Review: Draw This, Then Die! Vol. 1

One aspect of Japanese comics I've always appreciated is that so many of them are hyper-focused on particular niche subjects, their creators approaching those subjects with the same sense of import and drama that is afforded to what we Americans would probably consider more "standard" subjects, like epic fantasies, sci-fi sagas, horror and so on. Now, my own personal niche interest, like yours, is comics, and, of course, Japan will occasionally produce a comic about comics, or a manga about manga. I've been enjoying the ongoing Now That We Draw, a romantic comedy about two aspiring manga creators, for example, and now here's another manga that is about manga: Minoru Toyoda's Draw This, Then Die!While Now That We Draw has a romance at its core, Draw This is what Toyoda calls "a high school club story" in the short afterword comic near the back of the first volume. That club is a manga club, and the focus on the book is, once it gets going, more directly on manga and its production. If you read comics, and perhaps especially if you make or have ever tried to make comic, there's a lot to like here. I mean, when I first flipped through it, having picked up because of the intriguing tit...