Helen ESP by Katsuhisa Kigitsu

Every year that goes by, I feel like I'm too old to actually like the 4th of July and all its festivities. Its too hot to watch the parade, I'm too poor to afford the stall food, and fireworks have lost their appeal. Maybe I'm just a fuddy-duddy, I guess. Well, if you enjoy it, good on ya, that's what 'Merica is all about. That, and gifs like this one:

Helen ESP by Katsuhisa Kigitsu

Art and story (c) Katsuhisa Kigitsu

Genre: Supernatural, Shonen
Length: 2 Volumes – 18 Chapters plus one extra



           Very clean art, well done in every respect. The eyes are big and clear, and the hair is cute and modern looking. The clothes are detailed enough to be noticed but not

distracting, like real clothes. There is a wide variety in the face shapes and the body types, too, so that every character is unique. Then there is the dog, he's well done too, but at times he seems more cat like in his movements than dog like and the way he is one solid color also feels like less care was put into him than the other drawings.
           Helen is a girl who is deaf, blind, and mute due to an accident that killed her parents, but that isn't the only thing that makes her unique. Helen has an ability to see and interact with things that are out of the range of 'normal' making her world wider than anyone else's even though everyone else seems to think her world is smaller.
           This manga is written by the same mangaka as Franken Fran, and its pretty much exactly the same except it is less in the realm of horror, though some of those elements do leak through at times. As such, I had the same problems and pleasures with it. I'm going to start with the bad, since that is the longer list. Story wise, its a bit choppy, there isn't a feeling of cohesion through out, instead its one story then another story and they always come to a complete end and have no bearing on the next story. So, at the beginning you are just thrown in and at the end there is no sort of closure. Its pretty
disappointing in my opinion, but I like stories to have a definitive conclusion. And it used drawing Helen physically saying things instead of explaining the situation through more pictures a lot, too, which worked for Franken Fran because the situation always had a direct reason (i.e. Fran experimenting on something) while Helen just stumbled into things. The other major problem I had was that Helen's deafness does not come across well, so much so that I thought it was a mistranslation at the beginning until they repeated it several times. The way it is conveyed just looks like people are talking to her and she understands them. Adding her ESP into that and things really begin to get confusing visually, and manga are all visual. So, clearly I had some heavy problems but now, on to the stuff I actually liked. The stories told are innovative and interesting every time, even if they sometimes feel abrupt. The characters themselves are interesting and flawed, though most of them have no bearing on the actual plots, since Helen can't tell them about it. It has a dark sense of humor at times (that’s that horror creeping in) but it also shows a goodness in human nature to balance it all out. Also, since this manga is much shorter than Franken Fran, the choppy nature doesn't get too much on the nerves and can just be fun and light because its only two volumes compared to the eight that Franken Fran has. Its really hard to rate this manga, its interesting but the lack of it being a full story sort of makes it possible to stop at any time or start reading from any where. I'm going to give it the same score as Franken Fran, for the same reasons. Even though I liked it, it has too many problems to score any higher.


2.5/5 Interesting but it does have structural problems.