7. Katekyo Hitman Reborn!
Author: Amano Akira
Debut: April 2004
What is it, pj?
We finally get to one of the vets (pre-2005) of the magazine and into the best stuff of SJ: Battle Manga! So the premise goes that "No-Good" Sawada Tsunayoshi finds his normal life interrupted by a talking hitman baby named Reborn, who tells him he's the heir of the italian Vongola mafia. Reborn is going to tutor him to run a mafia, which is hard because Tsuna lacks intelligence, physical aptitude, confidence, and even motivation! But when Reborn shoots Tsuna in the head with his special bullet, Tsuna is "Reborn," the last unfulfilled desire he thought of becomes his sole motivation for a few minutes and does everything in his power to achieve it. Pretty zany, huh!? It was the premise of a gag manga that after 7 volumes ditched the genre to hop into full battle mode, but still manages to never ditch its premise, though I suppose it does get forgotten in the complexities of the arc stories.
Characters
Probably where the series falters the most, mostly because of 1-dimensional characters all around. Not that many of them aren't entertaining, but you'd expect the zero-to-hero premise to create a more interesting protagonist. Because of the nature of Tsuna's transformation, he pretty much acts as zero AND hero without development at all. He manages to not have grown at all since the beginning and yet transform into a super cool badass so that he can fight when the battles come up. The transformation IS cool, but still you'd think his normal self would merge or something. Then as part of this team of people, you have a bunch of his friends that are pretty much the most boring side characters you could ever have, just waiting for villain's henchmen to appear so they can get their battles in.
The villains fare much better. The rival protagonists are all anti-hero types that through various circumstances end up helping out Tsuna now and then, and end up having more depth to them even if it's silly sometimes. Can't really say too much without going really in-depth and/or spoiling so we'll just leave it at that. I said villains in the beginning but Reborn! follows Dragon Ball syndrome where the main cast is pretty much full of defeated villains.
Story
Despite Tsuna's story about becoming a mafia boss kind of boring and never really gone into because of the whole "status quo" thing, there are a lot of subplots and backstories that are interesting and slowly get revealed as the series goes on. The reason why a baby is one of the strongest hitman alive, the story of the founding of Vongola, and even Tsuna's own family have cool consequences to the story that are nicely woven into the plot of the current arcs. The author even throws mysteries at the reader, for example, introducing a mysterious character who helps the protagonist, and then disappears without any resolution in the arc he appeared. It's kinda One Piece-like, when the author promises mysteries to be unveiled in the future. Good plot overall that even puts uninteresting characters into interesting positions (or forgets about them if they're that bad).
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