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I started reading this manga after catching the first three episodes of the anime, which I didn't finish because I heard from others that it was abruptly ended when the studio that made it was shut down. Plus, I had heard that the manga was better, anyway.

If you were told that, don't believe the hype. It's not that good. In fact, it's mediocre. The biggest problem? Gangsta feels like the author was dying to create some gangland action manga and had a hard time coming up with anything remotely original...so decided to add a supernatural element (as in vampires)...but then realized that vampires would be ... too corny...so then invented a new type of human being that is kinda sorta supernatural (like vampires) except is called "twilights" (haha, get it? twilights?).

The manga already lost me with this premise, but I hung in there because I wanted to know the backstory behind the two main characters one of which is deaf. Afterward, I just lost interest. Basically, the manga is a generic story about a war between mafia families, needlessly complicated by this whole other angle about "twilights" and "tags." The fact that there are these new types of humans adds absolutely nothing to a generic gangland drama.

The backstory behind the twilights (all the laws, guilds, status, etc.) is are also incredibly convoluted, too horrible muddled and complicated to make it worth the effort of making sense of it all. Even the author has trouble keeping everything straight. In one scene, he explains that the twilights are called that because they have a short life. The reason? They use drugs that are so toxic that they shorten their lives, but the drugs are needed to extend their lives because otherwise they'd live a short life. I know. (I had to read that at least five times to make sure I read that correctly.)

By the time of the "twilight hunter" arc, I was done. Not only was it extremely derivative (there was a "superhero hunter" arc on One Punch Man), I just didn't care enough about the manga to continue. Besides, it's usually a bad sign when the author starts introducing a whole new bevy of side characters and subplots and veers away from the main characters. It shows he's lost interest or is wondering where to go next with the story. 3/10

What is worse than a bad manga? A manga that starts off brilliantly, and then flushes its brilliance down the toilet just as it starts getting good.

This is Diner in a nutshell. It starts off as this wickedly funny manga about a ditz named Ooba Kanako who is kind of drifting through life. She's sort of like a female Eikichi Onizuka (GTO), when he is whining in the beginning about how he has no real future prospects. When we first meet her, she is drowning in self pity and all but given up on life. Then, as fate would have it, she accidentally becomes a ... getaway driveway for a couple of robbers, and (without spoiling things too much) winds up as a waitress at a diner run by and for criminal sociopaths. Ooba finds a new lease on life, but in a fitting twist of irony, has to defend it at every turn when before she was all but ready to give it up.

The first few chapters play out funny scenarios in which Ooba keeps coming across these deadly sickos who threaten to kill her every second, (including her boss, Bonbello). I know it seems twisted to call that "funny", but by that I mean a lot of dark humor. At first, it seems as if Ooba is so dumb and clueless that she'll die at any moment, but over time, starts developing a little backbone and learns how to hold her own against her boss and all of these lunatics who keep threatening her. Plus, we meet some interesting characters along the way, particularly a guy nicknamed "Skin."

Just as Diner gets interesting, it goes south really quickly. Again, without spoiling things too much, the story shifts gears. It becomes nothing more than gore porn involving extended scenes of torture, maiming, and gruesome killings, and the story introduces a whole new set of characters that have nothing really to do with Ooba and her life at the diner. It's as if the author kind of lost interest in the manga's original premise or simply ran out of steam. Whatever the case may be, by chapter 44, "Diner" stops becoming Diner and becomes something else entirely, and you can tell that the author has started winging the series, not knowing where else to go with it.

If there's anything positive I can say about Diner, it's that the artwork is absolutely amazing. Outside of that, I wouldn't really recommend it.

Well, here's the good thing I can say about Steamboy: it's gorgeously animated and has great character designs. It's stuff like this that makes me feel that anime is the true successor to classic Disney animation, not this 3D animation garbage that's so popular now.

Okay, the bad news: the story starts off well and explores a very interesting theme of how inventions in the wrong hands can be used for evil, especially by the military. Everything goes swimmingly halfway into the movie, and then things get very confusing and hectic by the time we get to the Crystal Palace. Things go from bad to worse ... in the last act--it just goes on and on and on and on and on and on...and just when you think it's over, goes on and on and on some more until your eyes glaze over or you start looking at your watch.

Also, the grandfather character, who had started off being so cool, becomes a ridiculous figure. He spends the last half of the movie running around in rags like the Wild Man of Borneo.

So, verdict--an okay anime, just not a great one.

Ever since this manga first came out, I struggled to get through it. It's only now that I was finally able to complete it. I couldn't get past the artwork, which is both sickening and cringe-inducing. It's a bizarre mixture of different styles that don't click. Some characters are drawn in a very gritty, hyper-realistic style. Some look Disney-esque (Kawada's girlfriend=Belle from Beauty and the Beast). Some characters look like something out of the Sunday comics (Yutaka Sato). Some look straight up bishoujo. And some characters look very "Mad Magazine" (look up: Basil Wolverton, Mort Drucker and Sam Viviano).

On top of the mixture of ... cartooning styles is the bizarre mixture of cuteness and gore. Goofy characters in their death scenes will be drawn in extreme close-up and in gory detail. Imagine a "gory" closeup of a dead Donald Duck with pieces of his face missing, an eyeball popping out and exposed teeth and skull and you'll get a picture of how ridiculous some of the artwork looks at times.

Another problem with the artwork is that some of the character designs are so grotesque or ridiculous that I couldn't click with them. I was just too put off. The girl with bad acne, "Frog Boy" and the gay character were so ugly, almost troll-like. Other characters were so cartoony, I couldn't take them seriously. (The very first girl who is killed looks very "Family Guy").

