Week 10: Manga Comics

This week I had read a couple of manga comics. I would have to say, I was not really pleased with some of the comics in this series. The stories were very flat and somewhat awkward to read. Unlike other comics, my attention was not caught at the beginning of the story to draw me in to be interested in what was going on. If I did get into the story, it would be halfway towards the end. Many of these were just daydream drooling fantasies. The only one that stood out was Astro Boy, which was one of the fewer ones that were based off of a superhero.

From the featured comics one I really found myself interested in was Death Note. This was the only comic that caught my attention from the start and had a well compositional story structure. The Death Note series comes with many structural elements that interesting and symbolic. I really was interested in the monster’s Ryuk’s character. In the comic, his came off as this mysterious monster due to his horrid and intimidating features, but at some points, he became guidance to the main character Light and gave a relief of comfort in some parts of the comic. I liked the idea of killing off people by writing their name down in a journal. The graphics were well compelled to the suspense and action of the story. The visual and overly detailed images really showed the tone of mood in the story and what the characters are feeling. Even though I am not a huge manga fan I feel like I will be reading more of the Death note series.

 The other comic that I read was Cinderella Boy, which seemed to me, came off as one of those fantasy daydream comics. The story was somewhat interesting, but I just felt that the characters were way too dramatic for me to take this story seriously. I understand that this is a elemental style that many comics and writers in Japan use, but I did not find that useful for this story. The ending did make me curious to what will happen in the next comic, but style itself made not want read anymore of this series again.