Otaku Ink

May I just say first – major awesome geek points for Dr. Wall’s pick this month. Seeing as how our name would constitute this group being more of the “manga” crowd we had yet to see in the year + span of doing this club any Manga actually chosen for a monthly comic. So, to start, I’m happy that we’ve finally broken ourselves in. Now for the review…

Monster (Vol 1) was a let down for me. I really loved the tension it aroused and the story made a good start, however, there just wasn’t enough there in this book to really… well… review. Exposition was the only goal that this book sought – introducing us to the main characters, giving them motives and desires, but in the end that was all we got. I felt sort of empty – like I had just watch a Soap Opera episode when I thought I was gonna watch a thriller/drama.

The Artwork wasn’t anything special for me. However, I’ve found with most manga you really begin to appreciate the artwork when you compare the same artist’s work to his/her other works. You’ll find a lot of the time styles will change completely, which from my point of view is amazing. For instance, compare Takeshi Obata’s Death Note and Hikaru No Go. We have the one that’s incredibly detailed, abstract bodies, etc; and the other that’s more traditional with the big eyes, round faces, less features, etc. To have this kind of a range as an artist is amazing to me. I honestly didn’t even know it was the same person until I looked it up. So, perhaps I need to read something else that Naoki Urasawa has created to fully appreciate his style.

So… really I feel I’m out of things to say. This was a pretty short read and is meant to be a guide for the rest of the series – which amazingly has an ending! It’s 20 volumes or so, but still… I’ve been reading Blade the Immortal for a long long time, in fact I’ve stopped because I can’t take the never-ending story nonsense anymore. Maybe someday if it has a conclusion I’ll go back to picking it up again. I know for sure I’d definitely like to read more of Monster though; this first book has given me enough of a taste to want to see where it goes from here.

Tags: comic, manga, monthly red

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 at 3:36 am and is filed under Reviews, comics, graphic novel, monthly read. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.