Bakuman Review: Thorough Explanation on Making of Manga

Bakuman tells us a story of Moritaka Mashiro and Akito Takagi. Mashiro is a promising artist and Takagi is a aspiring young man who wants to combine his skill of inventing good story and Mashiros skills with making art. Combining their skills they plan to make manga so popular that it would eventually be adapted into an anime. Mashiro made a pact with a girl that he likes that when his manga will be made anime he will marry that her.

The idea of Bakuman sounds absolutely boring, but it isn't anything like that. In my case the interest to this manga comes from the interesting ideas that Mashiro and Takagi make as they learn and thrive to be manga authors. As a great bonus this manga introduces to people how making manga actually works and shows us what kind of stuff goes on on the background of the most popular mangas. It also shows us some of the harsh reality that goes on: making manga is one of those career choices that are very risky, if you manage to make excellent series you may hit big, but theres always a great chance for that not happening. There's also lot of hints how some of the things in Bakuman actually have real life inspiration: I wouldn't be surprised if the story of Mashiro and Takagi are very much like the authors were in real life.

Art of Bakuman is good/very good: even though there are not flashy battles every intention that Bakuman wants to show to the reader is relied with great visuality.

The characters, basically meaning Mashiro and Takagi are likeable. However even they are staying in the background while the whole concept of making manga is one the front side: The characters of Bakuman mostly just work as a story tellers how the manga industry works, but in a interesting way which is always a good thing.

The story of Bakuman is the leading aspect of the series and I'm not talking about the marriage promise between Mashiro and the her girl as that's only an excuse for the authors to focus on the stuff that tells us about making manga. If all the information about manga industry may bore the reader there's always the ideas for new mangas that Mashiro and Takagi make up which brings up the enjoyability to whole new level. It's pretty exciting to read of them making up some new interesting ideas and implementing them into drawings. Some of the "series" that are presented in Bakuman I'd like to read, but that most likely won't happen.

Conlusion: Bakuman is an interesting manga. You shouldn't expect some great story line, but just an explanation how the manga industry work in a way that actually interests people. You can think that reading an article from a magazine about the industry wouldn't really interest anyone, but the authors managed to spin a story around it and make it so that people actually want to read about it.