Let's fill a high school with the clones of all sorts of famous characters in history. Unlike the amazing Clone High, this story is all serious-business, and our protagonist, Shiro, is the only non-clone in the school. Things are all happy-go-lucky until Marie Curie suddenly "transferred schools" 'cause she didn't want to be Marie Curie anymore, and JFK was assassinated. Something's afoot.
To be honest, I wasn't exactly interested in Kumiko Suekane's Afterschool Charisma at first. They threw in too many characters at once, the art style didn't strike me as anything amazing -- albeit it was well done -- and the characters seemed a bit flat.
But all that changed when I reached the end of chapter four, where they introduced a cheery little boy from Austria. Now I'm wondering just where the manga is going to go by introducing a volatile character like the Fuhrer while trying to manage a conspiracy plot and all the other personalities at the school.
My recommendation of this series is a bit tentative, simply because it's got a really interesting premise, but I wonder if the characters will prove deep enough to be something more than the manga archetypes overlaid on top of a basic historical profile. The title certainly strikes me as one of the more mainstream series to come out of SigIKKI (more than Tokyo Flow Chart, for sure), and I'm sure it will see success once it makes it to print.
I'll be reading it, for sure, out of sheer interest to see where the plot can go, and if we're going to find the body of clone Louis Brandeis in Clone Hitler's room.
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