Slowly pulling into the station at the end of the year. I got sick right after Christmas and focusing has been hard all week, which left me with a bunch of manga started but not much finished compared to my rate for the rest of the year. I’m doing my best to let myself off the hook for not being an overachiever 100% of the time so we’ll say this is a good thing.

Anime: spy family 13, しっぽな 6, うる星やつら 9-10, ロマンティックキラー 5.

My first manga of the week was 怪獣８号 vol. 3. This is still the most difficult series I read simply because of all the military vocab and long kanji compounds. It’s hard to shake the feeling that I’m accidentally reading in chinese sometimes. Regardless, it’s a lot of fun. Good expressions and nice art, and the three main cast members (with maybe a fourth coming?) are always funny. I wish it wasn’t quite so exhausting or I would read it more regularly.

Next up was よつばと vol. 9. A few favorite moments: Yotsuba waking up crying and very angry at dad for eating her snacks (in a dream); the entire coffee saga and the reactions of all the girls drinking it (when they finally succeed in doing so); Yanda getting bullied at the restaurant; Yotsuba charging full tilt at a hill and ignoring the stairs completely, reaching the top covered in burrs.

Last completed manga of the year was あせとせっけん vol. 3. This is another series I keep picking away at very slowly. It’s really nice seeing the two main characters open up and get more comfortable with each other, and the presentation has a sense of maturity to it that sets it apart. The two of them are on a romantic getaway to Hokkaido now and it’s fun to recognize a few spots from my first trip. I particularly liked one scene where Asako is confiding in her section chief about her insecurities in comparison to Nattori’s previous girlfriends, to which he replies “But you are the one he’s in love with now, and it’s not fair to him if you don’t have confidence in yourself to be worthy of those feelings.”