THE WORST MANGA I’VE EVER READ!
Boy’s Abyss was written and illustrated by Ryo Minenami and was published from 2020 to 2024
FALL INTO THE ABYSS
Boy’s Abyss is thinking of ending things. This piece of art made by one Ryo Minenami is a baffling experience, one so thin in every single substantive way that when you reach out for something to connect to, anything really, you’ll inevitably pull your hands back empty with hazy feelings of confusion, disappointment and pain. Not a pain of connection though, instead a pain coming from having to wrap your head around what I found to be the most incompetent act of uncompromised storytelling I’ve yet witnessed from animanga. This manga is so bad it hurts to think about as I tried to reason with what in the end is a story with no purpose or reason to exist. I’ve seen and read well over 400 unique stories from the mediums of anime and manga and while certainly compromised series like Tokyo Ghoul:re Season 2 stand out as outright nonfunctional in it’s storytelling it’s a different beast entirely to this, a corporate mandated impossible adaptation instead of a singular authors intended vision. Boy’s Abyss is a manga written by a single artist and drawn with help by only a few more, serialised in the less censorious world of seinen publishing with the main constraint being the never-ending crunch of weekly manga creation. It is Ryo’s story, a artistic work of pure passion played out over 4 years of a real humans life and my main takeaway, the only truly biting tragedy of it is this. It was a waste, borderline wholly, of a real humans existence and that does hurt because I’m deadly serious when I say this work is irredeemable, it’s a complete disaster played in painful slow motion that’s insulting to art and the humanity that art is supposed to embody. This manga isn’t just a bad manga, it’s THE bad manga to me and I pray I never have to read something of this little worth ever again… after Chojo ends of course.
NOTHING’S OUT OF SOMETHING’S
So, what even is Boy’s Abyss. Well that could be an easy question if I took this manga at face value but everytime I do it feels wrong to admit that yes this is supposed to be a serious human drama and in that attempt displays the horrible abyss of complete artistic failure, it’s every choice running counter to competent or even reasonable execution of that idea. This manga functions better as something it never wanted to be because as a pitch black comedy it’s pretty damn hilarious, like it’s more consistently laugh out loud funny than a fair percentage of actual comedies. Unfortunately after saying my piece we must return to the truth, that this is supposed to portray humans and derive drama and meaning from their existence within the pages of this story, that this is supposed to be a serious exploration of the darkness that hides within the ordinary people of a small backwater town and how their environment tears them to pieces. There’s just one problem and it’s terminal, this story doesn’t depict real complex emotional humans but mere burnt out husks in the shape of them, husks filled only with unbelievable hatred and despair. The characters of Boy’s Abyss are a mixed bag but one where half the mix is missing, not by mistake mind you no the author intended for 3 of her main characters to be empty soulless beings and that choice, one of the very few clearly intentional aspects of this work, is quite possibly the worst writing choice I’ve ever seen.
REIJI KUROSE: THE WORST PROTAG KUN EVER
This series was built to fail the moment it’s main character, a boy named Reiji Kurose, gets introduced as the titular boy shaped abyss. Reiji is a character I find impossible to understand because he’s so inherently inhuman and impossible to empathise with that it breaks the whole story around him because if I can’t see the main character of this world as a human being the whole illusion shatters. This is a inherently tragic work, drenched in melancholy and evil it’s always shouting at the top of its lungs for Reiji to escape the grasp everything around him has, to leave the abyss he calls home and choose life and every plotline is an exclamation point to that idea, a demonstration of furthers hells that await due to inaction and fear. But why, sincerely I ask, should I care for Reiji, why should I desire for him to save himself and break the cycles of trauma he endures within the boundary that marks the town that is his entire world. Why should I care for a character this manga’s first act constantly gives me reason to despise. Why should I care for anything when I hate everything within, how am I supposed to connect myself to the emotions this manga seemingly wants to elicit from me. When I say this manga is an incompetent act of storytelling it all revolves around that question of why should I care and how this story’s every answer is just another reason to hate it. Okay enough sweet nothings, lets explicitly break this manga down and apart.
