Aishiteruze Baby

Mangaka : Yoko Maki

This manga is a slice of life, romance and comedy shoujo manga.

The major premise of this story is a young man (known to be a skirt chaser) ends up taking care of a 5 year old girl with him growing up into a better person as a result.

Plot : Katakura Kippie is a high school playboy without a conscience (or rather without the emotional maturity needed for one) whose care free live is taken over by
Sakashita Yuzuyu, his 5 year old neice who has been left at his household by his aunt.

His family unanimously voted for him to be her guardian and caretaker. He is not a bad guy, so he tries his best, gradually learning her needs and responding to them.

The rest of the series focuses upon Yuzuyu and Kippie bond with some chapters devoted to other characters.

A lot of emphasis has been placed on the role of parents. It even realistically portrayed parental abuse in one of the arcs with a kind of sympathetic look on both the aggressor and the victim

Characters : 
All the characters are portrayed really well to try and portray a slightly dysfunctional suburban family.
Their perception of Kippie as an absolute worthless scum was hilarious (inspite of him being a really nice guy).
At the end of the day each member is extremely independent of the others but they still care for one another.

Although only a few chapters (pages even) were devoted to the elder sister and  younger brother, it manager to evolve them as characters in their own right.

Kippie growth over the course of the series is also remarkable along with the gradual improvement in his relationship with Tokunaga Koroko.

The true star however is Yuzuyu with her personality and her insecurities and her very real yearning for her mother. And she is cute!!

Art : surprisingly the art was rather subdued compared to other Shoujo manga that I have come across ( not many frills and ribbons in the frames for one). Which makes sense I guess considering Romance and the ideals of love is not what it is espousing.

Advice : It is a feel good story about caring for someone else. It's a good manga, one worth reading.

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Homunculus

Mangaka : Yamamoto Hideo

I really don't know how to explain this manga.

It is a seinen manga with a heavy dose of psychological thriller vibe. Lots of psuedo science and a very bizarre ending.

Plot:

The story starts of with Naoshi who has recently become homeless and shows his interaction with others like him who live in.a park. His own living quarters being a beat up old car which he treasures. Circumstances however conspire to make him accept a doggy deal from a stranger. One where he will receive 90,000 yen fir undergoing trephination.

After the operation however Naoshi ends up developing the ability to see 'homunculi' - a visual representation of a person's psyche - with his left eye.

The premise is circumspect of course, like a bad sci-fi/horror story done to death during the 90s. But moving past that this story has a very odd feel to it leaving the reader with an unsettled feeling long after its end. Questions regarding life, identify and even our own life are bound to come up and add to the confusion.

If we are to describe art as something that evokes a viceral response within you then tis work qualifies, but a masterpiece it is not.

Characters:

The characters are complex and 2demensional at the same time. They have a rich backstory and especially interesting ways they have chosen to interpret tgeir experiences giving rise to their homunculi is interesting, but you never end up feeling for them. 

The 2 most important characters are so unique that there can be no empathy with them. In fact As the manga progresses Naoshis character becomes distinctly inhuman and unrelatable, no..... Towards the end we don't want to relate with him because the implications are just too disturbing if we do.

Art: 

The art is detailed and evocative, if a little rough. Characters rarely look pretty or attractive. Even good looking women are immediately made ugly with the transparent look of greed on their faces. 

I guess that is the strength of the manga, each character with a unique design closer to the average nihonjin than shounen manga showed their protagonist to be but made all the more real by the depiction.of their emotions.

Verdict:

This is not a manga for the faint hearted and once read is likely to split the readers into 2 camps - those who think it is interesting and those who finished are keep going WTF in their minds.

If you are a casual reader you are better off missing this one.

Futari no Renai Shoka

Mangaka : Yamazaki Kore

A 12 chapter manga portraying a love story between 2 similar people.

The story follows the relationship that blossoms between a two bookworms who are unable to deal well with people.
Kanako reads books because they remind her of a time in the past when she was happiest. Itou Akio who has always read books to escape from a lonely reality. They both end up finding a better reality in each others presence.

It's a straight-laced manga no matter  how you look at it. It's about these two individuals and their love for each other. No sexualisation, no oneesan play, just love. I really like stories like that.

But when you stop time think about it it's kinda crazy that no one  in the manga found it weird. Akio Itou is a middle schooler ( I would assume that he is 14-15) while Kanako is a university graduate( 20years old minimum  22 is more likely). This age difference alone is enough to invite 3volumes worth of griping from all the supporting cast and somehow, no one has a problem with it.

It's like the bubble of love ( the euphoric time in the earliest part of the relationship) has never broken for them.
The harsh realities of the world has not made its way into their personal world and while that makes for some cute material it also makes the story unrealistic.

Kanako is a cute young lady who is gentle and kind. Zero bitchiness, Zero cruel streak, zero domineering personality, zero jealousy, zero unreasonableness.
Ideal girlfriend material.
The fact that the art renders her looking of a similar age to Itou-kun may be a major factor in why we are not conscious of their age difference.

By comparison Itou Akio, inspire of being the younger one, is more mature, at least insofar as taking care of himself is concerned (he cooks).

Theirs is a relationship of equals (rare as fuck in any story) with each person contributing to the relationship for the others sake.

I guess what impressed me the most was that this manga showed a relationship that is the epitome of what I consider love should be like. It is when two individuals are drawn together inspite or maybe even because of their flaws and are able to make each other better and happier than they are.

Recommendation : Read it. At 12 chapters long it's not a manga that is worth missing.

