Boys Next Door Reviews

Rating: ♦♦

From what I gather, the Café Kichijoui manga is based off of a radio series. I’m not sure how well it worked on the radio, but it really doesn’t translate well to print.

We’ve got a collection of pretty boys, one with super strength, one with scary voodoo powers, one who’s uber-pretty, one who’s uber-poor, and one who’s a klutz. Oh, and a cat. Don’t forget the owner who, by all rights, should have fired these miscreants by now. Top those off with a collection of eccentric customers and you’ve got something that sounds pretty good, right?

It all goes together about as well as an bull in a china shop - literally.

It’s just a collection of vignettes designed to be slightly humorous, to draw the boys being pretty or cute and are very loosely strung together by the thread of running a café.

There are parts that are mildly amusing, and I can see it appealing to the fans that thought that the robot panda in the Gravitation series was the height of hilarity, but it just didn’t do it for me.

Aside from all of that, much love to DMP for the quality of the presentation. The book comes with a full-color, fold-out game that kind of sets up the style of humor found within. It’s a nice touch and, as always, DMP impresses with their oversized books and their dust covers. I just wish there were more substance to the story to comment on.

Rating: ♦♦

So, here we go again with another series of madcap adventures. Maybe I’m just mellowing out this week, but I’m not quite as cranky with this series as I was before. Keep in mind that I still really don’t like it, but it does have a few cute points.

I did enjoy the story about the little girl who gets lost and ends up turning the café upside down and making the boys slightly more crazy for an afternoon, and I was really quite fond of the story about Toku and the fact that because he’s so clumsy that he never has any money. (Almost all of his paycheck goes to paying for the dishes and crockery he breaks.) The running joke is that because Toku is so poor, the hamsters that he has as pets are his emergency rations.

So, poor Toku goes home one day to find that a neighborhood cat has gotten in to the emergency rations, er, pets. Toku rescues the hamsters from the cat and spends all of his tiny paycheck on vet bills. It’s not much of a plot, but it’s cute.

I think Toku is really my favorite character; well, aside from the scary voodoo boy. I like him too. He’s creepy.

Aside from all my bitching, the series is really well drawn. That really doesn’t make up for the lack of a cohesive plot, but I’ll take what I can get at this point.

It’s cute for about five minutes, but it’s really not something that sticks with you. This is definitely a series I would flip through in a bookstore or borrow from the library. There’s just not enough plot between the moments of cuteness to hold my attention.