Phantom Dream # 1, by Natsuki Takaya

[rachelmanija]

Tamaki is a teenage boy who has been trained in the family tradition of exorcism. In the company of his peppy female friend Asahi, he learns to use his magic, puts ghosts to rest, and battles spirits born of negative emotion.

This starts out with little to distinguish it from the approximately one thousand other manga with the exact same premise, but eventually introduces some poignant moral and emotional dilemmas.

An earlier work by Fruits Basket mangaka Natsuki Takaya, this fantasy manga is enjoyable in its own right and has promising plot developments by the end of the first volume, but perhaps most interesting as a run-up to Fruits Basket. I noted slapstick domestic violence (treated much more seriously in the later work), an excessively cheerful heroine, inherited magic, loneliness and alienation, and a light touch with dark themes.

Comments

[umadoshi.livejournal.com]

Guess I have to fidget a while longer, then. ^^ (Given some of the things I've read in other reviews, and a mishap with the preview, I'm more impatient than usual to see the final product.)

I read a few chapters of Tsubasa wo Motsu Mono (I think the domestic title is Tsubasa: Those With Wings) a few years ago, but it was never widely scanlated, and I don't remember very much about it. I gather it's supposed to be stronger than Phantom Dream, but then, I think vol. 2 of Dream is more interesting than vol. 1, since it's off and running on the main plot. I'm looking forward to seeing TWW when it comes out, though.

The other thing that interests me about Dream is that Takaya-sensei mentioned once that it was the work she was most likely to revisit, although it didn't sound like she was considering it all that seriously.

[octopedingenue]

Wah, I've been hoarding those Tsubasa scans unread* for a rainy day, but I hadn't realized the whole thing wasn't scanslated. Guess I will pick up the official translations and go back to not-reading Twinkle Stars.

Your icon still makes me happy.

*I've started reading more widely in Kazuya Minekura's works, so I needed another mangaka to save for a nuclear disaster, because If There Is Nothing Left Unread Of [Mangaka Name] I Will Cease To Exist. Have I mentioned I haven't finished Fruits Basket yet? Is it worth reading the scanslations at this point when the translated finale comes out in less than a year? (This is an actual question, Resident Furaba Guru: if the finale scanslations were sub-par, I can run from spoilers for another season, but I'd also rather my last first run on Furuba not be a translation that Gets It Wrong, even if that's the official one.)

Why is this footnote longer than the main text?

[umadoshi.livejournal.com]

I don't think it was ever fully scanlated, but I could be wrong. I think I read...maybe a bit more than one volume? Certainly not more than two. And it's six volumes long, if you want to check to see how many you have in reserve.

That's because my icon is Still Awesome. *g*

I haven't noticed any major details in the Tokyopop version of Furuba that have made me unhappy since around vol. 14 (and even before that, "major" for me is probably not actually a big deal in most cases, although there's a line missing in vol. 14 which the Twins figure went AWOL during layout, and there's at least one line invented out of thin air in vol. 12). I'm very comfortable trusting it, and the current rewriter is very good. I can't personally speak to the scanlation quality for the last few volumes, since I don't think I've read them, but I've heard horrible things. (I was reading raw scans and text translations during the serialization. The last scanlated chapter I remember reading was 108, which I'd already read Shadow's translation of, and even knowing what was going on I had a very hard time making sense of the scanlation's utter gibberish on some important points. o_o)

(Of course, my Furuba-related paragraph is by far the longest. ^^)

Have you read Takaya's single-volume collection of short stories? If not, you could stash that away. (To the best of my knowledge it's not licensed.)

And footnotes are also awesome, which may answer that question.

[larryhammer]

Some of the scans of the last two volumes were of ... questionable clarity. As in "wait, what?" sort of reads, of the sort that it's clear the original was probably more coherent.

---L.