Akumetsu is a story of one man. And a horde of his look-alikes who collectively become known as Akumetsu. They are a terrorist group who kill off evil politicians and people ruining the country of Japan and causing it to accumulate around 7 trillion in national debt. After an Akumetsu kills his target, he dies as well.
The story is pretty simple and is mainly divided into arcs centering around Akumetsu focusing on a certain target and killing that target (pretty much always an old, corrupt, male politician) in a flashy way so that more and more people come to know of them and they can be one step closer to fixing the country. The story can be a little repetitive at times though it always spices up each arc with some new feature (car chase, barricading his target in a room with him, etc.) Akumetsu use the idea of one man, one kill. After they kill an evil person, they die as well because the act of killing is evil in and of itself.
As far as characters go, Akumetsu is about the only important one. Side characters, even if they seem like they will be important at first maybe as a rival to Akumetsu or ally, never become important whatsoever. At most they will pop up from time to time to show how someone with conflicting views on Akumetsu's approach to evil is reacting. The targeted people in each arc get more time spent being focused on than any character who actually survives for more than one arc. Akumetsu, as is shown early on to the reader, is a high school boy named Shou. He is a goofy, geeky, and extremely likable boy that no one around him would ever expect to be a murderer. He is really the only important character overall and gets plenty of development. Unfortunately he suffers from many problems with the biggest problem for me being that his backstory and how Akumetsu began and functions as an organization doesn't even get explained until about 100 chapters into the story. While it does work kind of well on keeping you wanting to know more about the story, that is a huge part of the story and really the only thing that wasn't made clear about how the story would go from early on. The Akumetsu are perfect at nearly everything they do. This relieves any tension the reader has that Akumetsu may fail (aside from only two parts of the story where things don't go as planned). This does still leave you wondering how Akumetsu will actually murder his target which is the main appeal of the story.
As for the art, I'm very mixed on my opinion of it. While it does look very well done for a weekly manga, it suffers from one big problem. It stereotypes things. The evil targets of Akumetsu are always old, disgusting men. Even the one time high school kids are shown shortly to have different views than everyone else, they are shown as disgusting looking people. The good people are not ugly whether they are old or not. However I did like how most of the evil people are created after real people who do look somewhat similar to their manga counterparts (albeit less over-the-top ugly). Still, the art has a very nice look to it aside from this with a style that reminds me more of western superhero comics than Japanese manga. It's got a bit of Batman-like style if you took the superpowered villains out of Batman and replaced them with corrupt politicians.
Despite my problems with Akumetsu, I did enjoy it. It can be very wordy at times about how politics work, and for someone who's not from Japan, can be confusing at times. Still, I found it read fairly quickly and was quite enjoyable especially during the more action packed scenes. In the end, it was well worth the read. Especially if you are interested in political or superhero stories, I recommend reading Akumetsu. Still, if you are looking for a story with a great character cast or an easy-to-understand conflict (one that doesn't involve complicated political views), then I would not recommend it.
