Boogiepop Doesn’t Laugh 2
Posted: December 22, 2006 Filed under: Boogiepop Doesn't Laugh 2 Comments »Okay, you get this, then you get 6 volumes of HanaKimi and at least 4 volumes of DN Angel, maybe 5 if I can read another tonight. I’m gonna flood the front page with two series, sorry.
I had the second volume of this sitting around forever. I should’ve just read it since it was the end of the series, but I was pretty disappointed by the first. The second wasn’t really much better. It was almost a direct retelling of the novel, except it’s easier to read the novel and understand what’s going on. Granted, you’re not supposed to entirely understand the story, but the manga left a few more things out than the novel.
Really, I already wrote about the content when I talked about the first Boogiepop novel. If you are just dying to see what I thought to know if you should rush out and buy it, then read that one. I had kind of thought (and maybe because it WAS mentioned somewhere) that the manga was an alternate retelling of the story, but it’s nearly verbatim.
Perhaps everything did make sense in the manga, though. It’s hard for me to tell since I read the novel first and already knew the plot. The story’s still excellent, but the art’s not good enough to warrant a retelling in this fashion. Granted, I like Kadono’s color illustrations plenty, we get a ton of them at the beginning of this volume. The black and white art is pretty okay too, and I kind of like the sketchy, almost painterly style he has, but it’s also pretty empty, and kind of plain as far as action goes. He’s definitely an illustrator before a manga artist, and it kind of shows, but if you haven’t read the book, the manga will do just fine for the story… though I would say read the book, because the story is excellent and there’s plenty in the book that wasn’t included in the manga.
There was nothing particularly BAD about the manga, the novel is just far superior, and it feels like I got nothing out of the manga after reading the novel first.
I read the manga before the book, and I agree that the book had more in it. I liked the manga, but even though I read it several times I felt like there were a lot of loose ends. I didn’t really get those parts of the story until I read the novel.
Also, to me at least, all the characters in the manga looked alike, so sometimes I had trouble figuring out who did what, and sometimes my guess was wrong. I didn’t have that problem when I was reading the novel, so it was a lot clearer.
I agree with what you said about the character designs, too. I knew who the characters were as long as they said the same things they did in the book, but a lot of the character designs did look alike now that I think about it. The discipline committee president in particular seemed like she came out of nowhere and played a weird part in the second volume of the manga, and also looked like at least two of the other girls.
It could just be my faulty memory, but I don’t really remember her in the first volume. I read it too many months ago, though.