Manga Review: DC3

I am hoping to get in some more manga reading as of late and decided that perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to try some short manga where possible. I just finished this one-shot manga titled DC3, released in 2021 by author Kaiu Shirai and artist Posuka Demizu, both known for their work on the manga series The Promised Neverland. I have previously read a volume of The Promised Neverland manga and watched the first season of the anime and liked those parts of what I consumed. I hear that the rest of the anime isn't quite as up to snuff as that first season, but I don't actually know that from personal viewing experience. Regardless, I'd liked these creators' work well enough that giving DC3 a try seemed easy enough to do, especially with only one chapter to read.    

A middle school girl named Saho is pursued daily by an onslaught of fans, haters, and reporters during her day-to-day life. This is because seemingly as a child she accidentally slapped around on her father's laptop enough to just by happenstance figure out how to create androids. She herself is no genius or anything—the whole thing was a mistake. Regardless, her father created an entire business around making these androids, which seemingly in the last decade or so have changed the world.  

 Saho just wants to go to school as a normal student, but her father doesn't want her going without some sort of protection. As such, he has sent a bodyguard to watch over her at all times. This bodyguard calls himself DC3—a robot designed to look like a middle school boy the same age as Saho. DC3 is also a very clever designation for this reason, as it is an acronym for "Dansei Chuugakusei 3", or "third-year middle school boy". He performs incredible feats of strength such as lifting cars above his head and firing powerful explosions, all in an attempt to thwart Saho's assailants. But what isn't immediately made clear is that DC3 may not simply be an android. In fact, he's more than that. Turns out, he's a cyborg—a boy who once befriended Saho as a child and promised to protect her, believed to be long dead, but instead has had his limbs replaced with robotics, and is now fulfilling his promise to protect his childhood friend with them.

    Though the narrative is told quickly to fit into a single chapter, it does feel like a fairly complete story is told from start to finish. It certainly feels like a brisk proof-of-concept, wherein if it had been well-enough received, it could have branched off into a full fledged series of its own. And I think it absolutely has enough juice that it could have stood a more full and complete run. But clearly in the years since, that has never happened. I can't pretend to know exactly whether or not the editors at Shonen Jump were ever interested in pursuing a longer run of DC3, but I think had they decided they wanted to, it absolutely could have worked. For now, though, it didn't seem like many English-speaking readers were very aware that it even exists, outside of a couple of reddit posts.    

The panel framing does a pretty decent job of blowing through some situations very quickly without ever having to say a word. Saho gets harassed on her way to school, and although while she's at school she doesn't seem to get a lot of this same harassment, the cyborg DC3 himself never rests in his mission to protect her everywhere she goes at all times. We see quick glimpses of him following her all throughout the school during the day, including bursting straight into the girls' restroom as Saho tries to escape him, not wanting to be followed by some weird robot boy all the time. While we don't have time for more in-depth looks at how he bothers her throughout the day, we do get a very quick barrage of visuals that give us the sense that he is absolutely relentless, even comedically so.    

The action is well-drawn and is visually clear to understand. Not all action manga are necessarily easy to read through a visual mess of action and explosions, though DC3 seems to do it just fine. It is clear that the premise is intended to be just slightly absurd and thus a little bit comedic. But there are moments of touching humanity that we only get brief glimpses of, such as the flashbacks Saho has to a young boy who once promised to protect her, and the events that led her to believe he had previously died in pursuit of that promise. If this had ever been expanded into a larger narrative, I would have been very invested in seeing how these two young friends developed their relationship, certainly now that Saho knows he is still alive and is part robot.    

At current, there does not appear to be a physical book release of this one-shot manga in English, which I suppose is to be expected, given it is less than 50 pages in length. But it can be read legally on Viz's website or the Shonen Jump app, which I highly recommend because you simply get such a large volume and great variety of Shueisha-published manga at a ridiculously low price. I'd love to spend some more time reading and reviewing more manga like this. If I can make more time for it in the future, I most definitely will.    

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