IT’S JUST LIFE, NOT!
Boy’s Abyss does not understand the simple concept of life and thus fails at being a tragedy in any sense of the word. Instead of being a balanced work that utilizes the raw power of good times juxtaposed with bad it is instead a drone of ceaseless debauchery with no light to illuminate itself and stave off the dark for even a single precious second. With no concept of light by which I mean good it renders the dark boring and ineffectual, it’s every action just another result of blindly reaching out into said darkness and pulling something impossibly more grim out. We don’t meet Reiji as a normal human being who has passions, interests, good times, or anything remotely humanizing bar his relationship to his best friend Chako. We first meet a Reiji that is already broken , already swallowed up by the darkness of an abusive home life with no prospects beyond further enslaving himself to the town that is grinding his life away. Already a wall has formed between him and an audience in this case me, already I view him as less than human, less tangible and thus less worthy of emotional investment. In fact I just plain find him funny like I do every form of overly edgy storytelling that prioritizes misery over placing said misery in a human and thus painful context. Reiji is a farce from day one and it only gets worse when he meets the angel of death herself, the beautiful face of this series Nagi Aoe. They meet, bang(which um Reiji is a 17 year old and she’s 20 so already yikes) and than move to kill themselves in a lovers suicide in the space of a single chapter. Now do you for even one second find that to be remotely believable in any sense, the concept of two souls immediately trying to snuff themselves out as a twisted form of connection because I sure don’t. In fact I’m insulted and here Boy’s Abyss transforms from a just bad work to one that outright disgusts me. Because to this manga suicide isn’t just a key plot element but is something much more insidious, it’s a joke.
MURDERING MENTAL ILLNESS
Boy’s Abyss is not a mature piece of writing despite it’s gleeful embrace of adult subject matter that it wears like a crown of thorns and nowhere else is that more clear than this manga’s depiction of mental health issues. I don’t believe Ryo intended to be malicious in her use of real world social problems and it’s not like there’s anything inherently wrong with using art to explore such things, in fact it’s the safest way to do so. But Ryo’s own intentions mean little when the text itself uses such topics for blatant shock and horror value, with things like body dysmorphia and eating disorders employed with zero sincerity. Nothing compares to this series’s “handling” of the concept of suicidality though, it being so outright flippant it beggars the mind. Off the top I said this manga was thinking of ending things but really it’s the cast who I meant, not characters the whole frigging cast want’s to die by their own hand and in most cases at the drop of a hat. Aside from Mrs. Shiba every character weaponizes suicide, embraces it and tries to use it to steal Reiji away from whoever’s grasp he’s in at the given moment, a grasp that no matter who it is will eventually beckon him to the edge. These characters, this whole cast really, do have trauma beyond the wildest stretches of reality as we would know it and so I don’t think any character individually is written wrong to understandably be in the mental place that suicidal ideation could find them but the manga doesn’t treat it like a complex and highly motivated thing, suicide is only casual in Boy’s Abyss. It becomes a sort of horrid joke waiting for whatever side character is in focus to finally lose it and just beg Reiji to die together with them and thus when they inevitably do it doesn’t land like a dreadful heartbreaking action but a lazy thoughtfulness cliche of this work, another expected development in the never-ending tragedy. Despite how often suicide is invoked in this series its never explored, our main character literally being an emotional abyss gives him no personal motivation for anything in particular and the side cast exist solely for shock value purposes so their motivations ring boringly hollow. I’ve never seen a artistic work more inherently suicidal than Boy’s Abyss and I’ve never seen a artistic work handle this real and devastating issue so grossly, this is an unforgivable failure.
