Just Read: Crying Freeman by Koike & Ikegami

This is written by Kazuo Koike, whose historical samurai stories (primarily Lone Wolf and Cub, but also Samurai Executioner and Path of the Assassin) I've liked, and illustrated by Ryoichi Ikegami, who also did Mai the Psychic Girl (and probably lots of other things I'm not familiar with).

It's a modern-day crime story, and I expected to like it -- I've been vaguely thinking about trying it for years now, and I finally got the first volume and read it.

Sadly, I found it generic and not all that special -- yes, there's quite a lot of hard-R sex and crunchy violence, but it's really just a reluctant-gangster story, without anything particularly interesting. (Blah blah inadvertently discover secret gangster plan, blah blah brainwashed to be a super-assassin -- you know the drill.)

Ikegami does ridiculously detailed and photo-realistic backgrounds, and his minor characters have a lot of interesting faces, but his "attractive" characters seem to only have two faces (one for men and one for women), which can make telling people apart somewhat of a challenge. It's not such a big deal when the story is interesting, but, in this case, it's just the last straw. I might poke through later volumes in a store if I get a chance (though I probably won't -- the sex means that this series is shrinkwrapped).