Yen+ Issue 1
Take a step back in time to the future
Sometime before the advent of translucent cels photographed in a sequence to give the illusion of motion, some folks in a country not far from anime’s homeland invented a revolutionary device that allowed stories to be told, stored, and possibly fansubbed.
It was called paper.
Somewhere along the line, young humans lost their desire to get their entertainment from the material, which I’m told was somehow plant-based. The flashy picture-box holds more sway these days. But in Japan, and the West, there remains a paper-style form of enjoyment that’s still popular with the kids.
I’ve never been a big comics or manga fan myself. I like the stuff, but three volumes into Battle Royale I realized I could have owned the DVD of the movie with the money they cost, and it’s physically impossible to watch a whole DVD film in the 8 minutes it takes to read a manga volume.
And the serial magazines that we get in the US pale in comparison to the choices the Japanese have. But now, we finally have something reasonable.
Yen+ is, unsurprisingly, from US manga publisher Yen Press. It’s a giant hunk of that paper stuff that will surprise you if you’re used to the tiny-sized tankoubon that we usually get over here. The pages are big, there are a metric shit-ton of them, and they’re printed on paper that’s a good deal better than Japan’s newprint issues.
The magazine is split in the middle: Read it from back cover right-to-left until you reach the center, and you get unflipped Japanese titles. Do the opposite, and you’re reading American and Korean comics. Which you enjoy best is up to you, because the titles are really varied and most are pretty good.
Readers on the fansub tip will recognize most Japanese titles right away, especially the cover piece, Atsushi Ohkubo’s Soul Eater. The American side’s cover is graced by the inaugural issue of suspense author James Patterson’s entry to the manga world, Maximum Ride. This is a big post for a big volume, so check out the review after the jump. There might be minor spoilers, but these are all first chapters.
