• No sign of the emotionless killer loli. She must still be off arranging heads in her trophy room.
• No Anekomimi backup story this time.
• EcchiHentai rival phantom is in the first five chapters. He drugs schoolgirls, almost gets MH to trade herself to free them, publicly humiliates Toichi in a fight (not understanding why his opponent stayed in human form), lures MH out for another duel, then easily evades her attacks in her topless power-up form until Toichi shows up and she asks him for some hands-on assistance, the resulting emotions transforming her "divine wrath club" into its max-power (and NSFW) form.
• Then, one of Volken's minions gets his own two-chapter adventure, as the eyepatch-wearing nazi chickdominatrix returns. It's a slightly skewed boyminion meets girldom story, with a happy ending.
• Next, it's Karol versus Mighty Heart in a fierce cooking battle, with Volken and his minions as judges. MH takes the lead with the first course, but Karol wins the rest, until the final course, the main dish: Karol's Passion Banquet (juicy tropical fruits on a bed of fresh Karol) versus Mighty Heart's Snowy Suspension Bridge (one large udon noodle stretched between her mountains, with a cup of dipping sauce in the valley below). MH is the winner by a nosebleed, leading a pissed-off Karol to yank away the noodle, triggering a Mighty Beam explosion.
• Moving right along, Toichi and Kokoro accidentally ingest matching "Love Portion" candies, leading them to come this close to a real kiss, before a classmate breaks in and reveals the candy's powers were just false advertising.
• In a rare service-free chapter, Toichi/Volken uses his great power and the fearsome reputation of the Phantom Legion to save a playground from destruction.
• Finally, the boss orders Volken to investigate Kokoro in order to learn Mighty Heart's weaknesses. He follows her to her rather unusual home, sneaks in when she steps out, and naturally ends up trapped in her closet while she undresses. G-cup.

I’m skimming the story, and only translating dialogue occasionally, but it’s actually turning out to be pretty good, enough that I’m going to go back and read it properly. It doesn’t seem to have much of a fanbase, so I’ll have to pull out my scanner to get a few nice character pictures.

I’m also going to spend some time reading the wiki page and the author’s blog, because this really doesn’t look like someone’s first work. I’m suspecting a history of porn comics under another name or as part of a doujin circle.

Our story begins with the Phantom Legion, a gang of armored (and, oddly enough, cat-tailed) villains, creating a huge explosion. Later, they gather in front of a vidscreen to receive the praise of their faceless master for bringing him the pleasure of human screams. Singled out for praise is the leader of the strike force, Volken, an armored devil in a trench-coat. The Legion is encouraged to keep up the good (aggressively destructive) work.

The next morning, perfectly ordinary high-school student Toichi Tenkawa listens quietly as his fellow students discuss the explosion, wondering if it was once again the work of the Phantom Legion. Foolish humans, he thinks, how terrified they’d be to discover that the Phantom Volken has taken human form and lives among them.

Lost in thought, he’s surprised when the other boys go wild at the sight of their new transfer student, Kokoro Maishima, a busty blonde who’s also loud, rude, and not the least bit interested in these pathetic boys. Naturally, she’s assigned to the empty seat next to Toichi. Despite her outburst, he politely greets his new classmate and offers to help her out if there’s anything she doesn’t understand. She rebuffs him with a blunt “omae, urusai zo”, shocking and angering him.

Later, Volken and his Phantoms lie in wait to begin their latest act of evil, hijacking a pre-school bus. As they move into position, they’re interrupted by a mysterious and quite curvy figure: The Angel of Judgement, Mighty Heart. Volken/Toichi is stunned to recognize his new classmate, and even more surprised as she leaps into the fray, and is instantly defeated by his minions.

Tied up, Our Heroine’s feminine charms are well-displayed in her skimpy costume, and one of the minions politely suggests a way to deal with their prisoner: they want her to join the gang. Surprised, Volken demands an explanation, and he explains that having a girl around would “enhance” their all-guy family. Volken nixes the plan, so the outspoken minion settles for a little fun, groping his way toward her breasts and commenting on how soft they’ll feel, and if she were to join the gang, she’d be vigorously groped like this all the time.

