Koe no Katachi created by Ooima Yoshitoki, is a very dramatic manga. What really got me into reading this wasn't really the art but the story and the characters. The main character who is also in a way the protagonist and classmates bully a girl who is deaf. Suddenly the teacher calls out the main character (Ishida) on what he has been doing and the whole class just throws him under the bus. As you can see on the last page Ishida is blacked out when they all gang up on him which I thought was appropriate for this type of scene.
Ishida is then shunned by everyone and loses all his "friendships" with people, but the deaf girl (Nishimiya) is still giving him attention. So basically the whole story flip flops and you start to feel bad for the main character. Another part of this manga I like is how Ishida portrays people in high school with red X over their faces, meaning he hates them, but you can see when he becomes friends with some one the X falls off which I thought was a neat idea.
The characters look like ordinary cartoons but the backgrounds and objects look quite realistic. The panels for the manga are set up like any other comic book, square and rectangle panels sometimes with slanted gaps.
The Manga is still on going which I'm excited for because this story can go in many directions and I recommend anyone who wants to read a dramatic story about bullying and how people live with it.
It is pretty interesting having the 'X' that signifies a character's feelings, but also see that 'X' depicted in three-dimensional space or breaking the 4th wall, making feelings -something abstract- have more solid weight.
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