Flower of Life 1-3, Yoshinaga Fumi

[snarp]

My response to this manga is a string of little hearts.* My favorite is the chapter about the girl who has a crush on Yamane. I want more stuff with Yamane in it. She is perfect and I love her.

This particular Yoshinaga manga’s Horrible Relationship is so deep into horrible it comes out the other end. It’s like Edward Gorey or something. I can’t figure out whether to cringe or laugh at it. It’s very, very horrible.

* But I’m not putting them here because I’ve developed an anal-retentive habit of avoidance of special characters due to fear of problems with my WordPress database. Though I feel that this dysfunction has on occasion damaged the integrity of my writing, it persists nonetheless. There is a small fearful twinge close to my heart when I switch on the Japanese IME, an almost tactile thing, as if UTF-8 character encoding was a physical organ within my body.

(I have such awesome problems.)

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Comments

[snarp]

That was a really long comment and not a very good response to yours, because I totally suck at art criticism; sorry about that. It's been sitting on a burner in my head for a while (I guess I have burners in my head?), and it exploded.

[cerusee.livejournal.com]

Non! It was good. It's not something that I was already thinking of--the extent of my musing on Yoshinaga has been "I love her comics like fire; god, she's twenty times better than most things I read" (which is still the case)--but it rings true.

Ambition or no, I enjoy Yoshinaga more than Kaori (maybe just because in her narrower ambitions, she produces very strong work), but this is a question of what I am looking for in each author, rather than a general comment on their individual contributions to li-tra-chore. It's like Neal Stephenson vs. Georgette Heyer: no one in their right might would compare them anyway; all they have in common is that I like them both, and that they are both skilled writers. I've probably gotten more pleasure, by the hour, from Heyer, who was prolific, but it has very little bearing on the quality of their respective works.

Oh, re: strong and weak Bujold: do I correctly interpret that as Bujold's stronger books vs. her weaker books? Or did you mean people writing like Bujold who are better at it vs. weaker at it?

[snarp]

Stronger books versus weaker books. I'm thinking of Barrayar and Memory as strong books and Diplomatic Immunity as a weak one.