NAGI AOE: MISJUDGING A BOOK BY IT’S COVER
Nagi Aoe, the woman who would first begin this farcical drive to unalive was the reason I read this manga and probably was yours too, dear reader unfortunate enough to know this work personally. I bet the reason a majority of this series’s readership first got sucked in was because of Nagi Aoe’s face on that iconic first volume cover, a mysterious beautiful women smiling softly as a lovely blue beta fish covers half her face. It’s a stunning cover design that did its job better than any other aspect of this manga and I salute it. I hate it twofold though because it’s seductive beauty led me here in the firstplace and with its showpiece of Nagi I’m left doubly disappointed because just like Reiji she is an inhuman abyss, a vacuum of emotion searching for the sweet release death but totally lacking the personal agency required to choose. So she beckons Reiji to join her and when that fails she drifts away, remaining a spector throughout the manga and being another indictment that the purposely vacuous nature of some character writing is simply nonsensical storywise. She does get a backstory, an attempt to explain why this human being has no soul anymore but that story is so ridiculously over the top ridiculous that it just further solidifies the idea that Ryo had no clue what to do with her and in the end reached for cry bait instead of something real. She failed, Nagi doesn’t even get a proper arc so she failed, god that covers promise of seductive intrigue was just fumbled so bad, arge.
OFF TO THE SIDE CHARACTERS
The other characters that aren’t intentionally written as human abyss’s fair even worse though because they don’t even have the benefit of explicit purpose, they exist and they exist badly. Chako first, man what happened to my girl. She was it, the one connection Reiji had that humaized him and there was real warmth to their interactions so I thought she was the key to his salvation but alas Ryo clearly had no idea what to do with her and in an attempt to inject drama using this character she ruined her. Chako the human, the actual person(by this series standards) with realistic emotional responses was broken into a ridiculous spiteful creature that lost it mentally and was shafted from the series overall as a result, only showing up at the end for the obligatory hey here’s a writer character so of course the title Boy’s Abyss must appear at the end. She disappointed me simply because there was something there in the beginning only for this manga to do its thing and suck the humanity out.
Then you have Gen and boy I hate Gen, like just as a person his bad boy archetype is obnoxious to me. There is a solid vision here though, you’re supposed to hate him as Reiji’s main bully and so his more humanizing moments actually worked like his confession of love for Reiji which wasn’t coming through by his actions because his childhood was so deeply shattered. Gen is a murderer see but not of his own volition, as a child he killed Reiji’s worthless abusive father and while I and other empathetic people would absolve him of all blame Gen understandably hates himself. This recontextualization of his prior actions actually makes sense which is a miracle for this work but than um… things go wrong. Literally yes things go wrong, everything’s always going wrong in this world but Gen disappears, reappears, is forgotten by the author for 2 dozen chapters, reappears in an illogical place, and than breaks. The next time we meet him he’s a changed person, his self hating depression grounded in believable action suddenly transformed into a twisted depiction of body dysmorphia where he has taken the form of the women that groomed him. This reveal hits like a truck by which I mean I was wheezing with laughter not just because of the poor drag he put on but because this development comes outta frigging nowhere and was easily the most random thing possible. Add on the on cue call for twin suicide with Reiji and you have a moment utterly impossible to take seriously, disrespecting like literally everything and everyone involved. He finds himself shafted from the manga right after so uh bye Gen, I genuinely don’t know what go think. These characters make up Reiji’s peer group and uh closest allies(?) so that means we must move onto the adults in the room, not like they act like it. After one aside to set em up of course.
