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Review

by Rebecca Silverman,

A Nico-Colored Canvas

GN 1

Synopsis:
A Nico-Colored Canvas GN 1

Free-spirited Nico grew up on a small island, but she's ready to expand her worldview by going to art school on the mainland. Things don't seem to be off to a promising start when she upsets the most prickly professor in the program, but it'll take more than a nasty teacher, a mildly creepy senpai, and a classmate who wants nothing to do with her to keep Nico down!

A Nico-Colored Canvas is translated by Valerie Ho and lettered by Dietrich Premier.

Review:

Are you looking for a serious manga about the realities of studying art? Then read Blue Period. Would you rather read about an aggressively perky art student who apparently didn't actually prepare for her oil painting major, got into art school anyway, and has all the subtlety of a hot pink bulldozer? Then, my friends, A Nico-Colored Canvas may be the book for you. The story follows Nico, a young woman who is leaving her small island community for a mainland art university. Nico is almost unbearably perky and quirky, a walking stereotype of the freewheeling art student who populates rather more fiction than reality, and while fiction is in no way obliged to adhere to reality, A Nico-Colored Canvas' reliance on the idea that in order to be special Nico must be zany risks alienating readers. She's a lot to take.

And she is not, of course, the only character in the story. All of the players in this piece suffer from being exaggerated to the point of near-universal detriment, with each taking a basic trope and then running with it as far as possible. While Nico is our giddy innocent who has never met a challenge she can't smile her way out of, Togo, her upperclassman, is introduced when he's filming all of the new arrivals on campus without their consent, searching for someone he can take advantage of. That naturally turns out to be Nico, and before long he's manipulating her for his own benefit – something that he's got a history of, if school scuttlebutt is to be believed. Then there's Kageiwa, a perfect stereotype of the jerk professor who lets the entire class know who got what grade and prides himself on how many people fail his seminar, Mitsuki, the top-class artist who becomes Nico's blank-slate bestie, and Nishinomori, the serious student who gets pulled into Nico's plans. Mitsuki is as close as we get to a likeable character, but she's so innocuous that she's just sort of there, saying whatever Nico needs to hear to move the plot forward. We're told that she's a famous, or at least professional, illustrator who's decided to go back to school for classical oil painting, but we never see her work, meaning that we have to just trust the creator on that point. And she doesn't do enough to earn that trust in this volume, especially since we're in the same boat with Nico's and Nishinomori's art – we don't really see it, we just read about how it is. In a story set in an art school and based around the students' art, that's a major problem. Based on my experiences teaching art students and watching my sister go through both undergraduate and an MFA program in art, I can't say that much about this volume rings true. The creator does say that she based it on her experiences at art school, but either she had a much different one than most art students I know or she's painting the whole thing with a liberal day-glo brush. The story lives and dies on heroine Nico's crafted quirkiness, and it's frankly a bit much. Nico's so ~zany~ and ~special~ that she becomes hard to take at all seriously, and we're forced to question why she's majoring in oil painting rather than illustration or performance art (assuming that's a major), because she's very much about putting on a show. While it's a neat trick that she uses her hair as a brush during an exhibition Togo has her do, her apparent ignorance of most oil painting materials and techniques feels jarring, as if she's enrolled at the school based solely on the fact that she's the heroine. While that's true in a writerly sense – that is the premise of the series, after all – it doesn't quite work in practice, especially when series like Blue Period and Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist’s Journey also exist. This is not to say that all series with the same theme need to be constructed in the exact same way, and if you didn't care for those other two more serious stories then this could work for you. But it feels like it's trying too hard, and that really does bog it down, particularly in instances like when a professor points Nico out as an example of how as an art school they “welcome eccentrics like her.”

On the plus side, Kageiwa really does need to be taken down, and Nico's idea to hold a “failures exhibition” is a decent one. The man not only punishes her for voicing her own opinion and standing up for a classmate, he also repeatedly calls her a monkey in class, and that's far outside the realm of acceptable behavior. That Nico's plan has parallels to how Édouard Manet broke into the art world in the 19th century is one of the better touches in the book as well, and while there's perhaps a bit too much emphasis on the Impressionists, it's still a good way to introduce a little art history into the mix. And while we may not see much of Nico's own art or any of anyone else's, Nao Shikita's art is very attractive. It's got a 90s shoujo sensibility that works well and feels nicely nostalgic, and the pages are very well set up, making the book easy to read.

I am, perhaps, being too hard on A Nico-Colored Canvas' first volume. It isn't a terrible book by any means, and Nico's drive to succeed is admirable. But the candy-colored vision of art school is just a little too over-the-top and Nico herself can be a lot to take, especially if you relate more to Nishinomori, who is constantly made uncomfortable by her actions on his behalf. This is the sort of book that it is perhaps best not to take too seriously, and if you can do that, it may end up being a lot of fun.

Grade:
Overall : C+
Story : C+
Art : B+

+ Very nice art, Kageiwa really does need to be taken down.
Characters are all a bit too much, very reliant on stereotypes of artists and art schools. Too much telling rather than showing.

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Production Info:
Story & Art: Nao Shikita
Licensed by: Kodansha Comics

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Nico-Colored Canvas (manga)

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