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Love Agency had a difficult road to walk, as the followup to the legendary romcom Kaguya, from the esteemed author Aka Akasaka. It made a rough first impression, with a convoluted premise and jokes that didn’t quite land. At the time, I kept up with it for a few chapters before dropping it, disappointed that one of my favorite mangaka seemed to be phoning it in.

I was wrong. Once it finished, and I got around to binging it, I found myself unable to stop reading it. Love Agency is a hilarious and heartfelt romantic comedy, and while it’s not at the heights of its predecessor, ... it’s a worthwhile series in its own right.

Comparisons to Kaguya will be constant throughout this review, and it’s not just because Love Agency stands within Kaguya’s shadow, the context permeating how 99% of people will approach Love Agency. Love Agency’s approach to love, and romcom writing, is thematically in response to Kaguya. Kaguya was a cerebral series, full of chapters built around some psychological principle or otherwise analytical way of looking at relationships. Love Agency does the same thing, but through the premise of love coaching — and it’s through the framing of it as coaching that Aka says something about analytical looks at love.

Our two protagonists, Mari and Seki, like each other, but are held back from confessing by their personal flaws or hangups. Rather than overthink and manipulate, they each hire the services from the titular Love Agency, getting an assistant that will coach them through an earpiece on how to get the other to fall in love with them, all the way down to exactly what to say in conversation. Mari’s assistant is Kon, a beautiful girl who seems to be experienced in love, yet lives as a shut-in. Seki’s assistant is Pon, a large and seemingly-confident man whose understanding of relationships comes more from books and study. Kon and Pon (which are their nicknames) are not just coworkers but rivals, yet they don’t know the other is coaching the same relationship.

The structure of the first several chapters is that Mari and Seki interact, but both are being fed lines by Kon and Pon, constructing false personas meant to appeal perfectly to the other. The problem with this structure is that it’s unwieldy; it’s asking you to follow four internal threads that don’t quite fit in a single conversation, much less in a manga chapter. Because of this, the characters also don’t get enough time (at first) to stand out, which has the domino effect of making it feel like the manga cares more about its gimmicky premise than it does the characters. Rest assured, this is not the case.

But compare that to Kaguya: It asked you to follow two internal threads, not four, during each conversation. The third major character explicitly was not written with an internal thread, and started out as a device to cause drama in the main two before being fleshed out further. The fourth main character wasn’t introduced until a while later. The premise was much easier to latch onto.

But the thing that’s easy to forget is that Kaguya’s first several chapters aren’t very good. Like, let’s be real. I have a lot of nostalgia for them, but it took Aka a bit to cook. At the time, I assumed this was because Aka was still growing as a writer. But with Love Agency as a second data point in how he writes romcoms, I think the answer is something else: It takes some time to experiment with characters before you figure out what dynamics have the most potential. Both Kaguya and Love Agency start by playing their premises straight, but grow into something more character driven.

In Kaguya’s case, it still stuck with the concept of manipulation games, to try and force the other to confess, for a long time. It was a better structure, don’t get me wrong, and one that an author could get a lot out of. In Love Agency’s case, it quickly moves on from chapters where both Kon and Pon are coaching Mari and Seki in the same conversation and we have to follow that, because it turned out that simply didn’t work very well.

That does not, however, mean that Love Agency wastes or abandons its premise to write more generic slice of life interactions, like some other romcoms I can think of. Because not only do Mari and Seki not know the other is being coached, but Kon and Pon don’t know their rival is coaching the other member of that duo. So what happens when Seki and Kon start talking? What happens when Mari and Pon develop a relationships? Do Kon and Pon have feelings for people, and how does that play into things? Does who each character likes change? The web grows wider and wider, involving side characters as well.

It starts playing with chapters where one character talks about their crush, and another character makes the wrong assumption about who that crush is on (perhaps they even assume it’s on themself). Written by Aka, chapters like that can be gut-wrenchingly hilarious, and were what made me admit I was really enjoying this manga. It builds to emotionally satisfying reveals, where a secret coming out also allows one character’s view about love to influence another.

One of the best parts of Kaguya, and Aka’s character writing, is the detailed relationships. Take any pair of main characters in Kaguya: They have a unique dynamic when alone together that doesn’t come out in a larger group. What they can be open about, and what they can’t, depends upon that specific relationship.

In Kaguya, this was used to bring the characters to life and write fun chapters. But Love Agency feels like it took that same quality of relationship writing, and made it core to the story. The stakes depend upon each unique dynamic between the main cast, and whether other characters learn that those dynamics exist. It’s the main thing you read the series for, and the premise allows for it perfectly — of course Kon and Pon can’t let the paramours of their clients know they’re involved. Of course Mari and Seki struggle with what sides of themselves they can show to others, when they’ve constructed such false personas.

The art sells these situations, for the most part. Personally, I’m sad that Aka has given up on drawing manga, and only writes it. Because perhaps his most underrated skill was his fantastic comedic paneling. Aka perfectly understands how to use panel-to-panel pacing, through panel size and shape and count, to deliver jokes. Jokes are all about delivery, after all. 5mm Nishizawa is not quite up to that task, at least at first. There are points where something is meant to be communicated, but the paneling fails to put the focus on the information the reader needs to be conscious of, and thus it becomes confusing.

But either I got used to their style, or they improved at executing it, because these situations stopped bothering me as it went on. There are punchline panels that felt like they could have been done by Aka, which I consider the highest of praise for a comedy.

Stylistically, Aka relies heavily on narration as usual. I am firmly of the belief that Aka knows how to narrate without it being telling-instead-of-showing — but the line is definitely a bit fuzzy, and sometimes it’s not done as well as it could be. At its best, it helps him create the tone of over-the-top reality that he goes for, but there are a few moments where it does feel like a crutch to get some characterization across. Yet quick and straightforward characterization does, ultimately, fit its identity as a comedy series, that wants to make sure character traits are clear to everyone such that the comedy that plays with them will land.

The main appeal to the characters is the relationships and the absurd situations. The characters are more interesting than the first few chapters give them credit for — Seki’s funniest bits come in later, and Kon and Pon are actual fleshed-out characters. But in general, they aren’t going to stick with you emotionally for years. They’re just extremely good vehicles for absurd situations that make for funny chapters.

If the series was longer, it might have been able to do more with them. I don’t think it needed to be a 200+ chapter behemoth like Kaguya, but it did need another volume or two. Some characters are explored enough. One character gets a backstory that could have dug deeper, yet the manga ends before it had the time to explore it, and is forced to skip past it. Another character never gets a backstory, or deeper look, at all, and it feels like wasted potential. There are also a number of side characters who feel like they could have been straight out of Kaguya, and I really wanted to see more with. Yet we don’t even get a note of what happened to them as an epilogue.

Despite the rushed ending, this is a series I enjoyed almost all of my time with. It didn’t let me take a break from binging it, and gave me enough laughs that I have to call it an 8/10. Maybe I'll lower that to a 7 after sitting on it, if the incompleteness of the characters bothers me more, but almost every moment I had with it was positive.

I enjoyed my journey with the characters. Because it didn’t just rest on the laurels of its premise, milking absurd drama of who knows what about who loves who. By the end of the story, I came to care about all of the characters as genuine friends; the connections they built were truly the treasure they found along the way.

Love Agency is a response to Kaguya in its core thesis. As said near the start of the review, Kaguya was a cerebral series that looked at love in analytical ways. There was nothing wrong with this — it was well aware that the logical angle was used as an emotional defense mechanism by its characters. But it was still a series that reveled in its analysis.

And that’s what Love Agency pokes fun at. By breaking the two halves of the premise into two seemingly-distinct sides, the clients and the consultants, it says something about the difference between romance as logic, and romance as feeling. After all, in spite of their genuinely-insightful expertise, Kon is a shut-in, and Pon hasn’t experienced a relationship himself. Are emotional logicians the best people to listen to, when it comes to love?

It’s like Aka is poking fun at his own writing style. Poking fun at the idea of understanding love from a distance. Embracing it, because it is fun to write that way, while also reminding us that there’s something more.

I was worried Love Agency would be a lazy follow-up to Kaguya. Instead, it was the perfect one.

If you read this review on Anilist instead of MyAnimeList, you'd get to see the Aka Apology Form meme I made.

Guyabano Holiday is a work of genius, and yet if you’ve been following panpanya’s work, that’s hardly even a statement to make. After the dreamlike Ashizuri Aquarium and the surreal An Invitation from a Crab, Guyabano Holiday is practically a victory lap. Of course panpanya makes manga this good, of course one of the most memorable artists and interesting minds in the industry continues to impress.

You can’t apply a neat timeline to this, of course — Guyabano Holiday is a collection of short stories from throughout the years, so it’s not a clean progression from the prior work. Yet there are still comparisons to be ... made; this collection was curated well.

