Bakuman – 13

Merry Christmas, everyone. Bakuman’s thirteenth episode probably isn’t the best way to celebrate it with, but at least things are slowly getting more interesting. The show may be slow, but at least you can say that every episode so far has progressed the plot. This episode was all about the main characters’ debut into the NEXT magazine, the introduction of Shounen JumpJack’s rating system and Moritaka and Miho finally start exchanging mails with each other.

I’ve heard from a lot of manga readers that the rivalry between our lead characters and Eiji Nizuma is supposed to be very good. In this episode I caught my first glimpse of interest in this. It finally introduces a bit of tension between their manga with the rating system. The differences are thankfully made not too big like you see in some shounen series, and if developed well and interestingly it definitely has potential.

Now that thirteen episodes have passed, the big picture of Bakuman is mostly unremarkable: it’s enjoyable, but nothing has caught my interest yet. Considering how this series might even go beyond fifty episodes, I guess that it’s excused from taking things easy here, but at the same time it is rare for a long series to not include any kind of hook whatsoever in its first season. Take a look at Hikaru no Go, which had some amazing first episodes to gain momentum, or Glass Mask, which already had very compelling characters right from the start. Even the World Masterpiece Theatre series, notorious for being slow, had already done something major at this point.

There have been series like this, though: which took their time and didn’t do anything major for their first thirteen episodes, most notably Touch and Maison Ikkoku, who instead depended on their long-term character development and twists that happened later on in the series. At this point, Bakuman is still miles away from those series, but at the same time it’s also not bad or annoying, like how a lot of shounen series start out that promise to get better later on.

On a completely different note: next week will be new year’s hiatus, so there’s not going to be an episode. After that, I hope that the creators are going to switch to a new OP because the current one is getting obnoxious.
Rating: * (Good)