Boogiepop Doesn’t Laugh 2

Okay, you get this, then you get 6 volumes of HanaKimi and at least 4 volumes of DN Angel, maybe 5 if I can read another tonight.  I’m gonna flood the front page with two series, sorry.

I had the second volume of this sitting around forever.  I should’ve just read it since it was the end of the series, but I was pretty disappointed by the first.  The second wasn’t really much better.  It was almost a direct retelling of the novel, except it’s easier to read the novel and understand what’s going on.  Granted, you’re not supposed to entirely understand the story, but the manga left a few more things out than the novel.

Really, I already wrote about the content when I talked about the first Boogiepop novel.  If you are just dying to see what I thought to know if you should rush out and buy it, then read that one.  I had kind of thought (and maybe because it WAS mentioned somewhere) that the manga was an alternate retelling of the story, but it’s nearly verbatim.

Perhaps everything did make sense in the manga, though.  It’s hard for me to tell since I read the novel first and already knew the plot.  The story’s still excellent, but the art’s not good enough to warrant a retelling in this fashion.  Granted, I like Kadono’s color illustrations plenty, we get a ton of them at the beginning of this volume.  The black and white art is pretty okay too, and I kind of like the sketchy, almost painterly style he has, but it’s also pretty empty, and kind of plain as far as action goes.  He’s definitely an illustrator before a manga artist, and it kind of shows, but if you haven’t read the book, the manga will do just fine for the story… though I would say read the book, because the story is excellent and there’s plenty in the book that wasn’t included in the manga.

There was nothing particularly BAD about the manga, the novel is just far superior, and it feels like I got nothing out of the manga after reading the novel first.

Boogiepop Doesn’t Laugh 1

I was less impressed with this manga. The novel was so good, and I ran out and bought this right after I finished it because I heard there was new content. Well… there’s not, really. It’s awesome, and Seven Seas gave it the royal treatment, but I felt like there wasn’t much point in me reading the manga right after the book. A lot of the text was verbatum from the book, and the visuals were… pretty much like I had imagined, particularly since the artist who did this was the same one who illustrated the book, so you don’t even really get a re-envisioning of the characters. But it’s pretty cool, all the same. It starts off with a really intense scene in the color pages, and I liked that a lot.

At least it’s only two volumes long I guess, but it does make me reconsider the Boogiepop Dual manga.