Ashizuri Aquarium was like a collection of dreams. Completely surreal and often abstract, with art that felt closer to real dreams I’ve had than anything else I’ve seen in the world. An Invitation from a Crab felt less like a dream, and more like the things you see when half-asleep, when the world blurs and shapes form in the darkness. Still surreal, but more of a surreal slice of life than stories beyond life.

Compared to those, Guyabano Holiday is grounded, yet still plays to one of panpanya’s greatest strengths — the ability to look at ordinary things in surreal ways. Take the chapter The Mechanism of Homework, which sees the protagonist bored with summer work. She decides to construct a machine that can solve math problems mechanically, and the way she accomplishes this, and how the story ends, are ideas that could only have come from a unique mind. It involves a parrot, believe it or not. The relatable scenario is exaggerated into something out of an old cartoon, yet is treated seriously by the characters.

It’s easy to see how many of these chapters start from a simple feeling — haven’t you ever seen a weirdly large pigeon, wondered if you could can your own fish, or seen a strange circling bird in the distant sky? If you haven’t, don’t worry — panpanya follows these thoughts through in the strangest ways. It’s like watching improv, for it never betrays the “Yes, And” attitude, as you never deny a thought, but just go with whatever is suggested. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of panpanya’s stories began as daydreams, daydreams that began at seeing something odd in the distance or on a shelf.

Yet this is contrasted with objective truth, in factoids or even scientific diagrams in the most unexpected places. If you ever wanted to learn how far electric poles go underground, in Japan at least, you’ll learn it here. Genuine research is baked into this as much as daydreams are. The thirst for knowledge in its purest form. I’m not sure if they help emphasize the surreality of the rest, or help you mind pretend that what happens could really happen, but they add to the atmosphere of the work. Truth can often spark the imagination further than lies.

Birds have been mentioned three times now, and I truly believe this gets at the core of panpanya’s kind of surrealism. It’s not separate from reality, but exists relative to it, manifests when you simply look at things, and realize how strange they are, realize you’ve never looked at them so closely before. That’s what panpanya’s art incites you to do; look at things in shapes you never quite thought about. I have a long-running theory that all surrealist mangaka love to draw fish, because there’s honestly just something funny about the way they look. And while they certainly make their appearances here, birds get a spotlight of their own today.

The art is in some ways standard for panpanya, here — which is still exemplary. Even the intentionally simplistic characters are rendered in such soft, cozy, almost crayon-like lines. The simpler the face, the easier it is to relate to it. And the easier they stand out against the impossibly detailed backgrounds, detailed without chasing realism, caring more about the feeling of light and shadow, the texture of a view, than however they might have originally looked. It goes without saying that perspective and form are still played with to great effect.

There’s a few more subtle tricks of visual creativity than usual, as well, in ways I hadn’t seen before from panpanya. A short chapter where the characters move in real time, but months subtly pass in the backgrounds, if you squint and read the details. Or the chapter Signs of a Coincidence, which I won’t spoil, but might be my favorite manga chapter I’ve ever read. Certainly, it’s a hilarious and clever visual gimmick, all the while being something you might genuinely think about yourself while walking down the street.

It doesn’t often have the heavy, moody watercolor environments of An Invitation for a Crab, or the insane imagery of Ashizuri Aquarium, but that matches the more realistic approach perfectly, as seen in the titular collection of stories, Guyabano Holiday. There, panpanya abandons even the pretense of surrealism and simply draws a travelogue of their trip to the Phillipines, in search of the Guyabano Fruit. If you’re experienced with panpanya’s past work, you might expect this to be a completely fictional fruit, but it’s very real, and this story made me want to try it.

Even for a travelogue, panpanya approaches things strangely. Things you might expect to be the highlight of a trip, like seeing whale sharks in the ocean, are glossed over in a couple of goofy images. Most of the time is spent on noticing ordinary things, the way traveling brings you new experiences by making everything subtly different. The billboards, the items sold in stores, the way people travel, the way people look at dogs. It’s not about seeing the big tourist attractions. It’s about comparing the way wild dogs in the street are ignored to a heartfelt movie about a man’s relationship with a dog that’s played while on a ferry, and wondering what the exact cultural view of dogs is, knowing you can’t truly understand things like that as a tourist.

It could have been drawn in an accurate, photorealistic way, that would show you how these places and things looked. Instead, it’s drawn as panpanya draws, that shows you how they felt.

All autobiographies, but especially those in manga form, abridge and simplify and make more entertaining, but it feels like a lot of truth leaks into this travelogue, in both real-life photos and sketches that seem like panpanya made while there, while looking out the window of a car.

Truth in other forms, too. There’s a part where the protagonist runs through an almost-closed shopping mall, hoping to find dried guyabano to take back home to Japan. That mall doesn’t have it, but they do reflect upon how the experience itself of wandering through a foreign shopping mall, powerless and barely able to communicate with anyone, was a rare and valuable one.

This kind of simple yet relatable profundity is yet another thing that makes this work special, and it permeates the whole of it. It’s an aspect of the human condition, the way we need to embrace and experience everything from the simple things to the struggles. That if we focus too hard on where we’re going and what we need, rather than what we have, we fail to appreciate life.

Maybe we should play more frustrating and confusing video games, instead of the ones that hold our hands. Maybe we should watch more movies with plots we can't follow, listen to poetry in languages we don’t know, or buy foods we’ve never heard of. Maybe we should let ourselves get lost, whether it’s in the wilderness or a foreign shopping mall. Or maybe we need to grab some object in our room and let our imaginations wander, thinking of where it was created, what could be done with it, what its existence says about humanity, and come to wrong but interesting answers.

I doubt panpanya is some kind of buddha, immune to the anxieties and needs of ordinary life. It’s because we dislike getting lost that we have to remind ourselves the value we can get out of it. But they’re able to identify emotions with a rare amount of truth, and communicate it with a vulnerable honesty through the veneer of absurdist fiction.

And sometimes, it’s just fun. It’s not all existential emotions, but is dense with comedy. It’s the simple feelings, the goofy ones, the questions you ask when you know you have better things to do but can’t help but be bored. Who wants to do summer homework, when you can start using your brain instead and think?

There are two things that Riichi Ueshiba makes me think of: intricately detailed, occultly fantastic arc, and offputting, often perverted narratives. Somehow, Ookumo-chan Flashback managed to be his best work despite lacking the former and only having a little of the latter.

Relatively little, that is. The perverted side of the story is at its core, as the protagonist, Minoru, is introduced as being horny for his mother’s ass.

It’s easy to imagine the exact kind of raunchy, offensive, incestuous comedy anime this sounds like — the kind that exists to be horny bait for a relationship it will constantly tease while never quite showing. It’s not ... one of those. It’s definitely not a romance; the driving force of the narrative is anything but a desire to see them get together. It’s more of a character study, along with an exploration of other relationships. If the premise puts you off enough to keep you from reading it, fair enough, but if you give it a chance, it won't hit you with very many degenerate moments, and will give you a lot more.

Minoru is portrayed realistically and genuinely. It’s simply a matter of fact that he feels that way about his mother. He knows never to act on it, but he can’t control the way he reacts. He shakes his head at himself when he catches himself thinking about it too much, and he never lets his mother find out, sparing the readers an extremely awkward scene. It affects more than just how he looks at his mother, Aya, but seeps into how he interacts with his peers, how he conducts himself socially. After all, he doesn’t need them, or a relationship, when he has her.

He feels that way due to the one fantastical element — Minoru experiences random visions of the past, where he sees through his father’s eyes when he was in high school, crushing on, flirting with, dating his mother. The way he stammered, watched her, spoke to her, and stared at her ass. Those feelings of love rubbed off onto Minoru, mixing with his familial attachment.

It’s weird, but a lot less weird than some of Ueshiba’s past work. His career began with his breakout hit, Discommunication, with incredible, surreal artwork, and an amateurish yet charming story that felt like it was entirely improvised yet never bullshits you. That manga was about love, how it is both simple and incomprehensible, despite the surreal and occult events of the narrative.

After a couple of Discommunication sequels, Ueshiba wrote Yume Tsukai. That was some of the worst and weirdest shit I’ve ever read, jumping between reprehensibly taboo and utterly ridiculous. You probably wouldn’t believe me that its second half was actually good. After that, he wrote Mysterious Girlfriend X, a manga I did not finish and cannot say much about. But I will mention that Ueshiba wrote it to exemplify pure, sex-free relationships between high schoolers. At the same time, he couldn’t stop himself from constantly incorporating a spit fetish.

That should give you a picture of the strange kind of artist he is. Ideas no normal person would come up with, sometimes intriguingly so and sometimes upsettingly so. But love is a common theme. That’s why when he wrote Ookumo-chan Flashback, about a boy horny for his mother, it wasn’t just a raunchy comedy, but a heartfelt look at just how love develops.

