About the Mangaka

Kubo Noriaki is the real name of Kubo Taito. His most notable work to date is Bleach, as his other series, Zombie Powder, was canceled after volume four. Like Bleach, Zombie Powder is licensed by Viz.

About the Manga

01

I’ve had a bit of a love hate relationship with bleach, and given my feelings towards Viz’s shonen team; it’s taken even longer for me to get to this series. Truthfully, I wish I hadn’t bothered

Kubo is a rough mangaka at first, and the first volume of bleach proves this beyond a doubt.

Art wise, he’s nothing special, and in fact a lot of his characters aren’t well drawn. Ichi is a perfect example of of this. In this first volume the design for Ichi is at times very rough and crude. However it does at others have a spark of potential.

Several of the characters go through cosmetic changes as the series progress, including Ichi, and all of them are for the better.

I don’t like Rukia’s design in this volume, at times it just looks to weird. Though as the design he choose works well with the few comical scenes in this volume.

I do like the hollows, they seem to have had a lot of thought put into them, and rather having them all generic in looks, he tries to make them all unique. He does this really well, and I like how they look and act.

Story wise the first volume doesn’t really allow you to get into the guts of what’s going on. At best we’re given hints to Ichi being a rather unique Shinigami. This volume focus primarily on setting up the relationship between Rukia and Ichi, which is great since it’s a relationship that needs a lot of ground work for the later volumes to make sense.

It also introduces one of my favorite characters, Orihime, who is just to damned funny with the way she acts.

While his art is rough in this volume, the story carries the slack. I was very happy with the development and progression. While it feels a bit fast, it’s really a good pace. It covers the bits it needs to, and does them fully and completely, without belaboring the points.

Sadly, Viz did their now expected hatchet job on the series. One of the biggest annoyances is Ichigo. Sometimes they leave his name as Ichigo/Ichi, yet at other times they translate his name as Strawberry. This is damn annoying and as far as I can see unneeded. Why translate it some of the time but not at others?

Next, as expected there are minor rewrites and name changes.

  • Shinigami -> Soul Reaper
  • Spiritual Power –> Dark Power

To name but a few of the more annoying changes. Also the way they unfold the story has been changed, primarily because of the rewrites they do. Another one they do, and one I was expecting them to get right, was Sado. In the scanlations he was also called Chad (as he is in the Viz release), however it was later noted that this was wrong. In fact everyone refers to him as Sado, with the exception of Ichigo who calls him Chad. There’s a bit of a story behind this which is revealed in a later volume. I can already see this being rewritten, which is depressing.

Sadly the paper quality sucks as usual, as does the fact they bleach the color pages. Also this volume suffers from bad guttering at times.

Overall this series goes on my Junk Pile, and frankly I’d say stick with the scanlations, and save your cash for better quality manga.

Where to Buy

There’s two versions of Bleach volume one available, and a box set of the first twenty-one volumes. I’ve included links to all three.

Normal Version:

Special Edition:

Box Set:

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