Shadow Lady: Dangerous Love #1
by Mazakazu Katsura
Dark Horse, b&w, $2.50
rating: Keen
More and more lately I've found my comics purchases dominated by manga and by collections, and even the collections are as often as not collections of manga. For some reason, even mediocre manga, which so far Shadow Lady certainly is, have a certain...wakarimasen, as the French would say if they were speaking Japanese. Which is just it, there's an exoticism to them that, at least for me, provides an entertainment value even when I find the story somewhat lacking. Of course, the joy of comparing the English translation to the Japanese text, to get that "Aha! So that's what that sequence was about!" feeling is not something that I anticipate most of my readers will share, but I'm willing to accept that if they don't there's probably not a lot of reason for them (that is, you reading this) to be reading things like Shadow Lady. Unless you like the lovingly rendered T&A, that is; I have to admit that Katsura does the sexycute thing as well as anybody out there.
Shadow Lady is the story of painfully shy Aimi, a demure young lady who just happens ta-da to have a magic eye-shadow case that transforms her (when she applied the eyeshadow) into the daring, dashing, master burglar "Shadow Lady", scourge of the city. Sort of a magical-girl-gone-bad, as it were. (Magical girl, by the way, is the name of the genre to which things such as Sailor Moon belong--stories of young girls who have the power to transform into more glamorous, usually older, versions of themselves complete with magical powers and fashion accessories.) That's pretty much all that the first issue had time to set up. I'll probably give this another couple of issues, at least until I figure that I understand the basic set-up and characters well enough that I can follow the Japanese version without cross-checking against the English translation: unlike Ranma or Maison Ikkoku, I don't think that I'll care enough about the nuances to keep buying both versions.