Discommunication was a question — just what is love — but Ookumo-chan Flashback isn’t the answer. Because it’s already been figured out. Ookumo-chan is a victory lap, so fluent in its understanding of human behavior and relationships that it can portray love without the fantastical metaphors Ueshiba needed before. Rather than a descent into the mindscape of the universe, Ookumo-chan delivers its message through its portrayal of natural, ordinary life.

Rest assured, the love isn’t between Minoru and his mother. Rather, it’s between Minoru and his classmate, Ninomae. From their first introduction, you’ll be rooting for them to get together, and the manga knows it. But there isn’t one moment where they fall in love, no beautiful moment of passion where feelings are realized and exchanged under the stars as angels sing. There are beautiful moments, but people move on from them, don’t change immediately, all while love slowly builds from the littlest things.

Ninomae is a great character, boisterous and outgoing to complement Minoru’s reservedness. But he can keep up with her, isn’t fazed or intimidated. There’s also the secret of how Minoru’s mother is actually the manga author behind Ninomae’s favorite series, something Minoru wants to keep under wraps to avoid the attention. It lends tension and anticipation to something that otherwise could have been a little too slice of life.

But the use of slice of life is also what grounds this manga and makes it so relatable. It rides the perfect line between drama and daily living. There’s always a point to a chapter, always some slight progression of Minoru and Ninomae’s relationship, never extending it unnecessarily. But that drama is typically something you could experience in your own life. The best slice-of-life understands that ordinary life is interesting, if you know the right way to look at it. It’s often tied together with a vision of the past at the perfect moment, giving parallels between the present and past that are not always between the same characters.

Ueshiba’s writing has matured over his long career. The heightened realities of his earlier work were at times jaw-dropping, but now he can provide an engaging story simply with the relationships alone. Neither approach is inherently better, but for him, the latter has the advantage of experience behind it, and is what makes this manga so good.

His artwork has also matured. The linework is a little bit more loose than in his past work, and it lacks the insane splash panels and immersive magical environments. At his best, he fills pages with details yet never lets them be distracting. But here he proves he doesn’t need those things, because he understands composition, panel flow, and how to use the little aspects of visual storytelling to add that extra punch. His faces used to be some of the simplest you’d see in manga; now he conveys nuanced emotion through facial expressions. The characters now stretch and bend dynamically, posed like human beings and not dolls. Poses themselves are sometimes used for subtle parallels; one of my favorite moments has two character in the exact same position, telling us there’s a connection between them, but the panels occur pages apart. So instead of shoving it in the reader’s face, it’s more like a moment of deja vu, that hits you the same way it hits the character seeing them.

He’s always been an expert at drawing, but now he’s an expert at drawing for a manga.

I think the feeling I felt most while reading it was “I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying this.” This was partially from the context of the author’s past work, the improvement from what he had done. But it was also the way it took a perverted-sounding premise and turned it into something heartfelt. The way it took something that could have been plain, and made it stick with me.

It’s my favorite of Ueshiba’s works, because by the end, you realize there’s a purpose even to the horny premise. Most of us, someday, have to learn to leave behind the love we feel for our parents, and find something new. They will keep being important to us, but someone else can become the most important to you. It heightens that extreme to romantic love to make its point, but at its core it is perhaps the most human thing Ueshiba has written.

Sazan & Comet Girl made me feel like a kid again. Like I was watching an adventure movie with more imagination than I had, something I could then daydream about for years. It pulled me in the moment I started reading and kept me awake until I finished it.

How can you not get immersed with art like that? Every page is rendered with vibrant colors, and the author, Akase Yuriko, knows exactly how to use them. Not only is every panel full of beautiful contrasting tones, but it uses the right highlights and shadows to complete the ‘80s-style trippy vibes.

The art works well for characters, ... emotions, and action, but most of all it brings the setting to life. It’s the kind of sci-fi that’s more aesthetic than hard speculation, but that’s a good thing even if it makes it fantasy at its core. We aren’t worried about how the technology works or the nitty gritty of how this galactic culture’s politics came to be. You can take it for granted that people here casually drop by Jupiter to visit a dive bar, work as planetary construction artisans, run away from space pirates captained by talking pigs, and swerve between planets on a space-motorbike. This works better in manga than in many other mediums. Rather than explain what exists, it can simply show it to us and have us accept it.

Many panels show space not as a dark void, but a canvas colored in bright nebulas and gas clouds. At the start of the story, our main character, Sazan, talks about how he doesn’t mind his blue collar job, because he gets to work in space. He understands that, at least in this universe, space isn’t lonely. It’s full of life and color.

Sazan is a simple character. He’s content with his ordinary life, but when he stumbles into something more, he silences his doubt embraces it with all of his heart. So when by pure coincidence, he runs into Mina, a hotshot space biker willing to give him a ride home, you understand exactly why he falls in love with her so fast. They both enjoy life.

Of course, it’s not that easy, as they get chased by Kidd, a space pirate captain and humanoid pig who’s intent on capturing Mina not for whatever mysterious value she has, but simply to prove himself as a great space pirate rather than a nobody.

That’s the start of the plot, but I think every reader can tell that it’s going to unfold into something greater. The surprise and entertainment comes not from the fact that it does, but the way it does. It’s a simple story at its core, with simple characters. But they work. The narrative is paced like a movie, and the characters have exactly as much as they need for that, with arcs and development that coincide perfectly with the scope and pace of what this story is capable of. Some manga need deeper, more nuanced characters in order to keep them interesting for hundreds of chapters. This one didn’t, and it understood that.

But that’s not to say they aren’t deep. Rather, the depth is in the simplicity. Mina is dangerous, and understands exactly why it’s not safe to let anyone be close to her. Sazan doesn’t care. He’s willing to let her belong. You’ve read stories like this before, but that doesn’t take away the value of this one.

That sums up this manga. It feels like a cliche. Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, girl has to run away because the entire galaxy is chasing her, and boy refuses to give up on saving her. When I read something like this, I feel like there’s a thousand stories just like it. So cliche that there are countless variations on this, right? And yet I can’t think of a single one that I’ve actually read (at most, it’s a little like Castle in the Sky, and I think that comparison is favorable to both stories). And in a way, I enjoy it for that classic-feeling simplicity that many stories try to avoid.

Some stories are too concerned with being original and different, and fail to understand that certain tropes are commonly used because they work. The narrative of Sazan & Comet Girl isn’t really cliche, because it’s not derivative. It doesn’t feel like it’s copying a thousand things you’ve seen before and has nothing interesting to say. It’s saying something so fundamental to what we enjoy about stories that our brains mistake it for being cliche. The story has confidence in what it is. Rather than fear being cliche, it makes the rarer move and commits to a simple and powerful story.

The plot plays out with similar confidence. That’s where the simplicity is deceiving. Every step of the plot naturally leads into the next; everyone does the only thing that makes sense for them to do in the situation they’re put in, and it still builds to incredible climaxes. Every choice each character makes is consistent with their core motivations, from the turning points to the little moments.

It’s harder than it looks to write like that. The act of making it look so easy is one of the trickiest things an author has to do. To speak non-specifically in order to avoid spoiling, the way the climax of the story is given an audience feels like it would be contrived if it didn’t make perfect sense, and it gives the ending the triumphant dramatic weight that it deserved. Plot details are reincorporated, important twists are foreshadowed, and characters change and grow because they really would when put in those positions, not just because the plot structure obliged them to.

It feels like a story done correctly. Sometimes, that’s not a good thing. Sometimes writing a story completely by the book leads to it missing passion. Sazan & Comet Girl avoids this. It doesn’t feel like the author followed a screenwriting guide to construct a technically perfect story. It feels like she had an idea she cared about, and worked on it and edited it until it was ready.

It’s not a perfect manga. The action paneling is competent but lacks a certain punch and impact, and action makes up a lot of the story. And in general, as much as I praise it for what it did, I believe it could have done more. When you have almost nothing but praise to heap on a manga, it’s tricky to define what exactly is the difference between 8/10 good and 10/10 good. The best example I have is that this narrative, in theory, could have made me cry. And while it constantly made me smile, it didn’t get any tears out of me. Simply put, it could hit even harder.

Another issue like that is the ending. It ends well, don’t get me wrong, but there’s one decision I would have changed. Something that, in my opinion, would have hammered in the theme of Sazan accepting Mina for who she is even harder, instead of making it a bit too easy.

The fact that it could have been even better doesn’t make it any less impressive for what it is. I’m always happy when I find manga like this. They remind me that no matter how many things I read, there are always interesting authors outside the mainstream doing things like I’ve never quite seen before. In this case, what it does is be an 80s-style action adventure that commits to the nostalgia of that style so hard that it turns into something new. Something that could only come out of a present-day author looking back on what worked in the past and refining it.

