I'll say this upfront: this review is going to contain spoilers from basically every part of the story, so it may come off as being more for people who have already read the series rather than for people who are thinking of reading it, but it should work for both groups.

Now, that being said, Candy & Cigarettes was a series that caught my attention a few years ago that I finally got the time to sit down and finish. The general setup had interested me, with a young girl assassin and an elderly cleaner forming a duo to fight crimes that were left long unchecked. There's a lot you can do with that simple premise, and the series starts off promising with some of the plot threads that it lays out. But as the story progresses you begin to see that a lot of what was initially foreshadowed doesn't really come into fruition in any meaningful way. This is clearly seen when looking at the character arcs of our two main characters, Miharu and Raizou.

At the start of the story, we are introduced to Raizou and we learn a two important details about him: that he used to be a bodyguard for government officials and that he has a grandson that is comatose that he is trying to pay the medical bills for. These are the main two building blocks for his character and it is contrasted with Miharu, who is a child assassin (the same age as his grandson) that is trying to get revenge for her family that was murdered when she was younger. With this initial setup there are already many potential themes and story beats that you can think of: you can look at the internal conflict that Raizou feels working as a cleaner after spending his entire life as a bodyguard, the comparison between Miharu and Raizou's grandson and his desire to help both of them get their childhoods back, or a commentary about trading in a child's innocence for the sake of revenge to just name a few. And these are some of the ideas that the manga brings up in its first few chapters which were what had brought me in initially. And yet with each of these the audience is left disappointed as none of them end up being done justice.

With regard to the first point, that of Raizou's internal conflict, we are shown this tension early on in the first mission that the duo go on. Their job is to kill a financial minister that Raizou has worked with in the past that has been embezzling money. When they corner the minister and Raizou learns that he had been a lapdog chasing money all his life from those that he had protected, he aims his gun at the minister, but hesitates to shoot. Miharu then takes the shot for him, thereby keeping his hands clean. Now, this is great setup because it is a whole reversal of what we would typically expect. Usually it is the older character would finish the kill for a younger one so they could keep their innocence, but because of the twisted background of Miharu, the situation is reversed. It also sets up for a potential later story beat where the opposite happens and the situation is brought back to "normal": Raizou would sacrifice his clean hands so that Miharu won't need to soil hers any longer. It would be a great payoff in order to close the character arcs for both characters. And, to its credit, the story actually delivers on the premise and does this... in volume 6 of 14... and keeps Miharu's hands clean for a grand total of 3 chapters. All of the setup and payoff only for it to last half a volume and for the characters to return to square one, except you've lost a fundamental component of one of your main characters.

As to the second point, it is for all intents and purposes linked directly to the first, so we know that she is not able to wash her hands of the killing at all in the series. Yet for some reason it seems like the author really wants to push the idea anyways. Throughout the series we are shown glimpses Miharu's life outside of her job, mostly spending time at school and with her friends. Raizou now and then also talks about how his grandson should be playing and having fun with friends at various points in the story and in the second half of the series we are even introduced another assassin girl who is Miharu's age that she tries to convince to not be a killer. She is literally telling another girl to stop doing the things she is doing because she doesn't have to live that way! It's almost impossible to not see Miharu's return to childhood as a key theme in the story, but the amount of work that is put to building towards that goal is minimal at best. Essentially the only point in the story where it is directly brought up is where she stands up for the other assassin girl and calls her a friend, similar to how a typical girl her age would act and even that payoff gets cut short due to a rushed ending.

To briefly go over the last point since the revenge happens so early in the story, I'm not sure if we ever get anything meaningful out of her whole revenge plot outside of setting up the next arc. Raizou asks her what she wants to do after she got revenge and I don't remember her ever saying what. Nor does she really change at all after her revenge is complete so it is once again another wasted plot thread.

Now, I haven't even gone into the whole mess that is Rem, her past mentor and his effect (or lack thereof) on her throughout the story, or the idea of their company ever being wrong about any of the jobs they are sent out to complete or the lack of development on anything related to Raizou's grandson, but I think that the point has already been made. Another unrelated point, but for some reason there's actually a whole lot of panty shots in this series? Kinda unexpected but maybe not. But I do understand that what may be at the center of my grumblings against this manga are my preconceived notions of how the story should have gone, but I think that the audience should always be able to expect something from a series and be unhappy when they are let down by the result.

So at the end of the day, is the series bad? Should it be read at all? Well not exactly. I don't think that it is a bad series per se, but it definitely could have been so much better. The waste of potential really hurts more than the actual contents of the story, so read it if you like, but don't expect too much out of it.