Welcome to the latest edition of the Multiversity Manga Club! We at Multiversity Comics are huge fans of all kinds of comics, but our coverage admittedly skews toward American and European books. Nevertheless, manga, or Japanese comics, has a huge presence in the world of graphic story-telling, as anyone who has frequented a book store chain over the last decade can attest. I myself have only dabbled in the medium throughout the years, primarily through my love of “Dragon Ball Z.” With the hope of presenting a more concerted effort to highlight the fascinating world of manga, I’ll be selecting a specific work each month and inviting readers to join me in reading and examining the book.
Happy belated New Year fellow manga fans! The Multiversity Manga Club returns after a long and much needed holiday break. Two months of “Death Note” drained me, leaving me emotionally bereft for days (an exaggeration, but only slightly). Rubber banding in the opposite direction, I’m excited to announce that out first manga of 2016 is the exciting and hilarious “Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma,” written by Yuto Tsukuda and illustrated by Shun Saeki. “Food Wars” was one of my favorite comic book discoveries of 2016 and I’m extremely excited ring in the new year with the series.
“Food Wars” is a comedy shonen series focusing on, as you may have guessed from the title, gourmet food! Think of the series as a sort of over the top version of “Chopped” meets “Harry Potter,” wherein individuals express their culinary satisfaction though various states of disrobing and sensual ecstasy. It’s a strange, charming little book that feels uniquely different from most anything else I’ve ever read.
The series follows Soma Yukihira, an expiring chef with a bizarre experimental streak, as he enters Japan’s most prestigious culinary school. “Food Wars” main draw is its intense chef battles. The attention to detail is both engaging and educational, as combatants explain the rationale and techniques employed in gourmet food preparation. The flow feels similar to “Yu-Gi-Oh” battle, though significantly easier to follow. In a fun twist, several of the recipes employed through out the series are featured in the tankoban collections, so that readers can try their hand at haute cuisine. The series isn’t all about food fights though. “Food Wars” features a broad and quirky cast that helps drive the story forward, keeping things fun and interesting between the staple shonen battles.
I’ll save the rest of my praise, as well as my critiques, for my review later in the month. “Food Wars” is an ongoing series, with 10 volumes in print and more currently running in “Weekly Shonen Jump.” In light of this, I’m going to handle the review a little differently, looking at the series in general rather than a specific set of chapters or volumes. I’ll reference specific events but will keep the spoilers to a limit. As such I encourage you to get out there and read as little or as much of the series as you’d like, a single volume or the entire series! I’ll give warning that the first volume only begins to set up the series, so you may need to delve a bit deeper to get a robust and accurate picture of the what the series has to offer. Leave any thoughts in the comments section, or tweet them using #mangaversity or directly at myself, @sirfox89. For this book more than ever, I look forward to reader impressions and contributions!
