Ghost Sweeper Mikami - Reviews

Well, this is a rather interesting manga. You put a girl who is really interested in money and wears really sexy outfits with a perverted man who pretty much is her slave and then add a rather quite sweet ghost and you pretty much have this manga. The manga doesn’t really follow a full fledged storyline, but it really doesn’t have to. Just as most I have reviewed before hand, this one acts more along case files then on a wide driven story. Some chapters are rather short when others could have 7 chapters all about one case. It all depends how fast the case is dealt with.

The stories don’t play out what you would expect but always seems to end up comical without really meaning to. It’s like people who work for a serious company but they are all jokesters. It just doesn’t have a lot of drama unless you count the many characters that pop up from time to time. You can pretty much know that the characters will get out fine except for maybe their wallets and a couple of scratches so you don’t really worry about that. What you do end up wanting to know is that if they are actually making money out of the job. I can compare this manga to a Sci-fi anime I watched before, Outlaw star. The Ghost Sweeping business is a lot like a starship; both need a lot of money to keep up and running. You can tell this by when Mikami talks about just how much money just one talisman is worth. So basically the main story of the manga is get enough money to get onto the next job and to keep Mikami happy.

The characters are… well strange… The extra characters almost always make life harder for the main characters. We have a crybaby with shikigami that go crazy when she cries, a woman who uses voodoo magic as Mikami’s rival, a crazy alchemist who has lived forever but almost every thing he does blows up in his face, and tons of other various ‘colorful’ characters. They all come and go as they please making it interesting when they actually end up showing up. Unlike Ranma (and thank god its unlike it), these characters are not actually love rivals although the girls normally end up catching the perverted eye of Yokoshima only for him to end up getting harmed by them as they either go through him to get to Mikami or just because of his stupidity. Unlike many characters that would be just fitting the bill of their stereotypes, these characters do slightly grow, and I think the one that grows the most would be Yokoshima. I consider him more the main character to these mangas then Mikami just because he is the one that seems to grow the most. I can’t really say how much he grows because it is really hard to do so and not spoil some of the things happening, but trust me, you will end up seeing it.

The one thing that bothers me though is even when they are trying to be serious; they end up messing it up with some lame joke that is used a little too much such as Yokoshima’s horniness of Mikami’s money greed. It feels like the only things that happen end with these jokes and when you are reading every single story and it ends with that, it sort of bothers me. Even though the main stories are delightful and have a really good creative flow, when they use the same joke as the ending to all the stories, it ends up feeling uneventful. Here is another example of something that annoyed me. During a rather intense battle, one with a rather strong enemy, for some reason as they fought, the enemy ends up slipping on a banana peel that had no reason to be there. Just little things like that, though entertaining, break the feeling that she manga had. There are other times where the characters talk about the author and talk about the series breaking the forth wall.

The style reminds me of Rumiko Takahashi’s work to a point. At least the male looks like a rip off of Ranma slightly in the face. You can tell the personality of each character by how they dress which shows that the author was paying attention to it when he created the manga. You can tell who the pervert is, who the quiet one is, and who the rather sexual and money grubbing one is. The artwork is pretty standard for how old it is in that most panels have just enough detail to tell you what’s going on but the artist didn’t go any farther then that. Comical scenes are very un-detailed with characters comically exaggerated with chibi style faces, characters being sort of squashed, or other such things.

The clothing style of the characters and even the people in the background are very suggestive of the timeframe where it reminds me of old American 1960’s, rocker hair cuts and jumpsuits, small mini skirts with jean jackets, the occasional headband tied around the forehead. It’s slightly surprising that she decided to use that art style when it was done in 1991 but I believe part of that is because of the culture. You see, when Japan tries to imitate America, they end up being a little behind in the times because of how fashion is circulated around the world. We may try to imitate Japan in a way (well, most of us otaku fans) but we are behind in that. This is a good way of seeing it from the Japanese standpoint and I do not fault the author on creating this type of style in the manga no matter now much I sometimes question the fashion sense.