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I need a full length manga of this.

The dynamic between the main two girls, the emotions, the art; everything was beautiful.

While it's only a one-shot and so there isn't exactly a lot of time to develop much of a story, I thoroughly enjoyed the read. The two main characters are likeable and well developed for such a short time phrase, and I was instantly invested in their struggles.

My only criticism is that it's just way too short. This would do great as a longer manga, the story feels like it still has so much more to say, it's a shame.

I have mixed feelings about this story. On one hand, I was incredibly excited when I found out that there was a manga that focuses on Vincent Van Gogh's younger brother, Theodore. And the way the story set itself up at first, with Theo's ambition to break from the Conservative clutches that the Art Academy has established and a passion for bringing his brother's genius into the limelight.

Other than the story, the art is decent with some very nice depictions of art pieces from the time.

Our protagonist, Theo, is captivating. Much like a performer on a stage, everything he does demands attention in all ... its charisma and intellect. That said, his brother Vincent was a lot less interestingly written. The creative changes to his character made him feel rather plain and unmotivated for the majority of the story, though the writing itself acknowledges this perception.

On the other hand, if you are expecting historically-accurate storytelling, you will be disappointed. The artistic divergences from actual known events that the story decides to take were a little less favourable to me. Without spoiling the ending - I had hoped and been looking forward to the exploration of the brothers' bond in their times of struggle, particularly in the events of Vincent's psychiatric struggles and Theo's chronic health issues. Unfortunately this was not explored in the way I had hoped, and that really ruined my enjoyment of the series.

Overall, I wouldn't say the series itself is bad. If you like the re-interpretation and twisting of commonly known events into something new, you may love this manga. However, from my very subjective perspective, it just didn't meet the particular expectations it had set when I first began it.

I've heard only great things about the anime, so I was really looking forward to the manga. Unfortunately I was only disappointed.

Before I get into the spoiler-heavy critique of the plot, I'll start with an overview of the other aspects.

The art:
The art style is a bit of a hit or miss. There are some panels that are truly gorgeous. But most of the action sequences, and even some non-action, fall under the somewhat common 90's manga trope of messy to the point of being hard to follow.

The characters:
Vash is interesting, or at least has the potential to be. He's a seemingly easy going character, ... flaunting a message of 'Peace and Love' and refusing to take anyone's life even despite being classified a 'localised disaster' level threat and being hunted by people who want to do just that. He has the air of someone with an interesting past, and the story scatters little elements about what happened to him before the big reveal in volume 2-3. The companions he gains are good enough to provide some fun conversations and switch up the mood of the action, while having potential for interesting developments themselves.

Now onto the story.

Because as I mentioned, we do actually get Vash's backstory revealed. Or at least, the big event that has caused a lot of his issues and motives in the present. Unfortunately, this is only one of my many issues with the manga's story.

The writing rushes through the reveal so fast that I hardly found time to care about what was happening, let alone fully understand it. The reveal of what happened to Rem was mentioned so abruptly and concisely that I had to re-read it to even realise that they had just disclosed what had been the big mystery of the plot up till that point. The introduction of Knives in the past was glossed over so little that all we knew about him was 'that one evil thing he did' and the fact that he and Vash used to be some kind of friends. This meant that when he showed up again, what was meant to be a rivals-with-history dynamic fell flat for me. This dramatic reunion between them, when their revealed backstory seemed so rushed, only made the confrontation feel dull. It would have been better to leave it all unknown so that the mystery of their shared past pushes the story forward instead, rather than reveal it in such a lackluster way and rush through their reunion after. Or at least lengthened the story to give it reasonable time to build all its pieces better to make for more impactful storytelling.

Outside of the reveal and reunion, a rushed pacing is a recurring issue in the writing, though that's when it was the most evident.

Perhaps this is only meant to serve as a prologue to Trigun maximum so I'm being too harsh on it. However, I'd still rather review this as independent from maximum since it stands as a story on its own. And, on its own, it didn't give me a whole lot of drive to read maximum next, even with the new pieces of information it introduced at the end to re-ignite its mystery.

Junji Ito's style of horror usually relies on an intricate mix of visual and symbolic storytelling. With his grotesquely detailed art at his belt, he can make even the most nonthreatening objects or symbols horrifying.

Gyo is a bit different from these types of works. There's nothing intricate about it, it's just pure visual terror - in movie terminology more akin to something the likes of The Human Centipede. To call it disgusting would be an understatement, and I can't deny that I was holding my nausea back at some of the later panels in the manga. I wouldn't personally consider it as great as the ... genius of Uzumaki, but it certainly does its genre justice.