One last problem with the artwork is that it seemed as if the artist forgot that the characters are supposed to be young teens. That is the whole point behind why Battle Royale is horrifying, that young, sweet innocent children are being forced to kill each other. If most of the kids look like hardened 25 year old Yakuza, juvenile delinquents or sleazy porn star veterans, where is the horror? It's the same as watching adults kill each other, so the horror is gone.

As for the story, it was better than the movie adaptation. On the other hand, there was too much gratuitous sex and violence. The gore did absolutely nothing for the story; it just cheapened whatever emotion there was to be had or made you so sick that you were more horrified by what you were seeing than sad for the character. For example, there is one sweet little girl who falls to her death, and the artist drew her with all her innards splattered all over her and her body torn apart. How can you feel sad over her death when all you feel is shock or nausea?

As for the sex scenes, there are pornographic scenes in here straight out of a hentai, one which includes rape (sigh). Ironically, the sexual abuse victim is the one who keeps being put in these scenes. It's almost as if the writer/artists were turned on by her back story of being raped as a child that they sexualized her as a teenager, even in death. Going into the manga, you will think she is the most interesting character and villain, but no--she is reduced to nothing more than cheap sexual eye candy for perverted male readers into rape fantasies and lolicon. The artist and writers didn't even try to pretend what she was; as she's dying, they made sure that the perverts got one last look at her naked body and erect nipples before she is killed off for good.

People complain about the main protagonist, but it's the main villain for me who is the worst character. He's like something out of those Freddy/Jason/Friday the 13th movies. No matter how many times he's shot, he gets right back up again as if nothing happened. There's an explanation for why he survives, but still it's too unrealistic how he keeps surviving round after round without so much as a scratch. He's drawn in a bland style, too. He's actually the least interesting looking character out of anyone in the manga--so uninteresting, in fact, that you would not know he was the main bad guy just by looking at him. I think the artist was bored with him or had run out of character designs. In any event, you'll see exactly what I mean when you see him.

All in all, Battle Royale is so-so. If you can get past the gnarly artwork, you might get something out of it. However, I don't think it's the "masterpiece" everyone has made it out to be. As for the artwork, sorry to harp so much on that but it played a large part in why I didn't enjoy the manga as much as I could have.

I'm beginning to notice an unfortunate problem with mangas. No matter how brilliant and imaginative a premise, no matter how creative, authors can never follow through on it or do its idea justice. Either they blow it with a cheap resolution or play the premise out in the most generic, tedious and cliche way possible.

Death Note is one of the worst examples of what I mean. It started off with a great idea--a high school student, Light Yagami, discovers a book that shinigamis (reapers) use to end peoples' lives with. The epitome of self-righteousness and arrogance, he decides he will play "God" and kill evil ... people. A "super detective" named "L" then goes after him.

So far, so good, right? The problem is that after Light and L meet, Death Note becomes one long tedious, repetitive and boring drumbeat of all the characters constantly contemplating what the other characters are thinking (i.e., "brain picking"). I am not exaggerating. 95% of the book is every character going for pages on end, "He thinks I'm about to do Y. But if I do X, he'll figure out that I'm onto him. So I'll do A. But then he will figure out that if I do A, he'll know that I know B, and then he'll try C. In which case..."

This "brain picking" reaches the height of the absurdity in the Yotsuba story arc. In one chapter, almost every line of dialogue contains the word, "if" several times. For example: "If Kira does A, that must mean A is true. But if Kira doesn't do A, then B is true. However, if Kira does C, then neither A or B would be true. But if C is true, doesn't that mean D is also true? No, if D is true, then F is true. But that's if Kira does A first. Otherwise, G is a possibility."


Again, it sounds like I'm exaggerating, but this is the bulk of the dialogue. It's as if the author just learned "Logic" in math class in school and was very excited to show off how much he learned.

Things get even more confusing later on because Light technically stops acting as Kira for awhile and makes other people act as Kira under his direction. So, when he joins his father's investigative team, he contemplates scenarios in front of them by giving false information about what Kira might do to cover his tracks. It then becomes a chore to make sense of what he's saying because while he does have another person acting as Kira, he is still technically Kira the entire time. No, he doesn't have the book at that point but since he's manipulating the fake Kiras, he is still technically "Kira."

This is not the least of the manga's problems. Light is a despicable character, yet we're forced to experience most of the story from his perspective. Takada and Mikami were equally as disgusting as Light, so made reading the manga even more unbearable when the two characters joined in as protagonists.

Most of the side characters were useless wastes of ink and contributed nothing to the story (like Misa and Matsuda, both annoying, stupid clutzy comic relief characters). The Euro male and female crooks who L hires to help him came out of nowhere and didn't fit the story at all. Aizawa was completely wasted as a character.

The story arc involving Mello and his motivations were convoluted. And there was no explanation as to why all the genius kids had an obsession with eating and stacking stuff. (90% of the time, Near, L and and Mello would be eating something or building things with their food.)

Lastly, the idea that teenagers and children would be the center of such a dark story is far-fetched, even for a manga. I don't care how "ingenious" a child is; there's just no way he would become an internationally famous crime fighter or be entrusted with such a difficult case.

Because of all of these issues, I disliked Death Note so much that I was this close to quitting halfway through. I forced my way through it because I hated the Light character so much I wanted to see if he'd get his comeuppance in the end. The ending wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, but slogging through so much "if...if...if..." wasn't worth it.

So all in all, a 5/10 for me, the 5 being for the great art work and character designs of the shinigamis.