By Dustin Cabeal
I love a long-titled manga as much as the next person, but just giving your manga a long title doesn’t make it good. There is a concept introduced in the first story segment of this volume that is interesting. The gist is that an extremely attractive and hard-working salaryman moonlights as an assistant to a mangaka author that is his childhood friend. Why? Well read that exceedingly long title and you will understand.
The story goes on to introduce Rin, a teenage boy that’s beginning an internship with his distant relative the mangaka author. The team is up against a deadline and in the middle of a death march when Rin shows up. The mood is terrible, they’re quick to snap at him even though he’s inexperienced and a digital artist. That is until The Chief shows up. The Chief is Yoshida, and he reorganizes the group. Sending them off to a nap and working one on one with Rin while bribing Sena our mangaka, into finishing her pages for the team to work on them.
Manga has been increasingly willing to peel back the layers of how the industry works and that seems to be one of the goals with Yoshida the Catch. It loves to take a moment and explain some aspect of the industry and pretend that it’s relevant to the love story we’re reading. The uninteresting part is the love story which is completely juvenal and unrealistic. The same gag plays out over and over in that something romantic or sexual comes up between our two characters and is ruined by our two characters. Suddenly we never leave the studio room, and it seems as if we’ll never see this balance between work and manga that’s introduced on the early pages of the story.
No instead we’ll meet the team as one by one they try to get Chief and the Boss to fall in love unsuccessfully. Our supporting cast is reduced to one-dimensional characters in an instant. None of them care about the work they’re doing or who they are outside of the contents of getting these two other characters hooked up. It becomes a chore to read by the second story arc and the rinse and repeat formula wears out instantly.
The artwork is quite nice. It actually looks digital since it doesn’t have a lot of extra linework going on. The linework is detailed and all the characters keep a high level of detail to them throughout the story. The flip side is that it’s all very boring and generic looking. Only one character remotely stands out and the rest are just kind of there. I couldn’t tell two of them apart sometimes and had to check what they were wearing.
Overall, it’s just not a very believable story which is saying something for manga. It’s dull but leaves itself nowhere to go because it’s chosen to stay in the studio with our crew. I couldn’t care less about them coming up on another important deadline, I’m assuming that’s the weekly norm. The love story takes a back seat to the manga business instantly. That and we abandon our title character after introducing his job. At the very least we could have done with some pages showing him staring at the clock wondering how quickly he can get back to see his love and work on the manga. Instead, it feels like the love story and job are dropped as quickly as possible in the favor for more behind the scenes manga industry stories that aren’t very interesting. Bringing it back to the title, it’s great, but misleading in that all of that is dropped or downgraded in an instant.
Shizuki Fujisawa
Kodansha