Ok, I’ll admit one thing straight up. The only reason I became interested in this manga was because of the cover. I couldn’t resist such a cute looking picture. To be perfectly honest, not only did I have no interest in this title before, but I had never even heard of it before seeing it on a ‘recent arrival’ list. I guess I should count myself to be very lucky since the manga is at least decent. Therefore, no lesson learned

I decided for this one that I would go with a little of a different style than my other impressions. It’s a bit more formatted this time so I hope that whoever reads it will enjoy. Many bothans died to give you this information, y’know.

Synopsis

The main character of this little story is Keiji Sendai. At school, he appears to be a tough guy, a thug. His actions in the past have caused his classmates to call him ‘The Mad Dog.” One of things that he detests are otaku. He does have a secret, however. He is actually an otaku.

He tries to keep his bad image going by hiding his identity as an otaku from everyone else. Unfortunately by him, there’s a clumsy girl by the name of Setsuna Yatsusaki manages to find out his little secret. She promises to keep his secret under one condition: that he becomes her slave (dog).

Presentation

The dust cover of the manga. Removing it reveals a different cover on the book itself.

The cover illustration of the book. Moe~

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to have dust jackets on all of their books. Unfortunately, it’s uncommon for manga released in the States to include the jackets. Fortunately, Infinity Studios is one of the few publishers that releases manga with the covers. That means, in addition to having a cover illustration on the dust jacket, there’s also a nice illustration on the inside cover.

Not only did they keep the dust jacket, but they seem to keep the color pages as well, which is a good thing. Of course, it’s not really that much of an advantage since there’s only two color pages in this one (and one of them is the table of contents.) In other manga, this has more of an affect.

In my opinion, it’s quite the nice bonus when a publishers keeps all of the features of the Japanese release when they localize manga. This added attention does come at a price, though. And that price is approximately one dollar over the average cost of manga in the States. Ok, so it’s not really that big of an increase, but people who like to buy manga in bulk might cry a little bit, given that the price of manga in the States is a bit… high.

Art

The art (and story) of this manga is done by Shaa (しゃあ). To be honest, I’m not very familiar with him. A quick look at Wikipedia pretty much tells me that this is his first work that’s been brought to the States. The only other notable thing he’s done seems to be the Clannad novel. The art of Kyouhaku Dog’s is very clean. It’s also very cute. There’s not really much else to say about it. The link above is somewhat useful for checking out his style.

Don’t worry about there not being enough fanservice, though . It’s normal school ecchi stuff. Shaa finds plenty of places to put a token panty shot or two as well as finding time for a dressing room image. You can’t have a manga set in a school environment without a dressing room scene, after all. The whole fanservice aspect is quite blatant, really, but I doubt many will complain about that. XD

Content

The plot of the manga is pretty simple. There are no big surprises here. From the first couple of pages, you can already guess that Setsuna has a thing for Keiji. And, of course, you can pretty much guess that Keiji is going to development a thing for Setsuna, as well. If this was a normal manga, you would expect Shaa to introduce new characters somewhere down the line to stir things up. Y’know, adding another girl related to Keiji’s past or something to make a nice little love triangle.

Unfortunately, Shaa will never get that chance. This manga was discontinued shortly after its introduction. The whole thing is only four chapters long (3 numbered chapters and an interlude.) The chapters combined are a tad bit short for a whole volume, so there are two extra one-shots included, as well.

While the plot of the main story is pretty normal, the plots of the one-shots are just weird. The first one-shot is about this thing called a Moe Battle. In your mind, you might be thinking of a contest or something, but it’s quite literally a battle. There’s a ring and everything. Two characters fight in the ring and whoever gets the most ‘moe points’ wins. The second one shot is even weirder, but I don’t want to spoil it (it’s short anyway.)

Even if the plot for Kyouhaku is a bit standard, it doesn’t mean that it’s boring. It was at least interesting enough for me to be disappointed when I noticed that there were two one-shots after the interlude. And of course, I was even further disappointed when I realized that the first volume (which was released in 2005,) is the only volume. I suppose this shows that it’s not really about what kind of story a piece of media has, but rather, how the story is told.

Given that, I would recommend this manga to anyone who is into reading cute stories and doesn’t care that they will never see the series get a real ending.