Kamen Tantei Vol. #01

By Greg Hackmann     March 10, 2008
Release Date: September 13, 2006



Creative Talent
Writer/Artist:Matsuri Akino
Translated by:Mike Kiefl
Adapted by:Patrick Neighly

What They Say
A pair of young aspiring mystery writers tries to crack the most bizarre, baffling, and hilarious cases around them. But as clues often lead to a dead end, lucky for our duo, the Masked Detective always seems to show up in the nick of time to help!

In this light-hearted comedy from the creator of Petshop of Horrors, it's not always about solving the crimes--but you can be sure that the trail of evidence will lead to a hoot and a holler!


The Review
The first volume of Kamen Tantei can't decide if it wants to be goofy or serious, and ends up not doing either all that well.

Packaging:
The front-cover artwork is a little bit random: it features a full-color portrait of the titular Masked Detective, apparently drawn to look like it's on the back of a playing card. This decision is strange because, despite the manga's title, the Masked Detective is not the main character of the story, and in fact hardly even appears in much of the story at all. (Plus, if the artist really is going for a playing card motif here, I'm not exactly sure what it has to do with the story.) Haruko and Masato, the manga's actual main characters, are demoted to a small black-and-white drawing on the back of the book.

The only extra is a five-page extra chapter that goes a long way toward explaining why Masato and Haruka only hang out with each other.

Artwork:
Akino's artwork is disappointingly flat and bland. Many panels have little more than glorified line art, with only one or two chunks of the art filled in with a flat grey tone to emulate shading. Akino frequently places characters in unnatural-looking stiff poses, and he has some problems early on with keeping proportions consistent. Haruka's head in particular seems to change sizes every few pages, though the problem is greatly diminished by the third chapter or so.

As unattractive as the artwork may be sometimes, it was never bad enough to actually hinder my reading. Though it may not always be pretty, at least it's functional.

Text/SFX:
The dialog is pretty simplistic -- and sometimes unintentionally funny -- but Tokyopop's translation of it reads well enough. Tokyopop sticks with a straightforward comic-style typeface for their lettering, so the dialog's legible throughout the book. English signs are writing are translated inline, while Japanese SFX are untouched.

Contents: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
The story begins with mystery-novel buffs Masato Nishina and Haruka Akashi finding themselves on the verge of striking it big in the literature world. A publisher has taken in interest in the students' amateur mystery works, encouraging the duo to produce a more polished work for possible publication. In a case of life imitating art, the two are barely able to sit down and begin their next novel before they're interrupted by the discovery a corpse: student Atsumi Takenouchi is soon found hanging by a noose from the ceiling of an upstairs room at their high school. As close friends of the recently deceased, Masato and Haruka aren't about to entrust the situation to trained professionals. Instead, they launch their own Scooby Doo-style investigation into the apparent suicide, driven by the belief that Atsumi had no reason to take her own life.

Despite Haruka's encyclopedic obsession with mystery novels, the two can't really make any headway into the case until Masato has a run-in with Atsumi's ghost. (Did I mention that Masato can see ghosts? Yeah, that pretty much came out of nowhere in the story too.) This strange visit is followed up by another one, this time from the mysterious Masked Detective. Unlike Masato, the Masked Detective was able to get a clue out of the ghost, letting him hand Haruka and Masato the solution to the case on a silver platter. This basic pattern repeats pretty much unbroken throughout the entire collection: the two stumble on a murder or attempted murder; they fruitlessly try to finger a culprit, sometimes in spite of obvious clues that immediately give the answer away; and the Masked Detective eventually whisks in to solve the case for them.

Comments
I'm not completely sure what to make of Kamen Tantei from this first volume. It seems to be written as a love letter to the classic mystery novel, but the execution is so over the map that it's hard to pin down exactly what Akino's trying to do here. Is Kamen Tantei playing it straight, as in the first and second cases? Is it a bizarrely self-aware genre parody, like in most of the third case? Or is it a weird mix of the supernatural and the melodramatic with just a hint of mystery, such as the final case? Trying different things isn't always a bad way to go, but here Akino hops between so many different approaches and styles that none of them ever really gets a chance to sink in.

If you consider Kamen Tantei as a standard mystery, the writing just isn't up to the level it needs to really engage the reader. The mark of a good mystery story is that the reader is tempted to follow the clues for him/herself and try to solve the case before the detective does. In this sense, the stories here miss the mark completely: two of the solutions are contrived to the point of being unfair, and others are so simplistic that Haruka and Masato look like incompetent boobs for not figuring them out earlier. (The first case actually manages to do both at the same time; it's directly explained by a single clue that the reader has no way of knowing about, but which our intrepid heroes handled literally minutes before the discovery of the corpse.) The supernatural parts of the stories just feel tacked on, since the Masked Detective and ghosts of victims inevitably come to the rescue when an investigation comes to dead end, but otherwise play no real role in the story. On the bright side, the humor is decently done, though it's neglected throughout most of the manga and only plays a big part in the third chapter.

The creative peak of this volume really is this third case, where Akino generates some decent laughs by poking fun at mystery genre clichés. Unfortunately, one interesting chapter just isn't enough to offset three other half-baked ones. I don't think I'd go so far as to call Volume 1 of Kamen Tantei a bad title -- "unsatisfying" is probably a better way to put it -- but it's solidly below average and probably not of much interest to anyone besides genre fans.