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Feb 19, 2022
TLDR: read it, enjoy it, mull it over, and try not to become a drunk in the process (xD).
As is the case with stories such as these, Bartender is about the characters. A brilliant young bartender plays therapist/life coach to a vast variety of folks that enter his bar, they come with problems and leave with insights that help them face their life.
This type of story format has a lot of strengths:
- It is beginner friendly, there are few recurring characters and the plot relevant characters, change from story to story until about the end, so you can pick it from mostly anywhere.
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Flexibility in story telling, the cast of characters, save for the bartender, change every few chapters, so even if you may not be too wild about the current story, you wont have to stick with them forever. It also allows for vastly different sets stories to be told.
- You can pick up whenever, since the story is largely episodic, you dont have to keep reading it, you can read it between breaks, leave and then pick it up whenever the mood strikes you. Its a very forgiving read. If you're like me and have a bunch of long running manga/anime on your watchlist, and still have to do stuff irl. You can appreciate how such a manga might be something you wanna relax with.
- It offers endings, every couple of chapters the story ends, so you get that sense of completion, before the last like 10-20 chapters, the bartender manga could've ended within a couple of chapters and it would have been satisfying due to the nature of the story.
It's well researched, the cocktails are a gimmick but the author researched them pretty well and manages to tie it to the story being told. Usually the bartender makes a drink, he thinks sums up the person's situation and provides the story behind naming them. I also had a lot of fun trying some of them, since a lot of these are classic cocktails that most bars wont place on the menu but you can still order them.
The story telling is mature, there's no over the top antics, fan service, people punching others on a regular basis for the pursuit of a gag. If this sounds appealing to you go ahead.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Feb 19, 2022
Captain Planet: Japan edition. There's another anime out there that fits that analogy better, but its name is escaping me at the moment.
How I imagine the whole thing went down: A new studio was looking for a big name to make a big hit to put their studio on the map around the turn of the century. Enter Shoji Kawamori of Macross and Escaflowne fame, who was reading Time Magazine or The Economist or whatever that were saying how bad things are gonna be in the 21st century coz of Global Warming, overpopulation, etc., and he said, "time to yell at everyone to do
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better". And thus Arjuna came to be.
Its very well done early 2000s show and the story telling is pretty nice. The problem is its very opinionated, which i thoroughly enjoyed, but that's because I didnt take it personally, and the stuff i disagreed with, I took it in the spirit of "Man this old man's really cutting loose". If you cannot stomach the stuff it says its gonna be a huge let down.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Feb 15, 2022
Didnt see a lot of reviews for it so i thought I will write one.
To put it very simply: Its Macguyver meets Indiana Jones. The end.
I read on Wikipedia that it can be described as "Matlock meets Jack Ryan", but i see less of that at the start.
If you have a fix for stuff like Adventures of Tintin, Batman by Denny O'Neil & Neal Adams but want a bit more mature story telling and some research like in Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese, but not that academic, then pick this one up. If you like historical mysterys like Da vinci code, then pick this
...
up. Legendary Musings of Professor
Munekata? Pick this up.
Urasawa teams up with a Historian (because a lot of it is pretty well researched) and a writer of Golgo 13 to write the globe spanning adventures of Taichi Hiraga Keaton.
Usually Urasawa stories are long form where the plot hits the ground running, like in Pluto, Monster, etc. But in Master Keaton you don't have an overarching plot, just the interesting adventures of an ex-special forces university lecturer who freelances for LLoyd's of London to make ends meet.
This allows for the creators to tell a diverse breadth of stories, from negotiating a hostage rescue in England, to discovering shipwrecked treasures by the coast of Greece, to meeting ex-German nobility in Berlin. Not all of them are action packed, some wax philosophical, some are more mystery oriented, but they are all pretty damn engrossing.
So far I am at volume 3 and I am not sure if there is a plot that will eventually get shown but you can say skip volumes and still not miss out much so long as you read volume 1 to get acquainted with the characters. There are few recurring ones, Keaton's family basically, while the rest are only relevant for the story that is being told, making it one of the few Urasawa works, to my knowledge, that you can just pick up at any random point and have a good time.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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