And she may become mainstream in the future. Akase Yuriko’s style is so digestible and fun that I think we need to keep an eye on her. A decade from now, she might be at the top.

Reiroukan is genuinely one of the most baffling series I’ve ever read. There’s honestly a beauty in that. Every truly awful manga is bad in its unique ways, and Reiroukan is one of the most unique I’ve seen. The art is great, the character designs stand out, the premise is decent (mostly), and the story decisions are some of the most confusing I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t feel like what an incompetent would come up with. It feels worse. You’d have to be trying to make something this stupid. It makes you wonder if the author, once realizing they were probably going to be canceled, ... decided to just fuck around.

And despite that, the author, Tomi Akihito, has genuinely grown since then. Let’s put this into context. I found Reiroukan because of a manga called Sinner of the Azure Abyss. A manga which has even better art and one of the most promising beginnings I’ve seen. It’s one of those manga that feels incredibly interesting and entirely natural, like the author lives and breathes manga. It only has eleven chapters translated at the time I write this, but I enjoyed those chapters greatly and am really excited for where else it will go.

Because I enjoyed it so much, I decided to read all of the author’s older work. I didn’t expect anything as good as Azure Abyss, of course. Most authors take some time to grow into their skills, and I’ve seen plenty struggle greatly before figuring out what they’re trying to do, producing garbage in the meantime. But this is a ratio of early garbage to later genius I haven’t seen since Oshimi Shuzo. I am honestly proud of Tomi Akihito for not giving up and polishing their craft after producing schlock such as this.

So let’s dig into Reiroukan itself. Our manga begins with our protagonist, whose name I already forgot… okay, it’s Genta. He moves into a fancy mansion known as Reiroukan to dorm in while studying in college. There are a fair number of other students there, although it’s not full. Honestly, the premise is already strange. You’d think a place so fancy and beautiful would have a waiting list, but no, he has to be convinced to move in. Something he only decides on after seeing an attractive girl changing — but I’ll say more about that later.

The fundamentals of the premise are solid. A group of college students living together in a beautiful environment, getting into wacky hijinks and goofy shenanigans. Now that I type that out, I realize that this could have been a breath of fresh air compared to all the high school slice of life out there. Unfortunately, the first problem this manga has is that its ideas for episodic plots simply aren’t very good.

The feeling I got during the early chapters was a mostly benign confusion (as opposed to the active confusion later on). The plots don’t explicitly not make sense, but they tend to flow awkwardly and make you forget what’s actually supposed to be happening. And whenever the author can’t fill the page time with things actually happening, we get fanservice.

For instance, Chapter 2 has eighteen entire pages of two girls in a room together changing outfits and talking about nothing, only for the actual plot of the chapter to be… the main character fell asleep after drinking a glass of wine and the other guys moved him under the bed in the girls’ room, so he was there the whole time. That gets a whole six pages.

Similarly, there’s a bathhouse chapter that just has some of the girls being naked together in a public bathhouse, with the actual plot mixed in between so sparsely that I was, again, genuinely confused by it. The mansion’s bath broke and they had to fix it, I guess?

Other chapters just don’t really have anything happen. Chapter 5 has a blackout, and… that’s it. Yeah, there’s a blackout. They need to get candles. Nothing else really. Oh, except the B plot where one of the college students is tutoring a ninth grader who simps for her, and she’s so scared of the dark that when he says he’ll protect her and wants to date her, she actually agrees. Yeah. This is not a great manga. (To be fair, after the blackout ends she becomes sane again and says she’s not going to date a ninth grader… at least not until he’s older? Yikes.)

But let’s go back to Chapter 2 for a moment. The one where the main character was stuck under a bed while two attractive girls were changing. Don’t you think that’s an odd thing to happen in the second chapter of a series? The first chapter has Genta touring the house, meeting people, and agreeing to stay there. You’d think in a series like this, with an ensemble cast, the second chapter would involve him spending more time with and interacting with at least one of the members, as we start to flesh them out. But instead, it’s drawn-out fanservice where nothing happens at all.

That’s a trend for this manga. The character designs are great. Distinctive, memorable, lots of personality conveyed just through their art. And that’s about all the personality you’ll get out of them. It’s not that they’re theoretically boring characters. It’s that the events of the plot never actually serve to bring anything out of the characters.

Chapter 3, for example, follows Genta on a wild goose chase trying to find Youko, the caretaker. Oh yeah, I should mention another part of the premise. At the end of chapter 1 he hears that Reiroukan is going to be gone in a year. Unlike a normal person, he doesn’t immediately ask a question about that — it goes unacknowledged for most of chapter 2, and then chapter 3 has him following a trail of Youko’s insane antics. It doesn’t even end with him finding her and actually getting to ask something. The charade is pointless, as most of the chapters are plotless.

But eventually we do get confirmation that Reiroukan will be demolished because the company or family or whatever that owns the land needs to build something else there to not go bankrupt. (You’d think that they’d do fine if they charged more than $300 per month rent, or that people would want to live in a literal mansion enough for the demand to drive that price higher — not that I support landlords, mind you, it’s just that this premise doesn’t even make sense.)

It’s unfortunate for Reiroukan to be lost. It genuinely is a beautiful piece of architecture, at least to my amateur eyes that know nothing about mansion design. But regardless of how it looks, the manga won’t let you forget that it’s beautiful, as it spends much more time using Youko to tell you that Reiroukan is important and shouldn’t be destroyed than it does showing you.

And this is where the framing gets weird. I understand why Youko is heartbroken about it, having poured her life into taking care of it and the students living in it. I even understand why she rejects historical preservation or turning it into a museum out of a belief that it’s meant to be a place for students to live together.

But it’s really not the biggest deal in existence. It makes sense as something for a character to feel, not for it to be their driving motivation and basically their only character trait. I dunno about you, but I think there are bigger problems in the world than whether a bunch of college students get to live together in a mansion. I mean, most of the plot of their drama together would be the same if it was any old dorm.

Like, it’s a nice place. I’d want to keep living there too, and certainly wouldn’t want it destroyed. But it’s just a place. You know what’s more important than the place you live in? The people you live with.

That’s the most obvious, bog-standard, easy theme to go for, and Reiroukan doesn’t. No, in this story the place is genuinely what matters, not the people. After all, you can’t believably make it about the friendships when none of the friendships portrayed seem particularly deep or meaningful.

But I’m being extremely literal when I say they make it about the place. The ending of the manga shows, twenty years after the demolishing of the mansion, how one of the characters has created a television drama about college students living in a mansion together getting into drama. Honestly, it’d be kind of sweet, if I could tell you literally anything about that character or if he did literally anything during the plot beforehand. Anyway, he spends all of his time lamenting that his TV show isn’t as good as the real thing and he misses it. He goes to the old site, which is replaced with a genuinely impressive piece of modern architecture that he completely disrespects, only to find that Reiroukan has been rebuilt?

Yeah, our main character apparently got money. I think he inherited his family construction company? Well, there’s a new Reiroukan. And we get to see Youko arrive and cry tears of joy. Because it’s not about the people or the memories. It’s just about having the nice mansion.

I think a manga about the value of historical preservation would be interesting. They talk about how Reiroukan's blend of western and japanese architecture is genuinely unique. It's a piece of art that would be honestly lost to the world when destroyed. But that's not what this manga is really about. No, it outright rejects that. The real message is that people should have nice places to live. These specific people and this specific nice place, of course. Not people in general.

You can’t make the theme about the people rather than the place when there’s never any real connection between the people. And where this manga tries to portray one is where it truly put itself among the worst manga I’ve ever read.

Let’s talk about the reason I gave it a 2/10. Let’s talk about the romance.

It’s not particularly present during the first half, but there are a few things I skipped over that are relevant. Firstly, when Genta meets his roommate, a certified Youko simp who insists that Genta stay away from her. Genta says not to worry, as he has a girlfriend. I was happy when I read that. Not like, ecstatic, but hey it’s kind of nice to see that kind of dynamic going into a manga. Yeah, I didn’t know what I was in for.

It gets a little strange when Genta looks through a slightly open door and sees our main girl, Mikoto, as she’s changing. Immediately after this, he makes his decision that he’d like to live here. That’s a little odd, isn’t it? Like, he has a girlfriend. We even got a flashback of how much he loves his girlfriend. But he decides to move in because he sees a hot girl changing? I mean, I guess pervert is a character archetype in manga.

The next few chapters keep putting him in positions to leer at the girls. This isn’t impossible to believe characterization, but it feels like he’s being written as your typical lonely single protagonist rather than someone with a girlfriend. Right now, it’s still lulling you into a false sense of security, though. While all this happens, you see Genta developing no relationship with anyone, including Mikoto. He has a few conversations with her, but it’s all superficial.

