As I promised - Japanese school girls.

Jisatsu Sakuru (Suicide Club) is a manga adaptation of a 2003 film with the same name. Having said that, it has very little in common with that film, except for the opening scene: a group of schoolgirls, holding hands, jumping into an oncoming train. The story follows Saya, the sole survivor of the accident, and her best friend, Kyoko, who begins to get suspicious about the company Saya is keeping.

Somewhat unusually for manga, it's only one volume long, so can be read very quickly (although the last few pages are somewhat…uncomfortable). It hasn't been officially translated yet, but you can get hold of a fan-translation here (a warning: it's definitely not for children). If, for some reason, you're in the mood for an unsettling story involving teenage suicide, well, it's your lucky day!

Also enjoying Viz's Short Cuts Vol. 1 at the moment. It's been around for a while (as you can tell by the Western right-to-left layout of the official translation), but I've only just come across it. Manga has a fairly well-deserved reputation of having stories that take place across 30+ 200 page books, but here, a tale is doing extremely well if it gets to a third page. It's a funny send-up of the clichéd handling of, er, schoolgirls in the manga scene (look, I swear, this post didn't start out as dodgy as it's turning out).

In cartoon news, Bonnie and I have discovered The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, currently showing on the Cartoon Network. Billy and Mandy are typical children, winning a bet with the Grim Reaper, and as a consequence, he's their Best Friend Forever. The Grim Reaper also appears to be Jamaican. Series Three began on Sunday, and since then we've had a spider that insists Billy is his dad, an Evil Tricycle from an alternate Pittsburgh (complete with bad British accents), Billy racking up thousands of years of bad luck in a mirror shot, and Grim's body becoming a supermodel. It's insane and very amusing…

Tomorrow…music!