Selections from what I read in February: digest version

Starting soon, I think I'll do this weekly, or maybe biweekly.  But for now, here's February in manga.

• b 13th Boy 2: Okay, I thought the talking cactus was pretty great.  Turns out it's a talking, transforming cactus, and that's EVEN BETTER.
• o Akihabara@Deep 1: Erm, it just kind of fails.  There's potential here, but it's all squandered and incomprehensible so far.
• b Beast Master 2: Kinda cute with a nice happy ending for a short series.
• b Bokurano Ours 1: The author of this book is an evil person.  EVIL.
• b Crown of Love 1: Looking forward to finding out what happens next.
• b D.Gray-Man 16: Wow.  Creepy, gothy-art, heart-wrenching story lines of protection, friendship, loss, and frailty.  Loving it.
• b Dance in the Vampire Bund 1: Okay, hard to recommend because of the tendancy of a certain main character to eschew clothing (specifically because this character's nudity is 1) not exactly like it appears and 2) supposed to appeal to a demographic that is quite frankly creepy).  The story itself could be really good, though, a nice spin on the childhood promise and master-servant/friend relationship.
• b High SChool Debut 1-8: This is pure, unadulterated, cute shojo relationship comedy, and I love every minute of it.  Haruna is fun as the straightforward, simple character, and the secondary characters are interesting.
• b King of RPG's 1:  Crazy and hilarious, and I say this as someone who has never played RPGs or done online gaming.  I do know about obsessive hobbies, though.
• b Monkey High 1-7: Another cute, shojo relationship comedy.  In this one, the male is the airhead, and that's pretty novel for me.  It sometimes tries to be ensemble comedy like Love*Com but none of the secondary characters are well-developed enough.  Like High SChool Debut, there is some fun with love triangles, rectangles, etc., that use a somewhat hard to pin down character.
• b Natsume's Book of Friends 1: This is a quiet, contemplative, sad, beautiful little story about loneliness, connection, and mystery.
• b not simple: This is hard-core literature.  S/T has an apt definition of that term.
• b Otomen 5: Oh, dear.  I love this series.  For its author's hatred of all things sparkly while drawing a manga overfull of them, for the characters in all their over-the-top glory, for the awkwardness, for the social commentary, and for Junta.
• b Silver Diamond 5: Will the power of nice be able to save a dying world?  Stay tuned.
• b Skip Beat 20: AWwwww.  I love it.  I love the curse demons, but I also love the cute, happy, nicey stuff.   I love Moko's internal knock-down, drag-out fight with herself so much that I read it about five times.  I love that Kyoko can still give love to others even though she is so broken.