Many thanks to Yen Press for providing a review copy of this title!!

About the Mangaka

Satoko is the artist that brought us Shoulder a Coffin Kuro, but is more famous for her games work, Yggdra Union: We’ll Never Fight Alone, and Knights in the Nightmare.

About the Manga

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To be honest I can’t decide whether I liked this volume or not, my thoughts flipped back and forth.

Since this was from the creator of Kuro, I had some very high expectations for it. I think that may be part of the problem, I was expecting to much possibly.

I’m not sure which came first, but going on the information available I’m guessing this was the first.

Part of the problem I think was that this series started out as a stand alone comic strip, and was later compiled as a full manga. This means that there’s no real starting point of the story, it literally just drops you in the deep end.

It took me a while to get into the story, which I first felt was disjointed and poorly deployed. However as I progressed I grew more and more into it.

This series does have some issues with the art, both on the part of Satoko, and by Yen Press.

Satoko’s problem is that I found Kisaragi’s character design to be to much like Kuro from Shoulder a Coffin. this put expectations on the character which left me disappointed when they didn’t follow through.

This is more a problem with me I think, but I do think differences between different manga are essential.

Like Kuro this series has a lot of colour panels, and as always they are stunning. Her use of colours in this series is amazing to say the least, though a few times the colours looked a bit off to me, it’s almost as though the colours were bleeding together making a fuzzy off colour image. While it’s not to bad, it did stick out a bit.

Story wise, it took me a long time to get into it, in truth I had to read it twice to really start to get into the story. The to enjoy this story is to forget the story. Contradictory I know, but it’s true, if you take each four panel as a pure stand alone it’ll flow better for you.

Sure there is an underlying connection in each, but unlike Kuro (or Sunshine Sketch) there is no real story to it. It is literally the daily life of a bunch of fifteen and sixteen year olds. Once you realise this it really does grow on you.

the other problem I had was the humour. A lot of the jokes just don’t translate well, and while they’re probably funny in japanese they were flat in english. There was still a lot of great humour in this volume however, and I found myself more than a few times laughing away happily.

Yen Press did their usual good job, a nice and smooth translation, with the exception of the above mentioned humour bits. However I do feel they failed a bit with the font choice at times. There were several colour panels where the fonts were hard to read because of bleeding, and the fonts being black on dark backgrounds. I found this funny in a way, since Satoko had previously mentioned how dark on dark was hard to see. Thankfully, these were few and far between, so don’t really hinder things.

I love the way Yen always keep the colour panels intact, rather than bleaching them like so many other publishers do.

One point of note, this volume has loads of translator notes, five pages worth. They also include a note for the word “boke” which in another volume which used the word I called a miss-spell. This note would have been well used in that one as well.

I’ll wait till I’ve read the second a final volume before making my judgements :D

Where to buy

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