“Blue Period” or get passionate about painting (and manga) -

© Tsubasa Yamaguchi / Kodansha Ltd.

  • The manga

    Blue Period

    by Tsubasa Yamaguchi was released last Wednesday at Pika editions

  • A teenager discovers a passion for the arts and painting, in an original story, didactic and not so far from the codes of shônen

  • Multi-awarded in Japan, the title will be entitled to its animated series in 2021

There is a manga for everything.

The formula may be catch-all, but no less true, with titles on wine, disabled sports, hemorrhoids, yakuza cats, dog paradise, the soft toy fetish, time-traveling thermal springs. … We'll keep you posted, it's fascinating.

Even the

shônen is

 making its small revolution, with new heroes and heroines, and new universes far from the codes of the genre and, let's say it, Dantesque battles.

Act-Age

chez Shueisha (Ki-oon in France), on the rise of a young actress, was one of them, but was broke in full flight, following the arrest of his screenwriter for sexual assault on minors .

Published by competitor Kodansha, and at Pika in France,

Blue Period

is placed in the

seinen

category

, for young adults, but digs the same groove, the exploration by the youth of the arts - here painting - as a means of expression, to exist.

Techniques, competition… Painting, a fight like any other?

Yatora is a successful high school student.

He has the right grades, the right friends, the right parties.

He does what society, the system, has always told him to do, even if he has to pretend, even if he feels a void.

A void that the discovery of a painting will fill, not suddenly but little by little.

Is he made for this?

Oh well, there are different specialties: Japanese painting, oil painting, design, graphics, sculpture?

This is where

Blue Period

borrows from the immutable codes of the

shônen

with the learning of techniques, the spirit of competition and a goal to be achieved, entry to the Tokyo University of the Arts.

In the manga "Blue Period", the young Yatora discovers the pleasure of painting, the means for him to express his emotions - © Tsubasa Yamaguchi / Kodansha Ltd.

If the manga, and the drawing, seem conducive to portraying full-page painting, this is not the approach of the manga artist Tsubasa Yamaguchi.

She does it a bit, but always remains attached to the characters, their exchanges, their emotions.

Blue Period

thus approaches the arts without elitism, and is very didactic.

Sometimes too much.

If it arouses vocations among readers, they will have their share of information.

Multi-rewarded in Japan, the manga will have the right - ultimate consecration - to its animated adaptation in 2021.

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