Everything changes in chapter 7. The plot here is that Genta wants to learn how to cook, and Mikoto is ready to teach him. Causing everyone to freak out, which immediately makes you expect that this is your typical gag of someone who can’t make something edible. But no, the joke here is actually that Mikoto is an incredible cook, so incredible that everyone who takes a bite immediately has a Food Wars level foodgasm and promptly passes out and loses their memory of what happened.

Everyone except Genta, that is, who enjoys it but is otherwise fine. The sheer uniqueness of this trait causes Mikoto to fall in love with him.

I honestly thought it was a gag at first, even for the next couple of chapters. Haha, a character temporarily falls in love with the one who can actually eat her food. Move on. But no, this is literally it. She fucking loves him. Immediately. Instantly. No relationship development beforehand. I’ll take a bland harem protagonist with no reason for girls to fall in love with him over a reason as stupid as this.

Oh, and as she confesses, Genta’s girlfriend walks in to visit him. Only to eat some of the food, and pass out to lose her memory of this. Next chapter, she’s still visiting, and we see Genta and her perfectly happy together, to Mikoto’s frustration.

The plot of the chapter after that is that Mikoto, frustrated with her unrequited love, sneaks into Genta’s room every night, gets naked, gets in bed with him, cuddles, and then leaves before he wakes up. It’s around here I started to wonder why nobody in this manga can act like a human being.

Except Midori, Mikoto’s friend. She hears that Mikoto and Genta have been spending a lot of time together, and catches her in the act. At which point Mikoto loudly confesses her love, and Genta kisses her.

I’m still baffled. Genta has a girlfriend. We see a flashback of how happy they were together. We see them happy together in the present, when she visits. Meanwhile the literal only connection Genta has to Mikoto is that he saw her changing once and is horny for her. Like, his girlfriend is attractive too? Frankly, I like her much better, because she seems like a perfectly normal person, who doesn't do things like sexually assault her crush or fall in love for insane reasons.

This is where Genta starts to come off like a real scumbag. A cheater, of course, which only Midori and one other character are sane enough to call out. But there’s still something off about it. If this was a narrative of a guy finding feelings for someone else while apart from his girlfriend, that’d be an actual interesting drama. If it was just about him being a scumbag, it would frame it more around his libido than it does, and not frame their love as genuine. But instead it just expects you to believe that he’s genuinely in love with this girl after showing none of why, no connection or development between them, and the dumbest reason for her to love him that I’ve ever seen.

I try to just take manga as they are. The character is acting like a scumbag, so they’re a scumbag. But sometimes there’s such a blatant disconnect between what the author is trying to do and what’s actually on the page that it completely takes you out of it. That happens a lot in this manga, with unfunny gags and story beats that fail to leave an impact. Genta genuinely isn’t supposed to be a scumbag, but being written as one anyway, is the worst of it. Along with how it tries to portray their love as something beautiful. I’m starting to wonder if this is all a big joke I’m not in on, if it’s supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, if it’s supposed to be a deliberately ridiculous romcom for the hell of it. I doubt it.

The next chapter has Midori spy on him as he breaks up with his girlfriend, a person I genuinely feel bad for. The humor here is supposed to come from him only making her feel worse while attempting to be nice, saying they can still be friends and all, and buying her a goodbye gift. On one level, it just feels mean-spirited, as she genuinely did nothing wrong. I mean, she obviously deserves better, but by all reasonable logic he also should still love her and not feel anything for the random girl he’s barely talked to.

After that, we have another case of the manga taking what would be a one-off gag in any other story and taking it absurdly seriously. After the declaration of love, Youko declared that tenants are not allowed to sleep in each other’s rooms. Only for a wall to accidentally get broken down between their rooms, allowing them to see each other in the night. They try to sneak through, they get caught, and yeah they’re kicked out now. Maybe don’t do the thing that will get you kicked out? I guess horny youths are horny. But the entire reason the hole exists at all is so contrived I’m not even gonna sum it up. The only reason it doesn’t feel like a ridiculously forced and annoying way to get them kicked out of Reiroukan is that there’s no reason to actually care about them getting to stay in Reiroukan after all.

Finally, they go home to visit his parents, to tell them that they want to get a house together. It gets suggested that they just get married, at which point Genta’s mother asks him to say if he’s truly serious about this girl.

And he says he is.

I don’t believe the manga when it says this. It’s just fucking lying to me. This girl who fell in love with him because he didn’t pass out eating her food, and this boy who fell in love with her for literally no reason and broke up with his girlfriend to be with someone he barely talked to on a serious level. I don’t care that the moment is meant to be genuine and heartwarming and he obviously isn’t lying. Unless there were magical timeskips unseen between chapters, they got together a matter of days before this.

The manga is wrong. The manga is wrong about what it is. I don’t know if this is the worst romance I’ve ever read, but it’s definitely the stupidest.

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to give you a play by play of their whole romance. I probably could have written this review with just a quick summary alluding to the fact that the romance is stupid and nonsensical. But I wanted to explain every layer of how ridiculously and unbelievable it is. There are a lot of manga about which people say the romance is awful, and I wanted to make it as clear as possible to you that this is even worse than those.

It feels like a joke. Like it was designed to be frustrating. Genta being serious about his love for Mikoto is the perfect punchline. But I don’t think this manga is in on it, and it spends enough time on other unrelated plotlines that I don’t believe it. It’s not something an author would create just to be stupid. I think it wants you to cry at the end, when Youko sees Reiroukan rebuilt.

It really could have been mediocre. Stick to the premise, drop some unfunny, bland slice of life chapters, and you’re golden. It didn’t shoot for the stars. It shot for a wall and hit an innocent bird. 2/10.

Seriously, though, the author improved so much. Go read Sinner of the Azure Abyss. Failure helps you learn. Does that mean that a failure this bad teaches you even more? I'm not sure about that, but it certainly doesn't mean you can't learn.

I came into Hi Score Girl expecting a classic fighting game experience. Two people pushing each other to improve, at a competitive format all about putting in the time and effort to overcome those better than you. Maybe a dash of romance in there too. Unfortunately, it had the opposite balance. Hi Score Girl is certainly not in the vein of sports series about improving and competing; at its core it’s a love triangle romcom. A painfully bland one.

What does the fighting game backdrop add, then? Certainly not an in-depth look at the skills and mindset one develops to improve at competitive games. It’s mostly ... nostalgia. If you’re invested in FGC culture, or classic gaming from the late 80s and early 90s, there’s a lot you may get out of it. You see the main character’s excitement as new consoles and iconic games are released, and within the games he competes at, there are plenty of references to specific combos or strategies that I’m sure are completely accurate to the time and the games. The author’s own nostalgia failed to inspire me to feel the same, but he shows a genuine appreciation for the culture of the time.

That’s as far as it goes, however. The plot only occasionally delves into the characters having a desire to practice and overcome each other, and when it does it’s mostly offscreen. It’s circumstantial, driven by whatever stage their romance drama is currently in.

And oh, the romance drama. If you’re looking for the kind of series with realistic relationship progression, then stay away. This is a pure love triangle about people too cowardly to realize their feelings. Love triangles honestly are not always bad, but the first half of the manga is all about people who are incapable of acknowledging that they’re in love. It fails to give that ignorance a youthful charm; it just feels like nothing significant is actually happening.

It is technically a romcom, not just a romance, but I didn’t find much real comedy to speak of. If the main character saying something stupid (because he doesn’t realize the girl likes him) and the girl enacting some over the top physical violence on him is enough to make you laugh, you’ll have a blast. Don’t expect much humor beyond that.

Why do the two main girls love the main character, Yaguchi? He’s an immature, gaming-obsessed child far more focused on whatever’s coming out than remotely understanding either girl’s feelings. Yet I’ll admit, with Oono, it honestly works. She doesn’t speak a word of dialogue throughout the entire manga, too shy to ever properly express herself, and the art does an acceptable job of characterizing her and showing her emotions despite that. It makes for an easy excuse for her to never confess her feelings, but it does help make her believable as a shy person who found a genuine connection with someone who had the same interest as her.

It doesn’t work as well with Hidaka, the love rival. She falls in love with Yaguchi because she’s enamored by his passion and drive to openly care about fighting games. She’s shy too, so I can at least understand that she wasn’t constantly finding better people, but the reasons the story gives just honestly don’t feel believable enough. In the first volume, before Hidaka was introduced, Yaguchi and Oono’s relationship feels somewhat charming and special. Hidaka turns it into a “the most beautiful popular girls are both in love with this unappealing nerd” fantasy.

In the second half of the manga, Hidaka does start to be legitimately open about her feelings with Yaguchi, matching him in fighting games and asking him out multiple times. It doesn’t matter, because unless this is the first romance you’ve ever read, it’s absurdly obvious it’s not going to happen and he’s going to end up with Oono in the end.

