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A short review for a short oneshot:

This seems like a proof of concept for a horror manhwa aimed towards teenage girls. It isn’t bad, but whether it is due to page limits in the magazine it was published in or the author’s limitations of skill, it is quickly paced to the point of becoming disjointed which leaves it lacking in suspense. It also speeds quickly through the revelation and conclusion, abruptly ending, leaving the reader without a moment to wade through the dread and terror of the creature that is murdering the students at the school.

Likewise, the true nature of the monster is never revealed. ... Regardless of spoilers, it is named, it is told how it was created, what it possessed, but not what creature was summoned to possess and kill. All good monsters have personality, in my opinion, in the sense that they have an MO or describable nature like a vampire, IT, Frankenstein, etc. My point is this monster is given no mythological type nor does it create a new type.

It is almost like the conclusion and ending are skipped completely. People die and their is gore, but what happens to the monster? It is not explained. And their is no reaction from the priest, the main character. As in, we never see his reaction and there is no follow up besides students saying, “Remember those murders? How weird?” It is just that the murders themselves are dropped. I guess even the priest just didn’t care to exorcise the spirit before the end of the story.

Just a shortly, bizarrely clipped story.

The art, I enjoy because it reminds me of the goth style of the Cain Saga from 15 years ago. But there’s not really any characterization and the story gives up on itself at the end. Not bad for a five minute read, but I don’t think I’ll remember it a week from now.

Tsukikage Baby starts out promising, but quickly lags into boredom when it starts to repeat the same situations, declarations, and rejections over and over again like a skipping record. It reads with the intention of having a different ending than it was given, as the main character has feelings for a character for the entire series before giving them up in the last three chapters. So, the ending seemed unlikely, disappointing, and forced.

Since it is a romance manga, it is horrible to have messed up the believability of the romance between the two characters, who wound up together, so much. In every romance, there is ... a certain amount of “Will they? Won’t they?”, but it only works when those scales are balanced carefully, which they certainly were not in this manga.

Again, as I said, the pacing was of this manga was off, going through an exceptionally slow story development for the first eight volumes before rushing to a cluttered ending with new characters, never before mentioned, appearing in the second to last chapter. The author, writing a serial manga, also focused too heavily on placing the perfect cliffhangers to keep people reading, but which don't work in the finished product’s favor because nothing exciting ever follows those cliffhangers.

So many essential elements are just off in this manga, but still the introduction to Owara dance as a subject is interesting. However, the rest of it is uneven, all over the place, and boring.

Araburu Kisetsu no Otome-domo yo is an interesting read. It’s a shounen title about a group of girls’ sexual awakening through literature written and drawn by a duo of women. It charts their course from learning love and sex on paper to learning what it feels like for real with sensitivity towards the girls’ experiences and emotions that are often overlooked or sexualized in books of this type when they’re written by men.

That is not to say that the girls in this book are not sexual, they most certainly are, but they are not objectified. Rather, Okada-sensei introduces us in each chapter to some new ... emotional development which ties into their sexuality. She tackles difficult subject matter in the series with sensitivity and subtlety while glossing over or skipping altogether other typical “drama” that one usually finds in shounen and shoujo titles to instead focus on subtler issues that gives the manga a sense of realism and higher purpose.

This title is really an overlooked gem. It is so layered. What strikes me most is how the author knows how to visit them at just right the moment. Each moment pushes the story along without it feeling sparing, rushed, lagging, or over-editing. It has such a natural flow and the author has such a wonderful, natural sense of pacing that leaves the reader wanting more with each successive chapter.

The art is likewise wonderful. It has a natural airiness and simplicity to it which on its own is exceptional, but together with the story is genius, perfectly complimenting the story and the personalities of the young characters.

This manga was made at the time when companies like Marvel, Tokyopop, and others were trying to break into the manga craze with titles like Peach Fuzz and the X-Men manga. They imitated Japanese manga, did not understand manga, nor its appeal to western manga fans. Most of these titles were a cross between manga and comic books that were not really either, revolting both American comic book fans and manga fanatics alike. This left little to no audience willing to purchase these products as they lacked both eastern and western identity, possessing only an awkward, uncanny mash-up of something in between. Thus, most of ... these titles, were both critical and financial failures.

Princess Ai, on the other hand, was not. Most western manga was imitative, but Ms. Love brought her own voice to this manga. A blend of fantasy, lolita fashion, and autobiography, she writes about Princess Ai, who is the thinly-veiled authoress herself, and Kent, based off of her late husband, Kurt Cobain, as they work to figure out who she is and how she came to Tokyo, all the while falling and love and becoming idol-singers.

It was in turns, to my young self, interesting because of who wrote it, a well-known, controversial figure, its lolita fashion, its music, its art, its magic, and most of all for its seemingly doomed, but deep love story, which I, even then, knew was written based off an entirely true and tragic story of a talented, young singer's suicide.

