‘Double Arts’, the end

Just when I had caught up with ‘Double Arts’ again, the manga is cancelled. The reason, as usual, is that the manga seemed rather unpopular with the Jump readership. For the past few weeks, it had been at the back of the magazine. The manga has an open ending – after only 23 chapters and with the characters clearly just about to begin the long journey ahead of them, what else could have been expected? It would have been impossible to wrap the story up in a few chapters, and I’m glad Naoshi Komi did not attempt to do so, and chose to stay true to his pace and his story and the characters instead.

The pace might have been one of the reasons – or the main reason – why the story did not last. ‘Double Arts’ was really rather slow. I have also seen people complain that the battles were too short – I disagree with that, I think ‘Double Arts’d did battles right, because they were not simply short, they were to the point. I like it when battle scenes don’t waste time with long exchanges of kicks and blows, drawn out over panels or pages. I prefer short fights where only the relevant moves are shown, and where the fighting styles or techniques are actually interesting and clever. In that regard, I liked ‘Double Arts’. But I did not mind the slow pace either, since it came across as a direct result of the characters’ behaviour… The Jump audience might see things differently. I’m not the target audience at all.

As for the characters, I liked them, and I loved that they were given the time to act and react realistically. Something else occured to me, probably in relation to the ‘Bakuman’ discussions. ‘Double Arts’ had a lot of female characters. It had more female than male characters. Heck, if you substract the disposable enemies that attack the heroes every now and then, and substract the characters who only appear in like two chapters
… there are three male characters. And roughly twice as many female. A very cynical part of me wants to see a connection between this unusual gender balance and the series’ cancellation… It’s probably a combination of both pace and lack of male characters (to either identify with, or draw yaoi fanart about).

In any case, ‘Double Arts’ was a good manga, and I’ll be looking forward to Naoshi Komi’s future works. Like the oneshot that’s going to appear in Jump SQ next December. Hopefully the Jump SQ audience appreciates him more… they are more mature, I hear…

I’m slightly bitter, yeah. Weekly Jump is boring again now.

Tags: double arts, naoshi komi