Review: I"S

Shonen romance can in some ways be some of the most timeless manga, but that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be any good.

 I"S (Aizu), by Masakazu Katsura.  First published in 1997 and first published in North America in 2005.

PLOT:

Ichitaka can seemingly do nothing but pine endlessly for Iori.  Too bad that she is way out of his league.  Not only is she one of the prettiest and most popular girls in the class, but she's also an up-and-coming model and actress and Ichitaka doesn't want to be yet another creep hovering around her.  He finally gets a chance when the two are thrown together on a project for the school festival, but a childhood friend who turned into a beauty in the meantime threatens to complicate Ichitaka's feelings.

 STORY:

I"s is a very traditional shonen romance.  There's no fancy concept, no sci-fi or fantasy angle, just a teen boy too neurotic to tell a pretty girl how he feels about her.  Ironically, it's that same simplicity which turns out to be this series' biggest problem.

Well...second biggest.  The first is that nigh unpronounceable title.

I"s spends way too much time inside of Ichitaka's head.  This was also something of a problem with his previous shonen romance series, but Ichitaka takes his neurosis to new extremes.  He's prone to overthinking every little interaction, to the point where handing a girl a pencil becomes an epic endeavor and declaration of love that renders him hopeful and fretful in equal measure.  This usually renders him unable to speak (even when he needs to), and when he is capable he often unintentionally comes off as brusque and weird.  His real problem is a combination of raging teenage insecurity, a terrible tendency to put Iori on a pedestal, and a nagging fear of his own libido.  In some ways he feels more like a shojo heroine than your typical shonen manga lead, but his mindset is written so intensely that it becomes off-putting instead of sympathetic.  I often found myself wishing that we could follow Ichitaka's best friend instead, a weird-looking dude who is perfectly comfortable in his own skin and with talking to girls and thus often find himself serving as middleman between Ichitaka and Iori.

Even if Ichitaka was able to talk to his lady love, I suspect she wouldn't have much of anything interesting to add to the conversation.  If not for the model-and-actress angle, Iori would be just another boring schoolgirl.  She exists not to be a character in her own right, but as an ideal for Ichitaka (and the reader by proxy) to pine for and as a vehicle for increasingly amounts of fanservice.

The one good thing I will say for I"s is that it has patience.  Katsura is perfectly content to take his time building up Ichitaka and Iori's love story and that lends this volume a languid sort of quality.  Of course, that atmosphere is punctured once Ichitaka's friend is introduced.  In fairness, she was telegraphed pretty heavily, with Ichitaka often reminiscing about their friendship.  It's hard to say how much she'll develop over the course of the series, but the fact that she makes her first proper appearance in her underwear does not bode well for her serving as anything but the final angle for the inevitable love triangle.

ART:

Katsura was always one of the better shonen artists working in the 1990s and I"s is no exception to that.  While his characters still tend to be a bit more short and squat than the norm, they don't come off nearly as bobble-headed as the cast of Video Girl Ai.  The guys still tend to get the big goony reaction shots while the girls remain blushingly cute.  Of course, I can't blame them for blushing when this manga goes out of its way to show off their vacuum-sealed panties in loving detail at every possible opportunity.  It happens so often that the fanservice threatens to derail every single attempt I"s makes at building up any sort of romantic atmosphere.  

RATING:

While it's a bit too heavy on the fanservice and perhaps a bit too emotionally intense for some, I"s has an attention to emotional and artistic detail that makes it a slight cut above other 90s shonen romances.  While it'll never be as eye-catching or as popular as Video Girl Ai, it thankfully is better than the other shonen romance Katsura was working on that decade.

This series was published by Viz.  This series is complete with 15 volumes available.  All 15 have been published; the physical volumes are out of print, but all 15 are available digitally.