capo” and kind of tells you the whole story right there. And on to Hachiyo of False Memory Loss by Hikaru Uesugi. The English subtitle isn’t really clear there, and the Japanese title is more like “Hachiyo-san’s Fake Amnesia.” I’ll leave you this panel as an example of why I don’t think it’s worth dwelling on:
After that is Azur Lane: Queen’s Orders, the reason for the season as far as I’m concerned. Like most of the spinoff mangas in Rex, it’s not going to impress anyone who isn’t a fan of the source material. But if you play the game and you know the characters and you like cute boats doing cute things, Queen’s Orders is a good time. This month’s chapters are all about Japanese New Year and so you’ve got the girls dressed up in festival garb playing hanetsuki.
On page 311 we encounter Onii-chan ha Oshimai! by Nekotoufu. I’ve seen it translated under the title Onii-chan is Done For. The sitcom premise here is that Mahiro, the titular onii-chan, got transformed into a cute little girl by his perverted science girl sister Mihari. So it’s a fun sitcom flip on the classic little sister incest stories, where suddenly onii-chan has become the imouto and the tables are turned.
After that comes Dioti Manual: Kami-sama-tachi no Renai Daikou (“Agent of the Gods’ Love”), written by Cool-Kyou Shinsha, the creator of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, with art by Yasu of Toradora! fame. This is kind of an esoteric story about two alien gods who come down to Earth and possess two high school students in an effort to understand humans, and end up experiencing human love and affection. It’s interesting and with the Dragon Maid + Toradora! pedigree it’s probably pretty good. This month is actually the conclusion of the story so I might’ve spoiled a bit for myself. Oh well.
As Monthly Comic Rex has been insufficiently ecchi so far, they decided to grace us with a chapter of The Hentai Elf and Serious Orc they advertised earlier in the magazine. I’ll let it speak for itself:
Horny elves are a tough act to follow, but Burakku Kigyou de Mananda Tatta Hitotsu no Saeta Yarikata (“The one way I learned to survive in a Black Company“) tries. It’s the story of a fledgling mangaka who gets hired by the worst possible company, one that works its artists to the bone with little or no reward. It’s a business comedy, but not a regular serial. It seems to come and go, probably depending on whether or not creator Shino Shinonome is getting screwed by a publisher at the time.
Then we pass on through a short, four-page self-deprecating manga about a mangaka being self-deprecating, an ad for a one-shot manga called Maou Nado ga Burakku Kigyo no Shacho (“The Demon King is the President of a Black Company”) that looks fun and is apparently an adaptation of a comic that garnered 150,000 retweets on Twitter:
And we’re on to a rather serious-looking story that starts with a boy starving and freezing on a street in the winter. It’s An Ogura’s Ikiru Riyuu to Shinu Riyuu (“Reasons to Live and Reasons to Die”), a one-shot pulled out of a Rex Comics’s anthology of mangas about witches. Witches aren’t my thing and one-shots are only really interesting if they have cool art or a shot at getting serialized and I’m not seeing that here so let’s move on to…
Another witch manga from the witch anthology? Okay, well, after this one surely we’re done with…
I guess Ichijinsha really wants to sell some witch comic anthologies. I can’t say I’m sold. Let’s hurry on to our last manga of the month: Yuuki Shikawa’s Bernard-jou Iwaku (“Miss Bernard Said”). The idea is Miss Bernie here is kind of a literature nerd who’s way into all kinds of classics she’s never actually read. It’s a fun way of introducing books, especially non-Japanese books, in comic form. This month, Bernard and her friends are looking at All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum. I can relate to these characters because I haven’t read that book either.
And that’s the end of the mangas in this month’s Comic Rex. In the back, we have ads for other publications under the Rex Comics imprint, a contest with some fabulous prizes Rex is running, and a really obscure feature by Maedax (nom de guerre of mangaka Koji Kumeta) about what he calls “background moe.”
Everything can be moe and I suppose MAEDAX is happy to teach you how to make even your desks and bags as moe as possible if you take his art classes.
As for me? I just want to see more of that hentai elf.