The drama is a hodgepodge of standard tropes. Tropes that are not inherently awful, but I was bored by the usage. Oono has an oppressive home life and is forbidden from going out and playing, except for the multiple times she runs away to spend time with Yaguchi. Expect multiple nights together in hotels where obviously they aren’t going to fool around together or have any romantic progress, as it’s just bait for the readers. And the finale uses one of my least favorite romance tropes I’ve seen way too many times. I won’t spoil the specifics, but it’s one of the cheapest ways to force a confession.

The finale is the only time the art grabbed me. There’s finally some interesting compositions and perspectives, as it realizes it can use art to convey emotion. Before that… well, let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

The art is ugly. Art styles are subjective, so you can disagree with me on this, but this has one of the most unappealing aesthetics I’ve seen in a professionally serialized manga. It’s not that they’re chibi, although the faces and the head shapes are unpleasant. It’s the awful anatomy, which leads to character designs with no consistency, that constantly feel off-model, deformed, and warped. If you like the art, please enjoy it. But few other manga make me HATE their art this much. Not dislike, or be bored by, but feel genuine disgust and loathing.

With how negative I’m being, even I’m surprised I’m rating it a 4/10 and not lower. Honestly, for everything bad I’m saying about it, deep down there is some level of charm. Maybe it’s in the characters, who do feel like the author put some heart into. Their relationships bored me, but as people there’s something to them. The main three aren’t generic or shallow, but have fleshed out personalities and desires. It’s not who they are that’s the problem, but what happens with them.

Something did keep me reading instead of dropping it, and I don’t think it was just my persistence to not leave stories unfinished. The author had a vision. I saw it through, but I wouldn’t recommend you do the same. Not unless you personally think the art looks fine, feel nostalgia for that era of fighting games, or don’t mind drawn-out love triangles.

There’s something repetitive about how Naoki Urasawa draws. His skill at faces is arguably unmatched, in design and caricaturization. He captures real peoples’ features more than most mangaka even try to, yet his characters still feel completely at home in a comic. But when you read more than one of his stories, you start to notice the similarities. The same exaggerated noses and large foreheads, the same folds in skin and shapes of jaws. Rarely will he completely copy and paste a single design, but he’ll happily reuse the building blocks. It’s like picking random in a game’s character creator — the combination may be ... unique, but none of the pieces are truly new.

The same, unfortunately, can be said for his stories.

You might not have read Pluto before. But if you’ve read Monster and 20th Century Boys, and perhaps the various Tezuka works that Pluto draws from, then there is little new for it to offer you. Urasawa does not push himself to new places here. He repeats concepts he’s already done, and all he adds is an ode to his favorite things from his childhood.

That’s not to say he is lacking in skill. He may be the most well-rounded, competent mangaka in the industry, in both art and storytelling. His style is easy to read yet complex to analyze. The grounded-ness and western movie inspiration make him an easy choice for those who “don’t like anime.” That mature mass appeal makes it obvious why he’s so highly regarded, and if you quantify how many things he does right, it’s easy to agree he’s one of the best. But the more I read his works and try to qualify them, the more I find myself bothered by the underlying issues.

There’s always the detective. And the villain, whose presence looms over the story, yet is always hiding in the background. You feel the tension that the villain is going to do something next, and that it will be bad, but it’s up to the detective to figure out just what that thing is before they can even consider trying to stop it. Story progression is driven by the key questions — who is the culprit, what is their goal, what motivates that goal, and what history gave them that motivation.

It’s not saying much to point out these similarities between Urasawa’s works. Yes, they’re mystery stories. How insightful of me, to point out that they all do things mystery stories do.

But you could draw all these same comparisons between Monster and 20th Century Boys. Doing so, I find that 20th Century Boys feels like it attempts to innovate upon what Monster did, to go beyond Urasawa’s bread and butter and add some new spices. Its plot structure gave constant surprises, even if believability was stretched thin as it went on. Pluto’s plot structure feels reminiscent to the point of repetitiveness. Gesicht, the detective, goes from place to place, meeting with people that give him nuggets of information that slowly point him toward the answers. Again, it’s standard detective fare. But so many scenes filled me with the worst kind of deja vu. Doesn’t this scene feel exactly the same as something I’ve already read? Then why am I reading it at all?

One of Urasawa’s bread and butter techniques is the episodic focus on side characters, exploring their emotions before they tie into the main plot (often by dying). I don’t have a problem with him bringing this one back — but yet again, I wish he did new things with it.

One of these, early in the story, is emblematic of his writing style. A blind composer spends his aging days playing piano for himself, not for the world. His robotic butler, a robot soldier, wants nothing more than to create music, so he can appreciate beauty for himself. The composer believes a robot couldn’t never do such a thing. Real music is analog and comes from the heart.

It’s a perfect setup. Too perfect. If something like this can make you care and cry, then I’m happy for you, and I wish I could feel the same. I find it to be lacking something, and I’m not sure if I can truly explain what. It’s far too predictable, to begin with — as soon as it begins, you know that the robot will not give up, the composer will get angrier, but they will eventually understand each other better, before the robot dies in combat with the villain of the story. In theory, the concept of this story is strong, even if it completely fails to surprise me. But conforms too closely to that concept, riding on the idea of it alone, and feels like it embodies a generic idea of what a “good story” is rather than doing anything interesting. Perhaps because it plays its hand too early, makes it immediately obvious what it’s going for rather than play with what kind of story the reader should expect. I feel as much emotion reading a summary of that arc as I do from the arc in the manga itself. The execution of the concept is so clean that it’s sterile.

The characters occupy a similar space. They’re crafted well. They do everything right. But I can’t help but find them hard to care about. Gesicht is an interesting man, in the skillset you see him employ to solve the mystery, and his underlying character struggles with the traumatic secret he keeps, and whether he can truly feel things as a robot. There’s no easy mistake to point to, nothing that’s blatant bad writing. But it fails to do anything truly acceptable. Certainly not as interesting as 20th Century Boys’ Kenji, much less Monster’s Tenma.

It might be easier to see in some of the side characters. The ones it actually wants you to care about, at least. Two of them are former soldiers now working as robotic strongman wrestlers. They care about their families, and giving their audiences joy, but as the villainous threat of a robot killing the strongest robots in the world grows, they stake their pride on trying to take it down. They fail, of course. But you already knew that before I said it. And will you really care when their tragedies occur, or will it just feel like going through the motions?

Well, maybe you cared. I’m just trying to explain how I didn’t. It’s okay for us to feel differently.

Where Pluto succeeds is with its inspiration’s titular character, Atom. As well as his sister Uran, who shares many of his ethereally positive qualities. There, Urasawa feels like he captures something genuinely greater than just the sum of tropes. A iconic, archetypal, larger-than-life goodness you see in paragons like Superman. Atom feels like he’s the main character, not of Pluto’s narrative, but of Pluto’s world. I never read Astro Boy, yet Pluto felt like it communicated to me why Atom was such a big deal anyway. All of the robots, when you look closely, are as human and feeling as their biological counterparts. Just in their own way. But Atom, in truth, felt even moreso.

Atom is the focus of the final stretch of the story, and this isn’t quite a good thing. Gesicht exits the narrative in an uninteresting way. If the casualness was the point, if it was meant to be incidental in an unexpected and unavoidable way, then I don’t think it worked very well. He doesn’t leave much of a legacy, even if it does lead to one key plot development that the story needed. And then, yes, Atom is the focus, and it’s no longer a detective story. Now it’s closer to a standard action story. Not quite the cliche battle shonen, but generic all the same. It feels disjoint from the first half. Urasawa finally does something new in Pluto, but it’s simply him doing his take on another author’s work rather than innovating. But I’ll get to that later.

What I do like about the final stretch of Pluto is how well it ties together the themes. I normally hate cycle of hatred themes. So often, they’re forced, hamfisted, and never quite justify their supposed depth. If a character is so consumed by hatred, then don’t make it so easy to change their mind!

Pluto does it right. The hatred feels justified in how extreme it is, and expressed in powerful ways. It’s tied to other themes in a genius way — that hatred that gets passed on and cycled in response to atrocities is the same strong emotion required to properly focus an activate an overly-complicated AI, which is the same hatred that is testament to how in the right circumstances, a robot truly does feel as much emotion as a human. It seemingly falls for one of my pet peeves — when a character consumed by hatred is convinced too easily — but the circumstances do make sense, and Atom is the one who convinces him. The quality with which he is written makes me believe it.

Part of the reason the cycle of hatred themes work is the source of that hatred. Pluto grounds it in one of the few things it feels like Urasawa was genuinely passionate about in this story: The Iraq War. Not the real-life one, but we have the United States analogue making false claims of the Iraq analogue having weapons of mass destruction — I mean robots of mass destruction — and invading and devastating the nation. Children are killed, chances of replacing the desert with flowers are destroyed, and the invaders continue to occupy and oppress the land. It’s not subtle, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s an expression of how strongly Urasawa feels about what the US did. It conveys the horror of an unjust war, and in doing so it fully explains the anger and desires for vengeance the villain feels.

