Take a boy who looks vaguely like Harry Potter, hook him up with a spunky gal and toss in a few gruesome but loveable monsters and you've got Yokai Doctor, a new supernatural shonen manga comedy-adventure from Del Rey Manga.
Kotoko is a pretty and popular co-ed who has a unique family heritage: her grandfather was a famous exorcist. While she has inherited only a fraction of her ancestor's spiritual abilities, Kotoko can do one thing: she can see yokai, the strange and mischievous spirits, sprites and demons who wander the world unseen by most human eyes.
Then she meets Kuro, a geeky classmate who has a unique afterschool job: he's a yokai doctor who cures spooks who are feeling under the weather. Kotoko volunteers to assist Kuro as a nurse, and soon enough, she's stuck with a bizarre array of mischief-making spooks pestering her for attention.
With its mix of monsters, slapstick humor and fantasy fun, this shonen series will surely please fans of supernatural adventures like Rosario + Vampire and fanservice-friendly comedies like Negima!, but does it have enough going for it to warrant a long-term reading commitment on its own merits?
Check out my review of Yokai Doctor Volume 1 by Yuki Sato from Del Rey Manga and decide whether this supernatural shonen series deserves a spot on your summer reading list, or if its brand of monster laughs is a bit too hard to swallow.
Image credit: © 2007 Yuki Sato
Comments