A friend convinced me to try Manga for the first time. I tried Uzumaki because I’ve heard great things. But I don’t see the appeal, is there any hope left?

Had this on my shelf for a while because a friend convinced me to read a manga for the first time. I thought who better than a highly awarded man who has successfully permeated the genre into literary main stream. I ended up rating this 1 star out of 5 unfortunately.

The art did in fact exceed my expectations, but my God was the story awful. In fact, there’s not really a story at all. It’s a collection of a bunch of ~30 page monster of the week stories (with each one only taking a few minutes to complete with often less than even 10 text boxes per page.) And in each story the author attempted to put in a pretty surface level extended metaphor that represents the story.

But a plot just isn’t there, every time the monster of the week is defeated, literally nothing happens. Nobody in the town learns anything, the MC still refuses to leave, they still question each other if they’re crazy about believing there’s a curse (after seeing a child turn into a snail before their eyes I might add.) literally nothing happens. The only character that changes ever so slightly is the MCs love interest, who slowly grows dark bags under his eyes as he’s just gettin sick of this, cool.

I truly believe this book would not change if the MC was some new random town person each chapter, and the new person saw the monster of the week, it’s that trivial. And by the end, when the author tries to string 2-4 chapters together with a coherent story, I have no reason to care about the characters. Then there’s like 3 text boxes trying to explain what happened ala At the Mountains of Madness, and the final body horror happens. Hilariously, this same ending panel body horror, the big build up of the entire novel, already happened to one of the weekly monsters at the start of the book! The same thing, the big ending I’ve already seen with two other characters.

There’s so much more I can say about this, like how all horror leaves your system when you see gangsters with aviation goggles zipping around hilariously, if it hadn’t left already, but I digress.

I cannot give this book more that one star because of the art, because the truth is reading the actual book gave me nothing more than just looking at the best panels on the internet would have. If you don’t actually need to read the book, that’s one star.

Maybe in the end this genre just isn’t for me, maybe I can’t get enough out of it missing prose, or maybe it’s just because everyone thinks his writing is bad and they read it for the horror, which I didn’t find scary? Idk if there is another avenue I should try in this medium, I’m not too well versed.