Unfortunately, there’s a major misstep in this I have to address. The story doesn’t just show the unjust war. It explains it, with the not-US President and teddy bear hyperintelligent AI. Supposedly, they orchestrated everything the main villain did. Narratively, this already makes no sense, feels entirely vestigial and tangential to the plot, and is so unsatisfying that I don’t even care that I’m spoiling it. How did they actually manipulate anything? What was their goal in doing so? It’s never explored. The villain easily could have done everything on his own, and is only less interesting because of this explanation.

But it’s even worse when you consider the political implications, and get to the reveal that the teddy bear AI was manipulating the President as well. It set up everything, going back to the war itself, because it somehow knew it would lead to the villain’s plan, which would lead to most of humanity dying so robots could take control. Again, this is already an unsatisfying, stupid reveal. But to take the fantastic commentary on a real-life war, and explain its origin with a nonsense rogue AI plot cheapens everything the story was saying. It could have challenged the true reasons behind the war, or something parallel to it. The evils of real life are evil enough without needing to fabricate a false one. Or, it could have just not included this at all, leaving it implicit, as the commentary would have worked fine without needing to explain everything. Some things are better left implicit than half-assed.

Perhaps the reason it went for the cartoonish explanation for war is that the more realistic, darker reasons would not have fit in a story tonally adjacent to Astro Boy. As I mentioned before, that’s what the final arc is — Pluto truly trying to be Astro Boy, rather than another Urasawa mystery. It does not do a bad job, but it fails to feel cohesive with what it had been before.

It’s in that recreation of Astro Boy, and Tezuka’s general bibliography, that Urasawa did truly accomplish something. For everything I think it retreads, and everything I think it fails to make interesting as an independent narrative, Pluto was never meant to be independent. It’s Urasawa revisiting his childhood, the childhood of his generation, and bringing it new life. I imagine it must be like going from Final Fantasy 7 to that game’s remake — taking something that was brisk, faster-paced, with more minimal dialogue, and filling in everything you had imagined in between as a child, to let you spend so much more time living with the characters.

And Urasawa doesn’t just bring to life the central Astro Boy arc. He draws from many Astro Boy stories and unrelated Tezuka manga, and does an astoundingly good job of weaving them together into a coherent narrative. It does not feel like the story takes breaks to tackle some other plot. It does not feel like a collection of disparate narratives, or like it makes out of place references. Pluto is as self-consistent and believable as if it had been entirely original, and I think someone would think it was, if they read it without knowing its origin story. Everything fits in the setting. I have to wonder if the reason Pluto feels so by-the-books and repetitive of Urasawa’s prior works is that he had his hands entirely full trying to make a hodgepodge tapestry feel cohesive at all. He succeeded.

But that reverence for the past is what bothers me about Urasawa’s style. His skills are undeniable, but he’s the ultimate boomer mangaka. He loves the good old days, the culture of his childhood. It’s not a bad thing to want to explore those themes — 20th Century Boys did something interesting with those ideas, by contrasting the dreams of his generation, growing up believing anything was possible, with modern cynicism. But as 20CB went on, its narrative developments grew unsatisfying and unearned, while its reverence for the magical power of rock and roll grew larger. Eventually, it just felt like it was idealizing that culture without purpose.

As talked about in a fantastic essay included in Pluto’s volumes, 20th Century Boys was telling men of Urasawa’s generation not to forget their dreams. Pluto is telling people a few things. Some of them are solid — anti-Iraq war, and some themes of robothood that are blatantly Asimovian but add a few interesting notes. But at its core, Pluto is Urasawa musing on how much he loves Tezuka. To the right people, that’s a good thing. The feat of tying so many Tezuka stories into a single narrative is, again, an impressive one. If anything similar exists in fiction as a whole, it’s certainly rare. But I’m hesitant to say that accomplishment actually makes Pluto a better story. To some, to those who grew up with Tezuka’s work, I’m sure it does. I can never read it from that perspective, and without it, the achievement does not detract, but it does not add either.

It’s not a bad thing for homage to exist in art, but this homage led to a story that felt blander than what Urasawa had written before, ripped between retreading his own work and retreading someone else’s. It might not have been possible for tributing Tezuka to have been done better than this, but I think the Tezuka tribute could have existed in a better story.

I’ve found it easier to respect Urasawa’s manga than to love them. Monster was technically well executed, but I found it hard to care about. 20th Century Boys hooked me, and had true potential that I wish it didn’t squander. It at least felt like Urasawa was still polishing his craft, and I almost love that manga, in spite of its failures. In Pluto, he stagnated. He fell back on old patterns so he could focus on recreating what someone else did, and ended up with something that didn’t do anything unique.

If you found an abandoned corpse, would you come stare at it whenever you needed to feel better about your life?

River’s Edge is the kind of manga I love to find. While Okazaki Kyoko is one of manga’s foremost and greatest josei authors, she’s tragically under-known in English-speaking communities. Her stories capture a kind of realism that’s both tragic and comedic. People suffer, are victims of their own self-imposed complexes and worries, self-destruct, and yet there’s always a sense of nihilistic levity. To worry too much about the horrors before them is to take life too seriously.

Even then, out of the stories of hers that ... I’ve read, River’s Edge is the darkest. Pink was gleeful and flippant in its slice-of-life portrayal of how much easier life is when you don’t worry too much. Helter Skelter was a grand tragedy, of a larger-than-life celebrity whose facade began to break as she flew too close to the sun. And River’s Edge is grounded, focusing its tragedy on ordinary people, with an air of realism inhabiting every way in which they hurt each other. Unlike those other two, River’s Edge is a study of a larger ensemble cast.

The protagonist, Wakakusa finds herself torn as her reckless boyfriend Kannonzaki bullies the secretly gay Yamada. In helping him, she becomes embroiled in the web of relationships with Yamada’s unsuspecting girlfriend, Kanna, and the young bulimic model Yoshikawa (who you may remember from Helter Skelter). There isn’t a singular goal to this narrative — they carry on with their lives, have conversations, and clash for reasons that feel natural.

Is it really realistic? That depends. No story truly can be, but River’s Edge shows one side of how Okazaki views reality, and I think it’s an interesting one. Most high-school manga are written to embody certain fantasies of that era of life. Okazaki is here to explore its flaws, not in the system, but in the people themselves. There’s certainly a realistic flair to some of the dialogue, in Yoshikawa’s eating disorder, or in Yamada’s sexuality. There’s a great conversation where he calls Wakakusa out for thinking that just because he’s gay, it’s appropriate to ask him overly sexual questions.

It’s the same kind of drama that might seem like it could be fully resolved if everyone just communicated, but this is not your shonen or shojo where they fail to do so just to force conflict. River’s Edge’s characters wouldn’t feel like themselves if they truly told each other how they felt, and that would probably make them hate each other more. It captures the imperfections of people who don’t understand what they really want.

You want to see Wakakusa call out her boyfriend. You want a climactic confrontation where she breaks up with him, pledges to never have anything to do with him again. You don’t get it, and it’s not because this manga is realistic. It’s because Wakakusa is a teenager who was never quite aware enough to realize that would be an option, much less go through with it. That’s not to say it’s a tragedy. In the end, her life goes on in a way you can accept, no longer affected by Kannonzaki’s behavior.

The end is woven surprisingly tight, though, for a story of this nature. Every plotline weaves together naturally, in a way that would betray the sense of realism if not for how well it’s done. It doesn’t feel like an ending Okazaki envisioned and contrived her story toward. It feels like the simple result of who the characters are. That’s the whole appeal of this manga. You won’t get the drama of heightened reality, but the characters are interesting, and they find themselves in interesting situations. It’s more about the people than the message, but the message is as simple as how important it is to treat each other kindly. What hooks you isn’t that simplicity, but the complexity that arises when people fail at that.

On a technical level, Okazaki is as competent as ever. While perhaps off-putting to those used to the stylization so common in the medium, with its simply outlined eyes and mouths, there’s still a careful aesthetic, and plenty of great composition and visual storytelling. The story can be a little more text-driven than it needed to be, and the flow of dialogue bubbles was sometimes unintuitive — flaws I didn’t find in Pink or Helter Skelter. But like those two manga, I would put River’s Edge on a list of great character studies that anybody should read if they’re interested in such a thing, in exploring josei, or in exploring what great manga can be found beyond the mainstream.

Weathering With You, the movie, was fantastic, but the manga feels like too close an imitation, rather than an adaptation that truly brings the story to a new medium.