THIN ATMOSPHERE
Boy’s Abyss really wants to be a series you remember for it’s atmosphere derived from the setting it takes place in and the best insult I got is this, Riverdale did it better. From page 4 the town is invoked with a ominous tone, a place that Reiji can’t think of leaving despite how clearly this towns grasp drains him of a real future. It does that to all, every citizen a secret wretch warped by the place they live and the hopeless culture it’s grounded in as this is a town whose greatest claim to fame is the story of the lover’s abyss. A young couple wanted to escape this town once and in their sheer hopelessness chose passionate twin death, their legacy ending up being a story that echoes in the minds of all who inhabit this place. So, what is this place huh? Funny question because I couldn’t tell you, the town so often mentioned in traumatized whispers being a non entity functionally. Characterizing a setting is not easy to put it lightly and it goes hand in hand with establishing atmosphere, tone, and the overarching point of a work. It takes a lot of focus to make a character that speaks only through still images of domestic architecture and a town isn’t just one or two buildings but a community. Boy’s Abyss unfortunately is just 2 buildings plus a riverside and double unfortunately the background artists are not very talented. They sure can draw a drab dreary townhouse but there is positively zero style to it, nothing unusual or personal to the blank exteriors that could potentially be used to establish a distinct location and less than nothing to provoke feelings of unease in an audience like the characters themselves feel. This town doesn’t exist for all intents and purposes, it has no identity on a visual level and crucially it’s a example of telling over showing, a personal pet peeve of mine in regards to the visual medium that manga are and should strive to be.
RIVERDALE DID IT BETTER!
That’s where Riverdale comes in, a series I watched 5 and a half seasons of and one which takes my award for worst written story from the west. It has many analogous elements to Boy’s Abyss like the edgy tone, empty character writing, using real world issues for cheap shock value and being unintentionally hysterical. It is also a series that emphasises setting and has a dreary atmosphere and hey waitaminute Riverdale is actually good at it, really good at it actually. Dripping with style thanks to great cinematography and characterizing its location’s (of which there are many memorable ones but mainly Pops’s diner) through an out of time mess of contemporary and old timey aesthetics and props, Riverdale is immediately distinct and immediately off which makes it’s growing atmosphere of dread very effective, at least early on. It’s like the one thing I can give that show credit for which is something hard to do for this manga. Boy’s Abyss isn’t named after the town it takes place in so obviously it’s not the primary character but it is a often mentioned subject that’s core to the characters own issues and sense of shattered humanity, it’s a genuine shame it’s not a successfully executed idea. But shockingly my complaint here is actually addressed by the work itself in probably its most successful element, the town’s physical proxy Yuko Kurose.
YUKO KUROSE: MIRACULOUSLY FUNCTIONAL
If there’s one thing Boy’s Abyss isn’t bad at it’s the villains, the two main antagonists being the best part from start to finish and you could even say they saved it entirely. Saved it from a 0 instead of a 2 but still, entertainment is value and one of em sure as hell offers entertainment while the other actually managed to pull off the impossible task of making a certified human abyss style character right. That’s right Yuko Kurose ain’t a person anymore than her son Reiji or Nagi which is why initially I couldn’t be bothered to give a rats ass about her and she slowly but surely sunk below my vision, successfully hiding her true self from my view. But it was always there, her secretive bordering on manipulative personality hiding being a unassuming background character who was actually more involved than I expected. Yuko is “stuck” in the same abusive household that’s killing Reiji slowly, her older though not biological son being a loud borderline violent shut in and her mother being old and incontinent. She works a hard job as a nurse, is never home and when she is comes across as very reliant on Reiji. You first take her to be a normal single mother working herself to death for her family’s sake and through her relationship to Reiji you could mistakenly begin to empathise with her situation, heck may even pray for her own salvation alongside him(if for whatever reason you cared for Reiji). And with that establishing characterization you’ve been caught, just like Reiji and just like the town overall in the grasp of a black widow. While not everything wrong in this town is her personal fault a surprising amount is, she pulls the strings of this web and ensnaring as many people as possible seems her only comfort in life. Her late husband killed by Gen, yeah guess who pushed him into it, his father’s late stage suicide attempt, well he needed some convincing, and finally Reiji’s entire story. Her own family are but victims trapped in her lair as she uses them to keep up appearances but it’s Reiji where her darkest and most un familial desires lurk. She gave birth to him not out of maternal desire but out of pure hate, forcing an inseparable connection onto another human being for the intended goal of using them to end her life as she just can’t do it alone. This time the double suicide motif worked because it wasn’t just another cliche, it was the cliche. See the truth of the lovers abyss story has been lost over time and in fact the girl involved did survive, I hope you can guess her identity. We see this portrait of the physically feminine embodiment of hate through a series of backstories that follow her through her childhood from a secondary source, her childhood flame Akira Nozoe.
