The Whitehawk

Every week me and some friends “gather up” in some key websites to obtain the latest chapters of our favorite japanese comics. Some of you may know them as TV shows, as the most popular usually become licensed and then turned into a cartoon show that we call “Anime”. Examples of such Mangas are Dragonball, and more recently Naruto and One Piece.

The latest chapters of our favorite Manga are usually released by some dedicated teams that translate the scans, the scanlators, and distributed by popular file-sharing sites.

For many years Manga fans have been forced to find and use programs that support image-browsing inside zip files in order to read their weekly chapters, unless they had the patience to individually unzip all of them.

Although you could already browse files in Windows XP and Vista, we were still limited by having to single click each page and close the viewer in order to browse a whole chapter or volume.

Thankfully Windows 7 supports file browsing zip files almost as if you were looking at an ordinary folder. For manga fans this means that no more using ACDsee or another image-viewer program.

I for one welcome 7 as our new image viewer overlord, and it’s about time that someone or something dethroned ACDsee from it’s lonesome throne.

Oh boy… this one was almost equally hilarious to the first volume.

Like last time, Onizuka and Danmna are still looking for ways to score with girls. However, this time around they get into even worse problems, but more on that in a bit.

The volume starts off with them joining a new school, and since no one knows anything about them (or their violent ways) they figure that it is the perfect opportunity to win some girls over, however, this time around they are not alone in the “hunt”. There is a Romeo in the classroom who already gets all the attention, therefore Onizuka and Damna’s hopes of losing their virginity with their female classmates are greatly diminished.

But that is where the fun starts… after “befriending” the Romeo, they are told of a certain way get many women almost effortlessly, so they both decide to enter a car tunning contest. However, instead of taking the heap of junk they took to the mechanic for tuning, they take a Mafia car and from there on all hell breaks lose.

If you enjoyed the first volume, this one brings more of the same, and it’s easily becoming one of my favorite comedy Mangas ever.

This is definitely one of the most hilarious, and brilliant, Manga I have ever read.

As if Great Teach Onizuka wasn’t hilarious enough, The Early Years (or Shonan Junai Gumi) brings us the same kind of comedy, and then some. But mind you, the show is much more adult than GTO. In fact, it has an 18+ mature rating.

This volume basically is the story of Onizuka’s and Danma’s past as teenagers. At it’s start, both of them seem to be at their peak of hooligan-ness. However, they decided to change their looks and behavior and follow a different path: they try to lose their virginity. From trying to act like nerds, to almost being rapped, the two of them go through a bit of everything, and sometimes you can’t help but to feel sorry for them.

Although that’s not the kind of story you’re used to seeing in GTO, if I wanted to make comedy that revolves mostly around sex, I doubt I’d reach a level similarly close to “The Early Years”. I definitely recommend it to anyone who enjoyed GTO, and, of course, is over 18.

After a long and cold wait for the Naruto manga, it has finally arrived. Accompanied by another wonderful series: Angel Sanctuary. I didn’t buy all the volumes of course, only 5 and 4 of each series respectively, but still, I’m very happy.

I ordered them from my local (and only) manga shop called Sétima Dimensão, however, due to the really terrible service on the behalf of the carrier, Roberto, the owner of the store was forced to cancel the order and try an independent carrier. And thankfully, it took much less for the books to arrive.

But now I have to study for the upcoming exams, and I have my birthday dinner Tuesday. So, for now, the mangas will have to sit on the shelf. But just looking at them make me feel happy that my collection is already shaping up to be quite decent.

It’s nothing special really, if you’re American or Canadian you can just pick them up from the shelves on any “store”, but for a European, and in the unknown little island I live in (Madeira), I think it’s a really great collection.

I’ll write a review once the exams are gone and I have time to read them carefully.

What a wonderful Manga!

If you look at it as an orange it has a thick peel which is it’s first impression: There’s a college… and a guy… and his nerdy (and perverted) friend… and a girl he has a crush for.

I know, it sounds awful, I thought so to when I started reading, but once it gets over it’s cliche peel and start going into the juicy part a whole new world of things start happening, things that you can relate to or not. But mostly, what’s so great about this story is that he isn’t the innocent brick-headed college student that never has the guts to do anything.

Actually he ends up doing a lot of things we never expected he would do or that we could do ourselves. In the end, you feel satisfied as if things happened exactly as they should, and all the little events mattered, even if only a little for the final outcome.

I don’t have a “review system” set-up yet, but from one to ten, I give this amazing series for it’s great storyline, beyond words artwork and for it’s great and balanced character development…

10 out of 10!