Many thanks to Yen Press for providing a review copy

About the Mangaka

Okubo Atsushi is better known for his more recent work, Soul Eater. However he also assisted on the older series, Get Backers. B.Ichi is his first independent work where he did both the art and story.

About the Manga

bichi_1

I was in two minds over B.Ichi as it’s by the creator of Soul Eater, which I don’t really like that much. After reading the first volume I still haven’t really made my mind up.

Okubo’s art is as distinctive in this series as it is in Soul  Eater, however it lacks the polish of the newer series. This series has all the elements of weirdness that the newer series has, such as weird environments and stuff, and I admit that at times his art is pretty amazing.

However I found that a lot of the time the panels were cramped, with to much going on in them. I also find that his art is rather inconsistent, one minute being pretty good, but in the next few panels swinging to bad.

The other area I wish he’d worked more on was his character designs. The facial expressions of Shotaro when he’s using his ability are rather lame. We see four different animal traits, bird, dog, monkey and snake. The first three of which all seem to have the same facial features. It’s only the final one that has a different feature set up. This is a shame, since this could have been a great chance to show off his art skills more.

The other area where he fails is the story, the potential of the story was great, but I felt it didn’t live up to the potential it could of.

Now, granted this is a short series, running for only four volumes, but even so I felt that there was to much information revealed in this volume. this leads to the story feeling rushed and cramped. By the end of the volume I knew pretty much everything there was to know about the series. Sure there were a few elements still to be revealed, but the meat of it was given already.

This is bad as it removes all the fun of exploring the story, the only way to make it fun again is to have a complete plot change.

There are a lot of similarities between this and Soul Eater, such as the girls are all either cute or sexy, where as the guys are average to bad. There are also environmental similarities as well, such as the weird designs, buildings with shoes for example.

However, all of that said, this is an interesting series that did manage to keep me interested. It is a novel concept, sucking on the bones of an animal give you the animals characteristics, but you have to something in return.

Yen Press did a pretty good job over this, as I’ve come to expect. The translation is smooth and flows nicely. Though as with other recent releases the editing is a bit off, with text being cramped into the side of the bubbles leaving a lot of wasted space.

One good thing I liked about this release was that there was no gutter issues. It was nice to read a volume without having to damage the book in the process.

Overall I think this is a okay series, not the best of ones, but a good one worth reading. It has some good comedy scenes that had me chortling.

Where to Buy

This is due for release on the 28th October 2008

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