It has been over 10 years since I read this manga, and though I no longer remember most of the details of it, I do remember the feelings I felt while reading it and for that, I believe it to be a great book. So where all others failed at making western manga, I believe Princess Ai, Ms. Love, and her talented artist, Kujiradou Misaho, all succeeded. It is a truly touching tale that I recommend to anyone in the mood for something very different from a very unlikely person. Courtney Love may be a controversial figure, but for this manga, I loved her as a child.

The story is disjointed. The first half of the story barely has any relation to the second half. Many characters are introduced in the first half that are not mentioned again later on.

Any character development is abandoned by the middle and is a plot devise to move the "story" along. Alice's involvement in track and ballet are used to make her more interested in "Judas". However, she reveals to Hana that she has no interest in finding out about him. Both leads are static.

There is a forced scene in the middle that leads to an hour of filler. The original story was a one volume ... manga that could have fit into a 30 minute OVA. They stretched it so they could attract film distributors, but sacrificed the quality of the movie for earnings potential.

The animation was cheap. The backgrounds were photos put through a photoshop filter. The characters were traced. The expressions were off and the reactions were delayed. The most effort was put into the poster, projecting a false image of what the movie looks like.

The music was not bad, but it was plagiarized. When Alice is in a park, Moonlight Sonata is playing, but at the melancholy drop, it changes to a different piece.

Overall, the original story was stretched out. The art was cheap to the point that it was detrimental to the story telling. The music was plagiarized. There was no character development.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

An appalling work by an atrocious author. I have never seen something so bad. I honestly wish that the rating system could go lower for this manga so that I could give it a zero in every category because only then could I be one-hundred percent honest in this review. The art being the only exception to this across the board score of zero and which was the only part of this manga which was handled with any form of wobbling, butcher-like coordination.

The review system says not to write spoilers, but my reasons for rating this abysmal manga so low must be ... given. In this manga one of the characters, who is a singer, is brutally raped and it is filmed and this is used as a plot device to bring the two characters together into a relationship. His rapists, after his rape, are given tickets to the music group's future shows. And his subsequent interactions with these rapists depict him cowering, but it is depicted as a sort of moe, like the reader is supposed to find his fear cute and the subsequent intervention of his beau heart fluttering. These dialogues are not taken seriously and are played purely for laughs and moe.

He even apologizes to his rapist's sister and it is treated like his rape was deserved, which is just disturbing to me that pen ever met paper and wrote this.

It all comes off as disgusting. A demoralizing and frightening work by an abhorrent, brutal, (apparent to me now after reading this work) fetish author. There is nothing in this manga that could be worth anything to anybody. You would absolutely be wasting your time reading this manga. I would say this manga is for no one with any moral values, not even for those with amoral ones.

However, it can be said that this work is one of a kind. It stands in a league all of its own as I have yet to encounter another work that has been so singularly vile, poorly written, and disgusting. Truly, save yourself some time and read another manga. You will never regret making the decision to read another manga instead of this one.

I decided to buy My Bambi because I really liked the cover art. Some manga artists’ comics tend to look like cleaned-up sketches or like the artist has some sort of horror vacui. However, this is not My Bambi, as Ozaki-sensei’s art and story made this short, four-chapter manga a pleasure to read.

My Bambi is about an overly-serious class representative named Nanase Haruko, who only wants to study and has no interest in other people, and Hachiya Chiharu, a delinquent who ... has not attended high school once since it began. The two first meet while Haruko is taking the train home, where she spots Chiharu engaged in a brawl. When he realizes her presence in the train car, he demands 10,000 yen for witnessing his fight. She distracts him and manages to escape, but later finds out on he is the student who occupies the desk next to her’s, which had always been empty.

What really struck me with this manga was that it does not prescribe to the theory of fixed intelligence. This theory being that whether you are bright or dim-witted is determined at birth. As I was not extremely clever or talented as a child, I also believe that the fixed intelligence theory is wrong. Now that Haruko is in high school, she is the top of her class, but before that she consistently ranked last. It was only a teacher’s intervention that sparked this change in her and made her realize she was not restricted to the smarts with which she was born.

The only thing that I can say I disliked about this series was its abrupt and unsatisfying ending. Unlike other series, which would fade out on a female protagonist’s inner monologue about her newly established romance, this manga chooses to end on a rather lack luster line uttered by Haruko to Chiharu. It also left me uncertain as to whether or not Chiharu understands that Haruko likes him as a love interest and not as a friend.

My Bambi is a must read for anyone who is no longer in the mood for the typical, overly kind and ditzy heroine. It ends where it leaves the reader wanting more instead of employing common tropes of the genre to keep itself going long after everyone has lost interest.