Over the years, I've purchased manga where the plot and characters seemed so remarkably like other things I already owned, I "paid them forward" (literally, since I "sell" to Bullmoose for shopping dollars).On occasion, I have purchased manga that were right on the edge. My reaction was, Hmmm, I've read this before; HOWEVER . . .
What creates the "however"?
Intriguing Secrets by Rize Shinba appears on the surface to be like every other story-about-teens-falling-in-love-in-high-school-by-joining-or-skipping-clubs.
If you've read Only the Ring Finger Knows, haven't you more or less conquered that entire genre?
Intriguing Secrets stood out for me for good character development, decent art, but mostly for the lack of melodrama.
Sure there's melodrama, but the melodrama is confined to ordinary human-being melodrama. Cut by Toko Kawai, which I also own, is Melodrama with a capital M: dead parents, crazy parents, abusive parents. It's John Hughes on steroids (and quite good, actually).
Intriguing Secrets is impressive precisely because it isn't like that. The tone is quiet, more Only Yesterday than Voices of a Distant Star (both also very good).And the denouement, in which the art is actually paid off, is quite clever.
Your Love Sickness by Hayate Kuku--okay, I had to wait so long for it to become available on Amazon at a normal, non-"collectible" price, I'm never letting it out of my hands.
Has the animal/spirits/human forms/temple milieu been done before?
Yes.
In this case, the tongue-in-cheek art makes the volume a keeper.
So that's that.
