Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Nosatsu Junkie, v.1

Created by Ryoko Fukuyama
Published in the U.S. by TokyoPop




Slugline: For once, it's the female character who has "the darkness" around
her and the guy has to "rescue" her from herself.

This has been a tough rating to decide on. In our system, 3 stars means that the title is average. This is a shoujo title that has some of the standard tropes -- cross-dressing, people who want to become idols/models to get back to their exes -- but they do put a nice little twist to it. In this case, it is the female lead who is dark, whose appearance puts people off, and the male lead who starts to see past that and helps her start to come out of her shell. It is not the most original concept out there, but it was nice little twist, and managed to be entertaining.

But, while the art itself was fine, the layout of the panels and pages were at times confusing, jarring me out of the story at several places, forcing me to go back over pages since I was think I must have missed some connecting panel. Which character was which was sometimes not intuitively obvious just looking at the panel, and you had to rely on the dialogue balloons.

Despite that, I still rank it as a three-star, because I do feel that
sometimes that I am little hard on shoujo titles, and the story was pretty good.



- Ferdinand

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