Publishing Information: TOKYOPOP, B&W with some color, paperback, 224 pages, $14.99 U.S., $18.99
Ordering Numbers: ISBN: 978-1-4278-1798-3 (ISBN-13)
The recently published Fruits Basket -Banquet- is a coda to the popular manga series. Fruits Basket is a shojo manga (comics for teen girls) created by Natsuki Takaya. It was serialized in the Japanese magazine, Hana to Yume, from 1999 to 2006, and was eventually collected in 23 volumes (or tankÅbon). It was published in North America by TOKYOPOP, both in paperback and also in hardcover “Ultimate Editions.” TOKYOPOP billed Fruits Basket as the “#1 selling shojo manga in America.”
Fruits Basket follows high school student Tohru Honda and her life with the Sohma Family. After Tohru’s mother died in a car accident, she lived in a tent and supported herself. She is eventually taken in by her friend, Yuki Sohma, and lives in a home with him and his cousins, Shigure and Kyo. Some of the Sohmas are cursed. Thirteen members of the family are possessed by spirits of the Chinese zodiac, and they turn into their respective zodiac animals when hugged by someone of the opposite sex. Although she keeps the curse a secret, Tohru makes it her goal to break the Sohma curse.
Banquet is 200-plus page of odds and ends. It opens with a 16-page color section of illustrations, with some of them being double spreads. There is some fan art and also a creator interview that is packed with pencil art. There are also several contest sections with a few pages devoted to most of the characters or chapters that received a lot of votes. Readers will delight in a new eight-page manga related to the “Couples & Combination” contest. In the end, Fruits Basket -Banquet- is for the hardcore Fruits Basket fan.
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The "hardcover" or "hardcore" fan??
ReplyDeleteI gotta change that. I must have been cracking out both when I wrote it and edited it.
ReplyDelete