Beck is an amazing and very fun manga from the get-go. The story is as simple as it gets. Guy learns guitar to impress his crush. It then evolves into a story about teenagers exploring their love for playing music.
It's a really funny manga, especially early on when we haven't gotten into the meat of the story yet. The comedy helps in getting you hooked into the story. One thing I really liked about Beck was how grounded the characters were. Many of the scenes felt real, especially when depicting the struggles of an indie band.
Some people might be turned off by a music-centered manga. Obviously, being a manga, you can't really listen to the music. This doesn't really bother me. I can just imagine them to be playing whatever I want. This made it easier for me to buy into people's reactions towards their music, as I couldn't form my own opinions on them. I found that when I actually listened to the music from the anime, I found myself a bit underwhelmed. Plus, the musical performances were always so well-drawn in the manga that you could basically imagine what it must actually be like to be there.
Oddly enough, despite being a fan of rock music and even having played in bands, my favorite aspect of the manga isn't really the music. The thing that got me most invested was the relationship between Koyuki and his eventual significant other (I won't say the name as Koyuki is faced with a few love interest options early on). The romance isn't particularly special, but it felt very real and grounded. I could easily see myself in many of their interactions, and I found myself extremely invested in their relationship. I got so invested that I would silently scream every time a wrench was thrown into their relationship.
There are some negatives too though. It suffers from a few common 2000's manga tropes. Notably, the abundance of shots focussing on certain female body parts. I didn't mind it too much early on, especially when it's from Koyuki's point of view as there was focus on him being a regular horny teenager during the early parts of the story. It does get annoying sometimes. It's just par for the course I guess for many manga especially from this era.
The manga also has some plot points and characters that just don't work. Some plot points are just not interesting or fun. They don't even affect the main plot. There's a character or a plot point that appears briefly every once in a while that feel really out of place. It's only after a few chapters that you figure out why they kept focussing on a particular character, and sometimes the pay off would be underwhelming. Some characters just disappear after they served their purpose for a particular plot point. This felt very weird, since they would sometimes to be built up to seem more important.
Overall, I think Beck could have been trimmed down a bit. In exchange, more focus could have been given to the development of the main characters. Nonetheless, I think It's a very good manga and has quickly become one of my favorites.
Despite enjoying the manga a lot (or maybe because I enjoyed it so much), I have a few grievances which I can't really talk about at length without spoiling the story.
The uninteresting subplot I mentioned earlier was Saitou and Momoko's relationship. Honestly I thought that should have just ended when they got engaged. Afterwards maybe we could see them together every now and then. But no, the manga decides to have Momoko cheat on him, which they drag out over several chapters by the way. And it just kinda temporarily ends when Saitou finds out. They don't even have a confrontation. Then later on she comes back and reveals that she had been bad-mouthing him by spreading rumors that he was peeping on middle school girls? Bitch what? It seemed like the manga wanted me to root for them to get together but I just couldn't. What the fuck's wrong with Momoko?
This subplot reaches its climax when Saitou interrupts Momoko's wedding and they kiss in the pool. Again, I was not really rooting for them. Aside from that, we already had a power couple with a lot of drama and passion that I was more invested in. If the manga really wanted to explore romance outside of Koyuki and Maho, they could have just gone with Saku and Hiromi. Maybe we could see a contrast between the drama of Koyuki and Maho's relationship, and the stability of Saku and Hiromi's.
This might seem like a weird comparison, but I think Friends did this well. We had Ross and Rachel's relationship which had a lot of heat and drama, and we had Monica and Chandler who were more stable and cozy. I think it would have been great to take a breather from Koyuki and Maho's drama by showing Saku and Hiromi's comfier relationship.
Another thing that annoyed me was how the manga tended to spread out certain plot points too much. During the whole England tour, when there was so much drama between Koyuki and Maho, I just couldn't care less about anything else that was happening. Like I said, I was most invested in their relationship. I hated seeing other plot points play out while I was aching to see what happens next with them. I was just praying to God, Satan and anyone else who'd listen that these two would make it through everything.
Building off of this point, the manga loves to throw wrenches into Koyuki and Maho's relationship. At times, it felt like I was being punished for being so invested. The moment Maho leaves foe England suddenly another girl shows up? Fuck off! I jus kept on hoping that Koyuki wouldn't do anything stupid. That girl (I cant remember her name) was just so unnecessary. She even completely disappears after serving her purpose of getting Maho jealous. This manga loves to tease (or in my case, torture) the reader with love triangles and I fucking hated it.
Being so invested in the romance, my favorite character was Maho. Though my grievance with her is that she didn't really had much to do or had much development outside of her relationship with Koyuki. Earlier in the manga, it seemed that she was gonna go places. We see her singing in a venue, and then as a model. I understand that she didn't really want to go through with either of those things, but I wish we could have found out what she did want to do. I mean, she was going to England to study. What for? What are her dreams? What does she want to do? It's really weird that we don't really get to know any of that. Her only real role in the story is to be Koyuki's love interest and I think that's a huge disservice to such a fun character.
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