May | 2016 | Ian Wolf: Odd Job Otaku

This month the 50th issue of MyM Magazine was released. I have been writing all the manga reviews for the magazine since Issue 1 back in May 2012, and occasionally did anime reviews too (not so much these days), so I thought it would be interesting to look back at my first reviews for MyM.

Issue 1 reviews 1

Issue 1 reviews 2

Among the first things of note is that one of the books is not strictly speaking a proper Japanese manga, but an Original English Language manga, the first volume of the steampunk fantasy Soulless. The other two books are manga: supernatural harem series Is This a Zombie? and the not that historically accurate Sengoku Basara: Samurai Legends.

Back in the early days of MyM the manga reviews were not out of a rank out of 10, but where simply “Hit, Miss or Maybe”. Looking back at the reviews I wrote, I would probably make Sengoku Basara a “Maybe” rather than a “Hit”. What I wrote in the review makes it clear that is the rating I should have given it (liking the art, not like the dialogue). The same is true with Soulless. I ended the review by saying it was: “Good but not great” so it is clear I should have said “Maybe”, not “Hit”. The problem was that the review system then was a lot more limiting, and by switching to a simple mark out of 10 it makes things a lot easier.

You may have also spotted that two of these reviews cover Yen Press titles (the other is Udon). The reason I covered two Yen books is simple: they were the easiest company to contact. Before this, the only manga reviews I had really written were for Anime UK News, and they were mainly books I purchased myself, not ones that I got in advance from a publisher. Out of all the companies I contacted, Yen and Udon were the first to give me anything to review. Others were much harder to contact, with Viz being the hardest. It was some time before I was able to get anything from them, but now they send me more books than any other publisher.

I certainly hope that I have improved since four years ago. I know there will still be things that go wrong of decisions that I will regret, but I hope I’ve done a good job and continue to do a good job in the future too.