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Reviewed by Ysabet Reinhardt MacFarlane Takami is tall, attractive and funny. But when one more guy she was interested in dumps her, she's at her wit's end to figure out what she's doing wrong. Maybe it's because she's interested in the wrong kind of guys--boys who want their girlfriends to act more "girly" than Takami. So she turns to her musical prodigy friend Akira for support. They've known each other since they started taking piano lessons as kids. Will their long time connection develop into something more than friendship? Venus Capriccio is Mai Nishikata's first published manga volume, and its plot, as outlined in the back cover copy, is fairly standard shoujo fare. But there's a lot to like in here: Takami is a tomboy heroine, but not inflexibly so, and while Akira doesn't push back aggressively when people tease him for his pretty looks, he's also not passive or unable to speak up. Both of them act against the usual gender roles, but in a fairly relaxed "what you see is what you get and it's your loss if you don't like it" way, rather than stressing about it. It's also nice to see that they're both very comfortable with Akira being a piano prodigy and Takami being perfectly average, without either of them thinking less of her for it. There are some challenges for them to face, of course, but they're believable instead of blown all out of proportion. Other people are interested in Akira, and Takami herself isn't really sure how she feels about him--after all, he's two years younger than her, and she thinks of him more as a little sister than a brother. (Akira has remarkable equanimity about this, given that he's not at all subtle about letting her know how he feels about her.) Visually, Nishikata's style noticeably improves over the course of this first volume (although the art isn't bad to begin with), which makes me think that later volumes will be even more attractive. Overall, this debut volume didn't blow me away, but it has promise. Volume 1 of Venus Capriccio includes brief character profiles and two pages of role-reversal bonus manga. Review copy provided by CMX. Comment on this review of Venus Capriccio v1 on the Manga Life Forums. |
6 October 2009
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