AKIRA NOZOE: I SLEEP
Imma keep this one briefer than it actually should be because I’m going fo be honest this was my least favorite part of this story but not because it was the “worst” written or anything, it was worse than that. It was boring. I could not be asked to care for or be intrigued by Mr. Esemori as he is known as an adult, he is the one character I bounced off hardest because his verbose yet meaningless dialogue meant that him being on page just meant boredom. So his backstories were immediately tarnished by how unwelcome they were to me personally, distractions from the current actions and drab distractions at that. But they were technically fine, no major writing issue’s jumped out at me like literally everything else about this manga. But plain unintriguing schoolyard melodrama, a by the books relationship kindled and killed(figuratively) did absolutely nothing for me and nothing for him either, Nozoe is the character I truly felt an abyss for, there just was nothing there. Those backstories do provide context for Yuko Kurose though, these events more explicitly showing her complete yet malicious emptiness and while her traumatic backstory was as edgy as one could imagine it didn’t detract from her because the moment the backstores over we’re thrust into its aftermath, this women’s control over the town only growing with each passing moment. To be clear she is not my favourite character nor did I particularly like her, especially for how increasingly stupid her plots for Reiji became but for a work like this to pull off something not totally vapid, subtle even, is a goshdarn miracle, Yuko Kurose functions and that’s a big compliment.
MRS.SHIBA PART 1: STARTING SOME SH*T
Now onto the other villain turned muddled anti…well not heroine but something of that like we have Mrs. Shiba. Mrs. Shiba is a poorly written and increasingly unfocused character who peaks very early on and than does nothing but be pretty and act completely out of character but it’s in that early insanity that I found the will to read this manga because let me tell you Mrs. Shiba is the absolute best! As Reiji’s homeroom teacher Mrs. Shiba(29 years old btw) stands out as one of the few potential saviours of him, always pushing him to escape this town and put his talents that only she can really see to use. She’s a proper teacher is what I’m saying and oh wait they just banged and hey waitaminute why’s she stalking him oh god she’s trying to kidnap him oh noooooooo! If you ever want to see a character go batshit insane in real time Mrs. Shiba is the one, a seemingly normal person who slowly but surely loses her grip on reality and becomes increasingly entertaining as she schemes to make Reiji hers’s. She’s a pedophile groomer nutcase who appears in most scenes after a page turn jumpscare and as the first acts villain like Yuko would do in the second act she’s got her hands on everything and is pulling just all the strings. She’s a delicious comic villain whose existence as a following spector made the first act almost a joy to behold in a sick car crash typa way, she’s totally unbelievably and tonally nonsensical but man she is fun and that was something I needed more of.
MRS. SHIBA PART 2: LOSING HER SH*T
Anyway the manga seems to have forgotten she went insane and is a terrible person because she spends the last half trying to save Reiji earnestly. I genuinely don’t know how we went from insane child rapist to heroine doing everything to rescue her crush and redeem her irredeemable past of just 3 months ago but hey Boy’s Abyss has to do its thing. It gets worse when she red faced confesses to Reiji that she loves him romantically and my not homie turns around, says yeah we’re both broken so we’re equals, apologizes for ruining her (which again she ruined herself with him as the clear victim), and then says yes to her engagement proposal. Let me repeat myself, the child rapist almost gets married to the child she groomed and this work doesn’t portray that in an explicitly negative light because she’s saving him from his mother and she wuvs him so there’s no problems. WHAT THE F(REDACTED)! She doesn’t end up winning but the actual ending being so rushed and inconclusive almost made it seem like the logical plot progression would be for her and Reiji ending up together and I just hurt, my brain hurts like how did we get here, Ryo what were you trying to say my girl whyyyyy! So yes my favourite character, my delightful and thoroughly unserious comic villain basically gets away with being a psycho rapist and I don’t know what to say other than c’mon, where’s my comeuppance. Bah it was good while it lasted, it’s not like Yuko literally just being given the middle finger was any better.
