Bakuman 3

Tsugumi Ohba / Takeshi Obata – Viz – 2011 – 12+ volumes

I like this series. I really do. I think it’s neat to see a bunch of characters who love manga sit around and talk about what makes a manga good. It’s something I do every day, after all, so it’s hard not to feel at least a little bit of affinity for it. Especially when all the criticism is so valid.

Hattori tells Mashiro and Akito what makes a popular battle manga, including a cute girl, a cause the readers can sympathize with, and sadness without making the reader feel like they are being manipulated. Later, Mashiro talks out some valid dynamic points about chapters ending with an unexpected cliche, not letting things get too monotonous, things like that. On one hand, I don’t really want to read about formulaic shounen battle manga, because I’ve read more than one person ever should. On the other hand, hearing them break down the genre for an entire volume is still really, really fascinating. They discuss things I hadn’t thought about, but still recognize as the stuff that boys’ dreams are made of and whatnot.

There’s a great scene where Nizuma draws the eyes of a handful of popular main Jump characters when he talks about the passion in Mashiro’s eyes. It’s something I hadn’t thought of before, but even the eyes of all those characters are distinctive enough that I recognized all of them.

On the other hand, the characters in Bakuman are still not all that interesting. I do like Akito, and I’m fond of all the crazy ideas he comes up with for his manga. I also think he’s the most normal person, which… when that’s one of the good points of a character, it’s kind of sad. I still can’t really wrap my head around Mashiro’s urgent dream of becoming a popular enough artist to have his series animated by the time he’s 19 because otherwise he can never see his sweetheart again since they will have failed to fulfill their dream. Also, it will be a failure if his sweetheart isn’t cast as the voice actress for the lead heroine in the anime. And they are all super-serious about this. I just… I can’t symathize with them. I’m sorry, I can’t. And they don’t really have much personality other than that. I like Mashiro for the way he spews manga statistics like it’s going out of style, but the way he sullenly rejects even the best ideas because they aren’t good enough to become popular and animated by the time he is 19… urgh. Azuki doesn’t have a lot of depth either, and her friend Miyoshi is… well, as Mashiro says, she’s more of what a boy thinks a girl should be like than a real girl.

And don’t get me started on Nizuma. He’s just a completely off-the-wall abnormal genius, who yells and rejects good advice and goes against instructions from professionals and doesn’t know what he’s doing… rude to a fault… I could keep going. I have no idea why anybody takes him seriously. But he probably needs to be there, yes, for Mashiro to learn from.

And that’s what it comes down to. This manga is almost a black comedy, a manga that critiques other manga while still being rather mediocre itself, other than the incredibly valuable advice it offers. I’m pretty sure the boring characters are intentional. I mean, they have to be. There’s no way that anybody could write a line where Mashiro calls for a stereotypical female character and rejects a female stereotype’s offer to write a realistic female character. There are so many meta levels there it blows my mind.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.