On the eve of her fourteenth birthday, Mayumi ends up asking a strange group called the Pretty Boy Detective Club for help in finding a star — a star that will determine if she can keep her dream of one day becoming an astronaut.
But while the five members of the club search for the star, I’m searching for ways the manga’s characters look like their light novel self.
NISIOSIN’s original Pretty Boy Detective Club novels features very minimal art, with just an opening and closing shot, so readers will mainly rely on the color covers to help picture the characters. When a novel gets a manga adaptation, most readers will expect some visual differences, as very few character designers handle the adaptation.
That being said, Suzuka Oda’s versions of the Club — leader Manabu, a confident lad who embraces his concept of beauty, Nagahiro with the beautiful voice, leggy and athletic Hyota, cook and “bad boy” Michiru, and quiet and artistic Sosaku — have significantly different atmospheres and/or appearances from Kinako’s drawings. Besides changes like Hyota’s eyecolor or Manabu gaining a back ahoge, Oda goes all-in on the shoujo aesthetic. Hyota and Manabu, whom outwardly appear to share the shouta role in the group, look older than Kinako’s version. The striped pants seen in the light novels are gone.
But perhaps the one who looks the most different is Sosaku, who goes from very short hair to almost chin-length. And while I don’t specifically remember how the text described his attire, Kinako’s lab coat for him is now a sweater. At times, I just couldn’t get over how the sharp and thick-eyed designs, which tended to match the often sharp wit of the characters’ attitudes, was noticeably softer. With the anime following Kinako’s style, it makes the manga look like the visual oddball out of the trio.
However, the manga is certainly attractive, especially the opening color art that could be an otome game cover art. Vertical also added a bit of flair to the physical version with an embossed logo. And compared to other omnibuses, this one didn’t feel too unwieldy to read, and the binding made it easy to view two pages at once single-handed. And because Pretty Boy Detective Club volume 1 combines two Japanese volumes, the first light volume (and the first arc of the anime) is retold in full. All of these things help draw readers’ attention and make this the kind of low-risk purchase for those who are unsure if this series is for them.
Volume 1 doesn’t cut much in terms of plot as protagonist Mayumi learns the truth about the star she saw 10 years ago. While she initially dislikes the concept of the Pretty Boy Detective Club with its focus on beauty, she begins to respect Manabu’s outlook that beauty is more about personal effort. The other four members each have their own talents (and personal flaw), which makes Mayumi both respect and shy away from them. But while this seems like a silly reverse harem comedy, there’s more to Mayumi’s story about finding a star no one else believes exists than you would expect.
The shift from a first-person point-of-view story to a more neutral perspective means the manga loses a lot of the philosophical stuff and acerbic wit that was a key point of Mayumi’s personality, but I also felt Mayumi’s eventual determination was reflected more clearly thanks to the art. Mayumi doesn’t suffer from the visual disconnect versus the novels/anime as much as the boys, and again, this emphasizes how much the Pretty Boy Detective Club manga is a shoujo work. It’s not an issue if you don’t mind that drawback, and it’s not like the novels didn’t appeal to female audiences. But this adaptation’s tone made it more like a typical girl-meets-handsome-boys story than it really is.