Post by zen on Aug 2, 2013 16:10:19 GMT -5
A few weeks ago, I was looking at the summer anime schedule and decided I would look into the manga for one of the shows in my favorite genre: Romantic Comedy. The anime is Kimi no Iru Machi or A Town Where You Live. When I looked it up, I found that it was by the same mangaka who wrote Suzuka and it takes place in the same universe as Suzuka, starting a couple of years after the end of the earlier manga, so I started with that. It was pretty good. Sure, there were a lot of trite and prototypical shounen romance tropes used, but the story had some heart and defied conventions on occasion. The biggest issue it had was the likability of the main characters and a forced feeling to some of the drama elements, but the art was fantastic, with some of the best depictions of the female form I have seen outside of the work of Kaoru Mori, the mangaka who wrote Emma and A Bride's Story.
After reading Suzuka, I watched the disappointing anime adaptation of it and started reading Kimi no Iru Machi. Common wisdom suggests that people get better with practice, and Kimi Machi seems to be an example of that in manga! In terms of writing, it is head and shoulders above Suzuka! I happened to be suffering from a major relapse in my battle with lumbar arthritis, leading to a period of four nights that I was entirely unable to sleep, and the 234 available chapters (at the time) of Kimi Machi helped me pass the sleepless hours without noticing the pain so much. Possibly this is due to the amount of pain the story causes, as it repeatedly thrusts sharp, barbed objects into a region just below your solar plexus, twists, grinds, starts to pull out the weapon, then plunges it deeper with an upward angle to puncture the lower ventricles of your heart. If you like romance with a lot of twists and heartache, but with a decent amount of truly well done comedy and a huge amount of truly beautiful and radiant moments as well, I would strongly advise reading this manga!
The art in Kimi Machi is also amazing, with fantastic character designs and some of the best background art, when the mangaka feels the need for it, that is... Sometimes the backgrounds are just plain and boring... It doesn't have the level of realistic nudity that Suzuka had, nor the level of ecchi, but the story line is, in many ways, more mature and serious, with the relationships in the manga far better developed and explored than I am used to in shounen manga. If I were given the manga with no clue about what genre it is, I would guess seinen, based on the complexity of the relationships and the fact that the story continues into the college years instead of staying in high school for the duration.
Kouji Seo, the mangaka for the series, seems to have a fondness for matching "big events" to milestone chapters. In particular, two of the most important "events" in the manga occur in chapters 100 and 200, with 200 being a much happier event than the earlier milestone. He also is fond of carrying threads of ideas across large spans of time. There is a conversation that happens in chapter 147 that is brought back up by one of the characters in chapter 199, which happens nearly a year later in the story's timeline, leading directly to the tremendously wonderful chapter 200... It is sweet, clever, and very, very satisfying for the reader. A masterful bit of foreshadowing...
I am currently blogging the TV anime version of Kimi Machi, which started this summer season, and, though it starts at a strange point in the story (80 chapters in, at one of the most dramatic and painful arcs in the manga) it is doing a good job of telling the tale, at least from the perspective of someone that knows what is coming... I strongly recommend them both.
After reading Suzuka, I watched the disappointing anime adaptation of it and started reading Kimi no Iru Machi. Common wisdom suggests that people get better with practice, and Kimi Machi seems to be an example of that in manga! In terms of writing, it is head and shoulders above Suzuka! I happened to be suffering from a major relapse in my battle with lumbar arthritis, leading to a period of four nights that I was entirely unable to sleep, and the 234 available chapters (at the time) of Kimi Machi helped me pass the sleepless hours without noticing the pain so much. Possibly this is due to the amount of pain the story causes, as it repeatedly thrusts sharp, barbed objects into a region just below your solar plexus, twists, grinds, starts to pull out the weapon, then plunges it deeper with an upward angle to puncture the lower ventricles of your heart. If you like romance with a lot of twists and heartache, but with a decent amount of truly well done comedy and a huge amount of truly beautiful and radiant moments as well, I would strongly advise reading this manga!
The art in Kimi Machi is also amazing, with fantastic character designs and some of the best background art, when the mangaka feels the need for it, that is... Sometimes the backgrounds are just plain and boring... It doesn't have the level of realistic nudity that Suzuka had, nor the level of ecchi, but the story line is, in many ways, more mature and serious, with the relationships in the manga far better developed and explored than I am used to in shounen manga. If I were given the manga with no clue about what genre it is, I would guess seinen, based on the complexity of the relationships and the fact that the story continues into the college years instead of staying in high school for the duration.
Kouji Seo, the mangaka for the series, seems to have a fondness for matching "big events" to milestone chapters. In particular, two of the most important "events" in the manga occur in chapters 100 and 200, with 200 being a much happier event than the earlier milestone. He also is fond of carrying threads of ideas across large spans of time. There is a conversation that happens in chapter 147 that is brought back up by one of the characters in chapter 199, which happens nearly a year later in the story's timeline, leading directly to the tremendously wonderful chapter 200... It is sweet, clever, and very, very satisfying for the reader. A masterful bit of foreshadowing...
I am currently blogging the TV anime version of Kimi Machi, which started this summer season, and, though it starts at a strange point in the story (80 chapters in, at one of the most dramatic and painful arcs in the manga) it is doing a good job of telling the tale, at least from the perspective of someone that knows what is coming... I strongly recommend them both.