Hotel Harbour View

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Common manga tends to be mediocre, with ‘Hotel Harbour View’ we have the supposed opposite side, a manga who tries to be serious, sophisticated, but that is as simple and plain as ‘One Piece’, but much more pretentious.

The characters have travelled all around the world, they remember experiences lived in L.A., Macao, Tokyo, París, Hong Kong, bla, bla, with this thing the authors think they are creating interesting characters inside a mature manga that is not. Let alone the situations like the man with cancer who hires a prostitute to kill him, situations that seem straight out of a cheap imitation of Wong Kar-Wai.

The ... only thing that is nice is the drawing, especially the cities, although it’s not something that we haven’t already seen in mangas or animes with aesthetics like this one.

Hotel Harbour View is set firmly in the noir world of the Fatal Woman. The two stories that make up the book read like cliches from an also-ran hard-boiled novelist - the kind of script Jim Thompson might dash off in 20 minutes in exchange for a shot, a beer, and a pack of cigarettes.

The artwork, too, is very western. I'm not faulting it for that. I quite like it. It's just that in pretty much every way - except that the story and art were provided by a couple Japanese guys - this is a western genre comic.

I'm curious about ... Netsuo Sekikawa, the story writer. He wasn't prolific and it appears he tended to focus on this type of noir-ish style. But on the back cover where the bios of artist and writer are shown, it says that he didn't want his profile attached with this work. Wonder why. It's not a bad work. It's just not particularly unique or interesting.