Our heroine is distressed, and to his surprise, Volken is also distressed, and moves to intervene, ordering them to act like professionals. Unfortunately, he trips on a rock, and catches himself with both hands on her ample breasts. The minions cheer (“Sasuga Volken-sama!”), but Volken is embarrassed, and tries to reassure the crying prisoner that it was an accident, and he was just trying to stop them from molesting her.

Too late. With a mighty explosion, Volken and his minions are defeated, and our sobbing heroine walks off into the sunset. Her true strength, it seems, is buried deep, and only moments of extreme shyness can allow her to call forth her Mighty Beam.

(end chapter one)

Coming from Shonen Champion Comics (publishers of Puri Puri, Zokusei, Hanaukyou Maid Tai, Mai-HiME, and Penguin Musume, among others), I expected Mighty Heart to live up to the “chotto ecchi” part of the back-cover blurb “chotto ecchi-na dokidoki kindan love comedy”. Certainly the cover art suggested as much:

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Amazon Japan just informed me that the third volume of Makino and Tsutsui (A Dictionary of Advanced Japanese Grammar) is now in stock. I’ll put it in my next order, because now that I’m fumbling through light novels, I’m running into things not covered by the previous two volumes.

While I was there, of course, I went through their recommendation list. I can’t imagine anyone who’d be interested in something like this…

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While idly browsing the recommendations on Amazon Japan, I found the latest volume in the apparently-popular Moe yo! Tank School series. The uniforms are decidedly non-regulation, but what really caught my eye was the mascot on their tank.

I had my hopes up for a moment, but sadly, it looks like a generic angry bunny-head, not the one true Max.

Ahem.

In today’s Megatokyo strip, the Tokyo Police Cataclysm Division learns of a previously-unknown Magical Girl (whose power level and mood are identified with the coolest Fluke meter in the known universe). She’s powerful, and she’s near meltdown, so Inspector Sonoda gives the order to evacuate every building in a 200 kilometer radius.

Just for amusement, I drew that out in Google Earth, and that covers the entire Kantō region of Japan, with room to spare. So, unless it’s a typo and he meant meters, this MG is an imminent threat to over 40 million people.

I suspect her first move will involve Tokyo Tower…

A frequent annoyance for manga and anime fans is the inevitable loss of information in translation. Little things like the use of -san, -chan, -sama, -dono, et al can be simply left in or explained once, and if you’re watching the subtitled version, you can pick them out of the original dialogue.

Often, though, cultural context means that a single line of dialogue can’t be fully understood without half a page of explanation, but sometimes it can’t, or shouldn’t, be explained. One of the dumbest things I’ve seen a fansub group do was fill the entire screen with a detailed explanation of a very small joke that added almost nothing to the story.

What we see a lot of today, though, especially with the insane pace of manga translation, is information lost because the translators didn’t have the context themselves; either they’re not native speakers who grew up in Japan (as pointed out in this Amazon review), or they’re not reading an entire story before translating a chapter (too many to list…).

So, here’s my tiny joke of the day, courtesy of a manga volume I spotted in Kinokuniya: 酒のほそ道. It’s the story of a salaryman who loves to drink; I can’t tell you any more about the story, because it’s entirely lacking in furigana, and I didn’t buy it anyway. It’s popular enough to have 22 volumes out, though.

Anyone familiar with classic Japanese literature will get the title immediately, and wonder just where the author is going to go with it. “Sake no hoso-michi” translates literally as “the narrow road of sake”, but it’s really a reference to “Oku no hoso-michi”, a very famous book written by the haiku poet Bashō.

Apparently Dr. Master Productions has been around for a while, publishing translated manga, but I’ve never heard of them before. Quite by accident, Amazon just recommended their English version of the Catholic schoolgirl fan-service comedy Puri Puri, which I commented on a while back.

They’ve been around for quite a while, and they’ve got some well-known titles, but I didn’t even know that anyone had licensed Puri Puri, much less that they were up to volume 4 already. I have no idea how good their translations are, but at least in this case the story mostly depends on how hot the girls are, so I can recommend it anyway. :-)