Being Mutsumi is suffering — Bang Dream Ave Mujica — First Impressions

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What’s the matter Mutsumi? Are you in despair about the state of Bang Dream: Ave Mujica‘ subtitles too?

A close-up on Mutsumi's face, filled with despair

I was honestly, no lie, so frustrated by the subtitles on the first episode that it has taken me until the second episode came out today to be interested in writing about it. I loved Bang Dream: MyGo, as you may have noticed and was looking forward to the sequel, but the way Crunchyroll once again handled the translation and subtitles almost destroyed any pleasure I had watching the first episode.

It is bad enough that the episode starts with a musical performance from Ave Mujica, completely untranslated so it looks impressive but I had no clue what they were singing. This is something that drives me up the wall with Crunchyroll, that they cannot be bothered to pay for the licensing rights to subtitle songs; the same has happened with the last couple of IdolM@ster shows too. I’ve given up hope for any streamers to put up the money to subtitle their shows’ openings and endings, but at least for a music/idol show, do translate the insert songs? They’re kind of important!

A close-up of Sakiko looking at her cell phone.

But things get worse. Because this first episode retells the story of how Crychic broke up from Sakiko’s point of view. What we saw in MyGo was her receiving a mysterious text, after which she disappeared from the band’s rehearsal sessions for weeks only to say she was quitting the band once she finally came back. Now here, finally, we get to see what triggered Sakiko — had Crunchyroll actually bothered to translate and subtitle them! Even if it wasn’t quite necessary to get the gist of it, it still vexes me that Crunchyroll just couldn’t be bothered. And currently there are no fansubs available either. At least episode two was less reliant on text messages to move the plot along, irritating me less.

Not that there was time to be irritating by Crunchyroll’s incompetence when the second episode was just non-stop blows hammering down on poor old Mutsumi. In MyGo she was the least defined member of Crychic, basically reduced to being a go-between for Soyo to contact Sakiko. Even then I felt sorry for her and the way she was treated by both: Soyo blaming her for the band breaking up, Sakiko for forcing her to be in her new project while seemingly taking her for granted. But I didn’t know how much I really felt sorry for her until these first two episodes of Ave Mujica. Episode one showed her role in the breakup and why she said what she said all the way in MyGo‘s first episode, while episode two has her dealing with the fallout from the previous episode. Spoiler: it doesn’t go well.

Mutsumi is the anti-Tomori. Both have difficulty communicating with others and are clearly on the spectrum in some way, both have to mask their true selfs to a certain extent, but where in Tomori’s case this draws people to her — Saki, Soyom, Taki, Anon, Raana — with Mutsuki it repulses them. Tomori has been hurt by people not understanding her, has internalised the idea that this is always her own fault, but she also has the resilience to keep trying to reach out while staying true to herself. When it’s important Tomori has been able to make herself hear and has been rewarded for it.

A downcast Mutsumi being berated by Nyamu

The same cannot be said for Mutsumi. Like Tomori she withdraws in her obsessions, guitar playing, growing cucumbers, but when she tries to use them to reach out to people, like Tomori with her bandaids did to Anon, she fails, as when she brings her cucumbers to MyGo to congratulate them in MyGo episode 12. Several times in Ave Mujica episode two she tries to talk, but she never succeeds, even as she gets cornered to the point of a breakdown. Nobody understands her or even tries to, not even her own band mates. They all impose their own vision of her on her and Mutsumi just does not have the strength to object to it. She has always been passive when we’ve seen her before, seemingly eager for somebody like Sakiko to tell her what she should do. But she has never been important enough for anybody to help her discover what it is she herself wants. Not like Tomori has had Taki and Anon and even Raana and Soyo.

Being Mutsumi is suffering.

The Adventures of Dōlo Rômy in the Underground City of Women — #aComicaDay (68)

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Looking for an old pal, a homeless lesbian stumbles unto an underground city of sapphic women, promptly seduces their queen and in the process foils a military coup. All in a day’s work for Dōlo Rômy

A black and white cover of a woman sitting in a chair, smoking and reading, she's dressed in jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt and wears a hat

Written and drawn by Karen Platt, The Adventures of Dōlo Rômy in the Underground City of Women came out in 1989 from Dōlo Blue Graphics in Minneapolis, as a black and white, magazine sized 40 pages long book, with cardboard covers. I could discover very little online about either this book or its author, who I don’t think is this Karen Platt. It feels and reads like something that was self published, outside of the regular comics markets. More a book you’d see alongside punk and anarchist zines than in your local comics store’s alternative section. Though I did indeed got it there, as a curiosity, but how they got it I have no clue.