NO STYLE NO SUBSTANCE
Well I think that covers it all, the characters are atrocities with the tone suffering as a result all while the attempt at a heavy and grim atmosphere fails like completely, what more could I insult. Oh yeah, the art’s mediocre but in a way that pisses me off personally. See I’m of the impression most mangaka don’t know how to make an effective manga by which I mean the form as a visual medium is secondary to the actual story the mangaka are trying to tell. Take paneling for an example, the fact that most contemporary mangaka are objectively worse than the godfather himself Osamu Tezuka always beggars my mind because it’s like none of them understand the concept or think about how unique and creative paneling choices can make stories come alive and pop. Same for dialogue, most don’t want to draw a story it seems because dialogue is king even though the saying a picture can say a thousand words is so appropriate to this medium. Ryo Minenami is not one of these authors though and backhanded compliment time thank god for that because this is a manga!
AN ATTEMPT MADE, AN ATTEMPT FAILED
The moment I see pages with no dialogue that stretch on for significant parts of a chapter I get excited and Ryo Minenami has clearly thought about and wants to tell as much of this story through pictures as she can. These “empty” scenes are clearly an attempt to conjure up that atmosphere she most clearly wants to provide and it’s certainly the best way to do it, sucks the attempt isn’t successful for reasons already mention plus another key and sadly crippling issues, Ryo Minenami has no artstyle. Art is subjective yada yada yada but man there’s nothing here, aside from visual motifs like the beta fish and its tank there’s absolutely nothing unique about the way this manga is drawn, stylistically it feels flat as a board. Sure it loves it’s blacks and characters for obvious reasons are always sporting some sort of depression face and on the character art front there is clear technical improvement over the serialization but still no distinct style which I really don’t get because Ryo’s drawn quite a few manga at this point, how has she not subliminally ended up with a style of her own. Add in the fact that those conceptually beautiful empty pages don’t actually contribute to the plot and said plot is almost entirely delivered through tell don’t show monologue and you have a story that isn’t as effective artistically as it clearly strived for. It’s this visual muddiness that ends up the final nail in the coffin because at the end of the day you won’t remember this for it’s art and with every other element incompetent or worse what is there left to even say.
TIS THE END!
Anyway what’s left to say is this, I despite it all don’t hate Boy’s Abyss. I can’t, I had a measure of fun here and there witnessing a truly bad piece of art. It’s a novelty I don’t indulge in purposely, I’m no trash connorisseur so if I hear somethings trashy or edgy I probably won’t bother with it on principle. But I like bad art in a way, I find it absolutely hilarious actually so no matter how far this manga went, no matter how shockingly bad it showed itself to be I was generally on board. The total lack of substance and those aforementioned empty pages made this a breeze to read too, no getting bogged down in something I grow to hate for over a month like Garden of Sinners and Tokyo Ghoul:re no sir I had a job to do and I killed this manga in 5 days flat. Reading bad manga is probably good for you, it’s way to teach you to appreciate things and be a better critic even. I think this work is like literally the worst and even I had things to say that were genuinely positive, I leave this experience better for it despite objectively wasting my time. Boy’s Abyss is irredeemable inconceivable garbage, a work of art that is genuinely detrimental in it’s existence because it wasted someone’s life in it’s creation. This story doesn’t understand humanity enough to be a tragedy but I’d still slap that label on anyway because this is a tragedy, just one where the main characters name is Ryo not Reiji. In short dawg this manga is hot ass, I politely do not recommend this unless we’re talking about bring a copy to a book burning!
FINAL RATING: 2/10
Boy’s Abyss can currently be purchased as single volumes from Viz if you didn’t read this review and still think it’s worth real money and time.
The Manga Meets Moron Blog 