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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Buy a tube of superglue while you're at it., December 14, 2004
This review is from: Junko Mizuno'S Princess Mermaid (Paperback)
I have bought this book two times over- once for a friend's birthday present, and once for myself because I was so captivated by the story and art. Both of us were very pleased, the plot and characters were perturbingly gorgeous and sexy, plenty smart but darkly charismatic. Julie, Tura, and Ai are all very strong female roles and are distinguished in thier own ways- but are always enthralling. There's no other style quite like Junko Mizunos, where it's so lovely and cutely poisonous you want to greedily take in thier glory as quickly as possible-but also dweel on the cunning little designs she sneaks in whenever she can. Like the skulls on Julie's tail on the cover.
BUT- here's something really big! The craftmashp is HORRIBLE! The other reviewer was right, the page quality is very poor- if the manga had been printed on glossy white sheets, it would have had the appropriate pop. But worse- much worse- is the binding is very insecure. the books is not sown together, but held to the spine with a very ineffective glue. Both me and my friend had our books fall out- her within an hour of reading it,and me a fews day later. We were not being rough with the books at all- in fact, I got mine later and knew that it was fragile, and tried to be extra gentle with it. Futile. Even gluing it back has rather poor results. Be prepared to spend quite a bit of time regularly reaffixing the book to its cover, or have the two be separated.
Otherwise, I can't recommend this book enough. I'm very glad I have it.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cute, bitter, vitriolic, and superb, February 15, 2004
This review is from: Junko Mizuno'S Princess Mermaid (Paperback)
Junko Mizuno is one of Japan's most popular modern manga artists and designers, and her style combines kawaii-to-the-max images with vitriolic plots. "Kawaii" means cute in Japanese, like Hello Kitty and Sakura from CLAMP's "Cardcaptor Sakura," but Mizuno's purposes are not to draw eye-candy in the form of pretty, and sometimes quite naked, girls. "Princess Mermaid" is a bitter, ultimately tragic story of three mermaid sisters who dwell not in oceanic peace and harmony, nor even in angsty yearning to be become human. Instead, they - and we - are always aware that up above on the pretty, shining waves are industrial fishing ships that capture mermaids in big nets and sell them as food.--- Mizuno is working in one of the great genres of Japanese art, in which meticulously composed, utterly gorgeous images of stunning beauty are drawn in breathtaking elegance, and are used to portray a world of demons, monsters, revenge, and death. Examples in classical Japanese art include the Hell Scrolls and a variety of wood block prints and sculptures of Lady Oiwa, a beautiful woman murdered by her lover who returns to wreak genuinely horrifying revenge on him. Like earlier wood block print artists, Mizuno too draws on contemporary images and icons -- in her case, psychedelia, four-color illustrations, fairy-tale princesses and princes, mermaids, and charmingly drawn jellyfish -- all inhabiting a world of chaos, mayhem, plague, rape, stupidity, and utter greed, in brief, a world not unlike our own. --- Throughout "Princess Mermaid," the mermaids are images of a peaceful and fruitful world being destroyed. Yet the mermaids fight their enemies, for if they are cute and adorable, they are also ferocious. That they do not all live is perhaps inevitable, but their life-affirming desire simply to exist suffuses "Princess Mermaid" with a grim optimism and a hope that someday the ocean will be free of the industrial fishing ships that capture and kill mermaids. In the meantime, the mermaids try to survive as best they can. --- "Princess Mermaid" is not as darkly funny as Mizuno's over-the-top "Cinderalla" (note spelling) or her film noir take on "Hansel and Gretel." Instead, her mermaids have kinship with San, the forest girl in Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece "Princess Mononoke," and share San's murderous determination to survive, for example, by avoiding the faceless men who want their scales and eyeballs ("We"ll make a killing!" one diver exclaims, "Mermaids are so rare!"). --- So do not expect pretty naked girl eye-candy from "Princess Mermaid." It is vitriol-dipped satire, drawn with an unforgiving eye that recognizes death underneath all the cuteness. Nor is "Princess Mermaid" for children -- do not buy it thinking you'll get a pretty Japanese version of "The Little Mermaid." That it ain't. "Princess Mermaid" is marvelous, rich, beautiful, and superb. Just know what you're getting before thinking that it's another story of adorable talking hamsters a la Hamtaro.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
awsome, January 16, 2004
This review is from: Junko Mizuno'S Princess Mermaid (Paperback)
while this book is darker than her other works, in terms of both artistic style and story, it still manages to live up to the quality of her other works. Mizuno has a distinct style that is diffrent to most other manga, it is both cute and grotesque at the same time. The story of this book is a retelling of the little mermaid, but with a twist. this book is simoly out awsome.
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