J-Pop Idol Volume 1

Mika, Kay and Naomi win a singing contest, but the record company just wants to sign Mika as a solo artist. As Mika begins her ascent to the top of the charts, she must deal with jealous friends, cut-throat competitors and figure out her feelings for Ken, a ex-boy band star turned producer with a tragic secret.

J-Pop Idol has all the ingredients for a modern day Cinderella story for the American Idol generation, but like contestants who sing songs that are out of their limited range, J-Pop Idol tries too hard with too little. Its derivative plot and mediocre artwork just make it an embarrassing manga mess.

Blame American Idol if you like, but the dream of going from obscurity to superstardom has been a favorite teen fantasy for years. What girl with even the slightest inclination for carrying a tune doesn't imagine being in the spotlight, wearing beautiful clothes and living the glamorous life of a celebrity? So it's little wonder that J-Pop Idol was "a #1 mobile manga hit in Japan," (according to its cover). It has all the right ingredients for a modern day Cinderella story.

But like how Nutrasweet leaves a weird aftertaste after you chug a can of Diet Coke, J-Pop Idol's generic artwork and hyper-melodramatic story left me feeling like I was reading a mediocre rendition of stories that have been done before, and done better by other manga artists.

First, Yashiro's overly-sparkly, miserably mediocre artwork. With characters who look identical except for their hairstyles, and stuck with limited emotional palettes of expressions, every page of J-Pop Idol demonstrates Yashiro's limited artistic abilities. It really started to annoy me that Yashiro's default expression for her characters is to have their lips flattened in a thick horizontal line that makes them look smug, or disgusted.

Then there's Millenni+M's derivative, poorly-paced storytelling. It's like he/she whipped through similar but superior shojo stories like Arina Tanemura's Full Moon o Sagashite, grabbed plot ideas off the shelf and hastily slapped them together. Jealous friends, cut-throat competitors, aloof men with tragic secrets and a life-threatening disease; almost every standard shojo plot twist is here. But like those American Idol wanna-bes who try to sing difficult songs by Mariah Carey and discover the limits of their abilities on stage, J-Pop Idol tries too hard and ends up being an embarrassing manga mess. Switch the channel and read something else instead.