Books: xxxHOLiC: AnotherHOLiC

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. — Hunter S. Thompson

You’re not really friends with someone unless you and the other guy can slag each other’s tastes with full-bore venom and still pal around with each other the next day. The other week I had the quote unquote pleasure of having one such friend drill into me for liking Witchblade. I saw a show about motherhood and the pain and joy thereof; he saw a bunch of top-heavy chicks powering up DBZ-style and clobbering the tartar sauce out of each other. But we agree to disagree there, and that’s that — and we both loved the hell out of Casshern, so it isn’t like we’re always at each other’s throats.

I’m expecting a metric truckload of the same kind of “you, sir, are an idiot” missives sent my way after I recommend ×××HOLiC: ANOTHERHOLiC: Landolt-Ring Aerosol (best title ever, by the way). I read it and I see an attempt to create a set of tie-in stories for the ×××HOLiC anime/manga universe, faithful to it in spirit and form, with as distinctive a voice and a set of literary tropes as the ones the author brought to his own original works earlier this year. You, on the other hand, will read it and think I am a complete pud. Fine. I still haven’t found a flaming gunblade on my front lawn for the way I savaged Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, so pud I am and pud I remain. I’d like to think I at least have a justification for my pud-dom.

Article originally written for AMN. Click here to read full text.