This one-shot manga fell into my lap because, well, of course it would. I love guitars, I love anime and manga about guitar players. And when you've got 90's grunge music thrown into the mix, you've got the most obvious pick in the world. Manga creator Chiaka Yagura's Alternative [Self Liner Note] is a story that carries the bummed-out spirit of grunge's lyricism, packaged with an art style that is as ragged as the thrift store clothing Kurt Cobain and company used to rock on stage.

It's apt to make the comparison to Cobain since the manga chooses to make the Nirvana frontman the ideal-i of main character, Rio. She looks and acts like her idol in every aspect: she cops long, blonde hair, a slim body, and a plethora of angst. She plays “Heart-Shaped Box” on her music player and has most of Cobain's guitar stylings down, too. A panel shows that Rio has Cobain's distorted guitar tone dialed all the way to 10 on her Boss DS-1 pedal. Rio does wield a Fender Jazzmaster guitar instead of a Fender Jaguar that Cobain would have preferred. Not that it makes a huge difference to me, since those two guitars' fuzzed-out tones sound so similar in nature. But I digress.

Alternative [Self Liner Note] follows Rio as she tries to make music and finds inspiration in her directionless life. She's outlived Kurt by a year and bemoans that at 28, she still hasn't anything to show. Rio sullenly wanders through the manga's panels until she finds the inspiration to write the perfect song at the end. To paraphrase the Soundgarden song, Rio makes it to the day she tries to live, and she does after realizing that the words she says never seem to match up to the ones inside her head. Namely, words of doubt, shame, regret, and possible suicidal tendencies. Rio passively fantasizes about entering the 27 Club, only to admonish herself for doing so afterwards. It's kind of a yikes moment for me. I never cared for the romanticization surrounding Kurt Cobain's suicide, since I feel it diminishes his life's legacy, and even if Alternative [Self Liner Note] chooses to cancel it out, it does so after flirting with the idea in the first place.

The art style of this manga is as messy as it should be. The panels look scrappily drawn, giving the characters and environments an uneven, wiry feel to them as a result. This makes sense. Grunge was a messy, noisy genre of rock and roll, therefore Alternative [Self Liner Note]'s art should be unclean as well. Reading this also made me think of the famous scene in Bocchi the Rock!'s anime where she suffered a panic attack, which also bore a similar style of deranged jitteriness to it. If it worked for that one bit in Bocchi, then I feel that it works well here in all of Alternative [Self Liner Note] just the same.

At the end of the manga, Chiaki Yagura leaves behind a note saying that they finished writing Alternative [Self Liner Note] when they were twenty-eight years old, the same age Rio is in the manga. I'm assuming this makes Alternative [Self Liner Note] semi-autobiographical in nature—Yagura leaving behind a playlist of her favorite 90's alt-rock tunes further cements this idea. The story of finding your way through inner turmoil has been told a thousand times over, so seeing a manga adopt that story through grunge music makes for an interesting and introspective read. And as a fan of that 90's sound myself, I'd be lying if I didn't say this manga didn't work its charm on me slightly.

One last miscellaneous note. There is a character who tells Rio that they heard she was “in a slump.” As a guy who still rocks the same Alice in Chains shirt he's had since high school, I almost read this as "down in a hole.”