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High art this is not, but if you care about Fujiyama's art and how he got to where he is now, this collection provides some valuable insight. I personally love to witness artist journeys and seeing the progress they make in their craft over the years, so this review is more about what these four stories are when compared to his later work, rather than an unbiased review of them and them only.

1. Niwa ni wa Niwa Niwatori ga Ita.

This is the most "I'm a 17 year old boy and this is the coolest idea for a comic ever" manga and I love it so ... much for it. Don't get me wrong, the story isn't anything special, there's barely any character in these characters, the art's wonky and the panels are all shaped like boring blocks. This is a very mid one-shot that didn't win a manga competition it was submitted for and to no one's surprise, but you can still see Fujimoto's unique tastes peek through the jank. Niwa attempts to tell a serious and emotional (? potentially?) story via humorous and absurd characters, but it doesn't really work here. A lot of the jokes and facial expressions here give off a very "random XD" vibe, and, therefore, don't really land - I'm not sure if they just aged poorly or if they had never worked to begin with. However, it's cool to see that this was his chosen storytelling style from the start and he had gotten so much better at it.

2. Sasaki Stopped a Bullet

It is honestly insane just how much better this is when compared to the previous work. First of all, the artstyle now looks much closer to what we now know as Fujimoto's signature one, and it's very clear that a lot of effort went in to perfecting the visual part of his works. The paneling is also much more interesting and dynamic, with some very lovely choices here and there. Visually, this already looks like s "serious work" when compared to Niwa's "amateur look". And when it comes to the story, what came into my mind somewhere around the first ten pages was "this was inspired by Asano Inio (the creator of Oyasumi Punpun), wasn't it?". Now, I can't confirm nor deny that that is the case, but the surrealism combined with weird sexual overtones combined with religious cosmic powers felt like something out of Nijigahara Holograph. I personally was not a fan, I think Fujimoto handles all these themes in a much more interesting and unique to him way in his later works, but for what it's worth, this is a very interesting second project.

3. Love is Blind

Finally, a oneshot I wholeheartedly LOVED! The humor was amazing in its absurdity and the characters were surprisingly adorable and heartfelt. The facial expressions got much better at conveying emotion, the protag's body language was top notch and the speech bubbles had a lot of character to them. The presentation still isn't perfect - the hatching's kinda wonky - but finished product as a whole reads as very good to me. I would totally be down to read 100 chapters worth of a romcom like this one.

4. Shikaku

Who would've thought that out of the first four works Fujimoto has created, two of them would be romance? And both painfully sweet too, I want a proper Fujimoto romance manga now lol. The artstyle got a bit wonkier and messier than it was before - if it's because he was in a hurry or if it's growing pains I can't say. It's harder to read than the two previous oneshots, but in exchange it looks much closer in artsyle to what Fujimoto's works usually look like. This work continues with the "real life in the real world until some crazy insane bullshit starts to happen" theme established by the previous to works, which I love - feels very on brand. Other than that, I don't have much to say - it's just a sweet little romance thing, a bit less interesting than the previous one but still plenty cute.

And that was Fujimoto, aged 17 to 21! In that time he's established the general aesthetic his storylines follow and developed his own unique brand of humor. Nothing so far has been truly "great" (except for maybe Love is Blind, but I might be biased), but I really feel like we're getting there!

To be completely honest, this is one of the most pointless things I've ever read. The manga is just 16 chapters worth of characters going through the most famous romance-manga-set-in-highschool tropes with little to no originality or any attempt to freshen things up.

I loved it, 8/10.

Instead of an actual manga with a plot, or any kind of point to it, really, this is just healing designed to help the fans of 86 cope with the horrible nightmares going on in the anime & light novel, and if you know 86, you know these poor souls really need it. Unless you love all the characters and ... want to read what is essentially highschool au fanfiction there's truly nothing to gain from this, but if you feel like you need to see Shin and Lena be happy little schoolkids to feel happy again this is going to be a very heartwarming experience.

You know the anime is great when on episode 5, gruesomely murdered women outnumber alive and plot relevant women 3:1.
(4:1 if the ending of episode 5 implies that another woman has died a horrble bloody death. I do not care to find out)
It’s not a spoiler, by the way, the dead women are irrelevant, half of the time nameless and their sole purpose is to be murdered and have their deaths investigated by the uninterested leads. As you can guess, it doesn’t make the situation better.

Do you like detective stories? Do you like the ones where most of the case is spent discovering and ... analyzing evidence to reach a logical conclusion? Do you like the grounded ones about regular people doing their best? Or do you like the ones where a charismatic genius assembles the finer details with ease and then proclaims their findings to the audience to everyone’s great delight? Well, then you’re out of luck!

In Kintsutsuki Tanteidokoro, get ready for the never-failing formula of:
1. Discover that a murder has happened in the very beginning of an episode.
2. Spend the next ten minutes following annoying hijinks of characters with neither depth nor common sense. The hijinks include: Ishikawa having no money (or spending whatever he suddenly does have on food and sex workers), Kindaichi being awkward and Ishikawa’s plot-irrelevant friends drinking in the same old bar/cafe and trying to do comedy(?) to no avail.
The hijinks may also include a confusing amount of gay subtext and moments that may sincerely read as romantic, though the reason for their inclusion is unclear as I see no tags/comments mentioning bl in sight. Is this just a way to poke fun at Kindaichi’s virgin-ness, implying that he’s so awkward with women because he’s gay for his womanizing bestie? Is this an awkward attempt at genuine representation? I wish I could find out, but the anime is so painfully boring and uneventful that I struggle to find the motivation to find out if the fruitiness is a gimmick or a feature, though I have to admit that sincere gay rep would make the show better only by a small margin.
3. Ishikawa will suddenly come to a conclusion that he has it all figured out and confront the killer, explaining the entire murder plot to the audience.
4. Que the ending, the first shot of which depicts a crab and a train, the relevance of which I do not know. Honestly, after episode two the mystery of the train and the crab was the only thing that kept me going, but even the combined power of it & the gay subtext couldn’t keep me from dropping the show.

I sat through five and a half episodes of this show and found not a single reason to stick around. I can’t even hatewatch, it has managed to be bad in the blandest, most oatmeal-on-water way possible.