Unlike Dōlo Rômy, Karen Platt herself is featured in the Grand Comics Database, having work listed on Dykes Delight and Dark Horse’s The Mask, of all things. She was apparently also featured in the 2012 Fantagraphics anthology No straight Lines, an overview of queer comix history and the subsequent 2021 documentary that spun off from it.

The story has Rômy finding the underground city of women, look around it for a few pages looking for her old gal pal before deciding to fuck it, have a drink in a night club and hook up with one of the locals. Who tells her the city was founded in 1973 as a new Lesbos, just underground and that there are now 60,000 women living there. Before they can get physical, Rômy is arrested by the police, who take her to the queen who will decide on her fate. Luckily, this turns out to be one of her old flames, they have sex but once again Rômy is interrupted, this time by the coup. She escapes, gets a couple of like minded gals to help her and in the end successfully launches a counter coup and finds her old friend. Who, it turns out, may have inspired the coup because she needed a few dames to provide her with the luxuries in life. All’s well that ends well and Rômy does get to finally enjoy both the first woman she got lucky with as her old pal the queen. A drifter at heart, Rômy and friend leave the underground city at the end of the story to roam the streets of Bush’s America again.

The art is rough, with lots of heavy blacks and zip a tone, which works well for this story. The writing is fun, this is basically a b-movie as even Rômy herself acknowledges, but it moves along with a bit of humour. The sex scenes flow naturally from the story, don’t feel gratuitous, nor that titillating if I’m honest. I’m not sure if there was every anything else of the adventures of Rômy published. The back cover promises she would return in Set a Bad, Bad, Bad Example but I haven’t seen anything about this online. The way this story also feels like it was the sequel to something, but again if it was, I couldn’t find anything about it.

Senpai Noticed Her – Hana wa Saku, Shura no Gotoku — First Impressions

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Get you a senpai who is this obsessed with you joining her school club:

'Better be thankful I came after you.' says the short cropped blonde haired senpai to her insecure, black haired kohai, both smiling.

As a young child Hana watched a recitation contest on television and became fascinated by it to the point that in middle school she held regular reading sessions for the younger children of her small island. By chance the club president of the broadcasting club of her new high school catches one of those readings and decides she has to have her for the club. But Hana isn’t sure whether she can, even if she wants to…

Mizuki grasping Hana by the shoulders as she tells her that just because something is difficult it doesn't mean it's impossible.

This was a nice surprise. I went into this completely blind and got not just a nice, sweet first episode about a girl who’s afraid to let herself attempt the things she wants to do, but also a bit of cute flirting by her senpai. Mizuki is a lot more touchy feely than normal for an anime character and feels extremely lesbian coded? Short haired, strawberry blonde, wears ear piercings and when we first saw her she was in a pants and blouse combination. I’m not getting my hopes up that this will amount to anything, but it would be great if it did. In the meantime this seems like a nice, meaty school club story and I like that it’s not all girls in the club either.

The character design is on point and the animation is strong, especially the character animation. Mostly it quietly shunts along until we get to the climax, where it lets loose, showcasing Hana’s dramatic recital of her favourite poem with equally dramatic animation. This so far is my favourite premiere of the season.

Zot! 01 — #aComicaDay (67)

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Welcome, one and all, to the far-flung future of– –1965!

A blond boy in a red jump suit with withe boots and belt, a ray gun in his left hand, his right hand outstretched in front of him is flying towards the reader. To his right his robot butler is walking behind him, pointing a gun at the reader while to his left a girl stumbles due to the backdraft of his flying past

If you don’t like the colour issues of Zot!, comics are not for you. Scott McCloud’s first significant comics project, it all starts with the titular hero from a parallel Jetsons future like Earth full of jet packs and flying cars, crash lands through a dimensional gate into the very ordinary life of bored teenage girl Jennie Weaver. Much later, after Zot! had been rebooted as a black and white title, this very ordinary life would become the focus, a critically acclaimed portrait of adolescence, but for the first ten issues it would be colourful high adventure all the way.

