Crows

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Crows is about Bouya Harumichi, a second-year transfered to Suzuran, a highschool full of delinquants. By becoming the number one of the school, he meet others gangs from other highschools.

It is a very fresh story, and even if its clasified as a shounen, it is more a seinen, as you can see blodd, and thematics like death are seen. It has the same style as GTO ( and if you haven't read GTO, do it !), with epic fights, friendship and lot, lot of stupid gags.

Story: 8/10 It is mostly cut in little parts, but every one of those is linked with the next ... one. It's well built, and even if Bouya is the main character, most of the others are seen because of the impact of their gang action on Bouya's life.

Art: 8/10 Well draw, and fights are very beautiful and easy to follow

Characters : 10/10 They all have a personnality, and are well disagned. You can feel a lot of empathy for some, and even want to become friend with them, as if you are in their gang. They are all different, and you can really feel their feelings.

Enjoyment 10/10 It is only my opinion, but this manga really enjoyed me, as I like GTO a lot, it is quite the same humoristic tone, and I really like this rock'n roll style, with bikes and pompadour. Alson, I love streets fights a lot ^_^

Overall: 9/10 READ IT ! Note that, if you prefer watching anime, or just want to make an opinion of it, there is a 3-episodes OAV that tell just the first chapters.

See ya!

it's amazing how 'Crows' doesn't try to be complex but ends up having its moments like that. The story may seem silly, but within the general context it is quite good, the author fulfills what he promises to do, he promises to make a good manga for criminals and he delivers it. Not much to say about this work, it is consistent, all arcs are well structured, the fights are well done and fair, the protagonist has his motivations and is very charismatic, drama is not difficult to understand and how I said before it works and delivers what it promises. It's definitely my favorite ... delinquent manga, because of the characters, almost all the characters in this work are quite charismatic.

TL:DR
Bad fights, repetitive plot, boring characters. Don't bother with this manga. At least there's good art

Story: 4/10
The manga has the same basic structure that it repeats endlessly:
enemy introduced > defeats previous enemies (now allies) to prove how strong they are > main character destroys them > they are now allies
This is basically covers the entire manga. They do this for nearly every single antagonist that Harumichi faces. Sometimes they focus a little more in the allies but ultimately it's the same every time.

The fights are extremely formulaic too. Harumichi starts out clearly losing, barely getting a hit in. Then, no matter how injured he is, ... he just suddenly decides he wants to win now and then does so effortlessly. Any fights not involving Harumichi are abridged with the author often just skipping to who wins with no view as to how they won or how the fight actually went. Funnily enough, Harumichi's boring battles seem to be the only ones that are shown in full and even that's not a guarantee. This is an insane decision for a manga based around fighting. There's this one fight were the manga just skips the fight and then just refuses to tell us who the winner was (let alone show us!). Why include this stuff if you think it's so unimportant? There are so many fights between characters that are just skipped, fights that could actually be interesting. This manga is a constant disappointment where it brushes past any combat that would be interesting or build up the rest of the cast in favour of giving us yet another scene of our Mary Sue protagonist Harumichi effortlessly dominating his opponent in the least fun way possible.

Our protagonist begins the manga as the strongest guy and ends it the same way. He loses a fair fight exactly once, and rarely loses a wildly unfair fight anyway. He's boring. Why should I care about anything when Harumichi ex Machina will come in and beat the bad guy effortlessly.

This leads to an obvious issue: how strong are any of the characters? They all lose the exact same to the next weeks villains and that guy all loses to the same to Harumichi. The strength of the characters are completely arbitrary, however much they need to be restart the cycle. It's not like anyone actually changes in strength in the manga, everyone ends it just as they started so nothing actually matters. Harumichi is always stronger than his opponent. Sometimes he wins effortlessly, sometimes he wins with a little difficulty but he always wins. He never has difficulty with anything, he never has to struggle, he never tries to improve, he never has to overcome anything. Why is he even here? Why Should I care about anything he does?

There are a lot of interesting concepts like gang alliance politics but nothing is done with it. Even in fights there are never any consequences. Every character goes down the same, gets the stuffing kicked out of them and then returns in a chapter or two like nothing happens. The most someone suffers is in a bloody car crash that comes out of nowhere and is unrelated to anything happening in the plot, what little of it there is. Now, I'm not saying someone needs to be crippled or anything so grim but there needs to be something or all fights are just pointless. Maybe someone gets depressed when they fail, maybe someone needs to train, to think about their flaws and what they need to overcome. But there's none of this, they just fight seemingly for the fun of it and never grow, forgetting it the second the fights over.

Which leads nicely into my next point, I have no idea why anyone does anything in this manga. Motivations are rarely given for why these fights are happening. These guys aren't committing crimes, they're not making money. The ‘gangs’ of this manga are essentially just groups of friends. Why the hell are they fighting so much? What do they gain from this? Again, I'm not saying that it needs to be something grand, “Holyland” (a manga with a similar premise but much more serious) has purely personal motivations and it's fantastic. Crows provides no reason to care about anything happening, why should I care about wins or losses when the most that's at risk is children's egos being bruised?

The manga never seriously interrogates what it means to be in a gang, what the consequences may be, what the mentality of a young gangster is. The characters are big fish delinquents in the small pond of school with no academic abilities and no real futures that they're working towards. they're in gangs that are basically school clubs and they fight constantly with no real purpose. There are no themes for the reader to grapple with. Things just sort of happen without rhymes nor reason.

In short: nothing of consequence happens, nothing interesting happens and anything that gets close is skipped over.

However there one thing that I will compliment the manga for, the manga gives time for the characters to think about what they're going to do after school, after they leave their gangs and enter adulthood. It's an interesting angle to end a delinquent manga on what the characters do to stop being delinquents.

Character: 3/10
Our main character, Harumuchi, is badly written. He is at his peak in the beginning of the manga and only gets greater with out ever earning it. He has no flaws he needs to overcome. He never has to change and so he doesn't. He has no goals to work towards. He's not really funny and he's not fun to read about because he's mostly just an asshole and not in a fun way.. He's a complete void of charisma. It's clear the author understood this seeing as he barely gets screen time or dialogue outside of finishing a fight. In the latter half, he's pushed to the side in favour of other characters who are frankly much more interesting.

The side cast is somewhat better. There are some interesting characters and they're fun to read when the author deigns to give them time to shine which is unfortunately not often enough. There is a large cast of reoccurring characters and the screen time is split between them and the one-off characters. This means the cast is never given enough time to be developed. Honestly, many of the side cast would be much more interesting protagonists than what we got with Harumichi if the author tried to develop their characters.

Art
The only thing I will compliment in the manga is the art. It's fantastic, fights are explosive, hits carry real weight. Panelling is excellent and it's effortless to follow the action.

The characters are well designed and distinct. For the most part anyway, a few of the minor characters are hard to distinguish but it doesn't negatively affect the reading experience. The characters are bad ass or goofy as needed and it's easy to see how strong a character is just at a glance.

No complaints on this front.

Overall: 3/10
“Crows” was worse than a boring read, it feels like the author is actively trying to disappoint me. Whenever something threatens to be interesting, it's skipped over and/or Harumichi just comes and does all the work with out having to overcome any real challenges. There is never any motivation to do anything so the events of the manga don't hold any weight.

The characters are 2-dimensional archetypes and never change. They are mostly just boring.

The worst sin of all: the fights are bad. This is killer for a delinquent manga.

Don't read this manga.