Review: Bakuman

Read the translated chapters of Bakuman here

Hello again folks!

2 posts in 3 days? How exciting! (Actually I'm required to have a certain number of posts a month, and my teacher just announced that more posts = a better grade. On the plus side, this means more updates for you, which is still exciting!) After blogging about Sket Dance I read to the end of the last translated chapter, and there were more and more in-text references (breaking the fourth wall...) about this manga called Bakuman. They're both serialized in Shonen Jump so I can see why that would be, but it just so happens that I read Bakuman before starting Sket Dance and it's very worthy of a review. One thing to note is that the author (actually, a team of 2 authors) writing Bakuman are the same guys who wrote Death Note (a super-epic psychological manga that I will definitely review one day!). If anyone has read Death Note, Bakuman is nothing like it but it is at least worth a try.

Summary:
This manga is about 2 boys, Takagi and Mashiro, who want to be mangakas*. Mashiro is in love with Azuki, a girl in his class who wants to be a voice actor*, so they make a promise to get married as soon as he rights a manga that gets turned into an anime and she does the voice of the lead female character. The story starts at the beginning of middle school and has continued into their early 20s.

Characters:
Mashiro is going through life being bored, thinking about how he'll get average grades and become an average salaryman*, never doing anything interesting in his life, and Takagi somehow convinces him to join forces and draw manga together. This set-up is rather cliché, which is a shame because the story becomes more believable as their pasts are revealed.

The rest of the characters (Takagi's girlfriend, fellow mangakas) are all pretty interesting. I have to say that most of them ticked me off when they were first introduced, but as their personalities were revealed I began to like them as people. It can sometimes be a little difficult to believe when a guy who is supposed to be a villain reverts to a good guy, or a guy who was a good guy suddenly acts like a total jerk but is still expected to evoke sympathy.
Overall, the characters are likable and mostly believable, but there are times when their actions don't match their established personalities.

Story:
This story has one overaching plot: to create a manga that gets turned into an anime so that Mashiro and Azuki can get married. This is good because I feel like I know where the story is eventually headed, but at times it feels like the authors create situations that are unrealistic in the current context of the story but need to happen for the story to move in a certain direction. For example, Mashiro and Takagi have a major rival named Nizuma Eiji (he's probably my favourite character, I wish he had more screen time!), and they were having a competition to see if they could beat his manga in the popularity polls. Mashiro and Takagi came up with a cool idea that really should have won, given the circumstances of the story, but the authors need to keep Eiji as a rival and so Mashiro and Takagi had to lose. It's situations like that which frustrate me as a reader.

Overall:
Reading a manga that is serialized in Shonen Jump, about a couple of guys who are writing manga that is serialized in Shonen Jump, is sort of an infinity loop. I enjoyed the earlier chapters, but there is an element of Deux ex Machina that is becoming stronger as the story progresses. My biggest fear is that the authors will add too much filler that doesn't advance the plot because they want to keep the serialization running as long as possible.
I've personally put Bakuman on hold until the current story arc advances a little more (I don't like waiting each week/month for a new chapter), but I'm still interested to see where the story goes.


That's all for now, expect another post within a few days!



*mangaka: someone who writes manga... duh
*voice actor ("seiyuu" in Japanese) : someone who does that voices of characters in anime and drama CDs.
*salaryman: like a typical white-collar office worker, the average Japanese salaryman seems to be a middle-aged, balding man with a slightly hunched back who takes a crowded train to and from work each day and carries a briefcase. Has the cultural connotation of a very typical or average lifestyle.