Back in the 1990s I was a regular at two comics shops: Het Perron, a traditional, mostly European orientated shop that had also started carrying American comics and Henk Lee’s Comics & Manga Store in Amsterdam. The first I went too every weekend I was visiting my parents, the second I went to every Thursday, new comics day. Henk Lee had his shop in the middle of Amsterdam’s Chinese district on the Zeedijk, at first as part of the Chinese supermarket his family already owned. I’d found out about him through an ad in one of the first US comics fanzines published in the Netherlands, Comic View, where he promised low prices and rare comics for cheap if you got a subscription. Back then Zeedijk was still somewhat of a junkie hangout, so it was a bit of an adventure for a provincial boy like me to make that first trek there…

Over the next decade I would buy most of my comics from there; I can still remember the smell of spices that hung over the store when it was still part of the supermarket. I’d soon established a routine of going in every Thursday, get the new batch of comics, then go to one of the Thai restaurants in the neighbourhood for dinner, occasionally strolling into the Red Light District by “accident”. What set Henk apart was not just that he carried new comics, as many other shops had started doing, but that he had a well stocked back issue section. Most shops just had random issues of whatever they had ordered new and some crap that had been floating around the Dutch comics circuit for years, but Henk actually imported them directly from America. Which is why I could get the first 18 issues of Zot! in one fell swoop. I already knew Zot! from mentions in the fan press, had already read Understanding Comics, so once these were available at Henk’s I immediately bought them.

The first issue is a masterpiece in how to get your readers excited. We get a few pages of Jennie moping about having had to move to the suburbs because of her parents jobs and her brother Butch teasing her, before Zot crashes into their lives, pursued by killer robots from Sirius who are after the key to the doorway at the edge of the universe. Jennie helps Zot defeat them, he returns through the gateway when she finds the key and ends up falling through it herself, together with her brother. Some exposition and touring of Zot’s future world of 1965 later, back to the action as a de-evolution cult attacks and Butch gets turned into a monkey…

Everything about this bops. The writing and art is great, while the lettering by Todd Klein, who designed the logo, and the colouring by Tom Zuiko is top notch too. McCloud would go on to do a lot of great, interesting comics but none quite as fun as these first ten issues of Zot!.

Anime Resolutions (The New Year’s kind)

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I was good yesterday. Instead of watching the first two episodes of yet another boring isekai premiering this season, or the equally boring first episode of a mobile game adaptation, I rewatched the first three episodes of 1999’s To Heart.



You don’t really get this sort of aspect to aspect mood setting scene anymore in anime, do you? Based on a Aquaplus romance simulator, To Heart is a nice little romcom centered on Hiroyuki, the guy at the end of the clip. Hiroyuki has a little bit more to him than the usual potato-Kun, even if his personality consists mostly of being helpful than any girl he meets (except for middle school friend Shiho) and wanting to sleep. But there isn’t that much romance in these first three episodes and they’re mostly told through other characters than him, mainly his childhood friend Akari, who very much has a crush on him, unlike Shiho, who sees him as her rival and a nuisance.

I first watched this years ago, in 2016 and thought it was good, but not that special. The only reason I started rewatching it was because various people I follow on Bluesky were talking about how good it was, independently from each other (for Bless it was his anime of the year, frex). Yes, I am easily influenced.

But I also did it because I wanted to get out of the habit of trying every bucket of slop that’s released in season and then continue to watch it out of habit. There is so much good good anime I still need to watch I’d really should start being more ruthless in culling the crap from my diet. Especially because there are a number of series on my backlog I really want to finish this year as I’m starting to feel guilty about them. In order:

  1. Mazinger Z (1972), 54 out of 92 episodes to go:
    The super robot show that saved anime from being crushed by the Tokusatsu craze of the early seventies. A kids’ show, but one in which in the last couple of episodes I watched we see a bus full of innocent people being murdered by the bad guys, a plane blown up and crashed and similar violence. Started out episodic in a monster of the week format but starting to deviate slightly from the format in the last few episodes. Not really made to be binge watched which is the problem.
  2. Kingyo Chuuihou! (1991), 28 out of 54 to go:
    A comedy series set in a school full of weirdos, done by the same staff who would go on to work on Sailor Moon directly afterwards. I started watching this a couple of years ago as part of a group watch but fell behind and stopped. The problem I have with it is that I like it when I’m watching an episode, but rarely find myself wanting to watch it. It is very funny but also something that I can only watch in small doses.
  3. Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (1986), 42 out of 47 to go:
    The third series in the OG Gundam chronology, the problem I have is that it’s a) an incredible mood swing from the previous series and b) its protagonist is an even greater jackass than Kamille or Amuro ever were. I first started watching this in 2020 (!) and never got more than five episodes in, even restarting it last year didn’t work. Just never build up the momentum to get over my dislike of Judau.

There are many other series I started and need to finish, but those three are the most important ones. If I managed to finish any of them I’ll be happy.