Nothing. I'm in self-isolation for about a month now, I'll review a rock at this point, Jesus Christ.
Zipman!! was written by mangaka Yuusaku Shibata and was released in the first edition of Weekly Shounen Jump in 2020, and by that I mean it was released in December of 2019, but they say it's issue #1 of 2020, I don't really get it either. Generally these manga don't really get any kind of "hype" or big promotion behind them unless it's by a very successful mangaka like Samurai 8 by Kishimoto and now Burn the Witch by Kubo. So they're kinda dependent of the buzz that their initial chapter creates and, in all fairness, Zipman!! did create a decent share of buzz, so lets check out why.
At first glance you can tell why this caught the attention of people. It's My Hero Academia! Well, not exactly, but it's super hero themed and the art is very similar to our favorite ongoing super-hero themed weekly manga from Shounen Jump that isn't written by ONE. Now, this is easily explained, the mangaka worked as an assistant for MHA and it's not totally unheard for people to have similar drawing styles to their mentor. I'd be more mad at it if the author had the style, but not the quality, but he does! Sure, it's not yet at the level of Horikoshi, but Horikoshi has some of the highest quality in artstyle that I've ever seen in a weekly release. Shibata isn't as good, but no question about it, he is good. The character designs of the characters are very appealing, the robots throughout the series look pretty great and the double spreads almost make this worth a skim, but the art isn't the only thing to a manga.
To begin with, this manga to survive already needs to establish that it's different enough from MHA that makes it worth staying alive in the same magazine, specially with how rutheless Jump is with their cancellations. But to give credit to Zipman!!, Zipman!! isn't really a rip-off of MHA, but rather a callback to shows like Ultraman and Kamen Rider.
It all starts with our hero, Tatara Kaname, a avid fan of super-hero shows, trying to get cast as an actor for the show Jackman, one he's been a fan since child, and Kaname has all the moves for the job, he's a bonafied action movie actor, but he's missing on a key point, his face being ultra scary, which makes him get the role as a villain, but he declines and goes back to mourn his dead twin brother.
Look, there's a lot to unpack here, I'm sorry.
Things go awry when he gets a message from his dead brother to meet him, while at the same time that a giant robot starts attacking the town, I said there's a lot to unpack. At the spot, Kaname finds a robot suit that enables him to fight and destroy the robot. The first chapter ends with the reveal that the dead brother's conscience is trapped inside the robot.
It was an alright chapter, it had a lot, even more than the things I mentioned, including a love interest, but it was around 50 pages long and the pacing was quite decent, when I finished reading it though, I wasn't sure it was enough to avoid cancellation, but it had people talking about it, so maybe I was wrong.
The next couple of chapters were alright, they followed an episodic premise of evil robot appears, our hero pops up and beats them, plus, it had the Megaman thing in which the hero actually got a power-up from the enemy. I think that last point could be enough for some interesting battles going forward, but it seemed like the power-up was always just a different kind of punch, so it didn't really add much to the story. It seemed alright for people who like those kinds of shows, which seems to be quite famous in Japan, but it quickly got stale.
After some chapters of this we got into bigger arcs and this is when the manga felt flat for real, the pacing moved incredibly fast, the story became incredibly confusing, despite the actually simple plot, and it was all just a big mess.
It felt like the author had got bored. After that arc, we got a time-skip, which time-skips at chapter 13 or 14 are red alerts that this manga is about to be discarded. Weirdly enough, the pacing of this arc actually felt better than the previous one, if you ignore all the unexplained developments, like the love interest girl now has a robot suit as well, okay, cool, why not? But a better pacing is pretty much the best compliment I can throw at this. I was never much invested in this story, and after skipping all of the character development, there was even less reason to care.
With a story that went from okay, to stale, to a big mess to a overall meh, there's not much reason to justify recommending this manga to anyone. It felt pretty bland throughout. The good point here is the art, which I do want to see more, even if Shibata ends up only doing art for another writer.
