51 Ways To Save My Girlfriend by Usamaru Furuya

 May the 4th be with you! I had to baby sit my 3 year old niece so I made her watch the original Star Wars with me, it was fun. May also is Zombie Awareness Month, though I do not have enough zombie manga to post one every week this year, so I'm just going to save the zombies for later but I will recommend a few posts from last year that I found totally fun and would read again if I had the time but I started re-reading One Piece and catching up on new chapters and that is going to take some time I tell you what. Anyway, if you haven't read Sankarea yet, do so, as well as Unlucky Boy Undead Girl (its the third one down on this page but the first two are pretty good, too). Hopefully some ongoing manga will finish by next May, or the zombie apocalypse will actually happen, so I can find some then. Well, enough of this run on sentence riddled intro and on the the actual review...



51 Ways To Save My Girlfriend by Usamaru Furuya

Art and story (c) Usamaru Furuya

Genre: Adult Survival Horror
Length: 5 Volumes – 49 Chapters



           The art was pretty bad, but at times I found it perfectly pleasing. I really can't figure out this art at all, it has sort of a skewed look to it as well has having caricature-type designs to people so then the regular people tend to just look awkward. The clothes are interesting and all but they do not always seem to fit people very well. Initially I found the eyes off putting, then they sort of went from fine to empty randomly, and I had a hard time coping with what people were actually feeling. As this is a survival manga, there is a lot of crying and the tears are not realistic in anyway, just large obstructions in people's eyes. Its a bit of the 'ugly' man art that seinen get at times that are semi-realistic but then the main characters were rather less realistic looking so they didn't match a lot of the other characters. Let’s just say, the art isn't terrible.
           When a large earthquake hits Japan, a young man and a middle school friend who just happened to meet on the street, are thrown together in the most extreme circumstances.
           This manga is like Dragon Head, but less convoluted and more preachy. I realized when I was starting this blog that I would end up reading manga that I did not like, in fact I have quit manga or simply have not reviewed them because I didn't think I could even muster the energy to complain about them. This was almost one of those. What seems like

an interesting title and plot turns into just men trying to rape women for, like, three volumes straight. I am not exaggerating. Interspersed with the main characters are explanations of what would actually happen if an earthquake happened, such as ground water seepage and fire storms, but then what starts as a warning tale of people getting drunk and women being alone and in danger turns into the whole plot line instead of another warning taking over. I got really bored really quickly. I don't usually use this as a bad thing, but this manga is also very Japanese. The main characters are going through famous Tokyo landmarks and districts but as I only recognized about half of them, the two page spreads of the destroyed skylines really did nothing for me, let alone knew where they were in relation to where the characters were trying to get to. Japan has a real problem with the threat of earthquakes and its interesting to see an artist's idea of what would happen. That is why people like to read post apocalyptic stories, to imagine this world we have going to total hell and how people would cope. In this manga's case though, it actually seemed like it was giving advice at times but that advice was dispensed in long-winded fourth wall breaking dialog boxes that really begged to be skimmed instead of read carefully. Even the characters themselves aren't worth mentioning, they were so flat. All in all I feel like I wasted my time, unfortunately. At least this was much shorter than Dragon Head and has nothing to do with the government secretly drugging people. It does have the eyes, though.


1/5 Tiresome after a while and with art that is a little hard to take in.