Quick Thoughts on:

Kare First Love Volume 1
Kaho Miyasaka
VIZ LLC; 200 pages $9.95 (August 11, 2004)

I wonder if I'm just growing tired of the teenage romance genre of comics right now.

This books is your stereotypical one about a young girl who is too shy and timid to really stand up for herself. Who doesn't have confidence in herself or think anyone else can like her so she hides herself away from everyone.

Who meets the popular boy in school, who has a secret artistic talent that allows him to see the depth our young "heroine" hides and tries to bring it out of her.

There really isn't anything wrong with the book, it just comes at a time for me right now where I almost knew what to expect from page to page. Which made for a boring reading experience.

I love the teen romance genre usually, but at this point I've seen it so much in other manga, in movies, and even on tv shows. That I'm to the point now where I feel burnt out on the genre as a whole.

I know very little is going to compare to the wonderfully engaging Hot Gimmick series, which I plan to cover soon, but I find myself expecting more than just average now as well.

Manga and the romance genre aren't "the new black" they first were to me, when I was looking for options to the typical nostalgia driven superhero or self centered couch sitting griping about life indy books. Instead of just being happy to be reading something different, to me at the time, now I expect just as much quality and freshness from them as well.