Tag: magic

The League of Extraordinary Grade-Schoolers, Part 5

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Chapter 5: Light out of Darkness

High above the Earth, Pink Vicious sat upon her great pink throne. Over her head was a huge skylight above which the planet, enormous and perfectly still, hung perpetually as it shifted through its daily phases of light and shadow. A black strip glossy with sunlight, like an enormous ribbon, stretched up toward the Earth and disappeared in the distance.

Pink Vicious did indeed have a space station situated at geostationary orbit, but that was not where she kept her headquarters: her headquarters were at the space elevator’s far end, in the counterweight, where the g-force was the same as on the surface of the Earth. It gave her a small thrill to know that nothing anchored her except that thin expanse of ribbon, and that if it ever broke, she would go hurtling into the outer darkness.

She had a full day ahead of her. The first order of business was to torture a prisoner. After that came snack time. Then nap time. Then time to develop her plans for world conquest. Continue reading “The League of Extraordinary Grade-Schoolers, Part 5”

Manga Review: ‘Saint Tail’

On a mission from God.

Saint Tail, vols. 1 and 2, written and illustrated by Megumi Tachikawa. Published in Japan by Kodansha Ltd., 1995. Translated by Anita Sengupta. Tokyopop, 2001.

I was unable to complete this in time for Easter Sunday, but, fortunately, Easter is fifty days. So here we go.

The kaitou, or thief, is such a popular figure in Japanese pop culture that kaitou may be considered its own genre. This is probably thanks in large part to the wildly successful Lupin III franchise, which is written to be a sequel of sorts to the stories of Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc. Magical girls had crossed paths with gentleman thieves in franchises such as Minky Momo and Sailor Moon, so a magical girl who is also a gentleman thief—or lady thief, rather—is an obvious next step.

What is perhaps not so obvious is that the magical girl lady thief should be a devout Catholic who steals in service to God, but such is the premise of Saint Tail, and the basic concept of Saint Tail also got recycled, but given a hard twist, in Phantom Thief Jeanne, which we’ll discuss in a later post. Continue reading “Manga Review: ‘Saint Tail’”