Bakuman Review: Vague

If you haven’t heard about this manga before, quit coming to my blog, tell your parents you let them down, and shoot yourself in the foot, stomach and brains. (Not necessarily in that order)

This manga is the second brainchild of writer Tsugumi Ohba and artist Takeshi Obata. You ought to have heard of them before, especially when they are the ones behind your Death Note.

However, this manga is nothing like Death Note, and hopefully will remain that way.

It’s about two aspiring teenagers who wish to become mangaka and actually succeed. I’ll be vague here because I’m lazy.

Apart from the usual “I’ll meet you, my love, once I have completed my life goal.” and the “We are real men. We will do whatever it takes!” this manga really doesn’t have much depth to it. But that’s what fascinates me! It might be superficial, but it covers a lot of ground in terms of introducing manga terms to you, how mangaka live and so on.

It’s amazing how the mangaka of Bakuman actually manage to draw the line between “We just have to show you the pride of us mangaka by throwing all sorts of complicated manga terms at you and putting up a false front to how hardworking all mangaka are” and “We will give you the truth, and throw in a bit of a plot”. If you don’t get my point, great. Because I’m being vague here. And you’re plain dumb.

I’ve read a couple of reviews (manga reviews are really, really scarce) of Bakuman when it first came out and almost none of them said anything positive- for good reason. At the beginning, it seemed as if Bakuman didn’t hold any ground at all. It had no foundation and its reasons for reaching a point of climax seemed exaggerated and nothing to be excited about.

HOWEVER.

If one were to have the foresight (like myself) to actually persist and read on, he/she would realize that what the mangaka has delivered is but the plain truth of the difficulties one would face if he chose to become a mangaka in high school. Slowly but surely, Bakuman captivates its readers with nothing but raw truth and a bit of humour. I would have been satisfied with that, but recently in the latest few chapters, Bakuman has simply outdone itself. It has managed to create a definitely unexpected network between all the mangaka within the manga and possessing this interesting potential to rise from the dead in terms of plot with so many factors. I cannot imagine how the mangaka of Bakuman actually came up with such a dynamic plot, where multiple unrelated things happen at the same time, which is life, but never happens in most manga.

To end off, I remembered this quote by Alfred Hitchcock- “Drama is life with the boring bits cut out.” Then I say manga is life too, but please, leave some boring parts for us. While a play cannot afford a minute of irrelevant ramblings, Manga can afford a page which absolutely has nothing to do with the plot. Please, bore us sometimes.