Clean-Freak

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Year: 2005-2007

Writer/Artist: Touya Tobina

Manga Review (Volume 1)
Judging by the cover, you might think this manga focuses on a team of sanitation superheroes. It's actually a shoujo manga about a tween boy with a serious OCD problem, and the relationships he develops despite (perhaps because of) it.

This first volume focuses on three characters: a sweet girl, a weird boy, and another weird boy. It's a very broad comedy, intercut with some extremely melodramatic shoujo moments.

Interestingly, the characters are all in 7th grade, so they're starting to get serious about their opposite-sex relationships. Nobody's lusting after each other, but they've certainly grown beyond the "girls are icky and boys are gross" attitude common in elementary school.

The art style looks shoujo and spastic. The artist fills panels almost entirely on heads and basic bodies. Unfortunately, the character designs shift inconsistently from page to page, varying in proportions almost randomly. Normal conversational pages are crammed with oddly framed panels for no apparent reason, leaping from intense close-ups of a character's mouth to a long shot of another character from 50 yards away. This technique would be interesting if these scenes impacted the story, but it's used on simple connecting tissue. I found myself wearied by its constant use.

Because this is a shoujo story about relationships and emotion, the artist throws several heart-wrenching moments into this volume. Several can be seen coming from 50 pages away, while others snuck up like ninja and both surprised and delighted me. That's not to complain about the obvious melodrama, either.

There's a charming innocence to Clean-Freak that reminds me of Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes. The characters are not naive, but the plot revels in simple truths and in a desire to see friendships grow.

Moreover, the protagonist constantly builds walls between himself and other, partly through his extreme OCD and also because he generally dismisses the rest of humanity as unnecessary. I keep wondering if all of the people who've committed to stay with him will do so. This is shoujo, so I'm sure that he won't be friendless on the final page, I suspect at least one connection will have grown apart by then. And I wonder which one that will be?

As with so many works, Clean-Freak swept me along with its story more than its art. I want to read more, and find out which of the characters manage to stay together.