The Spring 2022 Manga Guide

Phantom of the Idol

What's It About? 

Yuuya, one half of the boy pop duo ZINGS, may be the laziest performer in the Japanese music industry. His partner is out there giving 110% every night (and, thankfully, he's quite popular), but Yuuya's half-assed, sloppy dancing, and his frankly hostile attitude toward the audience, has the fans hating him and his agent looking for any excuse to cut him loose. The career of a pop idol just isn't the path of easy leisure and adulation Yuuya expected…

After a particularly lifeless concert appearance, Yuuya meets a girl backstage. She's dressed to the nines in a colorful outfit, she's full of vim and vigor, and all she wants from life is to perform. There's just one problem: She's been dead for a year. This is the ghost of Asahi Mogami, the beloved singer whose time on the stage was tragically cut short, unless… If ghosts are real, is spirit possession really that much of a stretch?

Phantom of the Idol has story and art by Hijiki Isoflavone and English translation by Max Greenway. Kodansha Comics will release its first volume on May 24.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

There's no such thing as a perfect job, as Niyodo is learning. After being scouted on the street to become an idol, he's now half of the group Zings…and damn if being an idol isn't a lot more work than he thought based on repeated statements of how he “has the look.” It turns out that he has to actually expend effort if he wants those riches he was after, and while he can't quite bring himself to quit, it's definitely not something he enjoys doing. That he's also sticking around because the other half of the group, perky Yoshino, has terrible stage fright if he has to go onstage alone suggests that Niyodo's not a total jerk, but still – an idol who turns his own mic off? That's not really a good look.

Phantom of the Idol, however, is a comedy, and actually a quite funny one at that. Niyodo's life takes a turn when he realizes that he's able to see the ghost of Asahi Mogami, a super enthusiastic idol who died in a traffic accident and most definitely has lingering regrets. Asahi being able to possess Niyodo's body is good news for both of them, because now he can just relax while she gets to live out her idol dreams. But of course everyone can see the difference between the two “Niyodo” performances, and that's really where this book shines. Asahi's performances are off the charts awesome; Niyodo's response to a fan asking for a finger gun is to mime using a sniper rifle. Asahi knows every lyric to every song; Niyodo forgets the lyrics and just sort of holds his mic out to the audience to get them to sing for him. They couldn't be more of an odd couple, and that plus a pretty spot-on sendup of both the idol industry and idol stories makes for a very funny absurdist comedy.

The downside to all of this is that the art is incredibly busy in its fervor for showing us the differences between the two of them. While it isn't hard to tell characters apart (so far – the cast is increasing), there's just so much going on in every panel on every page that it can get overwhelming to try to take all of it in. There's lots of little text details in tiny print, not entirely clear movements, and just too many lines for easy reading in general. It's a work to read this, and that's not always something that our inner Niyodos can appreciate, because with its breezy plot, the art should perhaps have done better to match. But even that can't take too much away from a story that's patently absurd in the best way, and this really may be a winner.

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Christopher Farris

Rating:

Some idol manga specifically focus on the cutthroat world the characters have to navigate, the exhausting amounts of effort required to make it, to have a chance to truly shine. Phantom of the Idol boldly asks, "What if our lead character wanted no part of that?". It's a conceit I have honestly never seen before, with our focal part of the idol duo, Yuya, preferring to coast by in his fledgling musical career by doing as little as humanly possible. Finally, an idol story I can see as aspirational. Not that this concept itself leads to revolutionary storytelling, as in practice, it simply lends Yuya's rapport with his adorable other half Kazuki a lot of expected manzai trappings, but then that's where the 'phantom' part of this 'idol' story comes in. Asahi's appearance was immediately strengthened by the shockingly smart way Yuya reacts to her: He pretty much figures out immediately that she's a ghost, and he doesn't spend pages of wacky miscommunicated reactions trying to convince other people that she's there. It's honestly refreshing, after having seen so many other kinds of manga misunderstandings elsewhere. It seems all we needed was a protagonist who was simply too lazy to get wrapped up in that kind of sitcom silliness.

Phantom of the Idol hashes out its potential possession plotline so quickly – before the first chapter was even over – that the story in turn got me questioning where it was really going. And what we do get is a continuing idol- career story that keeps the right amounts of comedic chaos while also having some solid ideas at the heart of it. As illustrated by the perhaps-overwrought yin-yang metaphor earlier on, it's a story about the contrasts of idol-ing as a passion versus doing it purely as a job. Yuya's lazy persona makes him the entertaining core of this plot, but also serves as an underlying demonstration of how good he could really be if he just put in the effort. It gives this book a solid arc to follow apart from what you might expect from a gimmicky ghost story, reinforced by points like an extra comic strip in the back where the characters note how they're specifically not doing some of the more expected, typical body-swap gags.

The commitment to more unique forms of chaos is to this one's benefit. I have to give an especial shout-out to the litany of textual background gags incorporated into the series, from audience-members wielding fans asking for reactions from Yuya as minimal as 'Breathe' or 'Exist', to the outlandish farmers-market-themed boy-band festival in the last part of this volume featuring the incredible tag-line 'A Bumper Crop Of Bae' (translator Max Greenway was clearly having some fun with all this). It does make some odd choices in prioritization, such as one chapter swerving over to highlight a gaggle of Yuya's fangirls, which goes on longer than some readers might expect and simply doesn't have the same energy as the focus on the idols themselves. And much like the effects of Yuya's regularly- shifting personality on those fans, the series' commitment to constantly keeping you guessing about what kind of comedy it's going to get up to next might wear some readers out. But for my part, I found Phantom of the Idol to be a charming, engaging time; unlike Yuya, it's really trying to do things at least a little unexpected with both the idol-industry and supernatural parts of the story.

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MrAJCosplay

Rating:

This manga's biggest issue might ironically be its biggest selling point. No, I'm not talking about the idea of a ghost idol still trying to be a part of the industry after she died – I'm talking about having a very detached main lead that wants nothing to do with the events that are transpiring in the story. It's possible to make a character archetype like Yuuya's work in a story where narrative progression is ultimately tied to putting some degree of effort or hard work, and comedy is certainly one way to go about it. However, I think Phantom of the Idol does too good of a job of making Yuuya uninterested in everything, to the point where there isn't really a lot to make you want to root for him outside of an understanding that sometimes working hard for a living can suck. I relate to that idea thoroughly, but that doesn't necessarily lead to an interesting story, and if it's being used so early for the sake of comedy then the joke runs dry very quickly. This is all a shame because the artwork is very expressive, and the manga has a strong sense of comedic timing. But when all of these things revolve around someone who has such a strong disconnect from their own story, it makes it difficult for me to get excited or invested in the hurdles that this idol ghost duo need to overcome. If anything, it just makes me feel bad for our ghostly idol co-star because I just feel like she deserves better. It's possible that Yuuya will change for the better as the story goes on, but if you wanna get your idol fix, then I think you're better off looking elsewhere.