Bomber Girl

Genre: Action/Comedy
Length: 1 Volume
Allegiance: Gutsoon! Entertainment
Mangaka: Niwano Makoto
Vintage: 2003
Intelligence Agency Report by: I
Kurosaki Guy is a member of the crime-abolishing police force S.T.A.D. to avenge the death of his older brother, Joe. Rashomon Emi is a beautiful, busty, deadly freelance bounty hunter who hunts and mangles her targets for fun and profit and has become the bane of S.T.A.D. When Emi moves in next door to Guy, they decide to overlook their differences and work together to foil the plans of Megalith, Tokyo’s most dangerous terrorist organization. As they fight kooky villains and make new allies, Guy starts to fall for Emi and they get closer to meeting the leader of Megalith, the feared Zayin.

Research Agent Report by: I 
Plot
Characters
Impact
Visual
4.75
5.50
2.00
7.00
Overall 5.25
(not an average)
There are many different manga being published today: some are modern classics, some are so boring that you’d rather memorize an instruction manual than read any further, some are nothing more than mindlessly fun reads, and some are so generic that you wonder why someone even bothered to waste time coming up with it. Bomber Girl fits into the last category; it’s a gaudy little manga made for nothing more than wasting time and forcing out a few strained laughs.Plot and characters are the heart and soul of a story; without an involving plot or interesting characters a manga is sure to fail. Bomber Girl barely manages to cover the bare essentials with its characters and its plot could have easily been an accident of catastrophic proportions had it been any worse. Every single character in Bomber Girl is a stereotype: there’s the valiant hero, the sensual but insensitive ass-kicking heroine, kooky villains, and even a kiss-up sidekick. They are mildly entertaining at best; all their value lies in how much fun can be poked at them, as no emotional attachment could be forged with any of them. The only character that shows any promise of serious development, Guy, ends up following the rest of the characters into the realm of tacky potty humor. Combine these already mediocre characters with a near train wreck of a plot, and you have a horrible manga. The actual premise of the plot wasn’t as bad as how it was executed; the first half of the book is too villain-of-the-week-ish, jokes sweep away any serious atmosphere the author may have wanted to evoke, and the end is ridiculous. It’s hard to tell whether the story is resolved or not; if it was, it was resolved all too easily. Why did I have to read this manga and watch Emi go through entire chapters devoted to fighting the arch villain’s lackeys when she defeats the actual arch villain within two pages? Furthermore, the relationship between Guy and Emi isn’t thoroughly processed. The end had to be the weakest point of the entire manga. Once in a while, bad manga can be tolerated if only to see the magnificent visuals the artists used for their stories; this is not the case in Bomber Girl. With inconsistent artwork from panel to panel, a mediocre style, and average character designs, Bomber Girl’s artwork is easily forgettable. Now, most manga are a bit inconsistent in the first couple of chapters when the harder bits, like characters’ faces, are concerned, but Bomber Girl continues its inconsistent artwork all through the story. Most of the character designs are fairly forgettable and typical, and the costume designs consist of random fashion mistakes thrown together in a haphazard clutter as if Makoto-san decided that they may accidentally arrange themselves into dandy little outfits just for his manga. There was also entirely too much fan service in this manga. The only truly positive thing that can be said about Bomber Girl’s artwork is that it has quite nice page layouts; the panels flow into each other very well without being too artsy or resigning to simple boxes. This makes for very smooth page-viewing, if you can overlook the inconsistent, tacky artwork. 

So please, go and read the other manga titles with the interest level of an instruction booklet; they might at least have good artwork. Read the fun little manga which serve as nothing more than mindless entertainment; they may have better characters than this. By all means, go straight to the modern classics because they’re, well, modern classics. But please, please don’t waste your time with this book. There’s so much better out there.