Boku to Akumu to Oneesan

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This was a work of Fukui Takumi, the team behind Record of Ragnarok/Shuumatsu no Valkyrie, and I've recently been obsessed with that series so I decided to check out his other works and... damn. This manga is brutal. At the beginning, it looked like it'd be some kind of shota thing, and while there are occasional nude panels and lewd scenes, it's mostly safe. The art is pretty bad in comparison to Shuumatsu, and you can really see how the author has grown, but it's not too big of a deal, and I still don't fully know if the art was even done by the ... same person. Besides the main character, the other side characters are very one-note, but I think the little mini-arcs each character gets each chapter is nice, with a poetic send off to the dream they caused. There were only 6 chapters I could get my hands on, which were done by AI and Google Translate, with terrible quality, but I intend to scanlate it a bit better at some point, and I highly suggest checking the first few chapters out, especially if you like light horror. It's just a fun short read in general.

(I did not know whether or not to mark this as spoiler, since I do mention elements and setup of the manga, however don't delve into the stories themselves)

This manga was... strange and disheartening, to say the least. The story follows an anthology type format, introducing new characters each chapter aside from our main character. Now, I want to start with the positive. I REALLY liked the art, and thought it paired neatly to the themes and elements of monsters/ghouls/yokai etc... as far as positives go unfortunately, that's all I really have to give.

Now, the negatives. Starting off with the lesser of my ... negative takes, I did not like the direction. In each chapter we are introduced to a different character who our main character inadvertently helps using his magic book. It's not a bad setup by any means, and can lead to some interesting stories, however, it is kind of a basic premise, and with the direction the author decided to go with, sullied the story. Secondly, I did not like the characters. Everyone, and I mean everyone, other than filling out some basic character archetype, felt really empty, which makes sense when we get into my final and most point of contention... the relationships between the main character and the women we meet each chapter. It was pretty obvious not even halfway through the story that this was fetish art. Our main character is a little boy, and all the characters he meets are much older women, all who dote on him and smother him in some kind of way. Not only is this gross, but how they go about it and their behavior towards it makes me even more grossed out.

To summarize, while the art itself aside from the subject and context was nice, the story itself was boring, and the other characters were boring and often predatory toward the main character.