Summer is heating up around here, so my energy has been low. Good thing reading manga is a relatively easy job.
Anyway, I thought I saw this at the bookstore once, but, as usual, it took the series actually coming to my library for me to pick it up. The series in question is Gakkyu Hotei: School Judgment.
I have to be honest with you: when I first saw this series at the bookstore, I thought it was some sort of juvenile gag manga. I mean, little elementary school kids holding trials and delivering sentences and whatnot? In keeping with the artist being none other than Takeshi Obata of "Death Note" and "Bakuman" fame, I thought this premise sounded like something his heroes Akito and Moritaka would have come up with when they were running out of ideas for their manga!
(Bakuman fans will get that reference. If you're not one, then you are missing out.)
But this series falls more under the "mystery story/occasionally dramatic" manga umbrella, with the occasional bits of humor here and there. (Plus, said humor is much more up-front than it was in "Death Note" or "Bakuman".)
Pictured above is our (debatable) hero, Abaku Inugami, a grade-school aged defense attorney with a talent for arguing people into submission with sound logic. Needless to say, this
talent, combined with his rotten attitude, does not win him many friends outside of the courtroom.
In this world, grade school students (and possibly all school students) battle in actual courtroom trials to settle conflicts and arguments. This system was apparently brought about to curb the kind of scourges that we now face from day to day, such as bullying.
Abaku faces off against Pretty Prosecutor Pine Hanzuki, essentially a twelve-year-old Misa Amane Expy (but without the creepy stalker vibes) and her assistant Lolimatsu (a middle-aged man with creepy stalker vibes aplenty), while protecting his own mysterious past.
I've always wanted to write a mystery, and the visual format of this manga makes it easy to follow. The cases aren't even usually all that "little kiddy" like one would expect from such a manga. In the first volume alone there's peeping, the violent murder of a class pet, and we're even led into the next volume with the start of a mysterious drug case.
All the more reason not to "judge" a book by its cover. (Sorry, I'm tired!)
(Oh, and PS, before I forget: I know I usually only review manga series based on the first volume alone, but it occurs to me that I'll probably always give positive reviews with that format, as every series starts off with its best foot forward. We'll see if I can't review more actual series on a running basis from here on out, but only if you fans agree with it.
If you have any questions or comments, then go ahead and message me!)
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