Manga Monday: Who knew a university of future superheroes would have so much drama?

In a world where super heroes are a fact of life, it would make sense that there would be institutions to teach  them the best uses for their powers.  And depending on the levels of young person’s powers, there would by necessity be universities of differing prestige.

Welcome to Liberty Vocational, seen here in Liberty Vocational Volume 1: Will Supervillains Be On The Final? This is the Ivy League of Superhero Universities.  And being accepted at 16, Leah Taymore is a prodigy.

Well, her powers are, at least. Leah, being younger than most anyone else on campus, is terribly awkward and a step behind from the moment she steps foot on campus. Granted, having co-ed dorms makes sense, when so many superheroes end up on teams and have to get used to the idea of sharing bunks and changing together eventually.  It’s a little hard for Leah to wrap her head around at first.  Having grown up with very low level parents, she is hardly prepared for the reality of a campus full of powerful superheroes-in-training, but she is ready to do her best.

We meet a few people during her first days on campus.  There is her roommate Yuzana Myat, a Bermese empath who tends to “listen in” on her classmates, but genuinely likes Leah, and helps her out.  In her chaotic first day, she also has time to find a male classmate named Paul Lyman to start crushing on.  Which, admittedly, is probably to be expected of a 16 year old girl.  We get to see a few of her classes, which run the gamut from ethics to costume design, and meet a rather terrifying dean.

But not all drama is confined to campus. When rains start to send the nearby river out of its banks & Leah is the only one on hand to stop it, will she risk being expelled to save the town?  And why does it seem like everything Leah does somehow gets undermined?

Liberty Vocational Volume 1 throws a whole lot of plot into under 200 pages of comic. Having never been serialized, it has a different flow than most manga, but plenty of plots are established to let the series go for quite a long time.

Highs: The stories do well at showing many parts of a university experience, including both the class time and personal time

Lows: It really feels more like an illustrated novella than a proper manga, with odd pacing issues and not enough explanation of what Leah’s powers are actually doing

Verdict:  Even with it’s flaws, the story so far is enough for me to want to know what happens next

Further Reading:  His Majesty's Dragon, Howl's Moving Castle

A slow boat to China must seem even slower with dragons aboard...

Note:  Throne of Jade is the sequel to His Majesty's Dragon.  The review of His Majesty's Dragon is here.  Otherwise, read on!

Who needs airplanes when the air force can ride dragons?

Alternate history stories can go one of two ways. In the first, the author is so concerned with the history that the story itself gets lost in the mix. In these, how history diverges and interplays with how history really took place is what the reader is looking for, and plotting and characterization oftentimes gets overlooked.

The other type of alternate history lets the history play as a backdrop to a character driven story. Unless the reader is an avid fan of the intricacies of history, generally this is the much more enjoyable of the two. In either type of story, the divergence point can be as small as a general taking sick, or as grand as an earthquake taking out an entire army.

Or the addition of dragons as an instrument of war.

Welcome to Naomi Novik's world of Temeraire, starting with His Majesty’s Dragon. Dragons exist, and as clever as humans. While there are still groups of wild dragons, especially in the Black Forest, many have been semi-domesticated, and are used by Europe as a sort of airborne cavalry. They’re large enough that they’re manned almost as an airship would, with a crew hanging off carabiners from the dragon’s harness.

When Captain Laurence of the British Navy captured a French ship, one of the prizes they took was a dragon egg bound for Napoleon himself. A dragonet generally becomes attached to the first person it sees after coming out of the shell, but this one passed up his intended handler and chose Laurence instead.

This rather disrupted his rather distinguished career as a Navy man, and immediately drafted him as an aviator. He gave up his ship; his future wife; and, after his father found out and disowned him, his family as well.

But with everything he’s lost, he’s gained an amazing friend. He named his dragon Temeraire, and a more loyal friend or family member he’ll never find. As Temeraire grows up, he becomesat least as intelligent as the rest of the characters in the book, and loves to be read to in both English and French, as dragons learn languages while in the shell.

We get to explore the world through the eyes of Lawrence, and are told about customs and such as he tells Temeraire. Dragons and their aviators are generally trained in Ireland, and we get to see the many ways that captains treat their dragons there, as well as later in battle.

The book feels much shorter than it actually is, because it’s such a fast, adventure story. Even when the story is being moved along mainly by dialog rather than action, I never felt the urge to flip pages until the fighting started again. It’s a great action book with little thought needed, and sometimes all a person wants is a little bit of dragon escapism.

Highs: Quick paced, great personalities among the dragons

Lows: If you want high literature, you’ll be sadly disappointed

Verdict: Great fun, and a fast read

Further Reading: Throne of Jade, Stardust