Ryu’s Musings – Eat for Your life vol01

eISBN: 9781613135655
Language: English
Direction: Right to Left
By: Shigeru Tsuchiyama
Publisher: Digital Manga guild
Type: Series, Manga
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Shonen, Slice of Life, Sports

Synopsis:

Mantarou Ohara’s salary can’t keep up with the amount of money he spends on food. He doesn’t just eat his meals, he savors every mouthful and travels Japan in search of new flavors to excite his taste buds. But when a serious lack of funds causes him to choose between living off noodles or entering an eating competition, it seems that the life of this gourmet is about to change…

Will the guidance of a mysterious stranger turn Mantarou from a food lover into a professional competitive eater? Or will his passion for the perfect recipe be his downfall…?

Well, i was rather surprised by this title, it took a sport (?) that i have little interest in and made it interesting to me.

Mantarou is an interesting character, while his personality is pretty average he’s got a good vibe for a character. I found i rather liked him and wanted to see how he plays out over the coming volumes.

Shigeru’s art style is pretty good, with good character designs that are consistent through out the volume. He has a pretty standard art style that is used a lot in series similar to this. For me it made it easier to get into, and feel more natural, and welcome.

The only part of the art style i didn’t really like was one of the characters, George Hunter. I hate the way manga tends to overly americanise their american characters. George is made out to be some sort of cowboy, which ne may well have been. However i have to admit that this style of character is getting rather tired these days.

The story is where it really shines though, competitive eating was never a sport (? is it really a sport??) I’ve had an interest in. Hell I’ll be honest and admit the only time I’ve ever heard about it is in TV series where it’s used in murder mysteries, such as Bones or Diagnosis M.

So for this was a refreshing voyage, a new plot for me to get into without feeling like i know what’s going on all the time, I found this invigorating and exciting. I find I’m actually really looking forward to the subsequent volumes, and i do hope this gets a print release as I’d love to have a print copy on my shelf.

This is another release from the Digital manga Guild, and i have to admit they’re getting better. their initial releases were a bit sloppy, but they’ve been improving in leaps and bounds. This release is damn near perfect. We’ve got a great use of fonts for the varying things such as special effect, comments and text.

I love seeing how they’re growing since their initial start up, and I’m even happier to see them growing beyond their initial yaoi titles.

I did say near perfect however, they still have a HUGE problem with the way their release work with Kindle. In as much as they’re horrible on android devices. So much wasted space that they don’t use:

As you can see there’s loads of wasted space, and the image looks very small on my android device (7” Kobo ARC). What’s more there’s inconsistencies in the size of the images on a page to page basis. On one extreme the image was a lot smaller than the one above:

Which as you can see is very hard to read. It does cause eye strain for me from time to time leading to headaches. On the other side of things we have an almost perfect image size, which to me shows they CAN do it:

They really need to get this sorted and go back through their releases and update those. What really surprises me is that they’re perfectly fine on the Online viewer as well as on the Kindle Windows Software, it’s only on the android app, as far as i know, where this has become a big problem. I would say it’s an app problem, but it’s only with the Digital Manga Guild releases that this occurs. They’re tied with Digital Manga, who have no issues with their releases so i don’t really understand how theirs can be so bad.

Once this gets fixed however we’ll have a really sweet little publisher. As for this release, i definitely think it’s worth picking up. I’m looking forward to seeing how Mantarou develops over the series and how he grows as a competitive eater