Roadsong Mini Review (North American manga)
September 19th, 2007 by Nothayama
PG-16 for some sexuality, people dying, girls in underwear, and maybe some language; official series website
There’s nothing obviously wrong with this OEL manga–the buddy-comedy storyline is solid with lots of room for humor and drama, the art is attractive, the writing is decent. The problem with it is that the entire comic suffers from a complete lack of subtlety. For a comic that should be driven by the personalities of its two leads, they both seem more like caricatures than real people. The villains are ridiculous instead of scary, the side characters are all one-note stereotypes, and the story they populate is just a little too exaggerated to be believable. The art doesn’t help matters with its zany facial expressions and flamboyant posing–where the art could be helping the script to create actual emotion or humor, it instead hits you over the head and practically begs you to laugh at whatever vaguely funny thing is occurring. This isn’t an actively bad comic, just aggressively mediocre.
Initial impression: Don’t bother. (NotHayama)
Everything you said is unfortunatly true, but I has potential. To be honest, the style is more American cartoon styled than manga, everyone overreacts, and the characters are a bit over emotional, but if you gave it some time, I think it could develop into a great manga. The plot is really good, the main characters are contridicting (which is a good thing), and there is a defined goal to accomplish, so I think it can get better.