Manga blathering

From what I've heard, the 'Victorian Romance Emma' manga may be coming to the US sometime sooner rather then later. It has at least been licensed for release in America but no idea who is actually doing it as neither of the big two, TokyoPop and Viz, have info up about it yet. Which will be nice, as the scans of the manga I have seen are very pretty, very nice style on them, but were untranslated.

The anime I still have no word on, but the manga will be cool enough on its own. Especially since the anime wrapped up with episode 12 while the manga didn't have an end yet at the time, so the anime didn't have a real sense of ending to it.

The other manga find that I've been enjoying is 'Monster' which is part of Viz's new signature line of mangas. It is, to put it simply 'medical horror suspense drama' which is more of a bunch of genre buttons that it pushes rather then a good description of it as a whole. The story focuses around a young neurosurgeon and a fateful decision to treat the first patient that arrived on his shift rather then the more politically important one that showed up a little bit later, how that ruins his career and personal life while it restores his faith in his career path as a surgeon. Though it gets helluva messed up after that as the patient he did save may have grown up to be a serial murderer. Conspiracies, drama, hospital politics, psychological suspense / horror. It is 18 volumes long, and that is all just in the first book. Have to say, they write horror in a much more psychological way then the old 'slasher' horror comics we had here.

'Gyo' and 'Uzamaki' are the two other horror titles I have read, both also put out by Viz and I think both were written and drawn by the same person.

'Gyo' is the less strange of the two, which is saying a lot when I describe it as being a story about fish crawling out of the sea with robotic crab legs grown onto them and that it is a sci-fi/horror story. Oddly enough, the depictions of the rotting husks of fish, the stench of the sea life out in the sun, all keep it from being surreal. It is so accurate in the depictions that it keeps itself from being laughable and is more 'fucked up strange creepy' then anything else.

'Uzamaki' is the harder one to explain. A town is haunted by spirals. Yes. Spirals. The shape you draw on paper. Bodies are found twisted into spiral shapes, strange deformed babies are born, odd snail like creatures show up. Again, not with the slasher violence but much with the weird creepiness and unsettling.