This one took me by surprise. I had absolutely no expectations, and this anthology has been a bit hard to find outside of Amazon Japan. I got mine from Hobby Search but do check around if your usual preferred shop has it available.

TIGER & BUNNY Official Anthology Comic
GO! GO!! Tiger & Bunny 1
Publisher: Movic
ISBN: 9784896018134
Price: 780 JPY [CDJapan] [Hobby Search]

Cover art: Arataka
Illustrations: Ouno Miyu, Jiku
Manga: Kusunoki Jun, Sano Masaki, Watanabe Kyou, Nagi Mayuko, Fujii Haruka, K. Arima, Yukinari, YASUMI, Ootsu Mugi, Toonoyuugo, Hako*, Yuuki Akira, Hitaka*, Morino Hana, Eikichi, Takepon, Asami Nao, Riutagao, Tachikawa, Takana, KAY, Isumikawa Ichi, Ine*, Nekota Choco

(The ones marked with * I wasn’t sure how to romanize and google didn’t give much help.)

I’ve not had time to read all the stories in GO! GO!! 1 yet – I’m going for the artists I know first – but so far the bits I have read have been really fun. The artists are mostly known for BL doujinshi (I actually have some books by Eikichi and K. Arima in my collection), and I think Sano Masaki & Watanabe Kyou are the biggest names on the list. As always there’s a few that have art I don’t really like, but overall quality is good. Like the other anthologies, this doesn’t count as canon but the stories are approved by Sunrise – official logo is on the back cover.

The stories are pretty short – most only a few pages – and there are a lot of yonkomas. I think this mixture of styles suits an anthology like this pretty well. Many minor characters who haven’t gotten proper appearances in the other anthologies show up, too. For example both Mr. Lloyds and Doc Saito have their own stories and Karina’s manager Robert makes an appearance. If I had to nag about something, it’d be the lack of Lunatic. Can’t have all, I guess…

This one is a bit more challenging to read if your Japanese is shaky, because it doesn’t have furigana for kanji. Still definitely worth giving it a go, this is my favourite of the anthologies so far.

Samples:

There are two more GO! GO!! Tiger & Bunny anthologies planned, #2 comes out 10/25 and #3 near the end of November.

I’m a bit reluctant to title this post “review” because it’s pretty hard to actually review these – the variation in art and stories is so great in each book. In the case of these anthologies, the word “official” just means that the stories were approved by Sunrise. These books don’t count as canon because the stories aren’t written by Nishida, but if you want more cute superheroes doing cute stuff, then there should be something for you in them…

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