Geobreeders Book 5: Big Trouble at Tokyo Tower

This work is a kind of ultra-distilled manga, combining three of the genre's most popular features: young girls, short skirts and guns. These elements serve the larger plot, about Kagura, a group of elite fighters who defend Japan from the Phantom Cats, an underground criminal organization. Their battles take them to snowy mountains and to the titular tower. Though formulaic, the story is also quirky: the characters play their roles but have off-center habits, like cooking pasta carbonara, which makes the nonstop action a little more human and easier to digest. But basically, the tale is structured like a video game and reads like one, too, thanks to the minimal dialogue and avoidance of anything resembling exposition. Ito builds the plots around the features of each death-defying location; the characters move from one terrifying situation to another, always just escaping, with the bad guys steadily advancing. Ito's drawings are fairly standard manga-style caricatures—petite bodies and big eyes—but he excels at action sequences that run for dozens of pages at a time and, again, resemble video games more than traditional comics. The action consists of frozen moments of impact; Ito doesn't waste time on explanations or transitions, but rather focuses on the key actions and their results. He expertly composes and draws these panels, providing the manga equivalent of a Michael Bay movie. Ito's range may be limited, but he is excellent at what he does; as a result, this book is fast and energetic, sure to appeal to fans of video games and action-based manga. (July)