The Spring 2024 Manga Guide

Bless

What's It About? 

At a young age, Aia Utagawa was scouted as a model, but his real ambition is to become a makeup artist. But, even as the end of high school approaches, it's a dream he hides inside, afraid of stepping outside his prescribed role as a pretty face. Then, one day, he meets Jun, a quiet classmate who hunches because she's ashamed of her face, covered in freckles. He convinces her to enter a school runway fashion contest together–with him doing her makeup. They make an incredible team, with Jun discovering a confidence she never knew she could show and Aia finally learning that, while it may be tough to open yourself up to failing at the one thing you care about, the difficulties can be worth facing.

Bless has a story and art by Yukino Sonoyama. English translation by KPS Products Corp. Nicole Roderick lettered this volume. Published by ‎Kodansha Comics. (April 2, 2024).

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Is It Worth Reading?

MrAJCosplay
Rating:

I love reading underdog stories with unconventional premises. We live in a world that's composed of hundreds of different professions of creative expression from drawing comics to performing stand-up comedy. It's always great when a writer takes a topic that usually isn't tackled and presents it in a way that is not only digestible but also enthralled. I think Bless is a great example of a story that can engage a wide variety of people even if most of those people don't necessarily connect specifically with the topic at hand.

Bless is a story about two people trying to make it in the world of modeling and professional makeup artistry. As someone with some experience in both, I was able to appreciate the exquisite attention to detail both in the artwork and in the overall breakdowns of the professions. Bless does skew more towards the makeup artistry side of things and I would've liked it to get a bit more technical when it comes to the specifics of the industry itself. But I also appreciate the angle they take with showcasing makeup artistry as a form of artistic expression in and of itself. The manga can get a bit overly wordy with its breakdowns of how it's setting up events, but I think the payoff for those events more than makes up for it.

The characters come off as a bit stocky, but the main lead, in particular, has a lot of relatability going for him. I think he fits the perfect blend of professionalism and inexperienced insecurity. This is somebody who knows how difficult the industry truly is and is even overly self-aware of his lack of talent but that makes the hard work he puts into everything that much more commendable. There's a line in the book about how people with no talent can be scarier than people with talent because of how much harder they feel the need to work themselves. That line resonates with me strongly and I appreciate stories that just make me want to work harder at whatever it is that I'm doing. If you're looking for a story to get you in a similar mood, then I don't think you can go wrong with Bless even if you don't have any interest in modeling or makeup whatsoever.

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Lauren Orsini
Rating:

Fans of Smile Down the Runway will enjoy Bless, a story about art school students who chase their dreams in the cutthroat world of fashion and makeup design. Aia is an ex-model who has a passion for makeup, but he feels constrained by others' beliefs that he should just stick to modeling and leave makeup to the pros. Udagawa is the typical teen movie heroine who is perceived as "ugly" until she stops slouching and instantly becomes model-gorgeous. When the two of them are randomly paired up to serve as makeup artists and models in a school fashion show, they realize that they make the perfect team. Only, while classmates expected Aia to be the model and Udagawa to be the makeup artist, they reversed the roles to bring out Aia's hidden talent and Udagawa's "unexpected" beauty.

The problem with depicting makeup in manga is that the art style is simplified compared to photographic images, which means the makeup is, too. Though I was a fan of the manhwa True Beauty, which also dealt with makeup transformation, it was hard to conceptualize "before and after" makeovers when it was just the artist drawing two very different faces. Though commercial makeup often relies on "barely there" to bring out a model's natural beauty, manga makeup can't afford to be subtle, or the reader will miss it. That leads to Aia's decision to make Udagawa look like a flower by overtly gluing flower petals to her face. I can almost see Val (the harsher of the two judges on the Netflix makeup competition show Glow Up) shaking her head at this overly literal interpretation.

After this first serendipitous collaboration, Bless follows Aia and Udagawa as they continue to pursue their dreams. The story arcs resemble a shonen battle anime in that our pair go head to head with other makeup artists and models—and each time, their rivals inevitably become their collaborators and friends. Speaking of friendships, there's a hint of a romantic subplot forming in this pair of kids who are so good at bringing out one another's confidence—but honestly, it's hard to see the romantic chemistry when the story has focused on their professional collaborations so far. In other words, Paradise Kiss this ain't. At 150 pages it's a shorter manga, so perhaps it needs another volume of character development to bring out its true beauty.