Truth be told it's not a great manga. But it is a nice story.

site map:
http://bestcompletedmanga.blogspot.in/p/p.html?m=1

Melo Holic

Author : Team Getname

I have no idea if the creator is a single individual or a group.

It is a Korean webcomic with a shounen feel to it.

It is a romance manga from the man's point of view. Yoo Eun Ho is a highschool teacher who has lived 24 years of his life without ever falling in love or having a girlfriend. However, he is not your average member of the 'single army' (because working out in gym alone feels better.!!). He is special because he is able to see into everyone's mind when he touches them ( To twilight fans - think of a mash between Edward's power and Aro's limitations). Unfortunately his ability endows him with a cynical nature when it comes to love, due to past experiences.
Enter the beautiful Ee Soo, a woman who attracts him to her because she really thinks what she is saying.

The initial chapters have a good feel to it mostly because if the Yo Eun Ho's monologue is fun to read. It even makes sense in a perverse kind of way, like listening to the Jokers speech about the truth of human nature. It will appeal to the single army world wide. But the mangaka doesn't really pull his punches either when  the rips the protagonist a new one by way of his friends response to said monologue (it boils down to 'everyone wants to be loved)

But then all that changes when he is in love. Seriously the 180 his personality makes is creepy. From then on it's a romantic drama, complete with a stalker and a near brush with death, personal difficult situations etc. Standard relationship stuff.

And there is a ending which is way too weird and ends up changing the feel of the whole book.

Personally I think the ending plot could have been made a bit better by bringing it into play earlier. Things would have been interesting. But I guess it would have ended up being like a shounen near-life-fantasy manga. As it is however it feels like a romance manga which veers it's way into thriller land for 5 seconds which then comes back into tragedy land.
There is a possibility​ of a happy ending though.

Recommendation:
I don't know who should I recommend this for.
The romantics among you might hate the last arc. The ones onto noir fiction will get annoyed at the semi stale romance bits.

You know what? Skip this one. Its not worth it.

20th Century Boys

Mangaka : Naoki Urasawa

I guess there is something wrong with me ... I really don't understand the classics.
Even while reading Akira, said to be a landmark in shounen manga, I was not impressed, it felt like I was reading the screenplay of an OK movie father's than a manga.
Naoki Urasawas masterpiece left me feeling​ much the same way.
Rather than a regular action manga, this was a psychological thriller with overtones of a  whoduinit mystery novel. Natural it was released for a Seinen audience.

Plot -
Endo Kenji is an unambitious and uninteresting young man running a grocery store while taking care of his neice. He was the ringleader of his childhood group of friends but the trials of adulthood have beaten the fight out of him. Meanwhile a mysterious masked man creates a cult centered around himself all the while plotting world domination.
What binds the two of them together is their childhood and the game they played with each other, becoming heroes to save the world. As the man limits his plan into action the world begins to go through crisis exactly as envisioned by their younger selves. It seem that the game is not yet done.
It's not that the manga is without its merits. It's a ridiculously scary idea. Kids have been know to dream up pretty horrific stuff, could you imagine anyone of them come true?

I used to have trouble differentiating premise from plot. most of the mangas that i have reveiwed here are short enough that the premise is pretty much exactly that. But I get it now. As far as premise is concerened this story is great but the plot ended up going on for too damn long

#spoiler alert

So Kenji manages to find his backbone and goes forward with all the intention of stopping the evil that is the friendship party. Just as the kids initialy imagined the friendship party rolls out a massive multipronged strategy become the dictators of the free world. They attack multiple places with a virus (which has a 98% fatality rate) they blew up a few places and finally they launch a massive robot in tokyo on New years day. Kenji in the mean time recruits his childhood friends to fight this threat, gets branded as a terrorist and has a final face off with the enemy boss monster - "friend"

Twist 1 - Friend wins, the massive explosion in tokyo and the virus plague are all blamed on the Kenji faction. Kenji is presumably dead. and we get back to the story after a 10 year time skip. Endo Kanna ( Kenjis neice ) is the new central charecter. 

Twist 2 - the man presummed  to be friend is not friend but just a body double. the real friend is one of the people who was a part of the Kenji faction. he is also Endo Kannas Father. The plan is to Kill the pope and in the global crissi to take control of the world. Plan fails and Friend is Killed.

Twist 3 - The world is still under "friends" control. that is the next minor mystery, friend died and friend is still alive. Endo Kanna is the new leader of the resistance, a ruthles young woman. friend is about to destroy the whole world, cqause thats just what dictators do when they get the whole fucking world. And Abracadabra, Kenji is alvie and well travelling the land with a guitar playing an anoying as fuck song whose chorus is 'Gulatlada-sulalada'.Ill admit its damn freaky to have a mob of starving and disenfranchised people come towards you singing that.. And finaly the whole damn series ends the right way.

Twist 4 - Kenji is the one who causeds all this by allowing someonelse take the fall for a crime he comitted. That someonelese became friend. (The last friend - Kannas dad friend died in the second major arc)

You see what i mean? i belive that the series should have ended with a foiled assasination attempt of the Pope

Instead they just went on and on adding gamechanging twists along the way. Ill admitit is a uniqu storyline, but there is a world of difference between a good storyline and a unique one.

My recomendation for this manga is a - ditch it. Its not worth the amount of head breaking involved. I would love to hear from anyone who thinks differently ofcourse.

Site map - http://bestcompletedmanga.blogspot.in/p/p.html