Manga Review: i tell c Chapter 1

i tell c Chapter 1

VIZ

Mangaka: Kazusa Inaoka

Touted as “a unique take on the crime-suspense genre”, i tell c chapter 1 follows sibling detectives Sakon and Ukon attempting to solve the recent murder of a celebrity by a stalker. Amidst their investigation, a friend of the victim appears to be the potential next victim of the stalker. For most of the chapter, we follow Tagame, a friend of the victim, as he appears to be dealing with the stalker while also cooperating with the detectives.

Kazusa Inaoka, whose previous works include the short-lived Bunkiten and Kimi wo Shinryaku Seyo!, does an excellent job of creating an intense mood and thrilling panels with his artwork. While the detective brothers both seem interesting, we frankly do not get a lot of time with them which hurts the issue. Tagame is a flat character used as the audience’s avatar to experience the tense situations, but there’s nothing particularly interesting about him besides that.

Beyond this point, I’ll be including some major spoilers for this chapter. If you want to go into the chapter without being spoiled, you can skip to my score at the bottom now. But because of the nature of this chapter, I can’t discuss it any further without spoiling the big twist. Here’s your warning.

Towards the end of the chapter, it is revealed that the mysterious girl who has been stalking Tagame is actually special detective Risa Aioi. She has the unique quirk of constantly falling in love with the culprit of cases, and has been stalking Tagame because he was the murderer the entire time. While the entire chapter up to this point had been fairly captivating, this twist really dropped my overall interest in this series. The “yandere” trope being implemented into a crime-suspense story is already strange, but the reasoning behind Aioi’s strange quirk is even more problematic in my eyes.

At the end of the chapter, it appears that Sakon and Aioi will have a slightly antagonistic relationship because he opposes her strange methods. As Ukon puts it, they see Aioi as “fighting poison with poison” but to me, I’m a bit tired of the yandere trope overall, and the way they implemented it here feels beyond strange. Hopefully, as we get more chapters the yandere aspect will be toned down and as we get more character development I may even find myself liking Aioi.

I don’t like to write off a series based on one chapter (hell, I ended up changing my mind about Undead Unluck) but right now I’m less than impressed by this first chapter. We will see how I feel after chapter 2.

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