Kinderbook vol 1 End
Well written collection of short stories densely packed with sharp realistic dialogues and alternative art style. The interesting thing about most of these stories is that they don't really have a major conflict or have a strong definitive conclusion. They are mostly snapshots of different people's lives so it's really a true slice of life manga. In a way, it reminded me a lot of the short stories that Tatsumi did. Except that instead of being mostly twisted stories about lonely and sexually frustrated single men, Kinderbook's stories are more diverse and features a variety of different characters.
The biggest strength of the manga is that most of the stories were well grounded in reality and you could easily believe that these are real people with actual problems. It also helps that the art doesn't rely on exaggerated facial expressions or reactions at all. Couple of the stories were on the dark side, especially
A Picture Story for Melancholic Girls, and the one with the double suicide pact,
Over There, Beautiful Binary Suns, but the rest did have some uplifting moments.
One thing I wasn't sure about is if that some of the stories were loosely connected together. I do recall seeing some names popping up over and over again, but these were for characters who were in high school in older stories and now they are grown up adults, and with this art it was hard to tell if there were supposed to be the same people.
arkness was moved to a different version of jump with much more lax rules so he gets more rope to play with
