The Manga Test Drive: A new year means another round of Dealer's Choice reviews. I'm starting with another Yu Watase manga: Arata the Legend. While it riffs on some familiar ideas, it does work as a serviceable start for a shonen series.

A new year means another round of Dealer's Choice reviews. I'm starting with another Yu Watase manga: Arata the Legend. While it riffs on some familiar ideas, it does work as a serviceable start for a shonen series.

Review: ARATA THE LEGENDmangatestdrive.blogspot.com A new year means it's time for another round of Dealer's Choice, where the only theme unifying the reviews is their refusal to fit into mos...

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I wonder how the whole thing will be once they revise all the previous editor butchery.

Considering how poorly this series did for Viz, it's unlikely we'll ever know (at least officially).

True.

I was so put off by how awful/annoying fushigi yugi is that I honestly haven't given yuu watase another look since Also, what editing we talking about here??

So Watase was initially paired with an abusive editor at WSS. From her Wikipedia page:

It got so bad that she got depression. She eventually got a new editor, but the series went on hiatus a few times before it was complete due to her mental health. When it was re-released the series in Japan in omnibuses, they also altered some of the earlier chapters made under that first editor.

Also, while I continue to not like the original Fushigi Yugi, I would recommend trying some of her later manga. She improved a lot as both an artist and a storyteller. I personally like Alice 19th, and what I've seen of the FY prequel series are vast improvements.

Hell, even Ceres is worth a look. It's a bit of a mess, but it's a compelling, horror-tinged mess.

Damn, that sucks. Did she get/want to redo those scenes, and it didn't sell well enough for viz to bother with the updated version or something?

She was able to fix them in a Japanese re-release, but I sincerely doubt that Viz would ever republish it with the updated material because it flopped here.

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