Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Different Champloo, January 1, 2006
(This review does not apply to the second volume of the Samurai Champloo manga. It was posted there by Amazon.com against my will. That manga, had I been able to rate it, would have surely gotten a 1 for going so far away from the original story and then ending quite suddenly with no promise to the future.)
The manga starts out almost identically as the anime. Fuu is still searching for her Sunflower Samurai, and Mugen and Jin are still at each others throats. Beyond that, though, the manga goes in an entirely different direction. Instead of getting captured in the first manga by the feudal lords, and instead of doing a great deal of traveling and battling, most of what happens is slapstick comedy that takes place in cities and villages, and we never quite know the progress of the heroes because they rarely mention where they are at. It gets confusing at times.
What makes this manga good, though, is that it reveals a lot about Fuu earlier than the anime did. All we know for perhaps half the series is that Fuu is searching for the Sunflower Samurai. The manga reveals a little of her history in the final chapter of this manga and why she's actually searching for this mysterious samurai. Plus, all of the separate chapters besides the first are entirely new. We can't have seen them in the anime, and they aren't jarring because the anime seems to jump ahead a lot, not to mention those "dimension" episodes, and these stories could easily be placed inside of those moments.
I'm still waiting for a major enemy to reveal him/herself, as the heroes have yet to get into a serious confrontation, with the exception of Mugen and Jin's constant, chapter-ending feuding. All the chapters deal with the ways the characters go about getting money to eat and drink. I like to laugh, but that's not why I like Champloo.
Still, it's difficult not to recommend this. Any fan of manga could pick this book up and find something inside worth reading, without any advance knowledge of the Samurai Champloo world. And if you are a fan of Champloo and want a new spin, pick this up. It follows the story in the anime but not in the same way.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
WANTED: Glasses, Slacker, and..err...We can't classify him., March 8, 2006
Very exciting! If you are a fan of the Anime series that airs on [Adult Swim], A fan of Edo Japan & Samurais, Or you are into a good book with a unique style of art- You are in for a real treat!
Samurai Champloo Volume 1 is a wonderful grab. Confronted with three characters- Jin [pronounced gene] who is a quiet and reserved samurai, Fuu [Foo] who is a waitress in a tea house thats not the brightest or most resourceful thing on the planet, and Mugen [Moo-gen]a samurai with no certain rythem or rhyme to his fighting techniques who can be called merciless and a womanizer at times-You are thrown into a freestylin', out of wack, crazy society, better known as the Edo Japan era -Just not the one you hear about in books..
The Manga starts out the same as the anime, where Fuu rescues the two samurai from execution in order to get them to help her on her quest for the mysterious Sunflower-Scented Samurai. All though it braches out from the anime and doesn't follow it to a tee -it gives you a quicker ensight into Fuu's background aswell as the same intence action. It also still gives you the same anxious rivalry & want on both Mugen and Jin's part to beat the other in a battle!
So Join this misfit gang on their journey for the Sunflower Samurai as they run into fights, trouble, danger, and...other peculiar incidences along the way. You'll enjoy this Killer sweet and satisifying Champloo spin on Edo Japan and the people in it with your soon to be favorite trio!
-Winry
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Dismal, September 11, 2006
This manga is everything the Samurai Champloo television series is not: sketchy, cliched, predictable, cheap, poorly written, poorly illustrated, boring pop-pulp trash.
I can't express how utterly terrible this manga is, especially since its based on Shinichiro Watanabe's equisite series.
The cover is nice, and thats about all it has going for it. The artwork within the story is in ridiculously sketchy cartoon anime style, with NONE of the stylishness, depth, or a dynamic motion of the series. Simply put, its bad. Thirteen-year-old-back-of-the-school-book bad.
The writing is even worse, based about a couple of new storylines. Initially I was very pleased to hear that thered be some new stories being added to the travelling trio, but the ones contained in this manga are just pathetic imitations of some of the ideas from the series itself. They contain none of the flair which Watanabe's writing staff brought to the episodes. Its not worth going in to details of plot here, since theres not much to it.
I have not read the first volume of this manga, and now do not care to.
Newcomers will be put off Samurai Champloo, and fans of the series will hate it even more since we know just how much potential was squandered with this crummy book.
Don't waste your time or your money.
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