The Fall 2020 Manga Guide

Mob Psycho 100: Reigen

What's It About? 

In a world haunted by dangerous supernatural forces, there are still some problems you can't solve no matter how much spiritual power you have. And a good thing too--because phony exorcist Reigen Arataka doesn't have any! But that's never stopped Reigen from running a ghostbusting business...and his new part-time office assistant is none other than Tome Kurata, a girl obsessed with the strange and unexplained--and the schoolmate of Reigen's protégé, Shigeo "Mob" Kageyama. Yet whereas Mob's incredible psychic strength resolved many a case for Reigen, Tome is as powerless as her boss! Or so she may think at first...but if there's one thing a master scam artist knows how to teach, it's the power of confidence and belief!

Mob Psycho 100: Reigen is a spinoff of ONE's Mob Psycho 100 manga and is drawn and scripted by ONE himself. Dark Horse will release both print and digital versions of the manga on December 2 for $11.99 and $6.99 respectively

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

This is a single volume spin-off of the series Mob Psycho 100, but if you're looking for Mob, you're about to be sorely disappointed. He does show up, just not until the end of the final chapter, but to be honest, the story doesn't necessarily need him in order to work. The focus is nominally on Reigen, but really, this is Tome's book, and that lets creator ONE get some good high school girl jokes in alongside the “psychic” lunacy.

Probably the two best are the conversations at school that Tome is sort of a part of and her two encounters with a girl who's late for school, running with a piece of bread in her mouth. Both take staples of manga for younger demographics and play with them, and the reason they work so well here is that ONE lets them go on for almost too long or plays them off as a one-off gag before taking them to their extremes. For example, the school conversations mostly jump topics from hot guy to band to gossip in every speech bubble, as if the girls are each having their own conversations with themselves but think they're talking to each other, which I have to say sounds like a lot of interactions I hear among high school students. Tome thinks that she's on the outside looking in because she can't confess her obsession with all things psychic, but at the end she suddenly realizes that everyone is hiding a weird fascination, from the mundane-yet-geeky to the seriously weird, at least by high school standards. It's a joke that takes the entire volume to develop, and it pays off, especially since you aren't expecting it to go anywhere (...or you weren't before this preview. Oops.).

The story itself is mostly about Tome trying desperately to convince Reigen to teach her to be psychic while he tries to get rid of her. It's fun and often very funny, but mostly that's in the words rather than the images. The manga is very wordy, even for a Dark Horse release – they tend, in my experience, to license more text-heavy titles than a lot of other publishers, which isn't a bad thing – and in some ways that's good, primarily because it distracts from the art. ONE's art isn't bad per se, but it's definitely an acquired taste and not all that polished, which in this case does work with the absurd story, but it won't be for everyone. It also means that this volume takes a bit longer to read than your average manga because the text and images don't work together quite as well. Again, not a bad thing, but definitely a different experience. But if slightly understated absurdity is your genre, this delivers, and does it well.

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Caitlin Moore

Rating:

Ask any fan of Mob Psycho 100 what the best part of the anime is, and you'll probably get one of two answers: the incredible artistry of its experimental animation, or the deep sincerity of its philosophy. Fans of the former may not be as enthusiastic about this spinoff about Reigen and Mob's thoroughly un-psychic classmate Tome Kurata, but luckily for me, I'm in the latter group.

Following the events of the anime, Tome has attached herself to internet sex symbol Reigen like a barnacle in hopes of learning about the occult or awakening psychic powers in herself. She's in high school now and has decided to keep her interest in the supernatural under wraps while among her peers, and as a result she blends in better but isn't getting much out of her social life. So, she follows Reigen and Serizawa around despite his insistence that no, she really is not needed or even particularly useful around the office.

I was skeptical at first; Tome's unassailable conviction that maybe she'll develop psychic powers just didn't have the same appeal as Mob's sweet guilelessness. She just doesn't work as well as a foil for Reigen's con man antics. Plus, even if I'm in it for the themes of empathy and humanism more than I am for the animation, ONE's crude art style doesn't really draw me in. But dang if by the last pages I feel like I've learned an important lesson or two about trying hard and making the best of life.

Plus, it's just nice to see these characters here and doing well. Mob makes only a cameo appearance, since he's finishing up middle school (and apparently studying trigonometry in ninth grade, what a smart kid) and working on having a life, but I was happy to see Serizawa working and thriving under Reigen. By the end of the book, Tome had won me over as well.