Detroit Metal City Review: Two Person Contrast

What would happen if the worlds roughest death metal band would be leaded by a wimpy guy?
In Kiminori Wakasugis Detroit Metal City, the main character, Soichi Negishi, likes Swedish pop music and dreams of a career in trendy pop band. At the same time, he is also the hottest metal band, Detroit Metal City, singer, demonic Krauser II. Devil, who certainly does not cry.

Although Negishi hates death metal and is shamed of his day job, he pulls Krauser's role as a murderous singer so effectively that among fans Krauser spuns variety of legends ie. they believe he killed his parents. The two-person contrast generates great humor, Krauser-personality of Negishi always hits on just the wrong moment. 

Art of the DMC is pretty much bad: however the series is so much humour and setting driven that the author has actually managed to make the bad art work with the manga so that it doesn't bother too much. I'd say that it's all about getting over the culture shock and getting used to the very personalized drawing.

It is a very much character driven series so it compensates a lot with the art which readers may even get to like after reading for a while: DMC indeed is very funny. It's almost weird how the sole concept of the series manages to make readers laugh, but it's such a strong mental image which makes the whole Negishi/Krauser polarity funny. Negishi constantly being in trouble with his alter-ego and his real life is always a funny thing to read. Most of the side characters and especially the fans has been so exaggerated that its hard not to find them amusing.

Being such a character driven series there really isn't a continuity, or even story for that matter: we are just given a few "guidelines" for the envirnoment in which the characters operate, but that may just be enough for series like this. I'd say that it consists similarly to detective conan of individual small stories which follow loosely a main story, or a guideline as I previously said.

 

Detroit Metal City has been published in Young Animal magazine since 2005 for 6 volumes, In August 2008 they released 12 episode OVA, and live action film.