If you look at the plot of this manga, it's ultimately common. If you look at the drawing, it's pathetic. If you look at the set up, it's naive. To sum up, this manga is a total failure.
Let's take a closer look at every thing:

A supposedly dead person got link to a living one. They'll both die after a certain amount of time if no one do anything. We have lots manga like this. 'Til recently, we have Bleach which is very successful, The World God Only Knows also make quite a debut. Obviously, they would be compared. Talk about bleach would take too long, so let's compare this manga and The World God Only Know.

On one hand, while the plots are relatively similar, this manga deals with dead soul of living creature of earth. It means not much to develop. What else can be there? They'll just go and deal with soul after soul until the very end. On the other hand, TWGOK deals with evil spirit from hell, which lead to a whole bunch of new possibilities. The main characters might end up bringing hell to a new life. Might as well get to heaven to seek help. That's what make a plot interesting. If the plot is common, the development is the most important aspect.

Next is the set up. A pair of pathetic boy and characterless girl will never be better than a pair of genius weirdo and a clumsy girl. Ever since the start, Kokoro is like a shadow. She doesn't have personality (obviously, she will be a sale-less idol). She doesn't play any role in soul-releasing. All she does is showing off her panties and boobs. And the pathetic guy is just like he was built 'pathetic'. Nothing more to him. In contrast, Katsuragi in TWGOK is an unique type of character. He can also be call a pathetic guy but he is interesting. He has ways too many side that attract attention. And his partner, Elsee is your run-of-the-mill clumsy girl, who is sweet and innocent. Needless to say which set up is better.

The drawing is even more of a different. While TWGOK characters all and each have an unique face which match up with their personalities (even with Tenri who has 2 characters inside), Baka to boing's Kokoro and Rie have the same fake innocent face; even the shinigami sometime looks the same. Expression wide, TWGOK is also better. Of course, art is something related to personal liking. So I wont take the argument any further.

To sum up, Baka To Boing is just an average manga in which selling point is boobs and panties. It's too far away from becoming something great. But good enough to be kind of like a side dish, a desert after you read other mangas.

The first couple of chapters make this title out to be a fairly shallow, fanservice-oriented, generic manga. But sfter about 5 chapters of character introduction and plot setup (mostly involving boobs, panties and general pathetic otaku pandering), suddenly we have a real story! And it's interesting! Though a bit cliche'd, the general premise of the story has its unique points. As of chapter 7, it's now set itself up to be a compound-episodic story. I usually shy away from stories that are clearly designed to be able to go on forever, but this one's unique points have convinced me to stick with it, at least for the time being.

The first few chapters had me rating this a 7, and it was only above a 6 for the cute, innocent idol character. It's now sitting at a high 7 for me. I'm interested - here's hoping this goes somewhere interesting!

well, i like this one.
i think the art is good, even though the guys below said only the bodies were good.
and of course, the fan service is good too.
but what i like the most is the story. it's promising.
i never seen a concept like this in any romantic comedy manga before.

Okay, so two more chapters came out and I'm glad that it didn't take the road I thought it would. The other two chapters were very interesting (The whole process in chapter 2 was a bit confusing though).

I only have two problems with it now. The first is Yamada. The man just screams and freaks out too much about everything. It's become more annoying than Kokoro's lack of common sense (Which thankfully, hasn't shown up after the first chapter). The other thing is the faces. Kobayashi draws everything else well (Especially the bodies), but when it's time to draw the faces, it just doesn't fit well with everything else IMO. Yamada I can understand (The whole ugly average person look suits him), but Kokoro looks like the very definition of butterface, while the shinigami looks somewhat decent (Would've looked better if she didn't have the same smile that Nnoitra has).

There's also more up-close panty and breast shots of Kokoro this time around, but you could see both from far away considering how Kokoro is dressed.

Anyway, this manga seems interesting enough to keep reading. It'll be interesting to see how this story progresses.

Protip: When you read chapter 2, go to page 9, and look at the bottom right panel of the page.

... Last updated on January 13th, 2009, 12:10pm