BECK Volume 32
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Confronted by an audience encompassing the entirey of the Avalon Festival, Koyuki and the guys take to the stage once more for the encore performance of a lifetime and draw the festival to a close with the one song on everyone's mind…"Devil's Way"! With an ethereal melody that gives the entire crowd chills, the phantom song takes form in this realm at last. And when the final note fades and the guys take a bow, they stand to see a familiar sight with familiar faces greeting them! Victor Slater, Leon Sykes, Ran... Everything is settled in this Avalon Festival finale!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Manga has its share of bildungsromans that follow the path of an unathletic kid who, by dint of practice, mentorship and unstoppable will, becomes a top basketball/tennis/baseball player. Beck belongs to this genre, with the interesting twist that its nerdy 14-year-old hero, Yukio Tanaka, is on a journey from zero to rock-'n'-roller. In the beginning, Yukio knows nothing about rock and is a fan of Okinawan pop music (which, it is implied, is very uncool). Yukio meets Ryosuke, a 16-year-old rocker who was brought up in the U.S., where he played guitar in a garage band. Yukio starts going to rock clubs, listening to rock music and hanging out with his beautiful classmate Izumi, Ryosuke and Ryosuke's sister, Maho. But not until the very end of this volume do readers get a hint that playing rock music is in Yukio's future. This appealing tale is marred slightly by the inclusion of a silly and clich d peeping-tom subplot, but Sakuishi's characterizations have a strong identification factor, aided by a sharp and funny translation. The book is aimed at older teens, and there is some profanity. The clean, easy-to-follow art resembles a slightly less manic version of Eichiro Oda's art in One Piece.
