Best of March 2025

All comics below are read from Right to Left.

Star of Beethoven Chapter 7

I originally wrote a review for the debut chapter of this series, but I was being so negative throughout that I canned it. We get enough gloom in the world without adding to it unnecessarily. To summarise how the blog was written, I wasn’t at all convinced that so soon after a previous musical failure “PPPPPP” that this series could do much different. PPPPPP was a series that also appeared in Shonen Jump, and though it had promise, didn’t survive the cut after 70 chapters or so. I felt that, a weekly comic that has no sound at all could never really translate musical performance very well. PPPPPP seemed to survive for longer than most axed series, but it was relying on its ability to use what we see in our minds when we hear music to keep us invested… eventually becoming a bit too abstract to maintain an audience without meaningful character drama to attach ourselves to.

This chapter however, unless I’m internalising too much, appeared to be aimed directly at critics such as myself, and it softened me up more than a little bit:

I think that it was probably a little unfair to be this judgemental too. While I wouldn’t say I’ve been convinced that this series has what it takes to survive, the hang ups of PPPPPP didn’t result in immediate cancellation either, it instead died a very slow death while the author struggled to write stories that held and conveyed all the emotional heavy lifting that the character drama would have to do in absence of the music.

Star of Beethoven plays into its circumstantial oddity to assist with the soundless wall it must climb. Beethoven comes back from the dead to help a struggling pianist who gave up simply for coming second in a competition. This particular chapter provides some drama with the main character’s entrance exam, whilst finally hooking the audience with a group of (secret service looking) people who could be potentially responsible for the music legend’s revival… if the man truly is who he says/ thinks he is.

DanDaDan Chapter 184

It’s a genuinely brutal scene, seeing Aira's head being dribbled like a basketball in the last panel, but the impact and the 2 blended frame motion really sells the fact that their head really is being dribbled like a basketball. I can sort of hear that last panel echo through the gym with the same sound effect that basketballs themselves make. Dadadan is one of those series where I feel like I can practically animate the panels in my head to enhance them even more despite their currently still nature.

While it’d be monstrous to say I enjoy a scene such as this, just like in any battle focused comic, I feel the artists is selling both the impacts and tension of each and every moment, and the more observant of you will notice that not a single sound effect is used to do this, it’s all being sold on the visuals alone.

Akane Banashi is my favourite series in shonen jump right now. I consistently save it for last whenever it appears in the publication. Shoumei is a man of precision, and a great parallel to Akane when it comes to the lofty weights we may place on our shoulders when we tell ourselves we are going to excel in a given profession. The visual consistency and pay off between chapters 151 and 152 are what made this particular moment such an easy pick for me. From the chapter cover, to Shoumei’s entrance, and to the performance itself, we are given clockwork imagery inline with his precision.

Alongside side this chapter’s release I’ve been reading “Be Funny or Die” by Joel Morris, which illustrates the importance of timing in comedy akin to the same weight it holds in music; I feel that even if these two events hadn’t aligned so perfectly that I would have still appreciated this as a moment in the series ongoing excellence. It’s hard to come across series in shonen jump that will use imagery in this way, as an abstract metaphor for how structured a character is.

I do wonder if this would be possible on this scale weekly if it wasn’t a writing duo involved. The more I observe the progress of this story, the more we see that it’s allowed the freedom to be just that little bit more refined than a lot of the other series; that Yuki Suenaga can really give the story structure, and then that Takamasa Moue then has time to walk around inside of it and find what it makes them feel and wish to extract from it all visually, is something I’m very thankful for when I visit the publication for yet another Sunday afternoon.

Conclusion

I don’t think I’m too late with this one, but things have been very busy lately. I spent a lot of this month trying to narrow down all the moments that caught my eye, and I wanted to also tighten my rambling up a little too. I feel like we managed that, but next month… or as it now stands this month, I plan to change things up a tiny bit again, and try and highlight what happened in a given week so that we can see how things stack in a bit more detail.

As always thank you for reading, and I should hopefully have another blog in the form of a video a little later this month.