It's impossible to talk about this without briefly reviewing the movie itself, so in short: The movie is fantastic. Makoto Shinkai's style of storytelling does not connect with everybody, but to those it does, it brings out incredibly powerful emotions. I particularly appreciate Weathering With You for how it takes the idea of fantasy explored in his prior films and challenges it — rather than be about a fantastical adventure of love and emotion, it's about a ... character who seeks those feelings, unaware of how immature it is, and makes reckless, dangerous decisions in conflict with the grounded reality around him that refuses to let him chase that fantasy. Yet the beauty of the story is that it still believes in that fantasy, and refuses to conclude that his desires are wrong.

How well does the manga adapt this? It does an okay job. I'd still give it an 6, because of how strong the core narrative is in a vacuum, but as an adaptation it gets a 3, because it has so little ambition to be anything more than an adaptation. Most of the story follows the exact same storyboard, beat for beat. There are a few additions, extra scenes that say new things about the main character's emotions, but they weren't nearly enough.

The art is fine. It's aesthetically pleasing and has some fantastically drawn two-page spreads. But the paneling style and general flow is my biggest issue — the vast majority of scenes tread far too closely to what the movie already did. It's not quite shot for shot, but it's close enough. Being paneled like a movie isn't always a bad thing, but it doesn't do this out of a mangaka's vision to create a story with that feeling — it lacks a vision of its own on how to make the same story work best as a manga. It doesn't take advantage of anything unique to manga as a medium. It's more like an illustrated script of the film.

Because of this, rather than bring the story to life in a new way, it feels like going through the motions of something you've already seen. But without the beautiful animation, colors, music, or voice acting, the experience feels emotionless in comparison. It conjured up constant memories of scenes I loved, yet I remembered feeling more than I did in the moment while reading.

I wish it expanded the story much further — not necessarily through even more added scenes, but just slower, more patient pacing, to give each emotional beat more space to land. The pace is so brisk, so rushed, when it didn't need to be. The movie had to deal with the runtime and budget constraints of its own medium, but let the emotions feel alive because of its production and directing. This didn't, and yet didn't take advantage of what it could have done.

In a vacuum, it's still good. Maybe if you read the manga first, you'll still feel things. But you'll probably feel less than you would if you watched the movie. Let that be your magical first experience. And after that, why bother with this?

Your Name had a much better manga adaptation; while also not as good as its film, it felt like its own take on its story. My favorite manga adaptation of a Shinkai work is She and Her Cat, which feels like it could have been the original. But Weathering With You's manga feels like it does not justify itself; it need not have existed, yet something much better than it could have.

Kareshi Kanojo spends most of its story bland and forgettable. It briefly becomes so ridiculous that it’s hilarious, only to end abhorrently.

The characters are remarkably shallow. Oh, they have “depth” that comes in the form of tragic backstories and internal self-hatred, but it’s all paper-thin. They aren’t believably flawed human beings. They’re perfect caricatures that exist for the reader to fantasize about dating them, and their “flaws” only exist to make them feel like troubled emo bishonen that a good girl can surely fix.

Miyazawa, the girl, has less of this issue, though she isn’t particularly interesting. If she was any more bland than she already ... is, I’d call her an intentional blank slate for the reader to slot themselves into. The story started with an interesting hook for her personality — an egoist who wants to maintain a facade of perfection to impress her peers. But this is only temporarily maintained for the initial drama for her to start dating Arima, and a brief arc of her being bullied. Past that, she essentially forgets that this was ever part of her personality, and settles into a forgettable lack of traits. You could call it character development, but she develops into someone with nothing interesting about her. Near the end of the manga she essentially stops having any relevance to the plot at all.

Arima is the bigger problem. He’s so perfect it’s hilarious. #1 test scores in the country, kendo prodigy, likeable and lovable by everyone. His only flaw is that he believes himself to be a terrible person, for hiding the fact that he’s a terrible person from those around him. Notice the circular logic? Not all characters need to be perfectly rational, but the internal conflict should be at least believable.

It reminds me of another manga, Kaguya Wants to be Confessed to. Kaguya feels like it took heavy inspiration from Kareshi Kanojo on several fronts. But it’s also much better written, and understood how to balance its perfect-seeming protagonists out by making them inwardly flawed in realistic ways. Arima feels like both of those characters wrapped into one perfect person without any of the realistic drawbacks to that lifestyle.

If all you want out of it is an enjoyable fantasy of a perfect, darkly troubled bishonen boyfriend, then I don’t begrudge you that enjoyment. I don’t personally think it holds up as well written.

Visually, it’s not particularly well made either. The art goes through three stages. The early art has extremely messy and hard to follow paneling, with way too many small (and weirdly narrow) panels crammed into single pages, and way too much dialogue crammed into those panels with very little flow. It was tiring to read. Luckily, past the beginning, the mangaka apparently got much more experienced with the art of making a readable manga, and it settled into a mediocre average. In this phase, the main thing I’d criticize is the extremely repetitive character designs. The mangaka blatantly had very few character design ideas to actually draw from, with many characters having the same faces and extremely similar hairstyles, differentiated only by hair color and height. There were countless points I mixed up the main girl with a temporary rival, or the main boy with the main girl’s father or another girl in the cast. If characters aren’t immediately distinguishable at a glance, then something’s clearly wrong.

The art improves in the final stage, but I’ll talk about that part of the manga later.

During those first two stages of the story, the plot is mostly bland. After Miyazawa and Arima settle into their relationship, it has a collection of arcs focusing on various other couples. Most of those are about as bland as the main duo’s romance, and I won’t say much about them. Though there’s a bit of a problematic romance between a high school girl and a 28 year old man. But that's another thing I’ll talk about later.

Most of the drama during this stage of the story is, yet again, shallow. There are far, far too many misunderstandings borne purely of miscommunications. There are ways to make the resolution to that kind of thing satisfying, when they finally do communicate, but here it mostly felt arbitrary and forced. I also never found this manga funny. There was very little drive to keep reading.

Later in the story, it improves… kind of. The art definitely gets better, with the occasional impact page that has solid shading and composition. This is where Miyazawa completely stops mattering to the story — now, it’s all about Arima, and his tragic backstory. The backstory itself isn’t that poorly written, but I’d laugh at the idea that this makes this story “dark.” It’s written to make Arima more of a caricature, the boy who’s oh so perfect yet is so darkly troubled. It’s dark in an edgy teenage way. All of the drama centering around his belief that he’s a bad person, because he was abused as a child, is just nonsensical.

What’s a little more compelling is his relationships with his birth parents, which have a little more basis in truth, in the desire some adopted people have to gain some sort of connection to the people they never knew. It’s not awfully written, I’ll say that much for it. It does, however, lead to an absolutely ridiculous climax. It’s like the story goes from an extremely boring soap opera, to an spicy, over the top, hilarious soap opera. I’ll give this part of the story credit for having the guts to go crazy.

After that, things get problematic. This is where I have to spoil a couple things, though I’ll try not to go into detail. Spoiler warning.

In its epilogue, the manga starts to seriously idealize certain ideas, and I’d call it genuinely harmful of it to do so.

The first is how it idealizes teenage pregnancy. Shockingly, there’s only a single character who has a realistic reaction to this reveal. Everyone else is happy and supportive. I won’t say it’s outright impossible for a teenage pregnancy to be handled in a mature way and for the involved parties to all grow up fine. But even with characters as “perfect” as the protagonists of this story, it comes off as incredibly tone-deaf and problematic to treat it as a perfect situation with no concerns. I guess it’s “believable” in this story since there’s rich grandparents supporting them through it, but realistically, I honestly don’t think this is a good message to end on, for shoujo readers to internalize or believe.

The second is to do with Asaba’s ending. He’s Arima’s best friend, a womanizer who never found the girl right for him. Somehow, when he finds out that Miyazawa’s baby will be a girl, he goes through a strange thought — that this girl will be his soulmate. I genuinely gaped when reading this, going over the last few pages, certain I must have misunderstood something. I didn’t. In the epilogue chapter it makes it clear. Their daughter falls in love with Asaba, and he “resists” this weakly, essentially acknowledging that he’s going to “give in” because he loves her too much.

This is not an okay thing to condone in fiction. I don’t care if you think that cases like this are okay because “the child wanted it.” Minors are not capable of making that kind of decision, full stop. Art does not exist in a vacuum. When you write something like this into a story, treating it like a positive, you influence your readers to think it’s an okay thing, to not be as careful as they should about not falling into abusive situations. If you read this and were smart enough to just take it as a story and not be influenced by it, then I’m happy you reacted to it properly. But that does not make it an acceptable thing to write.

These abhorrent moments are at least small, near the end. The vast majority of the experience has nothing to do with it. And normally, I would have given that experience a 4/10. Because of the way it ended, it gets a 3/10 instead.

But by and large, even without the awful ending, it’s not a manga I’d recommend. It’s uninteresting, unfunny drama, with poorly written characters. It feels like what Kaguya is making fun of, rightfully, and has none of the self-awareness. If you want to read a good shoujo, go read Glass Mask.