The big horror reveal starts on page 8. Literally page 8. We don't know anything about these characters yet, we don't know their personalities and we don't know their dynamics, and yet we're supposed to immediately care that this happened to one of them? Higurashi, possibly the best horror manga/anime/VN to exist, spends like a full episode following the main characters doing dumb stuff before anything starts to go wrong. In Madoka that's THREE episodes. And this manga does it in 8 pages. Like why. It doesn't work. It sucks.
The 8 pages are poorly spent too. The characters were not "introduced." They don't have that big panel where it's just them and their names and as readers we aren't properly introduced to the characters, so everything ends up feeling very abrupt. The dialog is useless small talk. Like you might want useless small talk sometimes (even though you'd better make that interesting, in which case, this small talk doesn't meet that requirement either) but this is the beginning of your manga!! Make your dialog count. The beginning pages are rushed but also meandering. It's crazy.
Is this what manga is becoming now? Is modern manga so terrified that it cannot even hold 7 pages worth of reader attention and so it must start going in on its premise on page 8? That kind of anxiety is off-putting. It reeks of inexperience.
Even past these pages this manga is plagued with similar storytelling problems. It doesn't understand basic pace. Why spend so many panels and page space in Chapter 4 on shots of phone text messages whose sole purpose is to tell Yoshiki to run errands at the grocery store? Just because it's an insert shot that might have happened in a movie doesn't mean it should be in a manga. If you show the phone screen you should show important messages only!! Is that not common sense? Just have Yoshiki be at the grocery store and people will just assume he's running errands. The economy of the page space is insane. It's like that tweet. You're spending $4,000 on candles!
Outside the store Yoshiki suddenly meets an important character, housewife Rie, who happened to see him and noticed something wrong. I say suddenly because it's very sudden, and not in a good way. Would basic storytelling not have the housewife notice him in the store, perhaps as a shadowy figure, and then follow him out? It would set up tension! Or at least, have shots of Yoshiki inside the store that's framed as if it's from the point of view of someone who's watching him. He is seen through the gaps between the products on the shelf. He is observed by someone standing behind him in line. It's another basic visual storytelling technique that nonetheless seems too advanced for this manga.
I read the manga adaptation of Higurashi and it was so much better than this, storytelling wise, and it was adapted by who I would call a journeyman (even though it's a woman), someone who if she had a popular series like this manga probably wouldn't take the job. And yet she did her job so well you wouldn't be able to tell Higurashi started as a visual novel. The drawings aren't as nice but who cares, You have to meet a basic competency threshold before drawing skills start to come into the picture. Comparing that manga and this one is like night and day. Night and day.
Where have all the skills gone? Where are our masters now? Who is this generations's Adachi Mitsurus and Rumiko Takahashis? Were they the last of their kind, storytellers so skilled that they were only rivaled by the other and would never be matched? I'd say that Urasawa comes close, but he's not of this generation either. I keep reading newer manga like this hoping to find someone who could be good but they never are. They're always too eager to please, not confident, not in possession of all the requisite skills, never mind being so masterful that they could do something unexpected or profound with the medium that we've never seen before.
Look, there are competent mangaka now but they are fewer and farther between, and I mentioned the mangaka of Higurashi because I think most mangaka used to be like that. Most of them were competent, confident, conscientious storytellers who knew how to pace a dang chapter. And well, that certainly isn't the case now.
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