Koohii Jikan - (Coffee Time)
From the author of Undercurrent, single volume of short stories.
The first impression is that it isn't as good as Undercurrent, not every author has a strong grasp in how make short stories tick, as the page limit is hard. In this case, I feel that maybe the author Tetsuya Toyoda would be more comfortable doing half the stories with twice the pages, instead of doing so many, as there are 17 short stories. I think he is a bit too subtle for doing really short stories, you need more oomph to reach the readers in just 12 pages.
That said he isn't bad or mediocre here, there are several that are decent and two or three that are good. NASA's Urasawa was worse, for example.
In some panels the drawing style really blends with Hiroki Endo's in my mind. Are we sure they haven't worked together? Because damn.
Actually, I think Toyoda does better faces, or at least more variety of them and they feel a bit more natural.
The common theme of the stories is coffee, as the title suggests, but that's the theory, honestly in most of the stories it isn't a real thing, it's just that the author thought it would be fun to have some kind of common element in all of them and put it there.
There is at least some variety in here. Some are bittersweet moments, others are more funny, others are slightly surreal.
[preliminary isnt even over yet in the manga]
